In the 'war for talent'...who's the enemy?

Yesterday U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said, “To start, we must always tap into our greatest resource: our people. Winning the war for talent is imperative if our country is to out-compete and lead the rest of the world.”*

The phrase ‘war for talent’ is provocative.  If there is a talent in the workforce that matters most it is leadership.  Time and time again, what determines if you have the right people, is the leadership that makes the people you have into the right people.

When an executive steps into a new job, he or she generally must take the team that’s already in place and make that team successful.  When David Marquet took over as captain of the nuclear submarine Santa Fe, it was the worst performing sub in the US Navy.   Unusual for the navy, but because the boat had such a wretched performance record, Captain Marquet had been given license to change out as much of this poorly performing crew as he wanted.  

He changed nobody.  Marquet knew the difference between a ‘manager’ and a ‘leader’.  Many submarine commanders are more managers than leaders.  In part, that may be because what’s of paramount importance aboard a submarine is control. Marquet knew it was possible that the crew performed badly as a result of being managed badly.  Perhaps, all the Santa Fe needed was leadership and control.

A year later, the Santa Fe was the best performing submarine in the navy.  What was remarkable about this turnaround was where you found the leadership and control.  On the Santa Fe, leadership and control could be found in abundance in every job and at every rank.  And it was intelligent control, not dogmatic control.  This worst crew in the navy, even in the isolation of a submarine, innovated many changes that ultimately were adopted by the entire fleet. 

If there’s a ‘war for talent’, it’s the talent of leadership. 

* "U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker Lays Out a Path Forward for American Competitiveness in Remarks to Minnesota Business Partnership." U.S. Department of Commerce. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Sept. 2015. <http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDOC/bulletins/1195cb2>.

HBR Dec 2008 Article: “Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators”

Missing the mark:

Broadly this is mostly an insightful article attempting to address the two key problems one encounters when dealing with the issue of innovation talent. First, how do you find your innovators? And second, what do you do with them once you do? But it misses the mark in a very crucial way - which adds to the understanding of why innovation is such a difficult thing to manage.

Stories like this lump into “innovation talent” two distinctly different types of talent. One talent is the creative design talent. This is a key talent in artistic enterprises such as art, music, movies, architecture, etc.,. It is also key in some aspects of business like the design that Apple builds into its products. The other key talent is problem-solving. Problem-solving is the talent most useful for gaining competitive advantage in business. We innovate to gain competitive advantage. When we innovate, we gain competitive advantage by solving a customer problem better than the competition. We do this by creating new knowledge in solving the problem, and we protect this knowledge to the extent possible.

The authors fail to recognize the valuable talent for innovation in business is a talent for problem-solving, plain and simple. While they don’t talk specifically about problem-solvers, they do describe what great problem-solvers are capable of doing. “The best innovators have very strong cognitive abilities including excellent analytic skills…They can frame and reframe challenges from multiple vantage points[1]…They zero in on the most important points and waste no time on peripheral issues[2]… innovators home in on the most critical components, see connections, and discern how to bridge different parts; they work hard and efficiently to recombine these pieces…[3]” This describes a great problem solver.

A great example of this skill is found in looking at how Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman backed up his off-hand, but specious boast in the Princeton lounge: “It’s easy to calculate e raised to any power using the series [4]:
”[5]

Of course Feynman’s fellow PhD students knew this was nonsense, and immediately challenged him:
“Oh yeah, well, then, what’s e to the 3.3?”
“That’s easy.” Says Feynman. “It’s 27.1…”.
Did he use this complicated series formula to calculate this? No. He had that great problem solving knack for seeing connections and discerning how to bridge them.
Here are the facts, which somehow popped into his head:
e = 2.71828…(he memorize e just because he used it a lot)
e to the 2.3 ≈ 10 (mathematician need to be able to convert base e to base 10 which Feynman had eventually memorized: e2.3026 =10)
e to the (x+y) = e to the x * e to the y.
Thus, Feynman calculated e to the 3.3 is equal to e to the (1+2.3) = e to the 1 * e to the 2.3 which is 2.71828*10, or 27.1…and he adjusted by estimating the difference between 2.3 and 2.3026 as the exponent. The answer was slightly less than 27.1828. When he got that right his colleagues gave him two more:
What is e to the 3?
What is e to the 1.4?
He used one additional fact he knew as a physicist who had to calculate half lives of radioactive materials, which is that e to the .7 ≈ 2 (e to the .69315 = 2). With this knowledge and the formula e to the (x+y) = e to the x * e to the y even you could estimate e to the 3 ≈ 20 or e to the 1.4 ≈ 4. Of course Feynman was more precise because he estimated for slight differences.

The point is Feynman had that very analytic mind which was capable of coming up with ways to break a problem down and synthesize a solution using those facts. In business, this is the basic talent you need in your innovators. It’s problem-solving.

The authors then go into outer space with statements like innovators can “identify which solutions are likeliest to be embraced by the influential people in their organization…[6]” and innovators are “ridiculously social aware of their surroundings at all times…[7]” That hey can “walk into a conference room…and quickly discern the underlying motivation of each one. They leverage that information to craft and communicate a message that resonates with every constituent.[8]”

Wow! This is not consistent with my experience. Nor is it consistent with Feynman’s. Perhaps the title of his last book tells it all: What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Dr Robert Sutton at Stanford wrote about the real characteristics of talented innovators in his book Weird Ideas That Work. It is pretty much exactly the opposite. Sutton says that the kind of people the company has to have to come up with these innovative ideas are your “deviants, heretics, eccentrics, crackpots, weirdoes and just plain original thinkers.”[9]

These are usually ‘low self monitors’. They are unable to, or at least don’t try to read other people’s non-verbal communication. Aside from being creative problem solvers, they tend to avoid contact with coworkers, have notoriously high self esteem, and are guided by an inner compass that pays little attention to how other people feel.

Actually, reading the HBR article, you get the intuition that the authors aren’t so sure about this high EQ talent idea. After all, why would you need to mentor someone who was such an extraordinary innovator who could walk into a room and command the emotional environment in a convincing way. The authors later in the article talk about taking innovators with ‘high potential’ (whatever that means) and mentoring them to defend their ideas and recognize their weaknesses[10]. In many respects, it is a fool’s errand to try to teach great problem solvers to develop a high sensitivity to other people’s individual underlying motivations. They really don’t care what other people think, and are disinclined to develop that talent. It is much more profitable to identify people with problem solving talent and marry them up to people who are savvy about interpersonal politics to work together in delivering results.

The also get right the idea that normal jobs may not be the right place for these problem-solving innovators suggesting that companies should be “careful to place innovators outside the regular structure” indicating that, for example, JP Morgan Chase “…creates new positions for rising stars if appropriate ones don’t exist.” The activity of finding great problem solvers and determining the best ways to apply their talents is what my company is all about. You cannot let this talent bubble up, because in most hierarchical companies it won’t. You have to aggressively search it out and that is our specialty. Then you need to tailor the business environment and assignments for the individual problem-solver based on his or her talents and baggage.




[1] Paragraph 9
[2] Paragraph 8
[3] Paragraph 6
[4] R. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, W.W. Norton &Co., New York,1985, p. 192
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function
[6] Paragraph 9
[7] Paragraph 10
[8] Paragraph 10
[9] R Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company,Free Press, New York, 2002 P. 36
[10] Page box “Idea in Practice”

Human Resources and Innovation

As an innovation talent coach, I find the single most important aspect of culture in a company defined in how people interact. There are two crucial factors. First, in many hierarchical companies interactions often have an undercurrent of position and privilege. The notion of superior/subordinate translates into a adult-to-child relationship where the ‘child’ looks to respond to the ‘adult’ to avoid displeasure. We hire people for their brains. This relationship undercuts that key asset. If you think about it, when an adult is present in a room full of children, the children look to the adult to solve problems. This sort of relationship is evident in many of the stories Bob tells related to his No Asshole Rule. It is an unpleasant environment for everyone except perhaps the CEO.

Many companies are adept at avoiding this trap. Gore is a company that does this well. I consulted for an Australian company where the new turn-around CEO established a single internal job title: ‘Colleague’. He inverted the organization chart putting the customer on top and the people who interacted with customers just below them, and all the management team (he called ‘team leaders’) underneath them. The chart underscored the role management plays in supporting the work done by the people who actually produce the goods and services for customers. He did some other clever organizational shifts as well. The results were phenomenal: – a 16-fold increase in sales; ROE reached 35% after tax, and increased market share from 4% to 16%.

In the famous example of the NUMMI plant in Freemont California just across the bay from Stanford, the old hierarchy was thrown out and replaced with three levels for the entire plant – Team Leader (a union worker), Group Leader, and Plant Management. The plant was managed by (drum roll please) HR! At NUMMI everyone actually working was ‘Team Member’ with a single pay grade.

Second, is a two step engagement process: 1) Link the sense of personal worth to the job. This is the 5 why-is-that-importants. You ask why a function is important, and then why that (the answer to the first why) is important, until you reach something like ‘because it help people’ or ‘because it makes life better’. You’re a tax collector, why is that important? … ‘Because good roads and excellent schools make the world a better place.’
2) Organize the work such that it is team work. Now you have a team that is working together ‘to make the world better’. Nothing is more fun than working on a team with a great purpose, and nothing drives the desire for excellence more strongly than working together to make the world better. It is the most powerful workplace motivator.