Talentism

First Ask Why

You start a new project. The team sits down together and the narrative begins. The leader asks:

What, when, who, how and maybe why.

The leader is responsible for results. He wants action. The team wants approval. So everyone starts with what. What is tangible and deceptively easy to describe. No messy language, no feelings. Just rough descriptions punctuated with waving hands. The team is following the leader, the leader is fulfilled. The project starts.

The leader asks when?  When are you going to give me what?

The team agrees, and the deadline is set. The people who are results focused start fantasizing about implementation details and heroic rescues. But some intrepid souls venture further.

“Who are our customers?” someone asks. Or maybe “Who will use this?”

The leader acknowledges the question. The brave soul is rescued. A quick answer ensues.

The critical project questions have now been answered. The experts are ready to deliver on how. They hope that how is delayed to another meeting.

And finally, drinking lattes and looking smugly at their new Volvo’s, a few tweed wearing bearded philosophical masochists ponder “Why?” But silently and with great confidence.

What, when, who, how, why. It’s the way it works. Except for one thing: it doesn’t work that well. Things are changing too fast. The project fails.

The new project team sits down. The new narrative begins.

Why, how, who, when, what…

Why would anyone start on a project without knowing the problem to be solved, or the opportunity that needs to be created? Why would anyone want to begin work without naming and considering the system? Why is purpose. Without purpose there can be no alignment. Without alignment there can be no success.

Purpose leads to potential. How is potential. Not how to get what done. How are we going to work with each other? How can I make you successful? How will we know when we are done? How will we let the insurgents in so we create the future, instead of repeating the past?

From purpose to potential to people. People are who. Who has the problem we are trying to solve? Or... who will be helped if we create this opportunity? Who are they? Do we know their stories? Are their stories heroic, desperate, banal or romantic? Who will our work matter to?

Purpose, potential, people and then place. When is place. Is this the right time to do this? Are stars in the system aligned? Is the environment right? Can we afford to wait? When would be better?

Purpose, potential, people, place and then finally, product. Product means what. If we know why we are here, and we know how we will work with each other, and we know who our work will matter to, and we believe that when is now… then what are we creating together? Only now should we focus on what. What is last. Because while what is what who will touch, why and how are how what has meaning when everything changes.

When time moves slowly, and there are powerful people and weak people, and the powerful can predict the future… then submit to “what first?”.

But when the clock spins faster, and the weak make your market and only the enlightened can tell you what tomorrow brings… then first ask why.

A Welcoming Community

Being welcomed back to a community is a wonderful experience. Colin Kingsbury calling me "John" aside (it's my middle name, so I guess it makes sense), the many people who have reached out to congratulate me on my new position and to welcome me back into the recruiting world have warmed my heart.

Ami Givertz, one of the many friends I made over the last 4+ years of blogging, writing and speaking, asked me the following question via Facebook:

If I was asked what is the motivation behind your rekindling of Talentism is what would be the best answer?

To which I respond: 68 Posts !

As I said in that post (oh so long ago):

But the secret to participating in the creative economy ...is that I have to pay in advance, before I ever get anything in return. And the market that I am paying ...sits in silent witness to my authenticity, commitment and competence. Because each of the participants in my market is seeking the same things I am. Those customers can’t evaluate whether I am worth adding to their market if I am not trustworthy, consistent, and valuable. (In talent markets value gets discounted heavily for lying and flaking out.)

So what is my motivation? To reconnect to the community I worked so hard to engage those many years ago, and through that reconnection fuel my passion for innovating and making a difference through the world of talent.

Why now? That will be the subject for another post at another time.

Thanks again to everyone. Onboarding to a new position is my focus for the next month, but I will try to post as often as possible to answer questions. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, I will have regained credibility with the community and be able to start having some interesting discussions about how to make the 20 rules a reality.

Start: 20 Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age

Time to start a new adventure. First published on March 1, 2005, this will be part of the frame of the future conversation.

Does your company operate in the creative age? Does it attract customers, defend its market position, deliver value and create investor return by monetizing human creativity? Then the answer is a definitive "yes" - your business operates in the creative age. If you are recruiting in the creative age, then you might want to consider the following:

20 Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age

1.) Talent is more expensive than capital.

2.) A portfolio is more important than a diploma.

3.) Recruiting is a sales function, not an administrative function.

4.) Recruiting is a fundamental business driver.

5.) Recruiting must run as a separate P&L within the business.

6.) Talent is defined by production, not opportunity ("Real artists ship").

7.) A requisition is a non-critical financial document designed to manage risk.

8.) Great recruiting organizations design for reward.

9.) Bad recruiting organizations operate to manage risk.

10.) Quality is not a measure of satisfaction. Quality is a measure of the frequency and range of variation to a specification.

11.) The recruiting "specification" is a job description. There is never scientific rigor applied to the creation of job specifications. That is why recruiting can't be held accountable for quality. That is also why recruiting needs to be accountable for organizational development.

12.) Talent is not a person. Talent is a capability.

13.) Talent is not an employment contract. Talent is the delivery of the capability.

14.) In every recruiting sale there are three customers: the company, the client (hiring manager) and the candidate. All three must be closed simultaneously.

15.) Time to fill is a worthless statistic. It measures administrative cycle times. "Strike zone" is the appropriate measure - hitting the defined specification for delivery of talent.

16.) Cost per hire is a worthless statistic. It measures neither the contribution of good recruiting nor the cost of bad recruiting. This is why recruiting must be a P&L function.

17.) Management should have no insight into recruiting budgets, nor any control over any recruiting headcount or line items. Recruiting must be profitable. Period. How that gets done is up to the recruitment management, as long as it is consistent with regulation and the organization's values.

18.) Recruiting does not exist for the candidate or the client (hiring manager). It exists for the company.

19.) Most companies have no idea how to define, defend, attract, integrate and manage talent. So recruiting generally exists for something that isn't even there: the company's understanding of the value of talent.

20.) Talent is more expensive than capital. This simple fact will change the world in ways not envisioned since the 1800s.

Thoughts on This Week's Time Magazine

Perusing through the last issue of Time Magazine and had some thoughts:

Arnie Duncan may be the Apostle of Reform, but is he Peter or Judas? I like the focus on student achievement, but the lack of clarity around “achievement in what?” makes his statements a placebo at best. He is also falling into the trap that most education reformers are – comparing our scores to other countries. That is less than pointless – it is destructive. We aren’t competing against Finland – we are competing against ourselves. But even more, external factors such as culture are as important as education in a country’s success. The objectives of our education system must be aligned with our culture, so comparative test scores are not the way we should measure success.

Logging on to the Ivy League. Nice article. Here is what I think it means:

• The brand of a fancy college won’t mean much when your content is evaluated by a broad community. Guys like me don’t care about the Ivy League – if there is a better content provider at San Jose State, then I’ll get my content there. Finally, a real market for knowledge, where the validity of knowledge is not based on who said it.

• The students will be grading the educators within the next 10 years. Finally. This will start to undo some of the upside down market dynamics of the education system.

• Some people love to talk up “choice” but then don’t do anything about the structural tyranny of the present bad system. Why are some people so caught up in socialist boogey men when real socialism (in corporations and formal education institutions) goes completely unchallenged? Maybe because the light is better where they look.

• What happens when you get your education from the web? You have a “What not Where”  situation, because having content expertise about a subject is not the same thing as being a good teacher. So when you break the “Where” of teaching into “Whats” you get people who specialize in conveying information and other people who can match excitement to skill to opportunity, and then others who can excite students about learning. And when you put the content purveyors in the web, increase the percentage of people who are telecommuting, and look at other effects of putting gigabit into the home, you end up with a situation where kids can get their content when and where they need it, and then they will work with other kids on projects to solve real problems under the guidance of guidance experts (i.e. a person who can recognize their specific talents and match them to specific future needs) and real teachers (i.e. people who can encourage children to pursue a life-long love of learning).

Stacktacular – is it just me, or does the increasing speed of innovation mean not only greater technical opportunities, but also physical and emotional as well?

Spinning a New Strategy. Even a mundane business like spinning yarn can be competitive if it moves from mechanical and knowledge work to creative work. Patrick Yarns is the only major textile firm left with major operations in the U.S. because they focused on solving problems, not blaming everyone else for their crappy management. This story is probably the best story I have seen to demonstrate that mechanical and analytical jobs will go overseas, but creative jobs can stay here, even when the industry started in the mechanical age (read the first post on the Three Ages here).

What Not Where

Recently I was watching an episode of the TV show "Lie to Me" and I had an epiphany about the future of work: work will be defined by what, not where.

The lead character of "Like to Me" (Dr. Cal Lightman, played by Tim Roth) has a skill that is much in demand*: he can detect the truth by analyzing a person's face, body, voice and speech. The show centers on how Lightman and his team use that skill to solve different problems. Often the problems are crimes, but the fictional team also use the skill to solve hostage negotiation stand-offs, disaster rescue operation bottle-necks, mysterious romantic entanglements and business negotiations gone wrong. In the show Lightman has built an entire business around this one skill, and it looks like the business is thriving. It also looks like the limits of the opportunities afforded by application of the skill exists only in the writer's imagination. Apparently being able to tell when someone is lying is much in demand.

One evening I was turning the show over in my mind, thinking about how cool it would be to have that particular skill (my kids would beg to differ), and then it struck me: "Lie to Me" is a dramatic revelation of one of my central problems working in a big company. That problem is that a "job" is a concept focused on groupin a bunch of problems that really don't have much in common, but that somehow define what value you can provide to the organization. In other words, the modern concept of a job places a premium on "where" you work (i.e. finance), and devalues "what" you do (i.e. tell if someone is lying).

In most companies you are labeled by what group you work in, not by what you do. Your brand is about your domain, not your skill. HR is a great example. A good HR function has people who are good at quantitative reasoning (comp), effective social interaction (employee relations), and systems thinking (workforce planning). Anyone of these skills can be applied in almost any domain, including operations, finance, engineering and manufacturing. But if you work in HR you are "an HR person." Which means that it doesn't matter whether you are good at math, or great at systems analysis or a great negotiator. What matters is that what someone thinks about HR, and what they think about HR (or finance, or engineering, etc.) is what defines your opportunity to apply your skill to the greatest advantage for the company.

Let us take the fictional Dr. Lightman as an example. If he came to work for a big company he would likely go into sales, because he would make the most money sitting across from the table with prospective buyers, quickly determining whether the prospect was going to really sign the deal and what the optimum price point would be. But since Lightman would be sitting in sales, he probably wouldn't be asked by business development to help figure out whether a critical partner was secretly looking at a competitor's deal. And he certainly would never be asked to talk to an engineer who was leaving the company in order to best figure out how to retain that person.

Of course selling is very important. But it may not be as important as keeping a key partner in place, or saving the organization's top talent. The company would be far the poorer for it's inability to internally source a valued skill for a problem that would get the best return for the shareholder. But it wouldn't matter, because Lightman would be thought of as a "sales person", even though his skill of "truth teller" is so much bigger and more important. In other words, no matter how valuable his skill, he would be reduced to being identified with a domain. He would be a "where", not a "what."

The problem with the "where" orientation to determining a person's potential value to a company are many. But among them are:

Lack of Engagement - People usually enjoy application of particular skills more than the preservation of a particular domain. This is easy to prove. Go talk to anyone within your company and ask them "What do you really enjoy doing?" The answer will not be "engineering" or "human resources." It will be instead "solving complex problems" or "helping people find a better job." Engineering and HR are domains. Problem solving and job placement are skills.

Poor Performance - When work is oriented around domains it means that problem sets are artificially aggregated based on a belief in the commonality of the work. For instance, HR work is about people, finance work is about money, etc. But this means that a person who is in finance has to do a lot of work that has nothing to do with money, including negotiating what chart of accounts to accrue something to, how to apply certain financial regulations in certain circumstances and making presentations about financial data. None of those is a "money / math" skill, but because they are aggregated under the header of finance, a person in finance can be expected to do any one of those things.

Expensive - The "where" orientation causes companies to compensate individuals regardless of what value they provide. For instance, the head of finance usually gets paid a lot. But what do they really do as the head of finance? It may be that they are only good at financial forecasting and that they have progressed up the career ladder by finding themselves in situations where forecasting saved the day and brought rewards and recognition to this individual. But the reality is that financial forecasting as a skill is not really worth that much. Supply probably roughly meets demand. So you are paying the head of finance much more than you need to based on their title in their function, not based on the skill they posses. The hierarchy of the function artificially inflates the compensation range relative to the value of the applied skill.

But the trouble with "where" just starts there. Like many ironies of the present business system, big companies spend more on talent than small companies but get less out of it. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most significant factors is that as a company gets bigger it places less of a premium on what a person can do and more of a premium on their job type, title and location. By comparison, a start-up must make the best use of its investment dollar, and will constantly look for the best person to solve a problem or innovate their way to a solution, regardless of their title or specific domain. For example, in a start-up the head of engineering may get to do the big marketing presentations because it turns out they are better with certain audiences than the CMO. That would never happen inside a large company. The "what" (presentation skills) would be far less important than the "where" (engineering vs. marketing).

Think about it: don't you have a skill or competency that you really enjoy, that makes a difference, that can be applied across many different domains or specialties and that has value for a company? Most people do. You may not know how to think about it in that way, but trust me, it is far more likely that you have one of these skills than that you are expert in a domain. It is far more likely that you like what more than where.

If you are willing to take a moment and put on your "what" hat, I would love to hear comments about how you think your job would change.

Reorg or Regret?

Anyone who has ever been through a reorg, or run a reorganization process, knows the feeling. Things don't quite fit. It's like you are building a piece of Ikea furniture: what you end up with looks OK, but there are left over parts and you are never quite sure if you put it together correctly. The only way you find out is when it falls apart.

Your typical organization structure is based on the military, but instead of generals you have CEO's and instead of privates you have your average employee. Like most things that are currently broken about business, the system made sense at the time of its implementation but quickly gained a life of its own and now seems so critical to the smooth operation of a business that it is beyond the pale of questioning. Grandiose hierarchies were a critical control in a world where the ultimate risk is to life and limb and where you need to deploy large-scale resources in a coordinated fashion. Early companies needed to create long-supply chains across huge distances (like the trusts during the late 1800's and early 1900's that combined control rail networks with control of production of oil and refining capability), just like an army. Early companies also needed to have one coordinated resource deployment, making sure that hundreds if not thousands of employees would all pull the same lever in the same way at the same time to get the same specified result.

Times have changed, and most companies (at least in the U.S. and Western Europe) do not get competitive advantage from large coordinated workforces doing manual labor. Our economies are service and innovation systems, and there is nothing that kills the human spirit like control, group-think and managers who get to the top through tenure and corporate politics.

Reorgs are based on the theory that you can take different units of management, composed of people who perform tasks, and rearrange them to achieve some objective more effectively and efficiently. Some companies, like Microsoft, reorg frequently as a way to get their people focused on customers, ideas and problems rather than manager status. But most companies ossify their organization structures because changing them is difficult and often takes time away from productive work (at least that's the theory). In this way experimentation in organization structures rarely comes from the very place that needs org structure innovation the most: large companies.

Org structures should first and foremost be a tool to align what Henry Blodget calls business risk and investment risk. Simply put, you want your employees to win when the investors win, and you want your employees to lose (but especially management) when the investor loses. Sadly, this is rarely the case.

So what does our present org structures of generals and privates get us? A perpetual system that places employees needs, the personal goals of management and the monetary goals of the investor at odds. Here are two of the most significant examples.

Title = Status. There is an implied assumption in most organizations that the way to get to the next title, the next rung in the ladder, is to make money for investors. We all know this is the exception, not the norm. Even when promotions are not due to favoritism or negative corporate politics, the reality is that it is very difficult for a manager to know exactly why their employee is successful. The manager is left with their instincts (usually an emotional response subject to wide variation based on mood and factors not associated with employee success), the input of peers and the need to solve a problem quickly (i.e. "I need this task done because my boss is chewing my butt about it, and I think Susan is the best person to do it.") All of this boils down to a systemic gap between what the investors care about (sustainable competitive advantage that delivers predictable returns above the cost of capital) and what employees care about (making sure that the stars align so that I can get a promotion and a raise). This means that reorgs often become a competitive, rather than cooperative, exercise. Everyone understands that the potential chaos of a reorg provides an opportunity to put oneself in a better position to succeed. The basic military org structure will always reinforce this behavior, no matter how much a good manager tries to work otherwise.

Artificial Barriers: Because employees understand that they don't win by focusing on investor objectives there is a huge pressure to ensure that "ownership" (as opposed to accountability) is first and foremost in most reorgs. But the nature of work is changing, and there are many times when a work product or service must de facto be the result of multiple groups working as an organic whole. Organic group direction has been written about and spoken about for a long time, but in a company it tends to run headlong into the reality that "organic" is short-hand for "no one to blame when things go wrong" and "no one to get the credit when things go right." As we have discussed, this matters a lot in a military org structure because getting ahead (and therefore getting more prestige, money and control) means that the person who is going to make the decision about whether you should get ahead or not needs to like you and feel comfortable with you. So the present org structures create artificial barriers between groups that almost always increase inefficiency and decrease agility and speed of response.

As has been written in this blog before the cure to this is to replace managers with markets. Buyers can rarely afford to be as free with their money as managers can. Buyers have to specify the outcome they want, what that outcome is worth to them (cost benefit), how they will measure whether the outcomes are being achieved (contract and / or SLA), ongoing negotiations around payment based on delivery and direct feedback about performance (since the personal relationship that frequently develops between manager and employee is harder to sustain in a buyer / vendor relationship).

Final thought on this is that the present economic downturn will likely start sorting some of this out. We are likely to see the total regular full time workforce as a percentage of the population decline and never recover, as more people move to independent and contractor status. Managers will increasingly have to spend their time selecting the right vendor, and spend a correspondingly decreasing amount of time managing reorgs.

Getting the Right Stuff Done

(Thanks to those of you who reached out via email and phone and welcomed me back to blogosphere!)

HR often feels caught between two worlds. In the world of payroll and picnics, HR practitioners measure their importance by how busy they are and how they make employees feel. In the world of grand strategies HR looks for an excuse to “be at the table”, to be a part ongoing discussions and decisions that affect the business. In the world of "Strategic HR" we develop complicated programs to influence culture and long-range talent decisions. My experience has been that all too often these programs are really just smoke and mirrors; fancy PowerPoints and tricky language to convince executives of HR's business relevance. This leads to executive smiles and platitudes, and ends with boardroom conversations about cutting HR as a cost center.

Regardless of whether you live in the world of pinics or the world of strategies, your world is being abandoned. Picnics can seem silly when people are losing their jobs and critical corporate programs are being cut. And any senior HR practitioner approaching a business person with big plans for cultural change is likely to get a blank look and a speech about how those programs will be brought back in better times.

In an economic meltdown “making people happy” and “being at the table” are luxuries that the business can ill afford. Regardless of industry or geography, there is only one truth in the world of business today: fear has replaced planning. Business planners feel as if they are groping around with a lighter and a hand-drawn treasurer map in an unfamiliar dark place. This is leading the people responsible for operating the business to cut most high-level engagement programs, since the prevailing wisdom is that people can’t find jobs and likely won’t be leaving. When you can't tell your CEO what the next quarter is going to look like, your CEO isn't likely to want to plan multi-year change intiatives

In the end, it doesn't matter whether you are into engagement or talent strategies: today's economy means that HR is getting whacked.

Or does it? As we discussed, HR needs to Get Shit Done (let’s call that GSD from this point forward, and turn our profanity into “stuff” so the kids can read at home). HR needs to move from grand pronouncements about “culture is everything” and “being at the table” to focusing on getting work done. GSD is more important now than ever. In fact, I will maintain that HR is more important than ever. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be happy with payroll and picnics.

Economic challenges do not suspend the laws of business physics. If anything, a shrinking top and bottom line drives a greater need for focus on results and accountability, two things at which HR have not typically excelled. Going back to doing busy work that someone else could do faster, cheaper and / or better is not a recipe for HR success. We definitely need to GSD. But GTWSD (Getting the Wrong Stuff Done) is often more expensive than doing nothing. It would be far better to have to HR professionals dressing up in cheerleader outfits and doing yells in the hall than having a group of talented HR employees committing their time, money and attention to activities which actually hurt the productivity of the employees.

HR needs to GSD. But more importantly, HR needs to be Getting the Right Stuff Done (GTRSD).

Now is the perfect time to evaluate what exactly the "right stuff" is. Any entrepreneur can tell you that chaos brings opportunity. When things are going well people get into a routine and feel comfortable. Convincing someone who is enjoying their job and getting praise for their work that they need to rethink the way they doing things is a very difficult task. Four years of tilting at windmills on this blog have taught me nothing if they haven’t taught me that when times are good, change is hard, no matter how badly it is needed.

But times are no longer good, and many good HR practitioners are looking forward to what comes next. Over the next couple of weeks I will use the idea of “Getting Stuff Done” and the current economic calamity to talk about what HR can being doing now to set itself up for success in the future. No grand pronouncements, no picnics. Just a hard-nosed look at the best work to be doing right now for generalists and specialists, including comp, recruiting, training and systems.

Getting Shit Done

As my friend Jerry Garcia would say “What a long strange trip it’s been.”

Many moons ago I was an HR generalist in the fastest growing manufacturing start-up in history. Things moved fast… really fast. Until you experience growing from $100 in revenue to $1.3 billion in revenue in 3 years, you really don’t know the meaning of the phrase “just get it done.” I was responsible for workforce planning, which (and this is not a joke) was adjusted every 6 hours based on what orders were coming in from Compaq computer. Our long-range plan covered two weeks.

Then I took a break from the helter-skelter world of start-up HR and started my own companies. When you are the CEO of a start-up you don’t have much time to think: everything is a panicked reaction to some angry customer or some new sales opportunity. You put your head down and you pray that you make it through the week.

After a couple of CEO rounds, I needed a break. So I started my own consulting firm. I worked with customers who were trying to develop and ship new products, or package themselves for a fire sale. Sometimes I would fly into a city in the morning and have a new product design late that evening. I once lead a team of 6 people that created, shipped and sold an entirely new product set in just 3 months. I always seemed to be on the hook for some fantastic, impossible new deliverable.

In short, I was always getting shit done.

And then I went back to HR. I have to be honest… part of the reason I did it was that I needed a break. Hyper-fast start-ups, CEO gigs where you sweat making payroll twice a month and harried customers demanding the impossible was starting to get to me. Not understanding what “take a break” really meant, I went to a fast moving video game company going through a major technology overhaul.

Then a couple of years ago I made a new friend. She had worked for some of the toughest CEO’s in Silicon Valley. She forgets more about HR every day than I could learn in a lifetime. But that didn't stop me from giving her my opinion. Thinking I was pretty smart, I would tell her my latest theory about HR (many of which I have blathered on about in this blog). And she would just smile at me and say “That’s nice Jeff, but you just don't understand. HR is about getting shit done.”

Getting shit done? At first I was insulted. “Hey!” I would think to myself “I fly all over the world and talk to people about HR and tell them its strategic and important and they listen and tell me I’m great! What the hell is this ‘Getting shit done’ stuff?”

Then, after a couple of months, as I started to read more David Ulrich and other leading-edge HR thinkers, I thought to myself “Getting shit done is just the way that HR justifies its existence – CEO’s don’t know what they really want so they send the CHRO on all these fool’s errands to make the board think that they get the whole ‘talent is important’ crap that everyone espouses and nobody believes.”

I stuck with that thought a long time. It made me feel better as I moved through various HR jobs (first Talent Acquisition, then HR Services and now Talent Management and L&D), smug and superior. “I am better than this shit" I would think to myself.

But today I had an epiphany. I think I get what my friend has been saying all along.

Strategies and missions and visions and grand pronouncements are all well and good. Sometimes they work; most of the time they mean shit. But it really doesn’t matter. Because business is people: customers, employees, vendors, shareholders. And people change every day. Some days they need more money to pay the bills; some days they need an emotional pick-me-up; other days they need to know where to get a question answered so they can get their job done; most of the time they just want to know how to deal with constant, never-ending change that seems to turn their life upside-down every day. It doesn’t matter: when the shit counts, they turn to HR.

Some people think that the daily tactical “shit” that happens when people change is frivolous and without value. I was one of those people. But getting that shit done is where the rubber hits the road. It is where employees feel better and decide to come back to work the next day. It is where managers learn to chill-out and think of their employees before they go on another pointless tirade. It is where someone goes home and looks their kids in the eyes and thinks “I got paid today.” It is where the board of directors says “This place is going to be all right, because we have the right people and they can make this happen.” It is where HR works.

Getting shit done is not only what HR is about. Getting shit done is what HR SHOULD be about. My friend is right.

Now I still fancy myself a big thinker, and I still like my big ideas and my lofty ambitions. Everyone needs their illusions of importance. But hopefully my friend has taught me the humility to realize that in these troubled times, when people need our support and our craft more than ever, sometimes my big ideas don’t mean shit.

28

Business does not exist in a vacuum. So while my purpose may be to build better businesses on a better business and economic model, there is no part of how businesses exist in a larger ecosystem that isn't worth examining. Take the education system for example. It's not just that the modern western education system is destroying something of incredible value to the businesses of the future (imginiation and curiosity), it is also that the system is creating massive structural inequalities that will eventually shrink potnetial markets for goods and services. Our education system is driving a massive wedge between the upper and lower classes in America, splitting the middle class between those willing to mortgage their futures to get into the right school district and those who either can’t afford, or think it is imprudent, to take that kind of risk. The fault line that is being created by a lack of corporate recruiting competence is leaving the poor completely behind. They can’t afford to move into the right school districts, to get access to an education and supportive peer group that will ensure that they will get into the right college so that they can get the right job. And since the poor are disproportionately people of color, the corporate system is blasting away at it’s foot in two ways: first, by ensuring that the possible pool of talent it can draw from is always scarce and reinforcing behaviors that are antithetical to sustaintable advantage in the creative age, and second, because diversity of background, opinion, perspective and thought are critical to the creative process. But since corporations are ensuring that every nervous parent in America is obsessed with homogenizing the unique perspectives, thoughts, opinions and backgrounds from their kids as they move in droves to exclusive gated communities, the talent pool needed to sustain competitive advantage is shrinking at a rate that is inversely proportional to the overall value of talent to the enterprise. That’s right: the corporate system of selection based on experience and education ensures that as the possible talent pool grows due to immigration and globalization, and as the potential value of that pool grows relative to the needs of the organization, that corporations will actually have an ever smaller pool from which to pick.

27

I have never met a two year old that lacked imagination and curiosity. I have met very few 40 years that still posses either.There is this little voice in a parent's head that tells them that seven million years of biology can't be all wrong, that perhaps the very reason we have schools and jobs is because human beings are just naturally curious and inventive. We have this sneaking suspicion that seeking to normalize thoughts and feelings, begging all the while for external validation and the warm embrace of group-think may not be the right way to go. It's not just all the counter examples to the conventional wisdom: the Curries, the Sanders, the Einsteins, the Kings, the holy writings and yes, even the Gateses. Its the feeling that we are all just going to Abilene, that someone, somewhere started all this with a rather silly (and perhaps even sinister) notion and that now we are all just feeding upon the group's validation of something that may be very wrong. And like the paradox shows, the group think effect has to start somewhere. People far smarter than I have developed almost as many theories around this as there are children struggling in school. But my purpose here is to link building a better business on a better economic model with the lack of talent to make that happen. And therefore, I propose that the problem starts with us. We are doing it. Recruiters and HR people. We can’t put together a job description or a reliable method for improving performance, but we sure as hell know that if someone went to Harvard they are going to be right for the job. Corporations can’t tell you exactly how they built a culture that fostered creativity and innovation, but they know for sure that if you finished a project at Cisco you must be a high-tech titan. It is our own incompetence, our own ability to decipher and describe reliable criteria for success, our own inability to look at an individual’s past and figure out whether they will be successful in our future that drives us to this incredibly destructive behavior. Am I saying that because we can't write a good job description we are strip mining our most precious natural resource for the most mundane and common ore? Yes... I am.