Talentism

24

More stories coming in about the difference between getting good grades and doing a good job. A friend has been reading this numbered rant and pulled me aside earlier this week. “You don’t know how much you have hit the nail on the head with this one” she told me. “My husband is running the software division of a new computer company. They are trying to solve really difficult software problems for a new computing platform. My husband needs help, so he has been calling in the best and the brightest comp sci guys he can find to help him. He has had to fire every single one. These guys simply can’t conceive of a solution that is outside their standard linear way of thinking. My husband is now hiring theoretical physicists and teaching them to code. It’s the only way that he can get the work done.” I have said it before, and I’ll probably say it many times hence… the jobs of the future will require creativity as foundational skill. You can say what you like about our education system (and many have), but nobody is claiming that the education system of today is enhancing the creative capabilities of our kids. At a certain point all the kids that get good grades, go to the right schools, know the right formulas and can perform all the right routines are going to have be trained to become like they were before they went to school: curious and creative. It is inevitable. And the reason it is inevitable is because recruiting hasn’t screamed “Stop the madness!”

23

A couple of months ago I was sitting next to the VP of engineering of a large software company located on the east coast. I was telling this person my Disneyland story. He replied “Depends on what you want to do.” I asked the engineer to clarify. “Well, I hire a lot of software and test engineers. Some of the jobs are pretty much rote coding type of stuff. Others are critical problem solving and new product jobs. When I want to hire the crank-turners I go to the comp sci programs in the area and go through the regular recruiting routine. The kids I get are fine for what I need them for. But when I want to hire problem solvers and innovators I skip the recruiting process entirely and go this one school, or look for graduates of that school. Funny thing is, this school doesn't graduate any software engineers. I have to train everyone I hire from there to code. But I have almost a 100% success rate finding the right people from this school.” (I have purposefully left this vague so that this individual can maintain their hard-earned competitive advantage in talent.) I then proposed that this engineer’s company would simply start outsourcing the “crank turning” jobs to China, India and Eastern Europe. “Sure – it’s getting close to the point where it is just too expensive to do knowledge labor here in the U.S., so eventually we will outsource all that stuff. But I need to be working in the same room with the innovators and problem solvers, so until I am ready to move overseas, I will continue to be bringing people here for that kind of work,” they replied.

22

The night after my social experiment with the sure and senseless band teenagers my wife reminded me that I may have an especially jaundiced view of those fine little fellows, as the entitlement mentality of the average American is a sure way to send me over the edge. Perhaps I was just being too hard on them, all evidence to the contrary. But my thoughts were reinforced the next day as I was talking to one of the fellow chaperons who I had met on the trip. It turns out that he was a software engineering executive at a mid-sized corporation. He laughed and said “We are all in big trouble. The same thing happened to me. But it’s worse than that. I can find lots of kids to hire these days, kids that come from fancy universities and have great degrees, but they are almost completely incapable of solving problems outside of a narrow band of well defined issues. Against the advice of my recruiting department I have started looking at second-tier schools where I can find kids who didn’t always get the best grades but know how to achieve an objective and make something happen. These kids that come from privilege just can’t seem to add value.”

21

(Thanks to all those who have sent me emails, comments and articles. I will be replying to those as the numbered rant concludes.)

Our education system is producing an entire generation of children that can barely think for themselves. Interactive environments where negotiation and social skills were enriched and enabled are dashed away in the vain hope that a full calendar of activities will ensure that little Jane or Johnny will get into the right school and earns lots of money. I was reminded of this recently when I chaperoned a group of 12 year old boys on a trip to Disneyland. Each boy was assertive to the point of being obnoxious and taxing, completely assured of their own self-worth and the value of their opinions. Every move I made resulted in a direct confrontation that questioned my ability to chaperon such a vaunted set of prodigies. Finally, on the second day, I pulled the boys together and said “You all seem very sure that each of you can have more fun if you are in control of where we go next. Yesterday we got on 15 rides due to my scheduling and mapping the appropriate routes. But since you are all very sure that you can do it better, today I will simply ensure your safety and let you determine where we should go, when.” The kids all gave a smug smirk and said “Finally!” Two hours later we were still sitting in the same exact spot, not having gone a single ride. That day we ended up going on three rides, and all of those were in the last hour before the park closed as the kids madly dashed to whatever was closest. It seems that all the children were extraordinarily adept at having their own opinions and questioning what everyone else did, but when presented with the opportunity to work as a group to guide their own destiny, they completely broke down and failed by any meaningful measure, especially by the measure of their own fulfillment and happiness. This is the result of the combination of upper-middle class value systems and the modern education system: narcissistic braggarts who can’t solve a problem on their own no matter how much incentive exists. Most of the children were straight-A students and were destined for the Ivy League. And still, I wouldn’t hire one of them if my life depended on it.

20

Perhaps if we were simply confronted with a static situation we could work our way around the education system. But things are getting worse…. Much, much worse. In order to normalize the data needed to establish the efficacy of education programs that teach these basic skills, and therefore insure that no child is left behind (or with a chance), all the creative and individual aspects of any result sets must be removed. Unfortunately for the people who insist on this normalized data, what is really being tested is the ability to take a certain type of tests. As numerous psychologists (and an increasing number of nuero-linguistic specialists) have discovered, intelligence takes many forms in people. Few would say that Bill Gates is an idiot, but he was barely coherent in early business meetings with IBM. IBM, deeply ingrained in a standardized vision of corporate professionalism, viewed Gates as borderline brain damaged. He would attend meetings mumbling to himself and rocking back and forth to the point where people would throw up their hands and leave the meeting. Since Gates couldn’t provide data in a format that the other members of the meeting found acceptable, should we infer that Gates is not intelligent? Or should the fact that Gates is the richest man in the world who has started and run the most successfully profitable corporate enterprise in all human history tell us something more meaningful?

19

It may well be that when explored from the very purpose of education we determine that organizing a learning environment in a hierarchical militaristic organizational structure that uses static information sources and that prizes and rewards rote memorization, basic analytical skills and obedience to higher authority. But until we have agreement about the purpose of formal education systems and structures we cannot reasonably answer whether those choices are appropriate or not. And as long as we can’t, we are forced to continue advocating for a system which, on its face, seems to be a complete failure at creating an engaged citizenry and a productive and engaged workforce. So the purpose of education is to perpetuate itself, and fight of all comers that may force it to reexamine its delivery mechanisms and methods, no less its reason for existence.

18

The modern western education system does not exist for the purpose of increasing the general productive capacity of the society. The modern education system exists for the purpose of perpetuating itself. It is an organism that has successfully fought off most major infections that would help it adapt into a superior being. To prove this point you just need to reflect upon what we have talked about so far and then continually ask the question “Why?” For instance, if tests are neither predictive of an individual’s ability to apply knowledge in a productive manner, nor able to infer an individual’s passion for a topic nor their ability to create and add value in the exploration of that topic, then why do we take tests in schools? If grades are not predictive of future success but only a quantitative measure (if that) of a person’s ability to adapt to a quasi-academic environment that is substantially different than the environment in which most people will create, produce and work the rest of their lives, why do we have grades? Why do we have teachers? Why do we have principals? School boards? Text books? Education may in fact be the one silver bullet we have. We engage in endless conversations about culture, business, celebrity and a myriad other issues. Why not education and its purpose?

17

The definition of “increasing productive capacity” is not a timeless definition. It is a definition that I believe fits our particular place and time in an advanced but structurally flawed economic system. As I have written, we are entering the creative age, where the ability to commercialize (as in “ship”) creative capacity will be the single greatest driving factor in sustainable economic success. Therefore unlike previous economic ages (agrarian, machine and knowledge), there is an alignment between an engaged, wise and connected citizenry and the needs of the commercial domain in order to achieve success. When what is right in order for the society to increase its general measures of health (lower crime, higher standards of living, lower barriers to individual fulfillment based on class, race, gender or sexual orientation and an increasing capacity to understand the consequences of our actions) is aligned with what is right for the primary drivers of the economy (lower transaction costs due to increase trust and shared meaning, lower cycle times to creative commercialization for increased speed of organizational learning, increased competition due to decreased cost of entry into a market, increased access to talent investors as the ability to individualize talent delivery matches organizational ability to commercialize on that talent), then what the company needs to do well reinforces what the society needs to increase fairness, economic justice, representation and engagement of the populace. So increasing productive capacity is good for the society, individual and corporation.

16

There needs to be a running dialogue about the overall purpose of education, and in absence of that conversation explorations of education’s deficiencies are little more than meaningless critical analyses. Let me propose for the purposes of this discussion that education exists to increase the productive capacity of the society. Some propose that the purpose of education is to expand the general happiness of the individual but I believe that happiness is a purely personal endeavor and not the domain of the state (which invests heavily in education) or society as a whole (which benefits from happiness, but cannot predictably create the conditions for it, as works by the likes of Frankl have shown). Formal education exists to expand the ability of people to produce, and in the creative age productivity is aligned with the individual’s natural desire for place, permanence and individual expression. For the purposes of this conversation, I also assume an interconnectedness between all the individuals in a society, such that productivity cannot be maximized if the society is not composed of “wise, connected and emotionally aware agents in an open civil society where production of value is assessed on the basis of true cost and sustainability.” Lance’s point is an excellent one, and I agree with him. One can view the purpose of education as productive capacity through the lens of civil society, culture, social systems, individual fulfillment or even through Maslow’s hierarchy. My point is that in the creative age, those lenses are all converging such that it will not be possible to achieve excellence in one without achieving excellence in all.

Who Are You Going to Blame When Your Straight "A" Student Doesn't Do Well?

The Corporate Executive Board is one of the most respected business think tanks in the world. The Corporate Leadership Council is the arm of the CEB that deals with HR issues. In 2005 the CLC conducted a study called "Realizing the Full Potential of Rising Talent: A Quantitative Analysis of the Identification and Development of High-Potential Employees". While the study is only available to CLC members, it should be required reading for every educator, academic and business person.

The study is long and contains much interesting information. For instance, the survey behind the study found that 78% of CFO’s were focusing on revenue growth over cost control. At the same time, the study found that 74% of respondents to the survey indicated that “skill / leadership gaps have a negative impact on product innovation.” A Chief Human Resources Officer in the study is quoted as saying that the skills gap is troubling because:

“These are the people we will call upon to lead us to stronger business performance over the years to come. They will launch new businesses, they will find new ways to strip out costs, they will build better customer relationships, and they will drive innovation. Really, the future of the organization is in their hands.”

The study went on to say that “Employee potential grows when employees are pushed outside their comfort zones in news, personal (and at times painful) ways.” The study examined which of these "growing experiences" had the most beneficial impact on the employee’s ability to grow. 22 factors were sited. Of those, only 4 were factors that are learned or reinforced in education institutions:

• Using specialized skills for daily tasks
• Engaging in business forecasting or planning
• Understanding markets, competitors or customers
• Designing new products (which I would argue is actually a creative exercise)

Only one of those factors ("Using specialized skills for daily tasks") makes into the top five (number 5, actually).

And the top three experiences that have the highest impact on employee growth?

• Modifying work to adapt to changing circumstances
• Creatively solve problems
• Persuading senior managers to take different actions

All three of these capabilities are actively and purposefully destroyed in K-12 education. Students are penalized for changing assignments with diminished grades (as my previous example about my son’s homework shows), penalized for solving problems in new ways (try telling a math teacher that you got the right answer by solving the problem in a different way and see what reaction you get), and teachers almost always discourage students from engaging with them openly about things that could be done differently in the classroom.

So let me frame this for you directly:

The Corporate Leadership Council asks it’s members (which include most of the Fortune 500) "What is important to your business?"

The members overwhelmingly say “Growth.”

The CLC then asks its members “What’s stopping you from growing?"

The members overwhelmingly reply “Lack of people who can innovate.”

The CLC then asks “What experiences would help the people who you most rely on (your high potential employees) to grow so that they could help you innovate?"

The members reply “Unlearning what they learn in school.”

Most kids show up to school creative, curious and brave. Most kids leave school programmed and afraid. As a parent you might be able to rationalize this destruction if it helped your kid live a healthier, happier and more productive life. But as this shows, it doesn't. It actually does just the opposite: if your kid is getting straight A's there’s a good chance they won't be a high potential in a world that demands innovative approaches and innovative thinking.

Think about that the next time you tell your kid the only thing that is important is getting good grades. Who are you going to blame when they eventually get bad reviews at work?