ACM Gets It

I have been traveling unexpectedly for the past two days and so haven't been able to get to my computer. My next post in the "Principles of Talentism" series will be up tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I found this synopsis of the series at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) website. There is a section of the website called the Career Resource Center - Career News. The career news is a compilation of various synopses of articles that the editor of the news finds out around the web. I don't know when the editor is but they / she / he are / is quite talented. The "Principles of Talentism" synopsis is such a fantastic write-up (much better than I could have done myself) that I have reprinted it here. You can check out the original post here. Please go over and check out the entire newsletter. It is well worth your time.

"The Principles of Talentism"
Talentism blog, May 16

Jeff Hunter, the Director of Global Talent Technologies at video game company Electronic Arts, outlines the core principles of what he refers to as "talentism." In broad terms, talentism is a management philosophy that "talent is more valuable than capital," especially for companies attempting to create competitive advantage in the global economy. Instead of conserving capital, companies should be attempting to grow and nurture their talent. Based on his experiences at EA, Hunter suggests a framework for implementing these ideas about talent at any company. By successfully embracing talentism, Hunter argues, companies can re-energize their workers and enable them to find meaning in their work.

The first principle of talentism, quite simply, is that "corporations are systems." While these "systems" are intended to be efficiently-organized and productive, the fact remains that many of these systems tend to have negative effects on the behavior of their individual members. As a result of these systems, "good people wind up doing bad things" that they never intended. As Hunter points out, "Present corporate systems make frugal people profligate, intelligent people stupid and serious people silly. If we had something else that was reasonable to compare it to most of us would think that the modern corporation is some cruel mistake hoisted upon us by those mutton-chopped monopolists of long ago."

Furthermore, the present corporate system is "broken," even when it comes to activities that corporations supposedly do well, such as increasing shareholder value. As Hunter points out, "Companies do risky and expensive things in the name of being safe and saving money. Since there is usually no connection between the people spending the money and the best interests of the shareholders, emotional comfort and a desire to further one's career can easily take precedence over common sense and delivering value." Since corporations emphasize homogeneity over true talent, they indirectly work to diminish individual contributions, resulting in human capital resources that are inefficiently utilized. In short, "the modern corporation prizes capital over talent and acts daily on the belief that a corporations primary objective is to manage their shareholder's risk rather than maximize their investor's return."