Talentism

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.

26

(With an apology to my international readers...)

As a parent you are caught between society's rock and the soul's hard place. Every SUV driving, Eddie Bauer clad super-parent guzzling their third latte by 8:00 a.m. will tell you confidently that if you didn't get your child into the right pre-natal school they are doomed to a hopeless future of dead-end sanitation engineering jobs.  The conventional wisdom about how to ensure that your child will be the next Gates allows for no mealy-mouthed weakness, nothing other than a dutiful sieg heil to the super-parent's delusion that they can accurately predict the future .  Dutifully we parents continue to demand that our children strip away their creativity and individuality, their ability to play and interact and problem solve in complex environments. We schedule them from waking to sleep, and we listen as pop culture tells us that we just haven't done enough today to make our child into the next Nobel laureate. And yet most parents are harboring this secret fear that all this will indeed make Johnny a dull boy. Their kids are turning into narcissistic automatons that  don't much resemble kids at all, just small investment bankers that have trouble keeping their rooms clean. And while these little drones are getting the right grades in the right schools, hanging with the right friends and doing the right activities, Will Wright becomes a demigod whose success tells them "Crap, this may all be wrong."

25

Whether thoughtful or not, conscious or not, the modern western education system acts as if its purpose is to systematize, normalize and homogenize the K-12 education experience. It focuses maniacally on least common denominator proofs of a young person's ability to work at home (homework being an increasing part of most students grades), take standardized tests, commit facts to memory independent of meaning or context, dissect problems into component parts that an outside expert has already validated and ensure that behaviors that are celebrated in most creative institutions are crushed and burned early. All of this is being coupled with an insane drive on the part of parents to have their children do more homework, take more standardized test and get homogenized even further. Desperate to find validation in a complex world that seems to change its theories regularly about what constitutes good parenting, parents are only too dutifully running to take all the guess work out of education. 10 = 10, and that’s good enough for them.