Talent?

I remember a comment made by Mike on this blog a couple of months ago
regarding how to identify talent. Let me quote something from Closework:

"[...] we talk about gifted people, but the most important
gift may be the talent to practise. The inner strength and desire to
keep practising on and on. That's something you can't teach."

Well, I am too optimistic about human potential to agree with the fact
that you can't teach or motivate someone to practise his or her art,
but I agree with the fact that, as Gandhi used to say, "an ounce of
practise is worth more than a ton of theory".
So perhaps one way of identifying talent is to assess how big a person's propensity to apply tools and knowledge is and how well they can practise their art... which is not necessarily well predicted by how "big" the names for which they worked in the past were.

This is not theory. This is what we did together with Mike when we recruited the development team of a small software company we ran together. We assessed technical knowledge, the ability to use that knowledge in practise, personality characteristics and fit with the requirements of a risky start-up. And you know what? That team was pure talent!

Closework!

Benoit, a good friend of mine was kind enough to send me a book he said would provide food for thought. The title is Closework and I found it incredibly engaging and definitely interesting. It's a business book that is woven into a novel or perhaps the opposite. The authors wanted to write a different business book that would not be "damn academic". Well, this one is not and it certainly feels like very practical stuff from the real world out there.
The authors argue that what ultimately makes a difference in business is the willingness to be in the field with the people who actually do the work and to facilitate their activity. What Closework is about is the absolute opposite of what big strategy consulting houses do for a living, i.e. engaging with Boards and senior management on consulting projects based on apparently flawless thinking. Flawless but not necessarily right in the real world out there, because at the end of the day it is people actually doing the work who hold the keys to sustainable competitive advantage.

Well, I kind of like that! I believe in the importance of people as key contributors to lasting success. And you know what? The places and "big names" for which one decides to work (or not) are not good predictors of one's ability to contribute. So much for old-world criteria for selecting talent.

I agree with most of what Closework asserts and I can say that working with people in the field has been the common characteristic of every single successful endeavor of mine. At the same time,  I feel it is important to keep watching the world, to keep learning (and unlearning) "theoretical stuff" and see how they can be actually applied and to be building actionable visions of the future. The combination of sound thinking and effective action is a key to lasting success in business in my opinion. I have not found my ideal mix yet, but I am working on it... in field conditions!

True. Especially in business

"If you want to know the past, look at who you are. If you want to know the future, look at what you are doing now" - Buddha

Mike's favorite quote

I found it quite funny... Thanks Mike.

"Never trust a tall dwarf, he's lying about something"

How infotech can help intermediaries strengthen their position

It's been a busy period lately... that's in part because I had tons of things to finish before taking a break. I plan to spend most of my next week improving my windsurfing / funboarding skills. One of the things I really like about windsurfing is the parallel to business life: using the environment, setting course and optimising my way of sailing to achieve better results.

When fundamental parameters of the business environment change and new ways of achieving results become reality, there is a need to adjust people, models, practices and organisations. This story is about IT and web technologies being used to strengthen the role of an intermediary rather than to disintermediate a business. Intermediaries can be extremely useful if they perform activities in which they add the most value.

A couple of days ago I spent an interesting half-day with one of my customers who is an insurance broker. His environment is changing  as some of the insurance companies he works with attempt to alter the balance in their relationship: they want to take over activities the broker used to execute simply because the organisational structure and tools currently in operation on the broker's side are not able to cope with demands for more rigorous management of the business. Clearly, the insurance companies have a point, but they also push the envelope a bit in the sense that they want to increase their control and reduce the intermediary's commissions. This challenge triggered my customer's decision to seriously review the core processes of his business and to set a strategic objective of becoming a value adding service node that owns customer trust and defines customer experience. The broker also needs to revamp their IT infrastructure and better exploit web technologies to be able to provide adequate reporting to the insurance companies and to better serve their customer base. The beauty of this project is that it could lead to the definition of the model insurance brokerage for the XXIst century in their geography. What I personally find exciting is how IT and web technologies can help an intermediary stay in the loop and be valuable again.

Disintermediation is not the only way to go with technology, contrary to what has been said over the past few years by consultants in dire need to prove the business case of their proposals by removing players from the chain leading from the production of a good or service to the customer.

A few good quotes

Provided by my good friend Benoit who lives somewhere between Indonesia and Malaysia and works as a consultant.

alex's favorite one:

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." Naguib, Mahfouz

The wise ones 

"Sometimes the solution isn't a bigger hammer ; it's a sharper nail" 
"The rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield" Warren Buffett 
"Look before, or you'll find yourself behind" Benjamin Franklin 
"If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." Seneca 
"The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining" John F. Kennedy  
"The problem is not that there
are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that
having problems is a problem." Theodore Rubin

"Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell." Anonymous 
"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." Paul Valery 

The funny ones 

"Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears." Robert W. Sarnoff  
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Albert Einstein 
"The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax." Albert Einstein 

Social bookmarks?

I discovered social bookmarking only recently and I just find it amazing as a way to help people share on the web. If you are interested in exploring the concept, this is an example. This is another example: deli.icio.us. There was also a nice post on the topic on Francis Pisani's blog. Pisani is a correspondent of Le Monde in San Francisco.

How social bookmarking could be interesting for someone was not obvious to me when I found out it existed. I just felt it was "a cool way for people to share perceptions and good tips about web resources". Now, that is perhaps nice, but it does not give us a business requirement or a specific need that the tool is able to satisfy for people. A cool way to share about web resources is nice and good. Does it allow me to say "to perform what"? No. So I felt quite awkward although interested by the potential I could perceive instinctively.

It turns out I am sometimes a little bit lucky and so a concrete example occurred to me today during a discussion with a young lady who attends the same NLP training as I am. Virginie has a job that I find fascinating: she researches and writes content for a publisher on various topics with an objective to contribute to the creation of a thematic encyclopedia on well being, which is distributed in the context of loyalty and marketing programmes.

Virginie likes doing her research and absorbing new material and in her job she operates like a "transformer" of knowledge: she researches sources of information and exploits them to understand and cross-check facts and data to build her knowledge of a topic. She subsequently uses that knowledge and the research material to produce content for the encyclopedia. In her mission, Virginie feels it is essential to make sure the content is as objective as possible: the readers need to receive facts and not her interpretation or her opinion on the subject matter. Therefore Virginie needs to find several sources "of good quality" on a topic to perform her job. A few minutes after speaking to her I realized that social bookmarking could be a great tool for her as a starting point for identifying sources on a given topic. For the sources extracted from social bookmarking, Virginie could have:

• a feel for quality in terms of other people's perception of the nature of the material, but not necessarily in terms of the intrinsic value of the material provided by the source;



• a fairly large number of sites and resources generally perceived as belonging to the same category, with which to carry out cross-checking;



• an indication of relevance of the site, i.e. one way to check how a given site is rated by other people in terms of connection to the topic she is working on.

To be sure, a social bookmarking site will not give Virginie any indication as to the criteria used by the users of the site to buld their categories. Furthermore, Virginie will still have to cross-check sources, make sure she understands what she is writing about and to produce content for her customer (today the publisher of the encyclopedia).

Well you know, infotech (in this particular case its applications to social bookmlarking) cannot do everything and should it really? I just believe the tool is a great candidate to help her work more
productively and to facilitate her access to relevant information on
the Internet. It does not replace, nor eliminate the relevance of
search engines. Rather it adds a human dimension to the categorization
of material present on the Internet.

Infotech just gives Virginie a better way to focus on her true mission in a better and more harmonious way. Infotech makes people power possible.