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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Recruiting in the Creative Age over at SimplyHired

As I announced here :

Talentism will be getting less content, and the content that it does get will be more around business strategy, global HR best practice and cutting-edge technology...  SimplyHired is about to do something really cool with it’s blog and you can read my thoughts about recruiting and the job seeker experience over there.

It appears that I am true to my word, as during the last month I have put up only 3 posts on Talentism but 10 posts over on the SimplyHired blog.

My original intent on the SH blog was to put up two paragraph hit pieces that would generate conversation. But I don't think in two paragraph chunks and so have found myself putting up the typical long-winded explorations of conventional wisdom that I have typically left for Talentism.

The present series around explaining and exploring "New Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age" (originally posted here) might be worth your time if you are given to more philosophical flights of fancy. But even if you aren't it is worth noting that the role of the HR and recruiting department, and the practitioners therein, will be changing pretty radically. I may be long-winded and didactic, but I feel confident that the points contained within these posts will come to bear within the next three years. In fact, I believe many are already in progress and impacting the recruiting profession.

Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age
Porfolios
Marketing & Sales
Be a Business
Run as a P&L
Real Artists Ship

As always, thoughts and comments welcome (especially over at SimplyHired!)

Talent and Spiritual Identity

I had the opportunity recently to talk to some people about their jobs. They came from different countries, different backgrounds and represented diverse genders and ethnicities. I started by asking the following question: “Picture that you have decided to retire. You feel content that your time at work has been well spent. Tell me about what you have accomplished with your professional career.”

The responses were highly individual and unique. But all answers shared one common attribute: everyone wanted to know that their work had contributed to making the world a better place. Some people defined “the world” as their workplace, where many others focused on much broader social, economic and political contexts. Not one person answered from an economic perspective. Nobody said “Well, I’d like to be as rich as possible.” Not one.

This was not a scientific study. There is no statistical validity to the results, But the exercise reinforced for me that people hunger for meaning in their life, and since work has become an increasing part of their identity, there is an ever growing desire for individuals to be able to equate the value of their daily work with impact beyond their pocketbook.

From an HR perspective, I believe this will be the greatest challenge that medium to large-scale companies will face in the coming 20 years. How do you balance the need to squeeze every last ounce of waste and inefficiency out of your processes, every last penny of value from your resources while creating systems that summon the human spirit? Or, to put a capitalist (talentist?) spin on the question “Which for-profit organizations will define spiritual fulfillment as their competitive advantage.”

There is a real danger that companies will look for easy answers to this question, much as nations have over the last 2000 years. Why spend the time to define a treacherous path that innovates spirit-summoning systems, that finds the good and the profit in connectedness, compassion and truth when you can coopt a religious theme and let the holy men do the heavy lifting? It may seem laughable now that large corporations would shift from secular worship of mammon to managerial religious zealotry, but in a world where talent is scarce and management is confused, benchmarking successful spiritual organizations will seem like a logical business decision.

But the spiritual problem that companies face is not a belief in a higher power. People have seen 1,400 CEO’s be fired or walked out the door this year alone. The higher power of the working class is spending too much time in minimum security to be worthy of idolatry. The spiritual problem confronting today’s organization is a belief in their own creative capacity and the inherent risks that come with that ability. The hierarchical control structures of work are designed to limit the unpredictable variations of the human being. When muscles or mind are the key component of the human cog then you must homogenize the diversity of the human spirit in order to maximize the utility of the human body. And therefore it was accepted (and rarely contradicted) as the appropriate and conventional wisdom that seeking a profitable path between the needs of fickle buyers and the opportunity of the unpredictable heart was a fool’s errand. The epithets “soft” and “wishy-washy” were issued with snickers and sneers. When work was solely about the accumulation and preservation of capital, and when the acquisition of that capital was dependent on the ability to run machines or maximize the value of information, tapping into the infinite creative capacity of the human sprit was seen as sure path to disaster.

The human body, enraptured by the human mind for the purpose of rendering products from natural resources, was the unquestioned domain of the capitalist. The human spirit, unleashed for the purpose of creatively solving many of the problems of our own creation, will be the privilege of the talentist. As companies increasingly compete on their ability to summon that spirit of creativity in the form of continuous innovation it will be job of HR to mine the natural resource of the human heart. But unlike the human body and the human mind, access will be denied to those who seek to profit through control, obfuscation, manipulation or opacity. Only time will tell if corporations are willing to take the risk to becomes temples that summon the spirit more often than the bankers.

Is Transparency Worth it?

There are a lot of conversations happening around the concept of transparency. It is a great conversation, especially for people working inside large organizations, where the fear of being too "corporate" in a creative age is a justifiable concern, as this sobriquet often is equated with "not being creative" and "bureaucratic."

Transparency is easy to say and hard to do. It seems easy to calculate the risks of transparency (including loss of faith in the disclosing individual when they admit mistakes, loss of market value, loss of competitive advantage, and, most of all, loss of the illusion of control), and so few calculable rewards, that most organizations and individuals spend a lot of time and money to reduce transparency rather than increase it.

And yet one gets the sense that there is this growing hum of conversation, this background noise of dissatisfaction that won’t seem to die no matter how many forces are aligned against it. Perhaps it is part of the human condition, or maybe these fires are stocked by the immedicacy of the technologies that allow us to become transparent at the click of a button. Maybe it's a realization that the present economic and social model of information asymmetry isn't sustainable, and that the only way to attract the talent that will fuel increasing growth (organizationally and nationally) is to build relationships of trust built on authenticity. Perhaps there is just something in each one of us that cries out to be a part of something bigger AND better than our individual lives. Whatever the reason, the conversation won't die. Thank goodness for that.

Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO of Sun Microsystems. He has been a regular, albeit inconsistent, blogger since before he got the top spot. Jonathan had a post on August 12 that is a worth a read (in fact he has many good reads about transparency, which, given his position, are especially cogent). I'll reprint it here in it's entirety:

Doesn't This Drive Your Lawyers Nuts?

As you know, I'm a big believer in the transparency blogging drives for me and Sun. Driving information to the marketplace - all employees at Sun can speak their minds and clarify our strategies and perspectives, rather than having a pundit or competitor talk over us. And in reverse, driving information in to Sun - if there are problems to be found in our business, I'd just as soon they were in the open, rather than hidden away. We (and true, the rest of the world) can see and fix problems first, rather than letting those uninterested in fixing the problems take advantage of their existence (whether competitors or litigants). Sunlight's a great disinfectant.

As a CEO who blogs, the most frequent question I get is, "doesn't this drive your lawyers nuts?" And as I've said, no. Our legal team understands, guides, drives - and protects - our business. All without sneaking into phone booths to change costume. And with technology, regulation and our products all colliding in the marketplace (is it legal to scream "SOX!" in a theater filled with CEO's?), I sleep better at night knowing they're actively engaged.

If you want evidence that navigating today's business environment requires careful thinking, consider one particularly ironic issue: posting material information about Sun on my blog, including information about our business results, runs the risk of violating something called Regulation Full Disclosure, or Reg FD. The regulation's goal is to ensure broad, non-exclusionary distribution of material information to the investing public. And somehow, my blog isn't deemed to be such a non-exclusionary distribution vehicle (but a press release, or the Wall Street Journal is). Reg FD is something we're going to be discussing with Commissioner Cox at the SEC (whose views seem to parallel ours - the more transparency the better).

Are our lawyers in the way? The opposite, they're driving the change. Want proof?

Very quietly, this week, our General Counsel - the senior most lawyer in all of Sun - started a blog. It's here. He, too, is now the only member of his tribe, the only GC in all the Fortune 500 to have a blog.

Now the real question should be (especially if you know Mike), am I worried about what he's going to say?

(Joke, Mike, take a joke.)

Johnthan's main point is that the risk of not blogging is greater than the risk of blogging. Or, put another way, the risk of being transparent is less than the cost of being corporate. Of course that may be easier for him to say than others, since Sun has been on a downward path since 2001 and doesn’t seem to have many options at it’s disposal. Perhaps Johnathan just has less to lose than others?

My experience has been that most companies are hyper sensitive to transparency and the risks it brings. I am still searching for an example of being “too transparent” costing someone a company, where there are many examples of lack of transparency (or “being caught in a lie”) doing a lot of damage. I would venture that at the very least your level of transparency, including the demonstrated willingness to engage in the difficult conversations that are the hallmark of the principle, will be increasingly correlated to your ability to land and keep the talent you want.

Each company has to examine whether it needs to engage in the pain of transparency. It requires a careful look at the company’s strategies, the assets (including talent) needed to win with that strategy and the culture that will attract, keep and maximize the value of those assets. But one thing is for sure: most companies are investing in the wrong thing. Bad news is the new good news.

Principles of Talentism: Part 12 (Final) - Operate from True Cost

A year ago some friends were talking about big issues like “How to save the world.” Brian started his career as a business person (an engineer at a Silicon Valley company to be exact) and then went back to school to be an environmentalist. He is an intelligent and thoughtful person, so he asked the question: “How do we get the environmental community working with the business community, instead of against it?”

I was probably (certainly) a little inebriated, and in that state it doesn’t take much to get me to hold forth (come to think of it, I do it when I am sober too). So I said “First, you need to get shareholders to understand that all pollution is the direct result of converting their capital into things that bring them no value, and in fact hurt them. Pollution is waste, and waste is something that all companies must seek to reduce all the time. Getting shareholders fixated on how the smoke coming out of the chimney is quite literally their money being burned because management couldn’t figure out a way to put that stuff to use and you will start to get some traction with business.” (That’s not the point of this article, but I thought I would get that out there all the same.)

Not to be stopped, with all around the table scratching their heads and wondering who would be the first to volunteer to get some coffee, I offered a solution that met with immediate scorn, and which subsequently everyone at the table has admitted could really solve some big problems: true cost.

Principles of Talentism: Part 11 - Consultants, not Accountants

(Continuing with the long running and often tortured series about the "Principles of Talentism". Hang in there, we're almost done.)

If you are in a P&L that delivers services then you need to learn how to be a consultant. In fact, spending time as a consultant is something that everybody in corporate America should do at least once in their career.

We need to separate the practice of consulting from it’s standard implementation. Consultants usually exist inside of consultancies, and consultancies, like all other businesses, exist to make money. Since consultancies make their money by finding things that are wrong and pointing them out to a client who may be otherwise blissfully unaware of the issue, consultancies are structurally doomed to be reviled by their clients and the clients employees. The fact that many consultancies make money by finding things that are perfectly OK, or could be repaired by someone internally, and then pointing them out to the client as not only broken, but only fixable by the consultancy themselves, further tarnishes the luster of the profession.

But we are not talking about the business of consulting here. So let’s acknowledge that “consultants” get a bad name for reasons both real and imagined and talk about what being a consultant is all about.

Good consultants do three things very well: ask insightful questions to gain deeper understanding, listen for opportunity and identify the real problem. By comparison, most business people spend time primarily as accountants: count the problems and cost them.

Principles of Talentism: Part 10 - Businesses, not Departments

Let's abolish the idea of the insular  "corporate department." Either what a group of people do adds strategic value or it doesn't. If it doesn't but the work still needs to be done, then it should be outsourced to someone whose whole job revolves around solving customer / client problems in that domain. But even more, when a function is strategic it has to be connected to market feedback. There has to be someone making a buying decision about what your produce. This is critical for HR to understand: HR is a strategic function but tends to believe that it is in a "problem solving" business as opposed to the "value delivery" business. You have to be able to “sell” your solution in order to gauge the value of your approach to the people who will be affected by it.

I see this all the time. HR analyzes a situation and determines that something is wrong. They then create a solution and go put it into operation. Because HR is assessing both the value and effectiveness of their solution, the only ones they really need to convince of their success is themselves. In the meantime, the client is sitting there wondering exactly what is going on. Either the client likes the solution, but was never forced to show just how important it was to them (so they have little long-term commitment or attachment to its success), or they are ticked that “the bureaucrats” have shoved yet another solution down their throat to a problem they didn’t even know they had. Neither situation is optimal (or even advisable).

People tend to value things that they pay for, and they really value things that they pay for and believe they thought up themselves. “Businesses” get this and leverage this tendency of human nature every day in millions of sales situations. “Corporate Departments” aren’t accountable to customers and therefore don’t think they have to “sell” anything. This is at the core of most corporate dysfunction – when a function is accountable neither to shareholders nor to internal customers who are accountable to shareholders then their interests and the interests of the business often diverge (sometimes widely).

We’ll get into that more in a later post, since it’s an idea that has been around since 1932. But a relatively quick fix for this phenomenon is to focus on creating businesses that have to sell and be responsive to a constituency, not departments that institute and evaluate their own solutions.

Principles of Talentism: Part 9 - Value, not Title

I got half-way through this series and dropped the ball. Apparently I can't take my own advice and started to look for certainty over clarity. So we'll plow through the last couple of ideas here and then get to some recruiting and technology posts. Some really cool ideas to review there.

And for now - back to "The Rules of Talentism." Today - Value, not Title....

This is a corollary to the "Marktets" rule. If people are investors and they are getting feedback from the markets they sell to, then everyone should be on variable performance pay: the more value they produce, the more return they get. It's beyond "pay for performance" (which is certainly better than the "pay for having a pulse" method that most companies use). It says that when people buy what you are selling, you get a piece of the action.

Principles of Talentism: Part 8 - Markets, not Managers

(Queue inspiring music...)

(Loud booming announcer voice) Are you stuck in a job you don't like? Tired of waking up each day and wondering just how many days until the weekend? Is the most important decision of your day "Toupee or comb-over"? Then boy do we have a product for you!

Did you know that in the modern corporate structure there are people whose job is simply to determine how bad you are? So powerful are these people, so omniscient, that they can predict the future and determine your destiny all in one well crafted business sentence.

These super-beings are called The Manager (TM). You wouldn't know them just walking down the street; they don't wear pinstripe capes, and they don't wear a big Brooks Brothers "M" on their chest. They mostly assume the quiet repose of a Clark Kent, pushing up their glasses with their middle finger and making silly jokes to be "one of the gang." In fact, you would have little indication of their super powers… until you need a decision made! Suddenly, faster than a speeding memo, the glasses come off, the voice drops an octave and you here "Sounds too risky... let's hold off on that."

And then you realize that the super-human powers that The Manager (TM) has lay not in their ability to bend policies with their bare hands, or to leap tall infrastructures in a single bound... no, The Manager (TM) has the power to speak for others! Yes, this is what The Manager (TM) does - they tell you whether other people will like you and your ideas.

In this way The Manager (TM) is like that famous super-villain from economics lore: Stanlist-man  (TM). The fact that The Manager (TM) would spend their life's last blood defeating Stalinist-man on the battlefield but then trumpet the evil villain's powers of central planning and thought control in the office is one of the great ironies of modern day business. Isn't that horrible? (Crowd shot: everyone nodding their head..)

"But wait!" I hear you cry. "We can't have people running off willy-nilly, spending money without some controls! There has to be someone who saves us from human sloth, avarice and treachery! The Manager (TM) is just the super-hero we need in these dark and dangerous times!"

Principles of Talentism: Part 7 - Finance before HR

I have ripped into this so many times in this blog (