How can this be?  Productivity is supposed to be a good thing.  Productivity is the measure of how much a business produces divided by the number of workers, so if productivity goes up a business should make more money.  How can this be a talent killer? (more…)

It’s common to think of top talent as people who are just plain smarter than the rest, the really bright people who stand out.  There are obviously some linkages, but they aren’t as hard and fast as they first appear.  Smart people who don’t really apply themselves can’t be classified as top talent.   There is also a case for different talents, not all of which are cognitive.  One reason for the interest in Daniel Goleman’s notion of emotional intelligence is because he explained how many top achievers differentiate themselves because of a particular form of social intelligence or personal mastery, not because of traditional measures of IQ or intelligence.

New discoveries in brain science seem to greet us almost every day.  How the mind and brain work is a fascinating field that just gets more interesting with each new discovery. 

We’re learning about different types of memory, the different regions of the brain where they are stored or accessed, (more…)

 One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of a million dollars a year as a professional manager was Charles Schwab.  He was picked by Andrew Carnegie to be the President of United States Steel in 1921 when he was 38 years old.   Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year to Charles Schwab?  

(more…)

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”  Vince Lombardi

“How do I stop the headaches without firing my people?”

You own the business and so all the problems that can’t be solved by others end up in front of you.  You have someone who handles personnel matters, but that means the transactional side of HR.  The personal issues, interpersonal conflict, lack of performance, all of the soft, squishy (but really difficult) stuff comes to you.  And you wish you could make it go away without needing to fire someone.  Maybe you can… (more…)

Meltdown, bailouts, recession–the last six months have provided quite a crash course in economics for us.  There has been a lot of talk about Wall Street vs. Main Street, as if you could easily separate the two.  The truth is, you can’t.  What is needed right now is a serious capital reinvestment in the economy.  I’m not talking about infusions of cash and liquidity like the Federal Reserve has been attempting.  I’m talking about an investment in human talent. 

(more…)

Last week I was in a session with several executives benchmarking a job.   That term is used to describe a number of different activities or approaches, so let me give you an insiders view of what we did.  

Our task was to determine what the organization needed from this job for superior performance (in our case it was the job of President of the company).  We discussed key results that the person filling the role of President was accountable for producing.  When we agreed on the five key results, our assignment next was to “let the job speak”.  (more…)

I just got back from a trip to Mexico City and besides having a fabulous time with my wife I also learned a few things on this trip.  On our first day in the city we went to the renowned Museum of Anthropology and were dazzled by the talent that was on display. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Nacional_de_Antropología to read more, or go to the museum’s site http://www.mna.inah.gob.mx/)

(more…)

The aikido dojo I train in had a significant event over the weekend.  Five of our members took a test, and I was one of them.

I won’t go into all the background here about aikido (*see the footnote below if you’re interested).  Since we don’t have competitions or tournaments in aikido, testing (and the training that leads up to that) is one of the times when we are able to assess what we have learned and how much more there is to learn.  Besides demonstrating specific techniques that are called out early on, the last part of the test involves multiple attackers coming at you from all directions and you have to effectively deal with each attack without injuring yourself or anyone else.  It is a true test of poise under pressure.

(more…)

Pardon the somewhat philosophical title for this post.  But I do ask it with some earnestness.  I commented before about how “talent” is climbing up the list of important business issues that executives are paying attention to.  I also noted that CEO’s seem to have great difficulties explaining what they mean by talent.

Here’s why:  they lack data.  Hard measurements and operational data belong to the CFO and the production side of the business.  When it comes to talent, we can’t agree on what we’re talking about because we simply cannot measure it.  The truth is we can, but most people don’t know how. 

(more…)