The Age of Average gave us a lot. Take clothing: We've all benefited remarkably from large, medium and small sizes making things affordable and available, but when it really counts - the wedding gown and the pressurized fighter pilot suit - it's bespoke all the way.

We've become so used to the concept as a measuring and sorting tool, that it and its correlates - below-average, above-average - are everyday speech. We don't even question the language, although the challenges we face require a different mindset.

The Age of Average gave us a lot. Take clothing: We've all benefited remarkably from large, medium and small sizes making things affordable and available, but when it really counts - the wedding gown and the pressurized fighter pilot suit - it's bespoke all the way.

We need to develop people rather than process them.

Character is incredibly jagged, and incredibly contextualized, even to the point where I still feel uncomfortable thinking about it.

Talent - really, everyone agrees, it's multidimensional, and often overlooked in standard assessments. That's not hard for people to accept.

It's fine to pretend that people are one-dimensional, like in body size; the problem comes when you forget that you are just pretending.