The headline in USA Today reads: "First-born kids become CEO material." Here's how the paper sums up the article that goes with that headline.

"Scientists have found that first-born children are smarter than their brothers and sisters. It appears they are more likely to succeed in business, too."

Birth order studies seem to come in clusters. They also seem to come up with a variety of findings. In 2006, researchers at Ohio State found that birth order had no affect on intelligence scores.

Frank Sulloway, in his 1996 book, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives, held that firstborns grow up to be rule-abiding conformists. Kevin Leman, writing a few years later, told us that firstborns turned into well-organized perfectionists. His book was titled The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are.

This is not a new thing. In 1874 Sir Francis Galton studied top English scientists and observed that a surprising number of them were firstborns.

For its article, USA Today asked Vistage, which describes itself as "the world's largest CEO membership organization," to survey its members on their birth order. They received 1582 responses, of which 43 percent were firstborn, 23 percent were born last and 33 percent were somewhere in between.

Again, so what?

This makes for fascinating reading, but ultimately that's all. The reason is that you don't manage or promote or evaluate people based on their birth order. For that matter you shouldn't be doing it based on their generation, hair color, or anything else except their strengths, their behavior and their performance.

The fact is that the people who work for us are far too diverse to be dealt with in any way except individually. And besides, you can read the data in lots of ways.

Note that 56 percent of the responding CEOs were not firstborn. And, as far as I know, no one ever counts only children as lastborn, even though they qualify for that as well as firstborn.

If you're responsible for the performance of a group, read these studies and enjoy them. But deal with your people based on the way they perform, on the way they act, and on their potential. Let the scientists worry about birth order.

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