Self serving thoughts or the way of the Lizard ?

When Dan Moniz reports on Paul Graham's talk, he mentions the following tidbit

Graham had gone around to several large tech companies (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) and asked them 'if you could hire someone who had tried and failed to launch a start-up company, or someone who had graduated college and went to go work as a developer at a big company (e.g. Microsoft), which would you prefer?' According to him, every single company responded that they would be more interested in the candidate who had tried and failed at a start-up; he included a verbatim quote from the person he talked to at Yahoo! who said he could quote him.

My experience has mostly been the reverse, but this survey reminds me of how NOT to do a survey. Clotaire Rapaille shows you how to find the inner lizard in all of us (see The science of selling) and how answering such a survey will not give you the right answer. Corporations do not take risks, they prefer youngsters for a reason, their inner lizards tell them so. What do I mean by inner lizard ? Here is an explantion from the persuader's script:

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: [voice-over] Of course, it's impossible to know if Rapaille's excursions through the collective unconscious really uncover what drives us, whether to Boeing airplanes or any other product. But even if he is onto something, you have to wonder about the net effect of reducing us to our most primal impulses.

[on camera] What about the environment? If the lizard wants the Hummer–

CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE: Right.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: –then– and the lizard's not going to listen to the environmentalist–

CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE: Right.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: –then isn't it our job, as aware people, to get the reptile to shut up and appeal to the cortex, to appeal to the mammal?

CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE: Now, you see, the problem is here, is that, if you think, right, the people who want to do good not always do good, all right? So the people that want to do good – for example, let's say, OK, we need to make smaller cars, right, to protect the environment. Then nobody buys the smaller car. Why? Because they're too small. So then the result is they go into trucks.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: [voice-over] Looks like I'm not going to win this one. After all, it's hard to argue against the reptilian brain.

CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE: We have to understand the unspoken needs of the people. It works. Good marketing research works. When we say it works, it mean that marketers understand the real need of the customers – sometime unspoken – and they deliver. "Give me what I want."

For a corporation, which has processes in place and acting in the status quo and trying to reduce its variation around its normal operation, the "Give me what I want" translates into "Give me youngsters I can impress and mold."