Corporate Talent Detection and Development

Yves Richez

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786303578
• eBook ISBN: 9781119564164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Talent is not a matter of status, nor a sub-component of personality, nor a commodity that can be quantified or measured.

This book consists of two parts. The first offers a fertile resource (epistemological and theoretical) to consider the notion of talent, as well as notions of potential, intelligence and business skills. The second part, in turn, investigates ten major families of talents (or "Natural Operating Modes"). From Marie Curie to Walt Disney, Hans Zimmer, Gabrielle Chanel and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the illustrations and examples are intended to be precise and demonstrative. Skills relating to observation, evaluation and elucidation are developed in detail and complemented with concrete examples.

Both managers and employees can use this book to acquire the solid bases required to potentiate and develop their talents within their respective company and beyond.

Part 1
Theory, Principles and Methods

1
Rethinking the Issue of “Talent Development”

1.1. Crisis at stake: the crisis is that of thought. We’ve forgotten where we think from

1.1.1. The forgetting of an “ability to think” attitude

Over the last two months, the human resources departments of two companies have been verbalizing a problem for which they do not know how to “get out” of or how to “think” about it. In both cases, this issue might have seemed trivial, as it was inserted into a broader discussion of talents and skills. However, if we look at the latter from a strategic point of view, we detect weak (but increasing) signs that allow us to draw a correlation and consequently a trend.

The first company – with more than 180,000 employees – finds itself stuck in its jobs “site” because of years of technical and declarative writing related to the organization’s professions. None of these professions, like all the companies that we know of in France, including those run by foreign parent companies, address the question of the abilities and skills (in the operative sense and not the “human qualities” sense) underlying competencies. Blocked by semantics rationalized by decades of concepts of “suitcase expressions” and (meaningful) words without (meaningless) observable principles, this company, like so many others, finds itself caught up in the meshes of its model, like a fisherman, falling then drowning in his own nets, unable to untangle himself. The HRD we met told us: “the repository is more focused on technical definitions than on capabilities [...]; the importance of semantics leads us to clarify this... But how? [...]; we are obligated to start over from scratch [...]”.

The second company – with 2,200 employees in the world (and more than 50 nationalities) – is radicalizing the subject. It does not want any more “market” concepts, exhausted by semantics that do not “mean” anything anymore and clutter the mind: “we don’t like the words of the market”, they say, “this requires us to reinvent talent”; so how can we “tackle the HR process without falling back on the tools that the “solutions” of the market offer?”

The corporate crisis – its problem (problema) – is neither economic, nor human, nor even linked to identity: it is a thought crisis. When we say thought, we imply cultural “thinking”, in other words, from where do we think about our daily lives? This crisis can manifest itself in an endemic inability to re-create and re-energize our language; this may be the reason why corporate operators “zap” concepts once they are exhausted by the colonization of inappropriate ideas. To put it another way, when a word can re-energize the company, a conquering intellectual interference unfolds and systematically colonizes its resources through a dictatorship of truth (aletheia). Six Sigma, lean management, leadership, coaching, manager-coach, agility, emotional intelligence, talents, high potential, mentoring, empathy (etc.), are just a few examples of systematic occupation-conversion by the ontological (science of being, nous) and rational (logos-mathesis) models.

NOTE.– We can note a form of similarity with the invasion of the Inuit by the southerners called qallunaat in the 1950s. In less than 50 years, a century-old people who have lived for thousands of years in a difficult, flexible and adaptive environment, speaking a syllabary language, found themselves “seduced” by a commercial, bureaucratic, linguistic and religious model.

In a work from 1836, misplaced by time, it is possible to read: “There comes a time when languages are no longer enriched, because the true richness of languages consists in providing thought with all the instruments it needs, and this need has limits [...]” [NOD 36]. By producing tools and milestones, the company’s language, and perhaps a few others, has become sedentary and consequently stopped enriching itself; additionally, as the same authors state: “It [the French Academy] left a large part to the fruitful lexicographer industry that grew with all the others, a large part to neologism and fantasy [...]”. It seems to us that the word “talent” has been widely explored by this fruitful lexicographic industry.

1.1.2. A background of thought focused on ontology and mathesis

The thought model of enterprise, but also of education, overwhelmed by this consummation of ideas, leads them to agony. It is not that the latter is “bad”, but it is now negative, because it has been exhausted by decades of linguistic rationalization, abstract concepts and verbal marketing: the latest concepts are, for example, agility and talent. If “bad” refers to a moral judgment, “negative” refers to a situation. In terms of thinking about the company, its “talents” are negative because it creates a gap with the original intentions and, consequently, with the expected result. In both cases, we observe a common ground of understanding: success, development, performance, empowerment, finding the meaning of one’s life, betterment, efficiency, innovation, creation, happiness, etc. The word talent thus found itself besieged by the referential of Being (ontology) and that of agility (efficiency). Talent and potential are sustained by a language of truth (aletheia), that is, a true discourse pronounced “by right and according to the ritual required” [FOU 71, p. 17]. Decorated with its initial base of agreement, they are made to say what makes “business” more convenient. We will come back to that later. This is how we sway the “right”, under the pretext of a few professional-university legitimacies, in order to define it on the basis of “one’s opinion”, justifying it by “the latest” research in neurosciences, or by some ambiguous analogies. Thus, like the literacy of society in the Early Middle Ages overseen by the clergy (owners of knowledge oriented by the glory of God), the aim is to make the message of the Holy Scriptures (Talents, Intelligence, Potential, etc.) accessible to the illiterati.

He who masters the “knowledge” of words has power over those who do not. The case of the word “talent” or “potential” is similar to that of literacy for illiterates. This method of invasion has been tried and tested:

• – enter a new word with potential;
• – “fill it up” with old standards, old ideologies;
• – define it according to a translated process, that is, by operating an analogy not related to the initial rule;
• – write a book to legitimize the subject matter/opinion/model;
• – replace the resource provided by the word with its own template and language that is “acceptable” to the reader;
• – create new abstract words/concepts – through the use of neologisms – consolidating intellectual “occupation”;
• – train and certify operators to lock the market that the promise and potential of the “word” offers;
• – control the “word” and its market by creating institutions based on power.

This colonizing process uses the Trojan Horse trick. At the height of the war/crisis (the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Theory, Principles and Methods
• Part 2: Principles and Operational Uses of MO.O.N.s
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of Names
• End User License Agreement