Geoffrey Colvin

Geoffrey Colvin is the author of Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (ISBN 1857886380); Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (ISBN 9781591842248); and The Upside of the Downturn: Management Strategies for Difficult Times. He is co-author of Angel Customers and Demon Customers: Discover Which is Which and Turbocharge Your Stock (ISBN 9781591840077). He is a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune Magazine.

Colvin obtained a degree in economics from Harvard and received his MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.

The thesis of Talent is Overrated is that the greatest achievers succeed through lifelong "deliberate practice." Colvin characterizes it as “activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it pushes the practicer just beyond, but not way beyond, his or her current limits; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun". "Some 40 years of research show that specific, innate gifts are not necessary for great performance", Colvin says; "great performance is far more available than most people realize".

Humans Are Underrated argues that as technology advances with increasing speed, the most valuable skills in the economy will be skills of deep human interaction – empathy, creative problem-solving in groups, storytelling – and that developing these skills will be crucial to the futures of individuals, companies, and nations. The book shows that while demand for such skills is rising, supply may be falling as our increasingly digital lives cause these skills to atrophy. The imbalance of supply and demand is thus making these skills even more valuable.

With Karen Gibbs, Colvin was co-anchor of Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS for three years, successor of Louis Rukeyser. His daily reports "Inside Business" and “Fortune Business Update” are heard on the CBS Radio Network, where he has made more than 10,000 broadcasts.

Colvin is the brother of singer/songwriter Shawn Colvin.