Welcome back. Labor Day tends to punctuate my year like the eye of a storm (I’ve been watching too much Hurricane-Gustav-TV). For those, like me, who do not vacation in August, it tends to be the hectic anchor month for the year’s work. On the other side of Labor Day, September brings with it the first advance charge of the year to come. The tense clarity of Labor Day is charged with the urgency of the present. There is none of the optimistic blue-sky vitality of spring-time visioning. But neither is there the wintry somnolence and ritual banality of New-Year-Resolution visioning. So I tend to pay attention to my Labor Day thoughts. This year I asked myself: why am I an engineer? The answer I came up with surprised me: out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In this year of viral widgetry, when everyone, degreed or not, became an engineer with a click on an install-this dialog on Facebook, this answer is important, because the most bloody-minded will win. Here is why.
How We Fly: Aircraft as Career Metaphors
If you visualize your career (or your entire life) as the piloting of an aircraft, what sort of aircraft do you see? Modes of flight work as great metaphors for your life and career. The story of Icarus, of course, is the best known flight-as-metaphor parable. On the abstract side of the metaphor, you have Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. On the pseudo-spiritual parable side, you have Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. In this piece you have a very literal-minded aerospace-engineer take on the subject (mostly stolen from other people; back story at end). Here’s a chart of major aircraft-choice personality types for you:
Aircraft as metaphors
Take a moment to classify yourself (if you know enough about aircraft, you can of course pick one not on the list, and get specific beyond generic labels like “fighter.”)
The Impossibility Triangle in Talent Management
I have taken to asking an unfair question in interviews in recent months: as a manager, how can you make sure you help people play to their strengths, while making sure the organization meets its goals on time? The question is unfair because I believe the right answer is you can’t. I haven’t yet gotten that answer from anybody. Most of the time, I get carefully noncommittal answers couched in terms of “there are always trade offs” or faux-pragmatic ones of the form, “well at some point people have to get on the same page and realize that a company is in business to make money.” Both answers are misguided. By trade-off people usually mean deterministically balancing coupled motivations in the presence of some sort of scarcity; they do not usually factor in uncertainty. Talent management introduces competing uncertainties, which are more complex beasts. The second answer is faux-pragmatic because everybody already understands tautological statements about companies being in business to make money. The realization makes no difference at all in how the psychological calculus of strengths and motivations plays out. In other words, yelling business realities out from the rooftops won’t help you attract talent or prevent you from hemorrhaging it.
So let’s keep ourselves honest here, by beginning our search for a next-generation talent management theory, Theory W, by acknowledging the fundamental limits in play. I represent these in the Theory W Triangle (if you are curious, this is inspired by the well-known Pizza triangle and the less well-known Spreng triangle, which I discussed before).
The Theory W Triangle
Let’s dig in.
Some Pointers to Thinking Styles
Okay, I couldn’t resist that bad pun in the title. I was idly wondering today, while taking my evening stroll to the coffee shop, about one of the most powerful visual icons in our world — the arrow. It is simple, yet supremely expressive. Take a look at this quiver full of twisty arrows I made up, to represent thinking styles. I had some more, but they wouldn’t all fit in this graphic, so if I collect enough more, I’ll make up a part two. And to think we invented the physical artifact merely to kill.
Some pointers to thinking styles, feel free to use, with attribution.
The Future of the Internet according to Jonathan Zittrain
“Be wary of SaaS and Internet-connected appliances, and it’s a good thing if the legal innovation never catches up with technological innovation.” That would serve as a rough summary of the thesis Jonathan Zittrain, cyberlaw Professor at Oxford, seeks to defend. In The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It
The Next Level of the Game
The coach tells the high-school star athlete, you’ve got to take your game to the next level to compete in college. The executive coach tells the young hotshot, at the next level, EQ matters more than IQ. What does this mean? The metaphor of levels is pervasive but obscure. It illuminates many things — sports, education, careers, personal-life stages — but very few things illuminate the metaphor itself. In fact I can think of only one: a certain class of video/computer games. Games that are somewhere between the elemental, abstract ones like Tetris and over-engineered MMPORGs. A great example, that I’ll use, is the neoclassical vertical shooter, LaserAge (think ‘modernized Space Invaders). Here is a screen shot of Wave 1, Level 1.
Ingava LaserAge, Level 1
What makes this game just right to illuminate the “levels” metaphor is that it is in a Golidlocks sweet spot. Unlike, say, Tetris, you don’t get sucked into a realm of mathematical abstraction. But neither do you get sucked into complicated mythologies and narratives that obscure the mappings to real life. Playing a lot of Tetris or World of Warcraft makes you better at Tetris or World of Warcraft. Playing LaserAge makes you better at life.
Acceleration as Strategy, Urgency as Doctrine
Three things happened today that created a sort of nuclear reaction in my head. The result was a rather blinding flash of insight concerning a set of knotty problems I am wrangling with. The first thing was a reaction, from a colleague, to a whirlwind burst of activity I put in last night to react to an opportunity. The second was an unusual compliment from another colleague. The third was a pre-release review copy of John Kotter’s upcoming A Sense of Urgency
Somehow the raw material brought me one of my increasingly rare moments of clarity (my last Aha! of comparable magnitude was 2 years ago). Condensed to a sound-bite, my insight can be summed up as follows: for your business to win today, you must adopt acceleration as your strategy, and urgency as your doctrine. Let me explain, via some bigger bite-sized thoughts.
Towards a Philosophy of Destruction
Somewhere in the back of our minds, we know that creation and growth must be accompanied by destruction and decline. We pay lip service to this essential dichotomy, or attempt to avoid it altogether, by using false-synthesis weasel words like renewal. I too have been guilty of this, as in this romanticized treatment of creative destruction (though I think that was a fine piece overall). Though I define innovation as “creative destruction” in the sense of Schumpeter, most of the time I spend thinking about this subject is devoted to creativity and growth. The reasons for this asymmetry are not hard to find. Destruction is often associated (and conflated) with evil. More troubling — it is often associated with pain, even if there is no evil intent involved. Finally, destruction — let’s loosely define it as any entropy-increasing process — is also more likely to happen naturally. It therefore requires less deliberate attention, and is easier to deny and ignore. Still, the subject of destruction does deserve, say, at least 1/5 the attention that creation commands. A thoughtful philosophy of destruction is essential to a rich life, at the very least because each of us must grapple with his/her own mortality. So here is a quick introduction to non-evil destruction, within the context of business and innovation. Before we begin, lodge this prototypical example of creative destruction, the game of Jenga, in your mind:
Jenga (Wikimedia Commons)
Peter Cappelli’s “Talent On Demand”
There is a compelling scene in HBO’s quasi-fictional Western, Deadwood, which qualifies as an instant lesson in the essentials of talent management. The 1870s mining boom town of Deadwood, which is just emerging from Wild West state-of-nature conditions, has attracted the attention of the robber baron George Hearst. Al Swearengen, the town’s incumbent strongman, adapts nimbly and switches from a governance-by-murder strategy to a more artful one, and in the process very effectively shifts power between his two key reports to reflect the priorities of the new situation. Dan Doherty, his dim and violent second from the lawless past, is gracefully shunted aside, while the more suave, but restless and underutilized Silas Adams is handed the tricky and critical “stretch” task of managing the relationship with George Hearst. Somehow, Al keeps both men motivated and loyal. Modern executives will recognize all sorts of very current themes in this little vignette. So how do you master these timeless elements of talent management, while operating in modern business conditions? You read Talent On Demand by Wharton’s Peter Cappelli, a book that completely validates my belief that talent management is the issue of the next decade (the purchasing function ranks a close second).
Work-Life Chemistry and How to Measure It
Let’s say you go on a business trip to the city where your favorite cousin lives, who you haven’t seen for a decade. You enjoy a nice dinner together one evening. In utility terms, this is positive work-life chemistry – your company doesn’t pay anything extra, and you essentially got a freebie family visit. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to read a book, but haven’t been able to find the time. Then the book suddenly becomes critically relevant to your work, and your boss demands that you read and present a summary at the next team meeting. So you spend a few afternoons at your desk, at work, reading it. Work-life chemistry happens when episodes of work-life blending lead to a non-zero sum outcomes. I made up a way to measure and visualize your work-life chemistry. Here is what it looks like. If the arrow in the diagram below is in the reddish zone, as in this example, you are blending work and life positively. In the blue zone, work-life chemistry is draining you (thinking “dampening” if you like). Let me explain how this works, and show you how to sketch out your diagram and arrow.
