"Grit filled a gap with an amateur survey by a social psychologist with limited psychometric expertise, but a great eye for marketing." This is how Angela Duckworth, the Godmother of Grit, was described to great laughter and applause at the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) annual conference. Instead, I interpreted the comment not as a badge of honor for the I/O psychology community, but rather, as a missed opportunity for the people in the room to increase their influence and impact. While Duckworth is giving TED talks, publishing a New York Times best seller, and consulting to Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks, the I/O community is missing the point by chuckling about her credentials. I/O psychologists are at risk of being sidelined by the buzz about new solutions, AI, and big data.

Google's screening tool that enables people to check online whether they are clinically depressed could do more harm than good, one expert has warned. Last month, the tech giant released a self-assessment quiz, called the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), which pops up as a result for the search query'Am I depressed?' on a computer or cell phone. Google developed its test in partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) but one professor claims that the quiz could just lead to over-treatment of depression amid the US's opioid epidemic. He warns the tool's development was funded by major drug company Pfizer, which profits from the sale of antidepressants. When you type'depression' into Google on your computer or mobile phone, it gives you the option to take its new screening test Google and NAMI both stressed that the results of their test are not an actual diagnosis.

Angela Duckworth, in her best-selling book, "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance," celebrates a man whom she calls a "grit paragon": Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, who led the team to a Super Bowl victory in 2014. It seems that Carroll had seen Duckworth's TED talk nine months earlier and got in touch, eager to reassure her that building grit was exactly what the Seahawks culture was all about. Two years later, Duckworth visited the Seahawks training camp. She lectured to the team's players and coaching staff. The subject was . . . Duckworth was impressed by the Seahawks, and she quotes sentiments that are characteristic of the Carroll ethos: "Compete in everything you do. Since the team trains ferociously all the time--going all out, for instance, in bone-crunching intra-squad practice sessions--this conversation may not have been entirely necessary. Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, finds grit in the best possible places. Her grit obsession, as she recounts, began at least a decade earlier. As a graduate student, she visited West Point, where each year twelve hundred new cadets go through a gruelling seven-week training regimen ("Barracks Beast") before entering freshman year. Most make it through, though some do not. Duckworth could make some guesses. In this same period, eager to find out what made top people successful, she was interviewing "leaders in business, art, athletics, journalism, academia, medicine and law." She discovered that "the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways.