Recognizing merit: those who talk most are not those who build

In this Italian-language video, shot at the Guggenheim in New York, I tell the story of Gabriele Münter, who long remained in Kandinsky’s shadow, and of the criticism that greeted Frank Lloyd Wright’s building. Here, drawing on a 2020 study of small groups, I explain why listening to those who talk the most is not enough to recognize merit, and what can be learned from the ramp that Wright kept fixed while the rest of the design changed.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

The Guggenheim is currently hosting an exhibition devoted to Gabriele Münter. The name probably means nothing to you.

For decades she was remembered mainly as Kandinsky’s companion, overshadowed by him. And yet she co-founded the Blaue Reiter in 1911, and she had an independent career spanning almost sixty years.

During the Nazi period she hid hundreds of the group’s works, including many by Kandinsky, in the cellar of her house in Murnau. Without that act, an important part of the history of European art would have been lost.

And this makes me think of how many people inside companies create value every day without ever being seen. With no signature, no recognition, no visibility.

That is also what strategy is for. To make visible the people who build. And to recognize that merit does not always belong to whoever talks the most.

When the design of the Guggenheim was made public, the reaction was very harsh.

In 1956, twenty-one artists signed a collective protest against the building, arguing that the spiral might compete with the works on display.

But Wright did not change the design. He replied that the building and the painting were to become a symphony such as had never existed before in the world of art.

It was a radical strategic act. Because it meant saying: I have a vision, and I am not changing it to please those who challenge it.

And it makes me think that in companies the opposite often happens. Everything gets changed, all the time, for fear of displeasing someone. In the end, the vision is watered down until it disappears.

Clarity, paradoxically, costs more than compromise.

Recognizing merit without counting voices

At the Guggenheim in New York two stories meet. One is that of Gabriele Münter, a German painter remembered for decades mainly as the companion of Wassily Kandinsky. The other is that of the building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral, which even before it opened was mocked by the newspapers and challenged by some of the best-known painters in the United States.

In a company the person who talks the most is not the measure of value: neither of people’s work nor of the choices that cause controversy.

The two stories show this from opposite sides. In the first, the value was there, and another voice drowned it out. In the second, the opposing voices were very loud, and time has ruled against their volume more than against their arguments. In the video I say that strategy is also there to make visible the people who build. Left to itself, though, a group tends to see the people who talk.

Gabriele Münter, out of Kandinsky’s shadow

The exhibition the Guggenheim devoted to her, Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World, was the first monographic show on her in the United States in nearly thirty years. For decades, the museum writes, Münter had been “relegated to a minor figure” of German Expressionism and the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), “overshadowed by her then-companion and creative partner.” The exhibition set out to correct a narrative that has pushed many women artists to the margins. The Lenbachhaus in Munich, which holds the largest collection of Blaue Reiter art, describes the group, founded in 1911, as a collective undertaking and names Münter among its leading artists, alongside Kandinsky: she was one of its founders.

Then there is the cellar in Murnau. During the Nazi years Münter kept her own paintings and Kandinsky’s in the basement of her house, to protect them. In 1957, to mark her eightieth birthday, she donated a significant part of them to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich’s municipal art museum, together with other works by the group: more than a thousand in all, including ninety oil paintings and around 330 watercolors and drawings by Kandinsky. Since then the Lenbachhaus has been the world’s leading museum for the Blaue Reiter.

Münter’s recognition did not come on its own: two museums decided it, one by accepting and studying her donation, the other by devoting an exhibition to her and saying why. Recognizing merit is an act that falls to those who lead, and where nobody does it, habit decides.

In groups, those who speak longest seem to lead

Since 1949, starting with the psychologist Bernard Bass, research on small groups has measured how much speaking time counts in how members judge one another. A study published in The Leadership Quarterly put the idea to the test again with 256 students at two universities. Each group, of four to ten people, had to prepare a plan in ten minutes and carry it out in one hour in a computer simulation, and after each phase the participants named who had led the group.

In 2020 Neil MacLaren and eleven other researchers observed 33 groups of students working on a shared task: those who spoke for longer were more often named as the group’s leader, even after accounting for intelligence, personality and gender.

In the authors’ model, an average of thirty-nine extra seconds of speaking was enough to earn one more vote. The authors themselves warn against reading too much into the results: the participants were students, the task had no consequences for them, and the quality of what they said was not measured, so it cannot be ruled out that quality counts too. Anyone who has chaired a few meetings, though, will recognize the scene.

In a company, the work of those who build almost always reaches the people who decide through someone else’s voice: the manager who presents the department’s results, the colleague who is more at ease in front of the owners. Alongside the judgments nobody voices, which I discuss in the piece on transparency in a company, there is the work nobody talks about. Part of the work on organization and culture is meant to bring this work to the people who decide, not only through those who talk the most. It is also why I talk to everyone, from executives to factory workers.

Wright changed a lot, but not the ramp

On December 10, 1956, an open letter from twenty-one artists, among them Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning, arrived on the desk of the museum’s director, James Johnson Sweeney. It was also addressed to the foundation’s board of trustees and sent to the newspapers: the New York Times reported on it two days later. The sloping ramp, the artists argued, did not allow painting and sculpture to be shown with due respect. Wright replied in Newsweek on December 24 that his “fellow artists” knew “too little of the nature of the mother art, architecture.” He wrote the line about the building and the painting becoming a symphony in answer to a different criticism, from those who feared that the architecture would overpower the works. For his part, Harry Guggenheim, the president of the foundation, wrote to each of the twenty-one, saying that the slope was within the city’s regulations for sidewalks.

The ramp stayed, slope and all: it is the vision that, as I say in the video, is not changed to please those who challenge it. The rest of the design changed a great deal. Wright accepted New York, which he did not like, because Solomon Guggenheim wanted it, and in 1951, when the foundation bought the last plot of land on the block, he revised the arrangement of the building’s volumes. In 1952 the city raised objections under thirty-two building regulations, and the permit came in 1956, after long revisions and a less expensive way of building the spiral.

Not giving weight to whoever talks loudest does not mean you stop listening: Wright changed the Guggenheim design many times over sixteen years, in response to the city’s regulations, to costs and to his clients, and held firm on the ramp.

When people ask me whether the strategy changes during the work, I answer with the same distinction: the direction stays; the path to get there is updated. In a business strategy, what counts is the reason for a change. Wright changed the design for reasons like these, and the volume of the criticism did not make him touch the ramp; a plan that changes with every piece of news, on the other hand, ends up following whoever phones most often. The same ramp, seen from the angle of what is given up, is the subject of the video on strategic choices.

The twenty-one, after all, had seen a real problem: on a sloping ramp a painting does not hang level by itself, and the museum still solves this case by case, sometimes by suspending works from the ceiling. Several of the signatories, among them de Kooning, Kline and Motherwell, exhibited at that museum in 1961. Hearing criticism out, because it often contains something true, and not letting its volume decide: Harry Guggenheim and the foundation’s board tried to do this for three years, with a building many people mocked. I have great respect for those who do the same with their own company.

What to do and what not to do

• When a department presents a result, ask who built it, and listen to that person at least once.
• When criticism comes, separate the fact it contains from the volume at which it is delivered.
• Write down the criteria for recognizing merit before you have to apply them to someone, and keep them the same for those who talk a lot and those who talk little.
• Do not mistake speaking time in meetings for the measure of a contribution.
• Do not change a choice of direction only because the opposition to it is loud.

Sources

• Neil G. MacLaren, Francis J. Yammarino, Shelley D. Dionne et al., “Testing the babble hypothesis: Speaking time predicts leader emergence in small groups,” The Leadership Quarterly, 31 (5), 2020, article 101409. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101409
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, press release “Guggenheim New York Presents Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World.” https://www.guggenheim.org/press-release/guggenheim-new-york-presents-gabriele-munter-contours-of-a-world
• Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, “Collection” (Gabriele Münter’s 1957 donation). https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/museum/collection
• Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, “History.” https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/museum/history
• Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, “Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation.” https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/museum/foundations/gabriele-muenter-and-johannes-eichner-foundation
• Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, “The Blue Rider.” https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/program/exhibitions/details/the-blue-rider-1
• Kate Lingley, “Three Degrees in the Forecast: The 1956 Artists’ Response to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ramp,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, September 16, 2026. https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/behind-the-scenes/three-degrees-in-the-forecast-the-1956-artists-response-to-frank-lloyd-wrights-ramp
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Timeline.” https://www.guggenheim.org/about-us/architecture/timeline
• New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, Guggenheim Museum, designation report LP-1775, August 14, 1990. https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1775.pdf
• Matthew Drutt, entry on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, culturenow.org. https://culturenow.org/site/solomon-r-guggenheim-museum