This is a book about the business of talent. I distrust most business books. This is the way they usually start: “Everything is changing. If you don’t run to keep up you will fail. the cure is:” insert the author’s one-dimensional solution here – leadership or innovation or whatever. This is unsatisfying for several reasons.
I disagree with the assertion that any single thing can certainly improve the performance of any complex system. Although there are counter examples, for the most part that’s not how the real world works: in the paradoxical cooperative/adversarial soup in which each enterprise exists, we and our partner/competitors have solved the more easily soluble, and what remains is the difficult.
But more fundamentally, I don’t believe that our greatest challenge is change. This opinion is not in fashion. Rapid change is real – indeed, the change in the business environment, especially where driven by improvements to technology, is exponential – but I believe the most profound challenges faced by the enterprise do not change. When one thoroughly considers any system, it is possible to perceive enduring truths. In the same way that while each river-crossing represents a unique challenge to the bridge builder, the mechanical laws of bridge building remain constant; the physics underlying the system abide no matter how dynamic the context. Understanding these fundamental truths is a prerequisite to determining what actions to take to deal with any situation, so identifying a response to the changing circumstance without understanding a system’s fundamental nature is at best a waste of time, and at worst a fatal distraction.
In these pages I will argue that we have been thinking about talent wrong. Fundamentally wrong, at the level of the physics. This is like telling the bridge builder that all of her bridges may fall down because her modelling software had the wrong formula. I believe that the fundamental challenge we face as business people, is that of improving large, invisible, multidimensional, systems of which we are not only a part, but a part of the problem. Because of who we are, and how organizations are structured, we have framed the problem incorrectly, and as a result we are consistently making poor business decisions.