Harvard Business Publishing

The ideas contained in War for Talent are pernicious for the reasons you've outlined. Let me add two more.

Success is rooted in the team, not the superstar. Even Michael Jordan couldn't bring a championship to Chicago by himself.

The keys to individual team success are systems and the team's supervisor. The systems are a corporate feature, but even in lousy corporations, there are great supervisors leading teams with high productivity and high morale.

It appears to me from observation of professional firms that the so-called "War for Talent" has shifted from being a war to develop talent (i.e. about better internal management processes) to becoming a war to attract and retain already-developed talent.

In their strategic plans, many if not most firms spend a great deal of time worrying about how to attract "warlords" who have a pre-existing following of clients (and junior soldiers.)

What's going on in university departments nowadays? Is the focus on nurturing talent or attracting superstars to campus?

David,

I agree completely, even though there remains a great deal of evidence that recruiting and developing young people gets you the best employees in the long-run, so long as you treat them right and develop them right. I think part of the problem is related to Pfeffer's brain vacuum syndrome. The company builds an awful system and focuses on squeezing every cent of people right now, has no incentives for the long turn, and keeps wondering why so many people don't grow in their jobs and have performance problems. They think that they have hired "bad people," so they throw out the old and bring in the new -- who act just the same!

Thanks for your comment.

Bob

I fully agree with your no arse hole rule. This is key to making for a healthy environment where individuals can thrive, grow and be creative.

The fact of the matter, from my own experience in Europe, is that we still have arse holes in organisations. This indicates to me that companies do not have good systems or a process which identifies these arse holes easily and with out significant risk to the identifier.

I would be fascinated to find out what different systems, good and bad, that there are which identifies the arse holes exist in the organisation.

Once the arseholes are identified what process exists to get them to change their behaviour and monitor that the behaviour has changed?

Bob:

Once again....ditto!

Talent management is now the rage within HR circles - and the focus seems to be on sharpening the focus on crown princes and princesses from the outside vs. building the systems and infrastructure that ensures a highly effective "farm club."

The NFL provides some clues in this regard.

robert edward cenek, RODP
www.cenekreport.com
Uncommon Commentary on the World of Work

Regarding the pay scale issue. I am curious about your data. I would think it would make a differnce where the pay scale falls. In other words, in a compressed pay scale environment, if the compensation was at the top of the market envelope, it may work, whereas if it is at the bottom, the top performer may not stick around. It makes sense that if the group as a whole was paid at close to the superstar level, performance would improve as job satisfaction would be high.

Obviously you are not talking about technical fields like software engineering. Among computer programmers there is literally an order of magnitude between the best and worse programmers, sometimes more. And this has been documented empirically.

Jonathan,

I didn't have space to go into it in the post, but if you read Hard Facts, we acknowledge and carefully review literature on that point, that the top 10% of performers in most occupations are many times more productive than the next level down, indeed programmers are one of the examples we use. BUT that does not mean if you hire all star programmers, you end up with a superior organization that cranks out software many times faster. Or more generally that if you hire the top 10% in any field, you get a top 10% organization. The system and its management still are more important, at least in large complex organizations and projects. This point and related ones are argued superbly in The Mythical Man Month, a classic book on software project management by Fred Brooks. See Wikipedia for a a quick review of the book. His point is consistent with the view that crappy systems undermine the work of the best programmers and that great systems enable average programmers to succeed. Of course, having both is best, and if you can have a world where programmers write discrete programs that don't need to fit with other parts of a larger system, your point in on target. But once you get in the world of big and complex systems, then again, Brooks book -- and research from a host of other settings -- suggest that crappy system have far more negative effects than crappy people. And having stars helps much less than you might expect.

So despite some of the most respected companies employing practices contradictory to your findings, you still think your research is correct?

Of course superstars won't stick around if wage is mediocre. But balancing the pay scale is only a way to mitigate dissatisfaction. If systems aren't good and don't allow superstars to thrive, there's no doubt that one will look for another job. In the meantime salary and bonus will retain the employees at least until they find a job where they can thrive, and get a better work environment.

Dear Bob,

Shouldn't we adopt a "contingency approach" refered to the industry we are talking about? I think that the focus on culture and organization's processes is good for companies like Southwest Airlines, but it could be not enough for other companies.
For example, here in Italy companies like Accenture, PwC and Microsoft suffer of talent shortage, so in some way they have to fight the war for talent, haven't they?
I agree that an excellent system is the condition to exploit all the competences of these "talents." But I think that we should avoid this contrast between the war for talent and the organization's processes.

Agostino

The war for talent is very difficult because of so, so,so and so.

God created man on the last day, when he was tired.

So he ended up manufacturing a creature with plenty of manufacturing defects that did not pass quality assurance.

So talent ended up inside people who are classified as non-conformists, dissenters and rebels by others.

So every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings, and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.

So we are forced to accept, "Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, brother.”

Mark Twain+David Ogilvy+Bob Parsons+Dean Koontz

:)

I appreciate all the discussion. There is one comment that I think is especially important to address, the commenter who suggested that the findings must be wrong because they clash with what all the best companies do. A few responses:

1. The findings may clash with what some of what the most vivid companies do, like GE's rank and yank system. BUT if you look across large samples in multiple industries, these findings reflect what the best companies do industries including manufacturing, baseball, a sample of over 200 Fortune 500 firms, academia, and on and on.

2.If you take a look at the the history of the industrial organization -- or for a more clear cut case, take medicine -- there are many things that, at certain periods of time, that the best companies all did, that now look pretty absurd in retrospect. So child labor was used by all the best companies until the last 100 years or so. Or if we look at medicine, all the best doctors used blood letting less than 200 years ago.

3. Every company, no matter how great, does some things that are right and some that are wrong, and other things that have an unclear impact ... at least if you look at what the best evidence shows. So, in the case of GE, I think they do many, many things right. They develop their people very well, are committed to quality, are committed to innovation, and they also make clear that an A player isn't someone who succeeds by stomping on others, but rather, is someone who succeeds by helping other employees and GE as a whole be successful. But if you look at the evidence, their decision to have a big spread in pay between A and B players most likely has a negative effect on performance. Now, I am willing to suspend belief as there may be something special about GE that makes this system work,even though the weight of the evidence from all careful studies I know suggests otherwise. But -- if we actually want to apply the best evidence we have right now -- my best judgment is that they succeed despite rather than because of the pay dispersion.

4. On a related point, like people, every great company I have ever looked at closely succeeds DESPITE rather than because of some of the things they do, so mindless imitation of "winners" is quite unwise. My favorite example is Herb Kelleher, who is famous consuming large amounts of Wild Turkey and smoking lots of cigarettes, and for running the most financially successful airline in the modern era. Following the logic of mindless imitation of great companies, as implied by at least one comment, we should start holding workshops where we teach CEOs to drink and smoke like Herb. Or perhaps because Apple has backdating problems, and they all started before their current wild success with the iPod, then more companies should start doing it too. It sounds really dumb, doesn't it? But no dumber than mindlessly imitating other practices that have been shown (by the best evidence we have, from multiple peer reviewed studies, not just success stories... or in the case of backdating, the implication is if you cheat more, it is better for your company).

In short, as we wrote in detail in Hard Facts, and I have talked about on my other blog, imitating "winners" is a dangerous game... and by the way, even if they are doing exactly the right thing right now, remember, that the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those successful organizations, and a few years behind! That might be good enough in some industries, but not others.

No system will ever allow for great software, original ideas, leadership, etc that a star can bring.

Toyota and Mc Donalds are in the manufacturing business, software development is an other game entirely. This is also true for the team. No team of B players (to use the expression of the text) will produce great, performant, software.

In other words, no amount of "average" will ever create "above average", much less "top" or "best".