Talentism

Working Myself Out of a Job

I have a great mechanic. His name is Steve. I treasure him like a lamp that has a genie that grants all my mechanical wishes. The man is a genius: efficient, effective and cheap. It is a pleasure to spend time with him, watching him work.

Sometimes I talk to him and tell him how he should expand his business. He doesn’t do tires, or cleaning, or interior repairs, or wheel alignment. I keep telling him he can raise his prices if he was more of a one-stop shop. I tell him I want to give him more of my money because I really don’t understand all this car stuff and I would rather be spending my time focusing on things that I know I am good at and that people pay me to do.

But this weekend I had an epiphany. After reading about how I should put myself out of a job I called Steve. I told him that I didn’t want him to be a one-stop shop anymore. I wanted him to teach me how to fix my car. I boldly announced “All you are is a tax on my driving. It’s time for you to realize how little value you really add! Steve, if you were a good mechanic you would be thinking about how to put yourself out of business!”

Steve said that I should come right over so that he could start to make himself obsolete. There was a twinkle in his voice that made me a bit uneasy, but I didn’t care because I was about to put Steve out of a job. I had important work to do.

I arrived confident of my ability to do whatever it is that Steve does. You see, I am a driver. I had never really thought of it until I read that great article, but the logic is unassailable: just like a manager manages people, and therefore needs to know everything there is to know about people, a driver drives a car, and so needs to know everything there is to know about cars. I used to just hop in the car and go, blithely confident that specialists would handle all the details. But I was completely wrong. If I could drive a car it was without a doubt: I could fix them, build them, design them, pave roads for them... I could do it all.

And let’s face it: how hard could it be? I mean Steve is no rocket scientist. He is a freakin’ mechanic for goodness sake. He turns a wrench and smears oil on himself to look busy. Time to take my rightful place as the master of my driver domain.

Steve started me out on some simple problems. He told me that I needed to gap the spark plugs and ensure that the throd bearing was seated properly. I scratched my head a little. I hadn’t figured that specialist would develop their own language to describe all the complexities associated with their craft. And frankly, I didn’t even know that spark plugs need to be gapped or what the hell a “throd bearing” was. No worries! I quickly picked up a hammer and started beating the crap out of the engine. I figured I would have gaps in spark plugs in no time. Pieces of engine quickly started flying all over the garage. I felt good. I was getting stuff done.

Steve smiled and waited. When I took a break to get an energy drink he patiently pointed out that a hammer wasn’t the right tool, and that in addition to understanding the problem I needed to fix, I would have to understand what tools to use, how to use them and even show a certain talent for understanding how to read engine diagrams diagnostic outputs. He sort of absently stated “You know, an engine is a pretty complex thing. You have to know how all this stuff fits together and how to get this baby to really purr.”

Oh Steve! You silly bastard!

“Steve, you don’t get it” I confidently replied “I am a driver. Experts have told me that as a driver I can and should know everything there is to know about driving a car.” He looked a little puzzled, so I decided to become more direct.  “Everyone knows that mechanics are just hacks who work on cars because they can’t get a real job. This has got to be simple. I mean, I drive a car. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I would logically be good at everything associated with cars.”

Steve is a patient guy with a great sense of humor. He said “Of course! Tell you what.... here are all my tools, all my manuals, all my diagnostics, the keys to the shop and my phone number. Here is the web address of a course you can take about gaping spark plugs. You just go to it and give me a call when you need help!”

I expressed my gratitude and started to get back to work. As time passed, a shadow of a thought passed through my brain.

What if being a good driver doesn't mean what I think it does? What if the experts have just created a big mess because they are so focused on how broken mechanics are that they don't ever really ask what "being a good driver" means. What if a good driver is someone who focuses on core driving mechanics, handles stressful situations well and achieves their goal of delivering passengers safely to their destinations? My gosh, what if the experts, in their kind-hearted efforts to get me to be good at just about everything associated with cars, are actually making me a worse driver? What if there are people who have a real talent for fixing and building and designing cars, just like I have a real talent for driving them? Wouldn't it be better to find people who are the best at all of those things, so I could focus on being a better driver?

Nah! That can’t be right. Steve needs to work himself out of a job. That means I simply must be as good a mechanic as he is, or at least a functionally decent one. I got back to work, merrily banging away. Sure I had to call Steve a few times, and it took me forever to find the right information in the right manual, but after several days of hard work, I was done. I wearily turned over the starter, and watched as an electrical fire enveloped the engine block and destroyed everything I had worked for.

Dammit! Now I couldn’t be a driver because I didn’t have a car. Maybe I should just call Steve and have him do this the next time.

While waiting for the fire engines to leave, I had another epiphany. It turns out that getting Steve to work himself out of a job was expensive, risky and short-sighted. I thought just because I could drive I must know everything there is to know about cars. And back in the early days of cars that was probably true. But now the entire “car ecosystem”, with all its regulations, technology, options and complexities is way more than just turning a wrench. Its more than just having the right manual, or having access to the latest tools. It turns out that I need specialists to actually make my car run, to source raw materials, to hire designers, to set-up manufacturing facilities, pave roads, write laws and fill ‘er up when the car is empty.

Sitting around with Steve later that day, I decided to return to my earlier observation. “Steve, this car thing is pretty complex. You should offer me more services, not less. You should be positioning yourself as the guy who can get me the best possible driving experience, not just as a simple mechanic who makes difficult and complex work appear so easy it causes your customers to doubt your value and gives you a self-esteem complex. I know that you are going to bring on new technology so you spend less time doing all the old tuning and other grunt work you mechanics hate so much, but what do I care? As your customer, I just want the job done. Steve, you should realize that as all this stuff inevitably gets more complex and risky, and as transportation becomes ever more important to how our economy runs, that you should be looking to work your way into more jobs, not work your way out this one.”

Steve just looked at me and smiled. “Your a great customer Jeff” he said. “You just keep listening to the people who tell you how I should do my job better, and I’ll just keep taking more of your money.”

I Feel Better - Inspectors Will Thrive Too

I have spent quite a bit of time over the last seven years writing about how work is changing and about the rise of the creative as a key economic driver. I remain confident in what I have written. But as the sun sets, when I am left to my own thoughts, I am often disturbed by a potential flaw in my thinking. "What about the people who aren't creative?"

I believe that creativity is an inherent human trait, and that when the economy inexorably shifts to valuing innovating and the creativity that drives it, that the number of people who are in a position to increase their standard of living will increase. I continue to believe that an economy driven by innovation will be more fundamentally fair and just than an economy that is driven by physical labor or an economy that is driven by analysis and communication. The point of this blog has been to express a desire for create social and economic justice through moving to maximizing each person's inherent value and productivity, putting them in control of their own means of production and putting the value of talent before the value of the management of capital.

But all that doesn't mean that there won't be people left behind. We have all known people who were just born to be bureaucrats and administrators. Bless them all, these people want to be told the right thing to do, and they value ensuring that the policy an procedure is followed to the last detail. They are the bane of my existence, and I am all too ready to casually dismiss their value. Often, after I have been told by yet another lawyer that I can't do something or another administrator that my vision is too risky, I think "You are on top now, but when the age of creativity rises you'll be in trouble." That is my darker, "Mr. Burns" sort of side, which I am working hard to get rid of.

But this morning I was watching the ongoing disaster in the Gulf, and I realized that I had been wrong. There not only is a place for the ardent administrator: they will in fact be in great demand. And none of this changes that the fundamental economic driver of the 21st century will be innovation and commercialized creativity.

Most industrial disasters, big and small, are not a result of bad planning. And they are not a result of bad leadership (except where that leadership diminishes the value and role of the administrator, as we shall soon see). The plans are usually in place, and the leaders say the right things about making sure that people do the right thing. What happens is that the role of the administrator becomes secondary to meeting some other deadline or objective. The administrator (including inspectors and other bureaucrats) will prophecy doom but be roundly ignored.

The present calamity in the Gulf is a perfect example. Bits of rubber coming up with the mud was a pretty clear signal that the BOP was not going to function as required. But the rig had a good safety record to that time, and BP had to get the rig capped to move to the next drill site. So the people who pointed out that things should be slowed down and precautions taken were ignored as being to sensitive to risk. Had they been listened to we would likely not have the disaster we now all face.

Administrators will continue to be overly sensitive to risk, and will often fail to update their models and analysis to add real value (rather than just prevent all the innumerable bad possibilities from occurring). But in a time of increasing complexity due to technological advancement and economic interdependence, the value of the inspector is growing.

The struggle between the forces of innovation and the forces of inspection will therefore rage, and this is a good thing. We will of course be left with a greater need for mediators, translators and integrators, those who can see the point of both side and effectively create solutions that answer the needs of both sides (the genius of the "and"). The role of leadership will change to value this role over the knee-jerk expectation for bold visions and calls to action. Perhaps this will be as important as systems architecture and translator. A thought for a future post perhaps.

But what excites me most is that all those people who want to be told what to do, who want to enforce rather than create and who see their purpose as safeguarding against disaster; those people are a key part of the future economic landscape. In fact their wages can rise and their conservative worldview can find a comfortable place in the unpredictable creativity of the future. They are the yang to the creative yin, both of which are needed to bring the system into harmony. That leaves me feeling even more optimistic about the future, and that's a nice way to feel on a beautiful Saturday morning.

Better? Better! (Overview)

People feeling helpless and scared is not good for our economy or our democracy. It is perhaps too easy to point out that people who earn their living by providing detailed arguments about why people should feel this way are a bigger problem than the underlying economic debacle. Regardless, the arguments prophesying the end of the world are extremely dull and all too common. Let’s talk about reasons that people have to be be engaged, investing in the future. I feel strongly that those reasons abound: we are going grow closer to our friends and family, we are going to cast off the economic shackles that have bound us since the 1850’s, we are going to see more people economically engaged and rising productivity, we are finally going to make a virtue of diversity and we are going to become happier and more civically engaged. We may even solve some of the most vexing policy problems that face us. Think I am smoking something? Possibly. Want some?

Miserable Opportunities

Every problem delivers its own gifts. The person who predicts those gifts is either a sage or a fool. People who lament our present as the end of a wondrous past are lauded while those who proclaim the opportunities born of suffering are seen as callous. But the readership of this blog has fallen so precipitously due to ill treatment by its author that a certain freedom is granted. Perhaps it is a Zen question: “If a Pollyanna trumpets gratitude and no one hears it does the village idiot make a sound?”

What the hell. Contrarianism is often (but not presently) an American value, and it is an honor to traffic with those who proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. Especially when the emperor is a cynic with a sallow mind. Purposeless anonymity has its virtues.

Over the next days we will discuss all the gifts that are being delivered to us in our present misery. The points raised may be awful and wrong. But I believe it is far better to be wrong in the service of opportunity than right as part of the problem. At least it is more fun.

Fixing Recruiting Over at Glassdoor

If you have a good idea about how to make recruiting work better for candidates please leave a comment over at my post on Glassdoor. Your input is appreciated.

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Looking for a Good Recruiter

Note: I am frequently at odds with myself over posting something such as the following. I count many friends in the world of recruiting, all of them dedicated professionals who care about the value they deliver. And yet I can't help but feel that our profession is at a crossroads that many are ill-equipped to face, no less capitalize upon. It is my hope that these postings help prepare us all for our likely future.

The Clearview Collection (the name of the group of bloggers over at Glassdoor of whom I count myself fortunate to be a part) is primarily targeting candidates rather than recruiters. My purpose for the most part is to get candidates to take control of their careers, building on the theme of Brand Talent. My post this past week over at Glassdoor explained how a candidate can evaluate whether a recruiter is worth an investment of time. 

I started out writing on Glassdoor as a way to connect with candidates, to understand what they are thinking and feeling and to offer my meager advice about how best to take advantage of the changing world of work. But a funny thing happened on the way to that objective: my posts have become a Trojan Horse enterprise, sneaking better candidates into the world of the recruiter. I found myself believing that raising the candidate's game may be the only way to get recruiters to confront the realities of their changing industry.

From where I sit, the millions of hours and dollars that have gone into providing recruiters with improved tools and processes have largely been worthless or wasted. It is not that all the work and advice is without value. It is that the value is not keeping pace with what the market needs.

Imagine if Chevrolet started marketing a car that they trumpeted as "every bit as good as the 1955 Corvette." The 55 Vet is a classic. Compared to a Model T, it was a huge improvement in transportation capability and value. But consumers today are faced with higher gas prices, faster travel speeds, more populated roads and longer average commutes. Therefore the average consumer doesn't pine away for an equivalent of a car that is 54 years old. They require high-mileage, trouble-free vehicles that has creature comforts that make the long suburban commutes bearable.

My latest post over at Glassdoor talks about four things that good recruiters look for in a candidate: business focus, problem solving, agility and purpose. Continuing with the car analogy, this is what I would expect from a recruiting Camry. This is what I believe the average business buyer demands. Nothing fancy. Just the basics. Unfortunately I would have to equate that level of capability to a recruiting Rolls Royce. The recruiting Camry isn't functionally superior to the Model T.

I base this conclusion on my own experience, not on the scientific method. I know of only two recruiters that even attempt to evaluate candidates for their abilities I listed in the post. It is not that they are incapable of doing so. It is that recruiters are caught between two worlds: what they were taught and what is needed.

What recruiters were taught is that hiring manager satisfaction is their number one priority (of course this is a generous assessment - there are many people who believe that recruiters continue to be taught about various tricks for putting butts in seats, many of which do no credit to the profession). The implicit assumption behind this teaching is that hiring managers are wise buyers of recruiting services. And I guess if you are a third-party recruiter you have to assume that whoever is signing the checks knows what they are doing. But if you are a corporate recruiter, you exist for the benefit of the business (rule 18), not the benefit of the hiring manager. The implicit assumption is that the hiring manager really knows how to best attract, engage and optimize talent. That is patently untrue.

Most hiring managers are too busy to understand the depth of their ignorance in the area of talent. They fail to understand the potential value of talent to their organization at the same time they over-estimate the risks of not homogenizing and controlling their teams. They write poor specifications, fail to understand biases that hurt their operational effectiveness, employ sub-optimal hiring processes that hurt organization productivity, evaluate risk improperly and fail to learn from previous hiring failures. This is the customer for recruiting services: march to their tune at your own peril.

This is the recruiting Camry: recruiters blindly accept job descriptions that are thrown their way by harried and distracted hiring managers, scanning resumes for keywords that they don't understand, eliminating candidates based on the "don't fit" criteria that they can't explain, and treating candidates like cattle. And this is not just in the trenches - I run into a lot of executive and retained search specialist who exhibit the same behaviors.

The entire system of recruiting (recruiters, candidates, management, consultants, specialists and hiring managers) continues to reinforce these behaviors even though they add little value. Woe be to the recruiter who dares challenge a hiring manager, or demands that a candidate stop bs'ing them and answer some questions directly. I am not saying that the needs of tomorrow are easy. But the problem remains: a recruiter who merely responds to quixotic requests from ignorant customers is bound to be automated or outsourced.

The standard retort to this indictment is that I don't really understand recruiting. I am glibly told that transactional recruiters will always be in demand because those same harried managers don't want to have to deal with talent problems themselves. The recruiter may not be doing brain surgery, but what they are doing is valued. The people who say these things are dangerously mistaken.

At the turn of the 19th century there were more people employed as household servants than as almost any other profession except farm laborers. The advent of household self-service destroyed the domestic help industry. Technological advancement always displaces work. Today I type my own memos, book my own meetings, arrange for conference rooms, book my own travel and manage a budget. How many of those tasks do you think were done by executives in the early 70's?

Transactional recruiting is a costly luxury. As costs continue to be eradicated more work will continue to be pushed from specialist (i.e. recruiters) to internal clients (i.e. hiring managers). The same trend that reduced the steno pool to a distant memory and that demolished the number of secretaries and AP clerks to just what is necessary to manage the work that hasn't yet been automated will inexorably reduce the role of the transactional recruiter. The technology exists to make this a reality today, but the corporate will required to force hiring managers to take the load has not widely existed. That is changing as companies look to deeper cost control as a competitive advantage. And that is the reason that what recruiters were taught and what is needed is growing into an ever widening gap.

But all is not lost. There is still a huge market opportunity for talent services. The changing world of work is challenging hiring managers too. Good hiring managers understand that just as manufacturing needed to bring in supply chain, robotics and computer control specialists to increase throughput, most hiring managers will need to bring in talent specialists to provide the capabilities needed to redefine who specifications are created, talent sourced and engaged, people motivated and organizations formed.

The two recruiters I mention above are already delivering this service. They force their clients to be clear about their desired business objectives, require that inefficient and ineffective talent practices be modified, challenge bad specifications based on their deep knowledge of the industry, the company and the businesses needs. They operate as true consultants, winning the trust of their clients so that when they have to deliver the hard news the client is open to change.

These recruiters usually don't have direct candidate relationships, because they know that this is increasingly the role of the corporate sourcer and the hiring manager themselves. Instead they are the translator of the businesses objectives into talent specifications, practices and processes that can be implemented, measured and improved upon rapidly. They don't just own the client relationship - they own the client's success. They take accountability for failure to make the numbers. In short, they are an integral part of the business. They are the ones who are truly at the fabled table.

And now to the punchline: Dolby is looking for someone to be the talent consultant for the sales and marketing organization. Put another way: I am looking for a good recruiter. Do you know of any? Would you be willing to loudly proclaim their existence in the comments section of this post, quickly desrcibing how this rare individual has already been delivering the next generation services that are described above? Or, if you are too shy for that public display, would you be willing to send me an email at jjhunter@gmail.com with your narrative and link to your public profile? And if you are in the market for a talent consultant, know what they are and how to use them, please let me know that as well. Creating a market for this higher-value recruiting is the best possible way to ensure the longevity of the profession.

Tom Friedman Gets Talentism

5 years. Hundreds of posts. Thousand of pages. And Tom Friedman does it better in just one editorial.

Let me boil down what Friedman's piece (and Talentism) is all about:

• America cannot compete on price.
• America cannot borrow its way to prosperity.
• America is uniquely able to innovate, but nothing is inevitable.
• Organizations that commit to maximizing creative productivity (innovation) will create jobs and continue to grow our standard of living.
• Organizations that compete on price will continue to ship jobs overseas.

America is a consumerist nation. Consumerism: borrowing money you don't have, to buy things you don't need from companies you don't trust. We are experiencing the inevitable consequences of the tragic illusion that every marketing campaign has sold us for the last 20 years: that we are inevitably great, that we can buy our way to happiness and that if it feels good it must be right.

We must move to Talentism.

Organizations that are committed to innovation (Talentist organizations) will:

• Remove the artifacts of Taylor, Sloan and their progeny, including compensation plans, organizational hierarchies, job descriptions and performance management. We must summon the human spirit, its resilience and creativity, if we are to grow our way out of our present situation. You cannot achieve economic greatness by making people do things they think are wasteful and stupid.
• Do something about education to get us away from believing that by being better at math and science we will be able to compete on price. (If you want to know what education should be all about, check out Dr. Tony Wagner's book The Global Achievement Gap - I have listed his "Global Survival Skills" at the end of this piece).
• Commit to implementing the "Principles."

It is an economic certainty that we will continue to see a declining standard of living, and a precarious economic situation for our children, if we don't change the way we do business: the way we create, sell and employ. We cannot borrow our way to prosperity, and we cannot compete on price. Fortunately, we still live in the best place to innovate on earth. There is hope. But we must act.

Dr. Tony Wagner's "Seven Survival Skills"

• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving 
• Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence 
• Agility and Adaptability 
• Initiative and Entrepreneurialism 
• Effective Oral and Written Communication. 
• Accessing and Analyzing Information 
• Curiosity and Imagination 

John Lennons, The Future of HR and Talent Camp

John Lennon was a great musician and a bad business person. Anyone reading the recent Rolling Stone piece on “Why the Beatles Broke Up” would be struck by this. But the fact that Lennon hired bad management, broke up the group and did other generally silly things doesn’t really matter. Given his body of work, the fact that he wasn't Jack Welch doesn't seem important.

Great artists are rarely great business people. For every Picasso there are a hundred John Lennons. This doesn’t seem to prevent great artists from existing, and some times even thriving. But HR may be standing in the way of John Lennon joining our band. This is a subject I hope my compatriots at Talent Camp will discuss, even though I may not be present.

As we have discussed before, business tends to look at work in vertically integrated slices. A job title and level covers an increasing scope of capabilities. A Vice President of HR may be expected to have a great eye for talent, the capability to negotiate complex contracts, the analytical ability to assemble complex compensation structures and the knack for coaching CEOs to greatness. Everyone takes for granted that as one climbs the ladder that they have demonstrated proficiencies in an ever greater number of areas. HR writes job descriptions, selects talent, manages performance and compensates people based on this deeply held assumption.

But this vertical integration means that we never get someone who is great at just one or two things. And this is preventing us from developing agile, competitive and productive organizations.

Imagine an HR leader who has just one competency: coaching. Whenever a search firm is looking for talent, they always land on this person, because they have been a long-time leaders at a very successful company. And yet, as the firm digs into the individual’s back story, they hear a long string of complaints: doesn't understand compensation, bad manager, doesn't understand technology, etc. We know where this story ends: the search firm passes the individual over and heads to the vertically integrated example of "executiveness."

But what if this leader is the John Lennon of coaching: the best in the business? This leader gets the CEO to do the right thing nine times out of ten. In fact, the reason that their company is so successful is because this leader has John Lennon's ability to create hits, but instead of writing and playing a guitar, our theoretical leader creates hits through their unique coaching ability.

Because this mythical hit maker doesn't fit the mold of the vertical genius HR is likely to pass them over. How would you compensate them? Where would they fit in your organization? Who would they report to? How would you measure their success? What the heck would you do with John Lennon?

This is why the HR of the future will have to change the structure of the organization. In the creative age, no company will be able to turn away John Lennon. And the company that puts in systems and supports that turn your average Joe's into John Lennons will have competitive advantage.

Finding, unleashing and commercializing these talents will be the key to sustainable innovation. HR won't care that the “John Lennon of Coaching” can't manage a team, program a system or develop a compensation plan. Why would they? There is a "John Lennon of compensation" and a "John Lennon of systems". Expecting someone to suboptimize what they love and are good at so that they can climb a ladder that requires a broad spectrum of adequate mediocrity will be (must be) a thing of the past.

Many will point out that the present business structure of hierarchically stacked positions with every greater vertical integration won't support this vision. They are right. HR will have to become "system architects."  But the system that will be established isn't going to be easy.

The system we need is a series of interconnected nodes, a network, not a hierarchy. People will be able to access the nodes given the problem they are trying to solve or opportunity they are trying to create. This networked-based system is often dismissed as being unworkable due to its chaos and inherent risk. But these naysayers fail to understand that the present miltary-type organization is simply unsustainable. It creates too much waste. It pays people for delivering a whole host of capabilities, none of which are world-class or market leading. Organizations simply can't afford to pay for something which adds little value.

Unfortunately, HR is largely engaged in other conversations. Engagement to prevent the coming recovery exodus, moving jobs offshore to help the CEO with their operational cost obsession and helping the CFO meet the street's expectations by changing compensation plans seem to be at the top of most HR leader's list of priorities. Unfortunately this will leave them at a significant disadvantage when the CEO finally realizes that none of what they are doing will help their organization compete on value in a global market.

HR's obsession should be creative productivity: increasing the creative commercialization opportunity of their talent investments. Here are some questions that such a new "creative productivity-centric" HR organization might ask:

• What is a person’s unique capability? Where are they “John Lennon”?
  
• What is the value of that unique capability to the business?
  
• What does that unique capability say about a person’s purpose (their sense of direction towards achieving a larger goal)? How has this been exhibited through previous work (the portfolio)?
  
• How does that purpose align to the organization’s purpose?
  
• Assuming that the purposes align, that the capability is unique, and that the business can effectively commercialize that capability to achieve its purpose, how will that individual’s work be integrated and supported so that they are as productive as possible?
  
• Assuming that you can solve for all that, how do you connect that “John Lennon” node into a network that will both utilize that unique capability AND challenge that individual to constantly grow and extend that capability into other areas that could be of value? How do you set up a structure that gets the maximum unique creative value from that node?
  
• And finally, how do you compensate that individual for the value they add (not the position they hold) in a way that is uniquely meaningful to the individual (give them a uniquely compelling return for the successful investment of their capability)?

Notice that these questions do not even remotely touch on identifying managers, putting people in boxes in an org chart, training, engagement exercises, detailed global compensation plans, performance management, feedback, employee relations, benefits programs, back-office systems or any of the other standard tasks of today's HR department.

And yet, only HR is really positioned to do this work. A functional manager cannot possibly see their way to this future vision, since they suffer from the problem of vertical integration even more than the HR professional. And executive leadership is heads-down worrying about operational cost management and the other obsessions identified above. Finance, IT? Only HR is ever called on to even think about topics like this.

And after all is said and done, it boils down to this tension: the opportunity of an incredible future of value and innovation being held back by the reality of a transactional and misguided present. How do we all help get HR to that new future? How do we help create a million John Lennons with a million different unique value propositions, helping our companies commercialize creativity and build global advantage?

This is what I am hoping gets discussed at Talent Camp.

The Future of HR, Susan Burns & Talent Camp

When I hear my good friend Susan Burns talk about talent I become inspired. She speaks passionately about the disconnect between executive management and talent, about people preparing to jump the corporate ship once the economy reaches better waters. She recognizes the fundamental disconnect between corporate actions and corporate words: people may be every businesses top priority but there is a growing feeling that there is an inability to put meaningful deeds behind those words.

Unfortunately, HR stands in the middle of that conundrum. With “Human” right in the name, there is a growing expectation that the HR department can develop new, insightful and consequential ways to increase talent engagement. But the disengagement does not arise from a lack of enough generalists or a failure to provide enough development opportunities. The disengagement is structural and systemic and can only be solved by rethinking the value and system of HR.

The problem is hard to describe but easy to capture. Simply ask the following question: “Who is accountable for productivity in a company that wins through innovation?” I still haven’t found anyone who can answer that question. For me, it is clear: HR. It is the only logical place that productivity ownership can sit. The CHRO is really the next COO, even if the well-intentioned people who found themselves detoured into HR on the road to their dreams shrink from this characterization.

The HR of truly great thinkers like Ulrich, while being significantly better at helping the organization than the picnic and payroll personnel organizations of days past, is fundamentally ill-equipped to take on this challenge. Engagement is just the latest problem that shows the basic quandary with the modern HR organization: policies don’t prevent risk, reviews don’t increase performance, compensation doesn’t motivate, programs can’t convince people to give their soul to the organization, classes don’t instill creativity and agility doesn’t come from management fiat. Everything assumption that HR uses as its operational foundation is being swept away in the current of momentous change. The function’s inability to turn around a bad engagement situation is a symptom of that problem, not the cause.

Productivity in the Creative Age starts with getting alignment between the purpose of the organization, the purpose of the individual. It continues with identifying and aligning the return requirements of talent, customer and financial investors. It ends with defining waste as work that doesn’t add value to the shareholders, the market and talent simultaneously. When innovation is the only way your organization competes in the global market, we can no longer afford the arbitrarily wasteful belief that an individuals' commitment born of their passion is second to shareholder return. Talent’s commitment is everything: you cannot have business success without personal success.

This new HR is an incredibly difficult job, requiring deep understanding of behavioral economics, finance, system dynamics, investment methodology, business fundamentals, marketing, learning organizations, human psychology and the creative process. There has never been a more difficult job in all of corporate history. 

Being adept at eliminating spiritual and economic waste out of business systems will be hard enough in-and-of itself. But developing a new way of thinking and working in the face of HR’s historical inertia and reluctance to change will be a truly Herculean task. For every Netflix manifesto there are thousands of group-think surveys and cheerleader webinars extolling the virtue of optimizing a broken past. Like any Black Swan event, this will work right up to the point that it catastrophically doesn’t, at which point our organizations and our people will be left the poorer for our willful ignorance.

The HR of the future must be about unleashing the human spirit, because only people whose life and work are indistinguishable can possible maximize organizational productivity in the Creative Age. It really is that simple. And that complex.

Into the vortex created by radical and unpredictable change steps people like Susan Burns, whose commitment to change that helps both organizations and individuals goes beyond writing and speaking. Susan is actually determined to be a catalyst in this momentous change. The first step in her revolution is Talent Camp, and I am excited to be a part of it. If Talent Camp proves to be half as inspiring as Susan, it will be time well spent indeed.

Hopefully a thousand Talent Camps will bloom in every corner of the HR ecosystem, with young idealist committing themselves to the idea that there can be no more noble and honorable work than helping people profit from their purpose. And when that day comes, I will thank Susan for her tireless work helping to make that better future a reality. 

Brand Talent Over at Glassdoor

There is a new article over at the Glassdoor blog that I would love to get your comments on.

Almost four years ago I was struck by this idea of Brand Talent. Three years ago Dave Lefkow and I spent an exciting couple of days locked in a beach house, drinking Jack Daniels, trying to develop Brand Talent into a book idea. Dave got smart and decided to go Bacon and get all famous, leaving me to keep muddling this idea over in my head.

Every once in a while I would put something new up about the topic, but overall it just sat there in the corner of my brain. And then about two months ago I was approach by the eponymous Rusty Rueff and asked to be a part of a new blogging adventure over at Glassdoor. I eagerly and gratefully accepted.

That was the easy part. Thinking about what I wanted to write about was of course the much tougher follow-up to acceptance. I wanted to have freedom to cover areas that are interesting to me and (I think) important to job seekers, but also wanted a certain coherence to my arguments at the same time. And I also wanted the topics to help both Glassdoor achieve their objectives, but also help support Dolby as I started to work with my new team over there to create the "next big thing."

One night, during a late writing binge, it struck me that Brand Talent might fit the bill. As I mulled it over, I became more excited about the topic, and am now fully committed to it. I hope that the few readers who haven't abandoned me due to my unpredictable writing schedule will kindly help by reading and leaving comments to drive the discussion forward. If you do, I can promise you a front-row seat at the next unconference, which is indeed going to happen and be focused on the "next big thing." More on that later.

The Glassdoor experience has been wonderful so far. I would heartily recommend reading all the posts. Of course it is no secret that I am a John Sumser partisan, and when he writes things like:

"School did not prepare you for twenty-first century work life. It’s no longer a question of jumping through the right hoops. You can’t get good enough grades. You have to be your own employment agency."

Thus my partisanship becomes even more entrenched. John is exactly right, and I am looking forward to using the venue to riff with all the authors about topics that are near and dead to our talent futures.