I've never been happy with the phrase 'War for Talent'. I thought it was just because I don't like elitism. But, it's actually because it's short-term and, like all solutions, it's the short-term obvious ones that get picked up and become the general rule and the long-term ones that get ignored.

Everyone (almost) has extraordinary abilities. Most people live and die without realizing them, without having them acknowledged, recognised, nurtured; without putting them into practice; without having a clue what they could do. Or could have done, more accurately.

Organizations encounter the problem of of increasingly sophisticated markets - I think they mean people - who yearn for imaginative, engaging, creative, connected, warm, fun, slick, professional-but-human, flexible organizations to cosy up to, ignoring the same-a-like rest.

It's a marriage made in heaven: most everyone, as they charmingly say in the US, can be extraordinary but isn't allowed to be or even believes they can; while post-consumers are crying out for extraordinary customer experiences that make them feel, er, extraordinary rather than just another punter.

Yet organizations have somehow morphed this enormous opportunity for organizations to evolve into a powerful force for unleashing human potential on a scale not seen in history, into...a recruitment and retention problem.

'War for Talent' half-identifies the problem then fully identifies an old-fashioned, ill-fitting, recruitment-led, pay 'n' perks solution. It becomes all about headhunters and pay inflation.

Real leaders get ordinary people to realise they can do extraordinary things then allow them to work in a trust-based, open environment to achieve those things.

Real leaders identify and REALIZE talent. They don't go to war over it. They cultivate it. They don't have to hunt it out. They know they've already got it; it just needs releasing.

As Javier Bajer puts it in Ken Robinson's book:

"Fighting the talent war with the outside world is covering up our own failure in terms of people development."

Labels: creativity, talent

I'm usually wary of books that change their name - this one used to be called 'Got Game' when it was published as a hardback in 2004 - but in this incarnation, it was recommended by Euan Semple and Johnnie Moore, so I thought it worth another look.

And it is.

Beck and Wade's research findings and views on how to lead and be led by the gaming generation in the workplace are illuminating. I particularly like the section heading "Leaders? We don't need no stinking leaders" and the explanation that "For starters, in the world in which gamers grow up, leaders are basically useless...".

True. But there again, even for the non-gamer generation, leaders are basically useless. Some research I was involved with a while back showed that nine out of ten managers find their own line manager or organizational leader 'uninspiring'. In my book that makes ninety per cent of supposed 'leaders' in organizations useless.

I'm not convinced by some of the arguments in The kids are alright, such as differing attitudes to risk when you have a reset button to push lead to the need to help younger employees manage risk more effectively.

But, there are useful explanations to ease culture clash in the workplace, for example, in pointing out that a manager approaching a gamer generation employee who has one ear piece in their ear, listening to their iPod, an IM window open on their desktop, two documents and a U Tube window open, and may not even stop using the keyboard as the manager is talking to them, may indeed be listening. Just not the way you and I listen.

It's not that the gamer generation can multi-task, say Beck and Wade. Technically, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. Their brains are just more adept at leaping from task to task and back again in ways that disorientate non-gamers. They don't have the timelag.

leadership

I was in Berlin over the weekend and was struck by how unimaginative and boring most of the graffitti is there (and there is graffitti EVERYWHERE) till I came across this.

I'm researching the links between leadership, mistakes, failure and innovation - traditional attitudes to success and failure severely inhibit innovation, yet leaders tend to reinforce these traditional attitudes - and came across this old Nike commercial from Michael Jordan. Despite the recent legal moves against YouTube from broadcasters who don't get it, I'm sure Nike won't mind this appearing here, as they do get it...



leadership

Labels: failure, innovation, success

"The implications of soldiers that express their thoughts every day can be explosive,"
- Extract from a war blog kept by a US soldier serving in Iraq.

I am interested in how leadership is changing in the military. Partly because old command and control leadership that permeates all organizations is based on the military model, whereas the military itself has, in many cases, moved on from that.

The US during the invasion of Afghanistan ceded control to junior officers in the field, whose favoured means of communicating horizontally with each other was texting on their mobile phones, using satellite links. The Army recognised that in such a fast-moving environment as a theatre of war, leading through the traditional vertical chain of command is impractical.

The US Army's recruitment campaign a while back was based on the theme "I am an army of one" and featured individual front-line trooops who had to make fast decisions regularly that would in the past have been passed up a hierarchy for a 'leader' to make the decisions.

Nothing illustrates the tension more between the increasing discretion given to troops on the ground to make decisions and the traditional military control model than the war blogs kept by US troops exercising their First amendment right to freedom of expression while serving in Iraq.

Under the old military leadership model, soldiers did not think. How does leadership work in a thinking army? BBC Radio 4 ran a fascinating item today on the war blogs kept by US soldiers in Iraq, including references to some of the highly disturbing and unsanitised clips of war in action as individual soldiers used small handhelds for vblogging that ended up on YouTube. The Radio 4 programme will be available in a day or two on their 'Listen Again' facility on the BBC website here if you are interested.

leadership

Want a happy workplace? Fed up with your people scowling at customers? Try Zajonc’s weird idea for inducing happiness:

Saying the phonemes e and ah, which activate smiling muscles, puts people in a better mood than saying the German ü, which activates muscles associated with negative emotions (Zajonc, Murphy & Inglehart, 1989). Simply activating one of the smiling muscles by holding a pen in the teeth (rather than with the lips, which activates a frowning muscle) is enough to make cartoons seem more amusing (Strack, Martin & Stepper, 1988).

Better (and less open to a law suit) than putting happy pills in their coffee.

Source: I learnt that from Bob Sutton of Stanford University

Labels: happiness

Lincoln was once asked how long it had taken him to write the one-page Gettysburg Address, the seminal speech that united a nation.

He replied "All my life."

Great speeches don't come from speech writers, which most CEOs resort to. Nor are great speeches made with Powerpoint, which the rest of us mere mortals have to make do with in lieu of speechwriters. It's deceptively simple: be yourself. People respond to authenticity.

Labels: communication, speeches