Talentism

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."

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.

15

Capital preservation is no longer a reliable method of opening, winning and sustaining new markets. The commercialization of human ingenuity is increasingly the path to better returns (both in growth and cost reduction). And when innovation becomes ever more important experience and education become less predictive of success. K-12 and university education systems are focusing on short-term measures of highly static skills sets: ability to read and comprehend simple information at a basic level; ability to use basic computation mechanics, elementary methods of communication and a cursory knowledge of history and literature. As Sir Ken said in the video I posted earlier  “(In our world) creativity is as important as literacy.” Unfortunately for us all, the entire education system is geared towards producing better machine-age workers on a farming-sensitive schedule. But even machine-age companies are changing their structures to compete in this new world where the creative is as important as the literate (witness what GE is doing with Ecomagination). As I said before, the education system is assuming that the world needs more investment bankers and academics, both notoriously difficult positions to achieve (and both of increasingly questionable value in a world that is creating as much as it is managing, moving and  measuring). None of these skills is important in adding and / or creating value in the corporate environment of the future.

14

As we have explored before, experience and education are decreasingly effective as means of determining whether an individual will be able to produce a suitable amount of value for the investment required (ROI). When the game was capital preservation (the basis of most risk adverse corporate policies) it made sense to homogenize the risk profile of any potential hire by proxying your decisions to the deans of admissions of prestigious academic institutions or to the hiring managers in other organizations which experienced consistent economic success or had a good brand. So a person attending Princeton and rising through the ranks at GE is going to be less of a risk than a person who walks off the street having barely graduated high school. The Ivy leaguer most likely has the analytical skills needed for most machine and information age management and product development, and they likely have the bland professional demeanor that clients / customers need to feel comfortable doing business with your organization, since most capital used in buying transaction was concentrated in the hands of people who were bland themselves. Whether a hire or promotion can really produce value or not was (and is) secondary to whether the output and the behaviors of the individual employee were predictable and safe.

13

For all the formalized systemization of business analysis (starting with Fredrick Taylor, traveling through Drucker and moving through Porter and Hammer, amongst others), business is still much more art than science. This is incredibly discomforting for all the MBAs that have been drilled in case method and six sigma. But the simple fact is that in business people are given titular power in a hierarchical, militaristic structure where the relative influence of the position is predicated on the individual’s ability to accurately predict the future, which as we all know, is much more art than science. I used to think that elevation was based on ability to execute ever larger tasks of ever greater value with decreasing amounts of waste, developing more complex and effective teams and influencing key constituencies to achieve ever greater levels of output, but I have long since given that up as being too Pollyannaish. Over the many years of participating in large organizations, I have come to the decision that the people who elevate other people are making a bet: this one is going to be able to predict the future better: what we should create for which markets, and who should be a part of the team to make that happen. All of it is about predicting the future, which is tough, because humans are notoriously bad at this mission-critical activity. As Sir Ken said in the video I posted “Nobody has a clue what will be happening in five years time… the unpredictability of (the future) is extraordinary.” Remember, this is a guy who got knighted because he spent a lot of time predicting the future accurately (specifically how society would require different ways of educating students), at a conference attended by many of the top minds in the world. None of them would confidently make predictions for what the future would look like two years out. And yet managers are asked to make those types of guesses all the time. It takes years for someone to become fully comfortable inside the average large corporation, and it takes years to bring products to markets and see whether they will take. So the person you are elevating in the corporate hierarchy today is being held accountable for making the right decisions in a world where the sheer amount and velocity of data makes most of the decisions merely educated guesses. And since the people who make the decisions about who should occupy these ever higher levels of control are as genetically hamstrung as the people they so elevate, those king makers (and their agents in the recruiting and HR departments), look for convenient short-hands that will reduce the risk associated with the hiring or promotion of that individual. The most common shorthands are experience and education. And this is where all the trouble starts.

12

Unleashing the inherent creative potential of human beings, reducing the power and presence of structures that incentivize people to produce waste and destruction as a necessary output of their production, changing the way businesses are valued to encourage them to invest more in creating knowledgeable, wise and constructive free agents in open markets (both internal and external).. this will hopefully be the legacy of Talentism. Obviously this is massive change on a global level. Such change can seem daunting, perhaps even so grandiose as to be unworthy of our attention. But I believe that we can start having an impact on the corporate system to bring this new vision into being, and I believe that the first step happens in the recruiting department.

11

Nothing I am saying here isn't understood by every business person who reads it. Growth means innovation. Cost control will increase profits (recent record profits by many large companies can testify to that), but at a certain point you have to grow or die. Innovation is the key to growth. Companies will need access to a certain type of talented individual (or group of individuals) in order to be able to continue to grow at the rates that they have in the past. Again, structural advantages (brand, access to capital, switching costs, etc.) will be decreasingly important, as those advantages are based on capital and information advantages (also known as information asymmetry) which are fast disappearing. Being able to attract the right talent, rapidly commercialize the outputs of that talent and extend the power of the talent investor through increasing the reach, value and velocity of information in their social networks will be the new advantage. This will require new thinking, approaches, processes and skill sets throughout the corporation, but most of all in HR. I predict that by 2020 we will see the first signs that finance is fighting to get a seat at the table and HR is the de facto control agent in corporate decision making. This will involve a wholesale replacement of the standard HR department with new “Talent Investment” and “Talent Operations” departments, just as HR replaced the old personnel department. The days of 'payroll and picnics' will come to an end.

10

Innovation will continue to increase in value as capital continues to commoditize. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future. The factors that are driving this (western policies that value wealth over work, the corresponding accumulation of capital in private individual’s hands who have enough disposable income to take high risk investing to new extremes, the application of that capital in corporate markets as a way to seek more predictable returns, demographic changes that shrink the available labor pool, education challenges which will continue to diminish the inherent capacity of people to add value in innovation-dependent environments, the increase of free agency as a corporate employment standard, the decreasing cost of infrastructures needed to create and commercialize at the mico-transaction level, increasing information transparency where IP rights and brand identity decreasingly have leverage in customer buying decisions and the inevitable march towards health care in the U.S. which will be decoupled from employers which will further drive free agency employment conditions) are not likely to diminish in any foreseeable future, and these factors will drive the continued value of innovation and the decreasing value of access to capital.

9

At the same time that innovation is growing in importance capital is decreasing in importance. It makes sense: there has been an unprecedented globalization of wealth creation and access to capital sources. Aggregation of wealth in the hands of people who get paid for getting the cash to move quickly (otherwise known as increasing the velocity of capital) means that the allowance for risk in capital markets has dramatically risen (so much so that the Fed is starting to look at the lending practices of banks in LBOs since the terms of the deals are so favorable to the borrower). It’s simply an economic law of averages: more money chasing a relatively stable number of deals means that the bets have to be bigger and the number of potential deals increased by looking for other avenues for deploying capital (the present LBO craze). So at the same time that creativity is becoming ever more important to wealth generation, capital is becoming decreasingly expensive (as measured by the total cost of acquisition and maintenance of that capital). Further, the means of production (those things which enable the commercialization of creativity such as software, hardware, financial services and networks) are easily accessible by everyone. It is cheaper in real dollars (not opportunity cost of time spent) to set up a website than it is to get the average fast food dinner for two.

Same Game, Different Team

Sometimes I feel caught in the middle. My language and concepts seem too esoteric for hard-nosed business people, and my focus on increasing economic effectiveness seems to pedestrian for academics. I get to live with the blank stares of corporate executives every day, so that I have grown relatively used to. But for some reason I am always hopeful that people who spend their lives thinking about education will understand me better. The greatest disappointment is when I realize that the academic professionals who are engaged in education are just as invested in continuing a bad system as the corporations believe they are. I realize that modern western education systems are really good at producing three kinds of professions: academics, investment bankers and attorneys. Since all three work in the field of analyses, they are all deeply invested in making sure that the education system continues to pump out more of them, however damaging that may be.

Perhaps it is just my native cynicism, but I don’t think that there will be a spontaneous societal recognition of the need for changing education, nor will there ever be a conversation amongst powerful people about ideas that will result in fundamental changes to our education system. Systemic inertia and myopic self-interest being what they are, nobility, goodness and wisdom are not the best way to get a bureaucracy to change what it does.

But that doesn't mean all is lost. I do believe that if you can get alignment between what is right and what is good, between what corporations need to succeed in the creative age and the capabilities of education to increase the generative capacity 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… then you will start to change the education agenda.

Just as organizations have had to go through the “mission / purpose” exercise in order to align their productive capability with an ever-more dynamic market landscape, I believe that once schools understand that what they do doesn’t get their products (educated children) jobs (and therefore doesn’t get them money), they will start to change their behaviors and fundamentally examine why they exist and how they deliver value.

Inevitably the education academics will change the subject and move to America's weakness against other countries in standardized testing, especially math and science. I think they are using this as a blunt instrument to show that the education system is working but inefficient; that we are doing the right things in education, but just not hard enough or with enough focus and fervor. They are dangerously wrong.

I don’t believe that a solid grounding in deep math and science is a prerequisite for future economic success in western economies. Saying that we should be concerned because we are falling behind other countries in standardized testing is exactly that same as equating America to a football team whose front linemen are small compared to other teams. The logical conclusion from this data is that we need to get bigger lineman in order to compete.  So we start building up our linemen and buying better, bigger front line talent at the same time another team comes out with the west coast offense and makes running up the middle less of a competitive advantage. In short, you can achieve the objective of optimizing a certain capability but lose the game anyway.

Learning math and science are not ends in-and-of themselves. They are means to increasing production in economic and scientific endeavors. We may all be competing on the same field, but limiting how we play the game to the standard model will surely result in a loss for the United States.

We can’t use the old linear progression type of thinking in assessing future competitive dynamics. You would think that China would have to put in a copper-based communications capability before they could progress to cell phones, but you would be dead wrong. As is reported on the Earth Policy Institute website in February 2005:

Nowhere is the explosive growth more visible than in the electronics sector. In 1996 China had 7 million cell phones and the United States had 44 million. By 2003 China had rocketed to 269 million versus 159 million in the United States. In effect, China is leapfrogging the traditional land-line telephone stage of communications development, going directly to mobile phones.

The U.S. will not be competitive in the long-term in analytical skills. The simple fact is that a middle-class kid from the U.S. will never be as competitive as a poor kid from China in math and science on the playing field of pure rote learning and fundamental mechanics. It’s not a xenophobic generalization. It is a recognition that China is going to invest more in math and science education than the U.S., that a middle class American won't wake up hungry and thinking that a good math and science education is the only way to get food and that the kid in China is going to have access to cheaper goods and services than the kid in U.S. In short, the problem is structural: it’s an economics, cultural and initiative problem more than anything else. This means we are playing the same game (global economics) but we need to put a fundamentally different type of team on the field in order to “win” (however loosely that may be defined).

Again, all is not lost. Far from it. Even innovations in math and science will be far more dependent on Einstein-types of skills (fundamentally reformulating the problem to arrive at a totally different perspective and solution) than Newton-types of skills (increasing precision in the description and prediction of a phenomenon).  While Einstein clearly understood math, it was not his forte. He was first and foremost a creative who was given the space to think differently because he wasn’t deeply embedded in the physics community of that day which was proclaiming that all things that could be discovered about physics were in the past.

Leveraging the comparative cultural advantage of the U.S. in a creative economy (openness to failure, experimentation and connection across cultural and economic boundaries) should be our first goal. It aligns what is good (increasing the generative capacity of all children, independent of race, creed, color or disability to produce sustainable value that benefits them and the buyer) with what is right (providing more jobs for more people while decreasing the cultural, societal, environmental and economic waste created by those jobs). I believe that the structural deficiencies of the corporatist system that feeds a consumerist dependency on individual gratification as the heart of economic prosperity is at the core of a lot of what ails us. Of course, I could be totally wrong. But one thing I learned long ago is that it is better to be clear than certain. And on this, at least, I am clear.

8

The modern corporatist system propagated itself unattended and almost without check, with the exception of the labor movements of the late 1800’s and 1900’s, which put a different but equally destructive system in play – that labor, like capital, is a value unto itself, regardless of how it is employed or the value it produces. Then things seemed to be turning around in the early 1980’s, when the advent of access to relatively cheap computing meant that an increasing number of companies competed in the realm of applying knowledge. Since knowledge was the unique province of the human being (as opposed to mechanical leverage, which was the domain of machines), people started to become more important than equipment. Then we moved to the place where knowledge was cheap and easy because of the interconnected capabilities of cheap computing resources. Competitive advantage started to go to companies that could commercialize creativity (the most common meaning behind the term “innovation”). As an increasing number of companies compete based on their ability to take human being’s ideas and turn them into consumable products and services, and as the infrastructure for commercializing those ideas becomes ever cheaper to access, utilize and extend, creativity becomes an ever increasing component of competitive advantage. In addition, as the excellent slideshow below demonstrates (a huge thank you to Gautam Ghosh for originally exhibiting this slideshow, whose wonderful blog covers many aspects of innovation can be found here), innovation is increasingly seen as part of process excellence and cost cutting.

7

We are creatures of our cultural heritage, all cogs in a system to which we contribute but can't possibly comprehend. We may never have been soaked with the hose, but we know not to go get the banana. I once heard Senge describe the war between our rather static biology and the complexity our systems as "driving ever faster into the growing darkness of a foggy night while dimming your headlights."  And so it is with business practice. Our tendency to value capital over the creative capacity that makes that capital possible is as old as western society itself (native people's and hunter / gatherers avoiding similar fates since ownership, and the capital that comes with it, was not a common concept in their cultures) . But the systems that would ensconce bad practice into self-perpetuating systemic oligarchy took on a regrettably predictable trajectory during the 1850’s and 60’s. It was during that time, with mass migrations from rural to urban and from agrarian to industrial production that we saw the general “employment identity” come to bear. This identity is based on the belief that access to capital is the equivalent of intellectual superiority, and that securing an investment is harder than finding an employee. Or, put another way… the basic employment identity says: money is expensive, labor is cheap and rank is based on merit. These temporary structural anomalies (for they are not permanent parts of a free market system but artifacts of demographic realities, class structures and resource allocation) created a deep-seated, but rarely examined, belief that there was a justifiable link between success, ability and fairness. That was not (and is not) true, but few wanted to admit that the most open economic system in the history of the world was a rigged game. If you were white, male, connected, safe and analytical, you could probably make a good go of it. If you were colored, female, disconnected, adventurous and creative you would probably die of starvation. Not always, of course, but the probabilities were clearly against you. For most of modern western economic history this power imbalance driven by capital was great for managers and bad for workers. In the creative age, it will be bad for both.

My Son Won't Do His Homework

I am going through hell with my son. He is twelve, and no matter what I do, no matter what my wife or my oldest daughter do, he won’t do his homework. We ground him, we take away all his gadgets, we prevent him from going to birthday parties and other social events that he loves. Other than corporal punishment (which is a place I won’t go), we have tried everything. It doesn’t matter… he doesn’t care. We can't force him to do something he thinks is wrong. And my personal hell is... he is right.

My son can listen to the radio and pick up his saxophone and play whatever he is hearing. Or, if his sax isn’t handy, he picks up whatever other musical instrument is around and plays that.

But he doesn’t do his homework.

I bought him a book about drawing and he gets up at night and reads it and sneaks around the house sketching things. The portraits he does are incredible. The comics he produces are funny, insightful and engaging. Everyone asks him to draw for them.

But he doesn’t do his homework.

My son is rarely if ever unhappy, and people are naturally drawn to him. He has a great delivery on jokes and has a photographic memory for any piece of pop culture he has seen. We riff on Simpson’s lines all the time, cracking each other up in the process. Then he’ll tell me movies he saw three years ago, shot by shot, line by line.

But he doesn’t do his homework.

My son is intellectually curious. He loves to learn new things and is always asking me “Why does something work this way?” or “What about that?”

But he doesn’t do his homework.

My son loves video games. I work at a video game company so I know how long it is supposed to take to finish all the missions in your average next gen video game. My son takes half that time. He holds competitions with his friends where, after he beats them, he shows them all the tricks that he has figured out about how to beat the game.

But dammit, he doesn’t do his homework.

The other day I insisted that my son finish a piece of homework. I sat down next to him and taught myself math that I never learned in all my years of high school and college (remember, he is twelve). I stayed up until midnight with him, browbeating him the entire time, my anger unchecked. Finally, we completed the problem, which had to do with plotting the parabola of a quadratic equation and reducing the result set to a graph of the system of inequalities. The project was about finding the cross section of a river based on a given quadratic equation.

The next morning my son woke early and went down and made his project interesting to him. He put in cartoon characters exploring the depth of the river, and drew a shark (which he labeled with his teacher’s name) about to eat a happy little duck (which he labeled “My Grades”). He drew a fisherman packing gear and assorted other fish and life. These were not just doodles – he actually helped clarify some of the information that he had been struggling with. By drawing the characters he was helping himself understand what the lesson was trying to teach.

My entire family was completely enthralled by what he had done. It was not only artistically creative and engaging, it actually helped clear up the very nature of the project. Justly proud, we anxiously looked forward to hearing how his teacher responded.

My son returned home from school downcast, shuffling his feet. I asked him what was wrong. “My teacher didn’t like the project, because I put it on the wrong size paper.”

I don't have much hair, but I am ready to tear what little I have out at the roots. My son doesn’t do his homework because his homework is stupid. I have spoken to educators and principles and academicians and grandparents and probably a hundred other people , and nobody has given me a decent answer to this question: "Why are you so convinced that my son is going to be an academic or an investment banker?" Because as far as I can tell, those are the only two things that schools prepare kids to be.

I have been sitting by my son's side for 7 years, doing his lessons. I believe I can state with the unequivocal clarity of someone that his given valuable time to a task that is largely worthless but required... the homework is just plain dumb. It is boring and condescending and even my son, at the age of twelve, can figure out that the rules are arbitrary, that they are enforced in a haphazard fashion, and that the stuff that he loves (art and music and video games) will be a great future for him and the stuff he hates (math and science) is something he will never compete in, never have a chance at.

But school doesn’t care, because school does not have the objective of helping my son produce the maximum amount of value in the future that he will probably encounter. School cares about ensuring that he knows how to take tests, follow directions and can do math that he will never have to care about for the rest of his life. School cares that he can either prove that he is worthy of being in the top 5% that will go on to be homogenized and brainwashed in a top-notch school so that they are almost completely without originality of thought or perspective or that he gets the hell out of the way for those kids that meet that description. School cares that he can be measured and managed, so that he will be a good little cog in a habitual big wheel.

As a parent I am caught between two worlds. I am 100% certain that school is doing great damage to his future prospects, but I also know that the game is rigged to be in favor of kids who get the right grades. Because recruiters can’t seem to get off the “experience and education” kick that does so much damage to our society and our children, I know that my children’s future job prospects are being controlled by people who have never once taken a critical look at what really goes into producing value for a business or market. They just know that their client (the hiring manager) told them they wanted somebody from Stanford with a certain GPA. And if they can get that butt in that seat they can then go deal with the next client.

I want to focus on what will make my kids successful, on what will allow them to provide the most possible value to their clients, their society and themselves. But I have to focus on what will get them work, even if that will hurt them, society, the companies that hire them and everyone around them. This is the very definition of broken system, the very epitome of how we are driving ourselves off a cliff all in the name of safe driving. This is why Talentism matters so much to me.

6

Talentism is the idea that there is no inherent contradiction between open markets and individuals achieving their inherent creative and productive potential in a way that generates the maximum amount of benefit for the shareholder, the company, the manager, the individual producer and the society at large. In this way Talentism is an Utopian ideal and therefore a theory that is open to criticism from those who believe that idealism in all its forms is fuzzy-headed clap trap that doesn't translate into reality.  I have no interest in thinking big thoughts in an ivory tower. Change, not mere words, is needed. That’s why I work in a large corporation and seek to put my principles into action. I am not an academic writing about this as I sip my latte and think about the next Volvo I am going to buy (since that seems to be the modern Dystopian’s metaphor for someone who isn’t given to fear-baiting and cynicism). These theories are being tested; data is being gathered. So far I would put the performance of groups that follow the principles of Talentism against the performance of any group run by the standard militaristic command-and-control risk aversion principles of the average Fortune 500 company.

5

So what’s my problem? Well, for one, western companies may compete in relatively free markets, but they are run as dictatorships for the benefit of senior management. Please, someone, tell me the difference between Enron and the regime of Ferdinand Marcos? These dictatorships create massive amounts of waste, put more time into figuring out how to control markets than actually competing in them and devalue people in the name of creating value for markets, comprised solely of human beings. None of that is inherent in the principles of free markets and privately owned means of production. The economic structures that cause so much damage around the world are artifacts of commonly accepted business practices, not proofs of the fallibility of self-governance. We can change for the better. Indeed, we must.

4

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(Thanks Dylan)

I have  given most of my life to building businesses. I love business. A value-for-value exchange in an open and transparent market between two knowledgeable, wise and responsible agents is one of the high points of human achievement. To paraphrase Churchill “Capitalism is the worst form of economics, except for all those other forms that been tried from time to time.” I believe passionately in “an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, and in which investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are determined through the operation of a free market.” (Wikipedia) But the context has changed: the means of production (our minds) are not privately owned, nor are they operated for profit, nor can we say that investment, distribution, income, production and pricing of the output of the means of production are determined through the operations of a free market. Our most critical resources are at the whim of a system that secretly covets waste and force as it talks enthusiastically about efficiency and output. And what is that critical resource? The minds of engaged and able people who aspire to maximize the value they can deliver to a fair and open market for their unique capabilities.

1999 or 1984?

From an email sent by the Aberdeen Group asking for participation in a survey on "The Global War for Talent":

The market for skilled labor is shifting at an alarming rate and the balance of power has shifted strongly in favor of job seekers.

Temporary trend (a la 1999) or long-term shift? Will talent finally start asking for more than "Can I bring my pet parrot to work and get an extra $10K?" Like control, participation in the profits, ability to select their own teams, pre-defined criteria for success, clarification on residual IP rights?

3

I know I am not getting through, that I am trying to unwind 140 years of corporate habit and that in a complex world people want simple answers to complex problems. So what? I genuinely believe that our future is at risk and that unexamined thinking, policies and structures in the western business world are at the very foundation of our failing schools, health care system, infotainment consumeristic society that can't seem to agree on anything except that evil people (definition: anyone who doesn't agree with me) are destroying us.  It is clear that the western corporate system is actively, though largely unconsciously, engaged in destroying civil society and the customer base that is formed by that society. Or, to put in the blunt language that executives claim they love: businesses are shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun. CEO’s everywhere are anxiously looking at next quarter’s P&L while the very structure of their economic enterprise is coming apart at the seams. They are the modern day Nero’s, actively and productively fiddling while their corporate Romes are ablaze.

What Does “Good” Mean, Anyway?

I am a big  fan of Dr. Steve Hunt. One of the most fascinating and wide ranging discussions I ever had about the world of talent was with Steve as we traveled to a lunch together. Steve is very bright and a deep thinker about most things near and dear to my heart.

So I read Steve’s article this morning over at ERE with great interest. I generally agree with his basic assertion that “hiring the wrong person is worse than hiring no person at all” (depending on whether the position is efficiency or effectiveness focused). But I am still left with the most fundamental question: what does the wrong person mean?

As I have discussed before, “good” and “bad” are terms that reference quality. (If you have a spare moment, read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and then read the Wikipedia entry on quality for two different takes on this fascinating topic.) Quality is defined by the scope and frequency of variation to a specification. So I have to assume that when people talk about a “bad hire” they are saying “I hired against a specific description and the person ended up not meeting that specification.”

If you have worked in a company for any length of time you know that the truth is more often “we really didn’t know what we needed, so we hired the perfect person, but not for this job.” Most bad hiring decisions have little to do with candidate misrepresentation or salesmanship, nor do bad assessments generally lead to bad hires. The problem is almost always a bad specification. And that means that Steve should be saying “Not knowing what the hell you want is worse than making any hiring decision whatsoever, right or wrong.”

“Back that up!” you say in alarm. Love to.

The Corporate Leadership Council conducted an extensive study of the hiring of executives. Executive hiring is instructive because most companies will wait to hire the right executive rather than just fill the seat and hope the investors look the other way when it goes wrong. There can be little dispute that more time and effort goes into the average executive hire (either an outside or inside placement) than the average mid or junior level position.

The CLC survey covered member companies such as HP, First Data, Nestle, Pepsico and RBC Financial: all companies known to think more progressively about HR practices than your run-of-the-mill company. So how did companies such as those feel about executive hiring? 59% of the survey respondents said that “Failure of externally hired executives” was a “significant problem”, with another 17% saying it was a “moderate problem.” Only 24% of the respondents said it wasn’t a problem at all.

So much for external hiring. What about internal promotion as an alternative? 50% of the respondents said that “failure of internally promoted executives” was a “significant problem”, with another 25% saying it was a “moderate problem.”

Later in the same study there is a quote that drives it home. A VP of HR for a manufacturing firm, commenting on the efficacy of their internal high potential program says:

We select our high-potential employees based on performance out of practicality—it’s the only measure that our managers trust. But it’s not sufficient. The success rate of our HIPOs might be 50% at best. Managers are beginning to recognize that the link between performance and potential is incomplete, but until we find something with greater accuracy managers will continue to use it.”

In other words – pick anybody and flip a coin. You’re success rate will be roughly the same as wasting everyone’s time and a lot of money ensuring that you get the “right” candidate. We can’t seem to reliably pick external candidates even when the vetting process is exhaustive and we are willing to spend a lot of money to get the right person. We can’t seem to reliably pick internal candidates even after we have watched them work in the same culture, in the same company, as the new opportunity.

For all the process work and lean staffing and other initiatives which make valid claims to reduce waste in the talent supply-chain, the dirty little secret is that we have bad specifications. And given that our spec is wrong, talking about good and bad hires is largely an exercise in futility. We need better specifications.

(I hope that Steve will still let me buy him a drink when I see him in Boston in a couple of weeks.)

(Quote and data from “Realizing the Full Potential of Rising Talent (Volume 1): A Quantitative Analysis of the Identification and Development of High-Potential Employees” published by the Corporate Leadership Council in 2005)

2

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.

1

When people ask “What is Talentism?” I should just say “A better way to do business” or “A way to fix what’s broken with a lot of western economies, but mostly with America.” Or maybe I should lay it on thick, put it all out there: "Talentism is a way to course correct from the managerial-centric corporate system that destroys shareholder value, encourages waste and immoral behavior and picks away at the very societies it needs to succeed." I should avoid devolving into lectures that have been developing in my head for almost 30 years. You would think I could learn by now that this is the business conversation version of “Isn’t the weather nice today?” Call me Quixote, but this is the windmill I have chosen, and I'll keep tilting at it until it really turns out to be a dragon or I die trying.

Why Nobody Describes the Elephant in the Room

(I would like to thank John Sumser for putting this back on my radar… I have wanted to write this piece for a while.)

The parable of the six blind men and the elephant has been recounted in many forums. While the original parable first originated in India and was passed as oral tradition through Hindu mystics, the English version of the parable was popularized by a early 19th century poet named John Godfrey Saxe. The full text of his poem is included at the end of this post.

The parable (and its representative poem) should be required reading for anybody who makes their living in the business world, regardless of whether you are an artist, engineer or accountant. In my 23+ years in business I have yet to see a critical business meeting that didn’t fail (to some degree) at this most fundamental level of understanding: we are each telling different stories about the same thing, each of us passionately committed to our version of the truth even though we don't have that much on which to base our opinion.

The last verse of the poem says it beautifully:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen.

How many of us have seen this played out in meetings? More importantly, how much competitive advantage would a company create if it had someone at the meeting who could take the various impressions of the blind men and coordinate them into a description of the truth that everyone could “see”?

Who is that person? The coordinator of information must be someone who is willing to take the risk of reflecting back to everyone what they are saying. Sometimes that will be a person with a fancy title, but more often than not it will be someone who just raises their hand and says "Here is what I am hearing, and here is how I think it all fits".

But regardless of who the leader is, it is painfully clear that the “wise men” must be all of us. Each of us must be prepared to bring our version of the elephant to the table, as well as listen to everyone else's version of "the truth". And even more importantly, each of must be willing to ask that we have access to all the original stories of every other person at the table. We must demand transparency, and then show the wisdom and emotional intelligence to demonstrate that we are worthy of the trust and honor that transparency demands. For when a person who is perceived to have power starts the conversation, things often go painfully wrong. This lesson is best expressed by another parable based on elephants and wise people:

Six blind elephants were discussing what wise men were like (never having seen one).  Failing to agree, they decided to find one and determine what it was like by direct experience. The first blind elephant felt the wise man, and declared, “Wise men are flat.” After feeling the wise man, the other blind elephants agreed.

This parable shows the danger of having the powerful describe reality: they can literally flatten the data before it ever gets investigated by anyone else. I can think of many situations where this has happened in public policy (the Mexican American war, the Spanish American War, Vietnam… to name just a few). But it is every bit as common in business. Enron happened because Jeffrey Skilling flattened the original data such that everyone else in the company had to react to his version of the truth. Since the first person or group dealing with the data has the (either unintentional or intentional) ability to change the data by their reading of it, every participant thereafter must react to the changed data rather than original information. This is how groups so often go wrong: they are all reacting to the same story, and that story is just plain wrong.

So we not only need someone at the table to coordinate the stories of all the wise people, none of whom has ever seen the elephant but all of which have a strong opinion given their personal experience about just what the elephant is. We also need someone who is making sure that there is no one person who is defining the initial reality, who is getting to the data first and therefore changing it so that all the opinions that come thereafter are simply an affirmation of the first person’s ability to change the information by their force.

Most companies ignore these structural issues altogether. They assume that leadership, by its definition, is the role of describing reality to the followers. The ability to change data so that others have to respond to that world-view is often an assessed capability of what is considered leadership potential. But in a world where everything changes quickly and where the issues being confronted are so enormous that the best any single person can do is to feel some small part of a gargantuan beast, leadership now must be something much different. Leadership must be ensuring that we are all sharing our part of the story, and that no single story becomes dominant before the rest of the stories are in. Then, rather than telling us which story is right (since the leader is often as blind as everyone else who is feeling the situation), the leader must explain how the stories coordinate into something like a reality that all of us can embrace and react to.

It may seem trite or overly simplistic, but just getting your story straight may be the single greatest competitive advantage you can create.

The full poem follows. Enjoy...

What you Talkin' About?

I liked Kevin Wheeler's article on ERE today (The Language of Success). Kevin is spot on, and yet I have to believe that there aren't a lot of recruiting / HR professionals who are going to understand what he is saying.

There is a certain entitlement mentality that exists within all corporate functions, but especially in HR. The assumption is that "If my customers like me I am doing a good job" or "If I am putting butts in chairs I am doing a good job." That's why so many people in HR / recruiting are so surprised when they get outsourced (as I said in the post "Can Client Satisfaction Lead to Outsourcing?"). They weren't using the right measures or the right language to demonstrate and explain real value to the business, but in their mind they have been doing a great job. It's like that famous quote (at least to us geeks) from the movie Office Space: "But you can't fire me, I'm a people person!"

Kevin said it better than I did, but I meant the same thing he is talking about when I wrote "Business People in HR have Something to Say" back in August of 2005. Interesting how these themes appear again and again, and yet when I go to conferences (just returned from speaking at the HCI conference) I hear things like "The biggest surprise for us is that we needed to take the business' needs into account when we were designing our metrics package" (actual quote from a panelist at the conference).

Wow. I wonder how long it is going to take before HR and recruiting people get that as long as they think they operate outside the world of business and value creation, they are just so much Kleenex - handy and disposable.

Coach Luke or Embrace Darth?

“Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker: who would qualify for a career coach?” That was the interesting question posed at a meeting I attended the other day. After some quick conversation, most of the participants agreed that Luke was the better candidate for a career / personal development coach. The reasoning was straight forward: Luke has trouble controlling his emotions and is a bit of a loaner. He’s a lot of potential but mostly gets mixed individual results. Darth, on the other hand, has already had a bad coaching experience (the emperor), doesn’t adhere to the stated values of most companies and is evil incarnate. Pretty easy decision, right?

Wrong. Like most business discussions, the need to get to the “results phase” of the conversation completed obviated and eclipsed the two basic philosophical questions that would make-or-break any possible response: “What problem are you trying to solve with the coaching?” and “What is acceptable behavior to achieve business results?”

Just for fun, I thought about other ways to start the conversation. What if you asked everyone at the table “If you had a choice between being Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, who would you chose?” Any doubt as to the outcome of that poll? I would then have asked “OK, let’s say Luke fails in the end and Darth succeeds. Who would change their vote?” Again, I am guessing that most people would stick with being the fair-haired fighter for truth and justice rather than the plasticized epitome of evil.

Then I would take a different tack. I would ask “Who has more integrity… Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker?” Everyone would laugh knowingly and say “Why Luke, of course.” And they would be wrong. There are several times where Luke withholds the truth from people who need to know it (as when he fails to tell Leia that they are siblings), while Darth always tells the truth. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure that you can go down any business-book definition of success and find that Darth is a better “business person” than Luke. Luke consistently fails to achieve milestones. In fact, if he didn’t achieve the one big objective he is after (become a Jedi, blow up the death star, redeem his father, save the galaxy for freedom and justice) Luke would be widely considered a bad employee. He has lots of character defects, whereas Darth is strong, confident and obedient.

Let’s face it, Darth Vader is the perfect employee and Luke is a bit of a knuckle-head who is a loose cannon. Darth follows the company line; Luke is a rebel. Darth is a commanding leader; Luke is a rural hick who doesn’t really fit it. Darth can mobilize resources quickly to achieve his objectives and is feared inside of his own organization; Luke is a bit of a wimp who always seems to need everyone other people’s assistance to achieve his objectives.

And yet, here we are, all keeping our hands raised in a vote for being Luke. What gives? And, even more fundamentally, why the hell would you try to change Luke from being the youngster flibbertigibbet he so often seems to be when he is the one guy who consistently saves the universe from evil and destruction? Why would you get the coach for Luke?

I think if you went through this exercise at any company across America (and perhaps Western Europe too) you would find the same fundamental disconnect: everyone wants to be Luke and everyone thinks Luke is the one that needs coaching. I have a theory about why this happens: we all see ourselves as the potential hero from a young age, but we have been programmed to believe that a corporate environment can’t accept the risky behaviors of heroes. So we quietly dream about who we want to be and then squelch that dream when we put on the suit and walk through the lobby door. Once the corporate armor is on we willingly (and evenly eagerly) accept that our individualistic tendencies towards intrepidness and fearlessness need to be “coached” out of us so that we can plug into the larger paternalistic / militaristic structure that corporations purposefully create to avoid surprising shareholders and getting executives fired.

I am not here to make moral arguments about whether crushing human beings into conformity is a good thing or a bad thing. You can be he judge of that. I will propose that today’s organization is best served by heroes, and that the nature of a hero is that she makes a lot of short-term mistakes on the way to a glorious end. You might want to consider that before you try to take your Lukes and turn them into Darths.

Recruiting B.S. – And How to Get Rid of It

I recently moved into an HR strategy role at EA. This doesn't mean I won't be writing and speaking about talent: far from it as I am booked for 5 conferences in the next 6 months. But it does mean that Talentism will deal with broader HRIT and C-level challenges around moving to a Talentism business model (when I have the chance to write at all).

It was no secret that I was starting to grow disenchanted with the world of recruiting. I started exploring the nature of my discontent here, and by the time December rolled around I was in a bit of a lather. Under Cindy Nicola's leadership EA had fixed so many of these fundamental issues  that I couldn't quite understand why more recruiting / staffing / talent acquisition departments weren't seeing the light and making the necessary changes to become a true value-add, competitive-advantage-driving, business partner.

That lather, and the freedom of moving to another role,  exhibited itself in the following broadside printed in the March issue of "employee Recruitment & Retention", a monthly newsletter for HR professionals and hiring managers.

The article is the artifact of pure serendipity: I got Frank Sennett's email requesting my views of what was wrong with the typical recruiting department at exactly the time that I had decided to take the gloves off and write a turgid synopsis of all my beefs with the recruiting world before I moved on to my next role.

If you want a copy of the article (and to learn more about employee Recruitment & Retention) click on this link (Download ERRReport307.pdf ). The full article (without Frank's merciful edits) follows:

Recruiting BS - And How to Get Rid of It

Requisitions – Don’t have anything to do with recruiting. They are a way to stay on the CFO’s good side.

Job Descriptions – Don’t have anything to do with the job.

ATS – Not only isn’t it the center of recruiting systems, it’s the worst part of it.

TPR vs. Corporate – It’s a silly war started by corporate recruiters who are trying to justify their poor performance and TPR’s who are trying to justify fees they don’t earn.

Recruiting – Isn’t about filling one position with the lowest cost candidate.

Customer Satisfaction – Isn’t the ultimate measure of whether you are doing a good job, especially if you are corporate recruiting department.

OFCCP – Isn’t about expanding opportunity for more people, it’s about giving bureaucrats a way to look like they care.

It’s About the People – Bull…. It’s about the business.

So, if you don’t want to get outsourced and work in a call center for the rest of your life, think about the following:

The offer is your ultimate control document. If you don’t trust your corporate recruiting department not to waste their time interviewing people the company won’t need then you have a bigger problem than “time-to-fill.”

Job Descriptions should be about the job that needs to be done next year, not the job that was needed last week. By the time you have spent 90 days hiring the right person for yesterday’s job, tomorrow’s job still needs filling.

ATS is commodity. Recruiting is about sales, and sales is about relationships. CRM is the right software for recruiting. It’s easy to embed ATS functionality in your CRM to handle your compliance issues. When it comes to selecting your system, focus on winning the relationship game, not making best friends with the CIO and the General Counsel.

You use the best resource that will produce the best results for the lowest price. It’s business 101. If your corporate recruiting department can’t hire someone after 90 days, and the position is critical to fill, it’s cheap to put a TPR on it. And if you aren’t proactively sourcing all the time, even in downturns, for the talent that drives your business, then every TPR you use when you get surprised by a new requisition for one of these critical positions is too expensive.

Recruiting is about driving the business forward. Competitive advantage. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t exist to get people jobs and it doesn’t exist so that people who couldn’t get jobs being a camp counselor can make 6 figures. That means that you figure out the positions that will make or break your company and you get the perfect person for that job, and you pour your blood, sweat and tears into that, and not into making sure that your hiring manager / client is baffled with bullshit and a pile of resumes so that you can get an “attagirl / boy” and a pat on the back. This means that you need to be able to show that you are driving the business forward even if the ego-maniac hiring manager who is slowly destroying his department right in front of your eyes doesn’t like you because you keep bringing him the right people, and not people he can browbeat into submission so that they leave as soon as they get another position.

And finally, if you really, really care about getting a more diverse work population, then partner with your lawyers to keep the bureaucrats at bay and go find great people where you wouldn’t normally look. They are there. If they don’t dress the way you like, or talk the way you like, or even smell that great, then get over yourself. You aren’t Este Lauder for God’s sake, you are there to drive the business forward, and that smelly kid that rubs you the wrong way may be the one person who can pop that product that’s been going nowhere into an open field run.

Recruiting is about talent, and talent is about results. Period. It’s not about whether your hiring manager loves you, or whether you use the right software, or whether you can source from the same pool of Harvard tightasses every day of the week… it’s about you being able to provide more punch, more value, better business results than a determined hiring manager with a computer and a secretary. If you can’t meet that standard then you don’t belong in the business and it’s time you move on to teaching macramé at the local JC.

Oil Changers and Car Designers

There are some fiery words flying around over on the wonderful new blog Recruitingbloggers.com. Apparently some people find no use for recruiting blogs, saying they are a waste of time and fail to provide any value. The logical challenge posed by people who spend so much time reading recruiting blogs that they can claim with certainty that the blogs are worthless aside (just how bored are you guys anyway?), the diatribes did get me to thinking once again about the value of blogging and the nature of recruiting.

Everyone inhabits the world of vanity press for their own reasons (and we should all be clear – given the nature of blogging, serial commenters are as much “bloggers” as the publishers themselves). When I started I hoped to create a forum for discussing the idea of a Talent-centered economic system, along with the possibility of changing the systems, technologies and concepts we use to identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. I believe that every business, including it’s component functions, must innovate or die. Recruiting is no exception. But of all the many and various corporate departments I have worked with or for, recruiting is by far the most intractable and resistant to change. It appears to be a combination of the arrogance of sales (“I am too busy closing to learn something new!”) and the business ignorance of HR (“You can’t fire me… I’m a people person!”). Recruiting’s bad rep is well known business-wide, and so I walked into blogging with my eyes wide open. It just seemed that the best possible place to affect corporate and economic change was in the “identify, locate, connect with and close” pieces of the puzzle. And so I have maintained consistently that recruiting is a strategic function and that if recruiting really was going to add to the top and bottom-line capability of an organization that it would have to operate a lot differently. In fact, I go one step further: there is no way to sustain comparative advantage without innovating around the concept, systems and technology that affect how you identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. Talentism has been a way for me to explore how best to achieve that objective.

By that measure, this blog has largely been a failure. It’s more than just Mr. Sumser saying “Nobody gets TQM” when we have been putting it into practice for the last two years, and more than some grumpy web denizens saying that blogs don’t have value. It’s this sneaking suspicion that I am tilting at windmills: recruiting is as recruiting does, and by that measure, not much is going to change outside of isolated businesses that get the value of talent and innovate to win.

The variety, depth and passion of the recruiting blogosphere was a valid indication that there were other Quixote's out there. But if even those fine individuals are saying that they are islands in a calm sea of "who gives a damn?" then it is perhaps time to evaluate the reason that sea exists. As I have peeled the onion of my own feelings of despair, I have come to the decision that at its core, I have a frustration with oil changers and car designers.

When the oil light goes on in your car you take it to Jiffy Lube (or your favorite mechanic). You want fast, cheap, reliable service. You don’t have conversations about epistemology or the purpose of oil, or how oil will someday run out and what exactly will that mean for the plastics and organic fertilizer businesses? You just need to know that the person in the coveralls knows how to drain your oil, replace the filter, and fill ‘er up with the right stuff. It’s not rocket science, but if it isn’t done well you are a lot of trouble, so you tend to value people who do it well.

When you are deciding to get into the car business, you go the Art College