TuSK

Kristi Cavanaugh

Have you ever worked with someone who is a mind reader? Well Kristi Cavanaugh might as well be a psychic. Kristi runs the Central Sourcing business at EA, and she is nothing short of amazing. Kristi is one of those people that understands her business so well and her clients so completely that she is able to answer questions before you ask them. Every conversation that I have had with Kristi over the last 6 months has ended with Kristi, ever cheerful, saying “Great idea!” and then finding out later that she had already thought of it and put it into practice. The work that Kristi is doing inside the Central Sourcing business is truly ground breaking. If you get a chance to meet Kristi, do it. You won’t be disappointed. Learn more about Kristi here.

Cindy Haugh

Cindy Haugh is the leader of the global talent acquisition organization at EA. As such, she is my boss (for the stuff I do at EA at least), so there is no way this won’t come across as gratuitous brown-nosing. So be it.

I once wrote a piece about Brand Talent and how organizations need to help their employees spread their wings in order to keep them around and engaged. I am sure that most people thought it was another one of my pipe dreams, but it was based on my experience at EA. As I have said earlier, the thoughts of going to work for a large company used to bring on waves of nausea. Why would I want to give up control, the opportunity to innovate and the freedom to chose the work I wanted to do?

When Cindy first contacted me about working at EA I let her know up front that working at EA was about as palatable to me as poking myself in the eye with a stick. I told her all the reasons why. She listened patiently and then replied calmly “I don’t work that way.” And she has been good to her word ever since.

In Good to Great you read about Level 5 leaders. Level 5 leaders are people who are humble and fiercely focused at the same time. They know the right thing to do and they organize and nurture teams that can accomplish those objectives, all while deflecting praise and attention on to the team. These kinds of leaders get amazing results and build tremendous team cohesiveness because they put the result before their ego. People want to excel for them because people learn to trust that the leader is in it for the larger good. Cindy’s teams have accomplished amazing results over the last five years, and it is due almost entirely to her leadership.

Sean Rehder

Sean runs Rehder Talent Logistics (you can read his great blog here). I have said it before, and I will say it again: “Sean is the shortest distance possible between a great idea and software implementation.” For those of you who haven’t heard my glowing praise before, Sean is the guy who is our Salesforce / contingent workforce / process guru. Maybe I feel such an affinity for Sean because I hope that I share some of his same characteristics: visionary, hard working and solid as a rock. Most likely I am just deluding myself, because Sean never ceases to amaze. For instance, we have been talking internally about some really cool contingent workforce ideas. Sean overheard one of the conversations. Three days later he came back to us with a prototype of something that answered 80% of our problems. Part of this is the ease of configurability of Salesforce, but most of it was Sean pulling a couple of all nighters to get something done. Again – this isn’t something that we asked him to do. He was just excited about what he heard and decided to unleash his expertise and passion in the service of a client. Simply awesome. I have worked with Sean since October of last year, and I don’t think there is a month that has gone by that the guy hasn’t done something to impress me and the rest of the team here at EA. So I just wanted this to be a public thanks to Sean for all his outstanding work.

Louis Vong

Truly consultative salespeople are a rarity in any business. The best ones usually bristle at the term "salesperson."

Louis Vong is simply one of the best salespeople I ever met at TMP. He's also a good friend (and hopefully will still be now that I've used the "s" word). He is TMP's not-so-secret weapon - competitors can be overheard saying "uh-oh, we're pitching against Louis." This is the guy that brought in HP, Boeing, Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, Swedish Medical Center, Washington Mutual and many more marquis companies in the Northwest and all over the west coast. Despite a relatively small market to work with, he's always among the top performers in the company.

And he does this by taking almost the exact opposite approach of any other salesperson that I've ever met. He doesn't go in with a bag of tricks, a set of products or even a list of case studies (although he can speak intelligently about any number of them). He just listens, tries to identify opportunities to solve challenges, and matches a set of services and people to your particular needs. Simple as that.

Louis' success proves two things to me:

1. Top people are your competitive advantage.
2. The art of selling is not to speak, it's to listen.

If you want to speak with one of the smartest people in the business, Louis can be reached at louis.vong@tmp.com.

The Elephant Seems to have Lost it's TuSKs

I apologize to the readers of this blog. Given my speaking schedule over the next week I haven't been able to put up any new "TuSKers." But rest assured, starting the first week of April I have 5 new and exciting people to introduce you to.

In the meantime, I welcome any of the TuSK co-authors to introduce us all to cool people in their network. And if you are at ERE San Diego this week, make sure to introduce yourself and tell me about your TuSKs!

Simon Longstaff

Having set my standard in my post on "my kinda people", I start at the top with an ethical philosopher.

When I first met Simon Longstaff, he told me that once a week, he sets up a chair and table in the middle of a shopping district in his hometown, Sydney, Australia. He had a sign saying something like, "I'm a philosopher, ask me a question." Simon didn't care if someone had a true ethical dilemma or a trivial problem. He loved teasing out the implications and helping people through their problem.

Of course if all he could do is help people on the street in Sydney, Simon wouldn't be very tuskable. His real work often helps big organizations understand their problems and work through them. Imagine, for example, that you are a major international sporting organization, and your reputation is being tainted by constant stories about corruption and bribes. You could, of course, call in crisis management consultants (and they probably did). They would help you manage the problem. Or you could call in Simon (they eventually did) to help you understand what an ethical policy might look like and help you write one that the organization could rally around and implement.  (If I haven't given enough clues about the client, think five rings.)

I don't know what Yahoo! is doing about its appalling Internet policy in China. I suspect there are crisis management folk up the wazoo. If they really intend to act ethically, rather than just create an appearance of better behavior, they'd do well to call on Simon.

That paean given, it probably helps to provide some facts about Simon. He is Executive Director of The St James Ethics Centre in Sydney. His philosophy doctorate is from Cambridge University (as a dark blue, I don't hold that against him), and he is involved in a wide range of business ethics councils and committees in Australia. But I think the world would be a better place if the rest of the planet stole Simon away from Down Under from time to time.

My kinda people

Jeff has been kind enough to both ask me to contribute to TuSK, and also to write about me. Before I tusk some people, I thought it would be useful to categorize what makes them "talents u should know".

I suspect most of the tusk-worthy people I know don't quite fit Jeff's criterion of being buried in large corporations. In my Davos days I met lots of corporate folk, but almost by definition if they are coming to Davos they aren't buried. I do, however, regularly encounter wonderful thinkers who the world should know more about, and that's what I'll be concentrating on in my tuskings.

I won't include people I have a current business relationship with through my venture Q Network. I think that would be against the spirit of Jeff's concept, since I benefit very directly as people use the talent in Q's global network of thought leaders. The people I write about, however, share the quality we look for in Q: they have the kind of deep insight that makes them particularly valuable to thoughtful executives.

I write having just read Jeff's cautions about smarts. I understand his caveat: "Smart people typically jump to conclusions without enough information and can be so sure of their conclusions that they foreclose future exploration." Maybe the distinction is that the people I am thinking about aren't just smart, they are wise.

Ray Morgan

(The following post first appeared on Talentism as "Strategic Step 4", but since it is about someone I think you should all know about, I thought I would post it over here too.)

Ray Morgan is a remarkable person. The teams he has lead have created amazing examples of engineering excellence and creativity, including the solar plane which holds the altitude record to this day. I once asked him how he did it. He replied simply “I made my company a massively parallel computer.”

It took me a while, but I finally got his point.

Think of your organization like a computer. Like a computer there are inputs, outputs, translators, memory and processors. Most organizations are set up to ensure that one or two key individuals are the processors: they take the information from the various input devices (their advisors), call upon memory (in the form of regulations, financial information, etc.) and then process the information into a decision (output) that they then expect executed by the rest of the organization.

In a small organization this “computing architecture” may be optimal. In fact, you see the “one main processor” design in many early-stage start-ups. But the larger your organization becomes the more inefficient this design becomes. Think of your computer at home: the more data you put on the disk, the more programs you have open, the greater the load you put on your processor. This causes your computer to slow down and eventually crash. It’s the same thing for an organization: put any one processor in the critical path, no matter how advanced, and your computer eventually stops working.

Ray went on to explain that he felt his job as a leader was to help everyone possible who worked with him to become better processors. As long as there was some ordering mechanism for outputs (i.e. more processors didn’t just create more confusion) having as many processors as possible helped his organization be more creative, solve problems faster and reduce turnover. No matter how big it got and no matter how complex the tasks before them, his division seemed to be able to work through it.

What Ray didn’t say (probably due to his inherent humility) was that he is a world-class system architect. He didn’t spend his time being the biggest, the fastest or the best processor in the organization. He understood that as one person he could never be as efficient or effective as many people aligned around working a problem. Instead, he spent his time setting up information channels, processes and systems to ensure that each team member (processor) could add as much value as possible to any problem they tackled.

Being a system architect is probably the most difficult work that an individual or team can undertake. This explains why so few managers do it well. As individualists and capitalists we are raised to be the best possible egocentric mega-processors rote education can produce. We are told that if you want to be a leader you have to be assertive and controlling. This means that when things go wrong most managers feel the undeniable urge to take control of the situation. And since there is always something going wrong, it is easy to feel that we are delivering the most value for the organization when we are the biggest and best processor of risk and cost information, parsing information and making decisions that send other people marching to put out the myriad fires.

This is most likely why most organizations lack for a coherent approach to resource allocation, process design and business model realization. This is also a key reason that people don’t usually reach the top when they play the role of the thoughtful background players. We are not programmed for architecture, especially when processing is so much more viscerally and socially appealing.

And yet it is lack of architectural competence that is the single most important reason for business disruption. It is not the failure to make grand strategic pronouncements that imperil us, nor is it a lack of people to take the lead and “make it happen.” It is the translators in the middle, the people who look at where the organization wants to go and what it has to work with and create the systems and processes and culture that enable that vision to become reality.

If HR wants to be a “strategic player” it needs to be doing two things well (aside from the day-to-day transactions): making as many people in the organization into processors and creating a system architecture that can harness the increase in organizational power that follows.

Thanks for the lesson Ray (the best father-in-law a guy could hope for). And welcome!

You don’t want anything to do with this person…

(Sharr Stark, VP/GM, TMP Worldwide, Portland, OR - sharr.stark@tmp.com)

… if:

• You’re interested in keeping the status quo
• You value quantity and speed over quality
• You don’t think that a brand has real, tangible value

If any of the above statements describes you, then you definitely won’t want to talk to Sharr Stark.

If you’re interested in learning how your organization can use a magnetic employer brand to take itself to the next level, build an in-house staffing marketing team, drive a higher ROI from your advertising spend or build a long-term partnership with someone that gets it and has fun doing what she does, contact her immediately.

Currently, Sharr manages the Portland office of TMP Worldwide, one of the world’s largest recruitment advertising and communications firms. She has worked with a range of companies like Nike and Intel, and in my experience provides the level of strategic consulting that many recruitment advertising agencies lack.

She’s passionate about branding and how it can impact a company’s ability to recruit high quality talent; has successfully run a P&L for the Portland office for several years; is insanely well-networked; and has built and motivated a truly incredible team. She’s also one of the best salespeople I’ve ever seen. 

If that’s not TUSK, I don’t know what is!

(Thanks to Dave Lefkow for his first TuSK post!)

Michele Macready

I have been thinking about diamond mining recently. It seems the near-perfect analogy for the potential of people inside of large companies. Most managers operate as if the only way to find a diamond is to a jeweler (recruiting) or find one on the ground somewhere around where you are camping (most succession planning). It turns out that if you want to score the big diamond you have to dig for them.

Companies typically have more diamonds than they realize, but because of titles or corporate bureaucracy no one knows they are there.

I am reminded of this every time I think of my friend Michele Macready. Michele works in an IT job running a large implementation project. It's interesting work and she does a great job at it. But IT project work isn't very glamorous and doesn't get a lot of visibility, so Michele works in relative obscurity.

That's truly unfortunate, because it turns out that she is a diamond. Not just any diamond, but a really extraordinary one. Michele is so self-effacing and unassuming that I would have never known. But one day we were talking about the various problems with corporate strategy and Michele starts examining strategy through the lens of metaphor. The subject is really interesting and very complex, and so I ask her how she developed such a fascinating perspective. I knew she was smart, but the stuff she was discussing was at a whole other level.

That's when Michele casually mentions that she worked at the Sante Fe Institute with some of the greatest minds of our time. She actually ran the division that was responsible for monetizing these geniuses' deep thoughts. Then she went to the Boston Consulting Group and participated in their Advanced Strategy Group. Michele's husband (whom she met at the Institute) is a well known quantum physicist who is doing cutting edge work in developing quantum computers.

In other words, Michele is a diamond, and a spectacular one at that. She has participated in some of the most cutting-edge work around about how knowledge is created and valued. If she were still working as a consultant companies would pay good money to hear her opinions.

"Why?" you ask. "Why is Michele working as an IT project manager?" Because she wanted to live in a specific location and it was the best job she could find. She didn't want to live the travel-centric life of a consultant, and there were no companies in the area she wanted to live who were hiring "metaphorical thinkers." So she took an IT job.

You may think this story is remarkable. And certainly it is. Unfortunate then that it is not as fantastic as it sounds. The company where you work probably has some Micheles in its employ. Do you know who they are? Or are you just assuming that since they don't have the fancy title that they don't have a great story, a new and interesting way to add value  to you and your company?

Diamonds may be all around you if you are just willing to dig.

Welcome Michele!

Tom Cullen

I don't think it's any secret that people who are considered "corporate functionaries" are usually assumed to be second-tier compared to their business-line counterparts. If a person builds a great new web tool and sells it they are considered a genius, but if they build the same functionality and offer it to their company their "genius quotient" is not similarly enhanced.

I bring this up because I have been surprised at how many truly awesome people I have run into in corporate HR and IT departments. I don't know whether it was destiny or a personal choice to avoid all the baloney that accompanies the typical entrepreneur's journey, but I have met quite a few people who, had they decided to apply their talents in a business-line setting, would be people who you would know.

Today's TuSK post is just such an individual. Tom Cullen was one of the first people I met when I came to EA. I was instantly impressed with his depth of knowledge about really difficult IT / integration issues. In his even-handed, aw-shucks sort of way he described how he viewed integration architecture issues in a way that was at once both cutting-edge and common sense.

Since that first conversation I have had many other opportunities to work with Tom. It is always a pleasure. Tom continues to explore the leading edge of how corporations can integrate various data sources and point-applications into a cohesive whole that is dynamic and transparent. He is one of those rare individuals who has great credibility with the CIO, the vendors and the thought leaders at the same time.

I have asked Tom to be an author on Tusk because I think he has some exciting things to say about SOA and other integration concepts. In addition, Tom is a person whose judgment I trust implicitly, so I am hoping that he will introduce us to great people he knows.

Welcome Tom!

Lance Knobel

I wrote here that TuSK is my opportunity to introduce the world to people who may have been out of the networking mix. It is also an opportunity to introduce people the world is quite well aware of into my network (which is probably of little value to them, but of great value to my network - assuming that my network is up to snuff!) Today I write about just such an individual.

A couple of months ago I had the good fortune to have lunch with Lance Knobel (more here). He writes the blog Davos Newbies  which is definitely worth your time. Lance actually ran the World Economic Forum one year, and was the editor-in-chief of World Link (the WEF publication) for many years before that.

I have now had the pleasure of talking with Lance a couple of times, and each time it is an absolute joy. We usually bounce around from talking about economic theory (Lance really understood the concept behind Talentism, but he thinks I am perhaps too optimistic to believe that corporations will be willing to reach far enough back into the educational system to make the changes needed to realize the ultimate vision) to great historical literature (we are both O'Brien fans).

Lance is now a part of Qnet, which is a group of true geniuses in the Bay Area. If you are interested in geopolitics, economic theory, technological innovation or just sparking conversation, Lance is someone you should know.

talentiNGS discovered...

Many, many moons ago I started my career as an HR Generalist.  I liked being in HR, yet I found over time that I was increasingly frustrated with the lack of tangible results that I produced as an HR Generalist.  Sure, I worked hard to influence decision makers to make what I felt were the "right" decisions, yet I couldn't point to a single decision and say definiteively that it was a result of my work.  I could hope that it was but I couldn't say for sure.  There appeared to be no ROI for all my hard work.  Then I discovered recruiting - not the kind of recruiting that one does on the side as an HR Generalist, but the real business of recruiting.  I've been a die hard convert ever since!

Here's what I love about recruiting, talent acquisition, staffing - the business of finding the right people at the right time...

I love working with businesses to create operational efficiency in their talent organization via predictable, repeatable and logical processes.  Uncovering inherent sytematic inefficiencies and replacing them with a process and tools that the business can embrace and champion rocks my world!

The other, and even more important piece of recruiting that I get excited about is understanding where an organization's talent comes from, and then translating that into a sourcing methodology.  Too often companies rely on a post and mine strategy while ignoring passive talent, brand talent (thanks for that one Jeff!),  referrals,  new grads and other sources that are critical in today's market. 

Finally, I love getting to the ROI.  My experience has shown me that most business leaders are willing to place bets on acquiring talent, if the person making the proposition can intelligently discuss the probable ROI and how the results will be measured.  In my view, this is the best part about being on the "happy side of HR."  We can actually show results for just about everything we do, and that is the biggest kick of all!

Thanks for starting TUSK Jeff, and I look forward to from hearing from TISK (talent i shold know).

Cheers,

Nancy

TalentiNGS

I initiate Talent u Should Know (TuSK) with a post about Nancy Gray-Starkebaum. Nancy has recently left EA to start a new firm: NGS Talent. (Her new email address is "TalentiNGS@gmail.com" which I think is pretty clever.)

I have worked with Nancy for the last year and it has been one of my great pleasures and privileges. She is a keen architectural and operational mind, a rare find in the world of corporate talent acquisition management.

Nancy started the EA Canada recruiting and sourcing organization. The EAC operation went on to source thousands of people and hire hundreds of the hardest to find individuals on the planet (senior software engineers with deep game development experience). EAC's success is a real credit to her capabilities.

Nancy is a blast to hang around - great sense of humor, down-to-earth while still being hard-driving. She lives in Vancouver, Canada and has the coolest little son on the planet.

Drop her a note and get to know her. You won't regret it.