We had an interesting ignition session with a number of talented talent managers. To prepare for the session we looked at a wide range of titles.
“New Normal” and “The connected company”
From “New Normal” to “The connected company”. Which is about the way your organised as a company (small is beautiful), how meaning, values and mission are crucial and how new technology behaviours need to be embedded into your organisation. The BYOD movement and “Hacking work” as examples. Your legacy systems are not relevant to generation Einstein.
“Marketing 3.0” and “Workplace 2020”
In anything to do with HRM, “Marketing 3.0” and “Workplace 2020” cannot be ignored. HRM is the new marketing. Extreme transparency through social media makes every person in your company a carrier of your brand. Terms like sense-making, adaptive thinking, new media literacy, transdisciplinarity and cognitive load management become important. Digital natives have that in abundance, digital immigrant will have problems keeping up.
“The Shallows”
Opened a very interesting discussion about Generation Einstein, gamification of work (Warcraft as a recruitment tool is only the beginning), “The Shallows” and how to manage an origination with people that have a constant attention deficit.
“The second machine age” and “Shift”
Technology and Moore’s law was covered through “The second machine age” and we picked that because it gives a counter weight to the notion that there is a war for talent. If you belief some of the stats 45% of all jobs are under threat and you are lucky to have one. That puts talent management in a very different context. Retention will become less of an issue. The dark side of “Shits”
“Mavericks at work”
We almost throw into any session the book “Mavericks at work”, which is about the importance of passion and passion as the real USP of every organisation.
“Bioteams” and “Beyond performance management”
In between, we covered “Bioteams”. What can we learn on how cells communicate and organise themselves? In some ways “Bioteams” is not that dissimilar to “The connected company” or “The starfish and the spider”. It is all about an organisation that is fluid and extremely adaptable. “Beyond performance management” talks about how most of the systems applied do not work. Adobe spend 80,000 hours on performance management with no measurable benefit. They scrapped it. You should too.
“Employees first, customers second”
“Employees first, customers second” shows how performance management was put on it head and focussed on the serving manager and full transparency and accountability of management to their staff. With 60,000 staff, across all continents. If they can do it, so can you.
“Talent is overrated” and “The rare find”
Some books like “Talent is overrated” (it is about 10,000 hours) and “The rare find” (read CV upside down and ignore character at your peril) were not even covered, due to lack of time.
“Talent masters”
We ended with our favourite, which is “Talent masters”. Without talent you are nothing, everything is about talent and if talent is not a agenda item on every executive meeting at all layers of the organisation, you are creating a big problem. Your organisation is not living and breathing talent.
We closed with the 3 questions that every employee (including talent) asks:
- How am I doing?
- What is my career path?
- How does what I do matter?
“The Strategist”
And we think that the third question is the key question. Straight from “The Strategist”. Meaning, values and culture is everything. Which shows that talent management, HRM, marketing and strategy are all very closely interlinked.
“Business exposed”
Which is confirmed by the anti-book we always throw in for good measure, titled “Business exposed”, which states that talent is more than overrated. It does not work. It is the soft capital in an organisation that enables people to flourish. It is culture and passion that drive top performance, not people.
