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What is Talentism? Thirty years of angst is a lot to bottle into a pithy sound bite, so I usually start my standard diatribe about western economies changing as capital becomes cheap and talent becomes expensive. I point out that hedge funds and venture firms are turning away investors at the same time that companies are jacking up the price of talent in order to find that next "iPod opportunity". I talk about all the reasons that companies waste shareholder value in the name of keeping shareholders happy, and how this is especially true in the area of human ingenuity and creativity, where companies become obsessed with crushing the unpredictable tendencies of people to create and learn at the most inconvenient moments, all in the name of keeping the stock price buoyant. And then I expound about the structural hypocrisy of the average corporate governance structure, which claims to advocate for the average mind-numbing hierarchical control system in the name of protecting shareholder value but that rarely accomplishes more than lining the pockets of insiders regardless of the results they achieve.

Comments

[Epithet]

Jeff, not a bad start for 30 years of pent up angst! I will be not be turning of my Talentism RSS feed as it is one of the few places that really has anything useful to say about changing the paradigm.