Harold Jarche

The Talent Myth

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In a recent ChangeThis manifesto, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, states that “The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.” He cites Enron and WorldCom has examples of the continuing quest for the best individual talent gone awry; while Southwest Airlines and Wal*Mart are companies with inclusive, and more effective business cultures. This search for individuals with star potential, at the expense of the organisation, is what Gladwell calls the “Talent Myth”.

They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.

To me, this is just another example of businesses grabbing on to the latest management gimmick to solve all of their problems. It also shows how human performance technology would have been a better approach for these companies in managing their workforce. HPT looks at the alignment between the culture and business operations, as well as the role of individuals within the system. As James Hite describes HPT, ” …human performance is placed in context along with other subsystems that constitute the presence of the organization.” It’s the relationship between individual performers (especially the “stars”) and all of the other components that has to be examined and understood. Or as Earl Mardle says, “Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations.”

Gladwell’s stories of narcissistic star candidates, many being paid more than they were worth, are interesting to view from a performance analysis perspective. A cursory look would show that this misalignment of rewards and consequences could cause systemic problems. HPT may not be glamorous, but it works.

Going Euro

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A few months back I had mentioned in an interview that New Brunswick (read: Atlantic Canada) is uniquely situated to take advantage of the European market.

“New Brunswick’s history and its location on the east coast of Canada make us able to bridge the gap between Europe and the Americas, serving the needs of both,” states Harold Jarche, of Jarche Consulting. Indeed, New Brunswick is a cultural melting pot of French, English, First Nations (similar to Native American cultures), and other ethnic contributions that combine to create a rich cultural soil. Without doubt, the province seems to exude one very distinct message: We are diverse, but we are one, and we are open for business.

There is some focus on the European market but this is miniscule compared to our single-minded fixation with that marketplace to our South. I’m not saying that we should avoid US markets, but that we are not taking advantage of our “middle power” position. Dave Pollard has recently presented some statistics that reinforce my belief that we should be putting more emphasis on developing solid business relationships in Europe. Dave shows how Canadian employment rates are far surpassing US rates and:

Secondly, courtesy Yahoo, are updated charts showing the continued weakness of the US dollar against both the Euro and the Canadian dollar. Against almost every other currency the picture is the same. The declines reflect the fundamental weakness of the US economy, and especially international concerns over the crushing US debt load and continued dependence both on willingness of foreign creditors to advance more credit to the US and on cheap energy costs.

Our reliance on a cheap Canadian dollar relative to the Greenback is coming to a close, and it would be a good business strategy to look across the pond for some new business opportunities.

Further to what Dave Pollard has said, an article on Jeremy Rifkin’s book The European Dream, was recently published by Knowledge@Wharton (requires free subscription). Discussing Rifkin’s book, the author states;

Europe has become the “New World.” The European Union, with its embrace of former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, is now a continent-wide system. Even more revolutionary is its internal organization. The EU is on track to becoming a unified realm where national borders are little more than vestigial remains of the bad old days of nationalism. Economic fault lines and conflicting religious and social ideologies are disappearing too. A sense of unity and identity is rising, especially among the young, not seen since the spread of Christendom throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.

There are many indicators that this is fertile ground for business relationships:

Rifkin highlights a recent development in the Information Revolution to illustrate this cooperative mindset in action. He cites the example of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which linked its 2,700 desktop PCs together using a computer grid to give the firm the capacity of a supercomputer without having to buy one. Grid technology is being embraced throughout Europe, which has seized a commanding lead over the United States in its implementation.

The Art of the Start

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I usually peruse the business section in any bookstore and am quite selective in what I decide to buy. There are a lot of business books, but few that stand the test of time. I’ve just finished reading Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and his book is the exception, for a number of reasons.

First of all, I use Furl to mark web pages of interest that don’t get on to my blog. My Furl page referring toKawasaki’s book has had more views than any of my other Furl pages. Kathleen Gilroy has also made positive comments about The Art of the Start, and Brendan Wilson has an overview of the book’s major principles. Therefore, I finally went out and bought the book.

This book is for anyone starting a business, or helping someone to start a business. It cuts to the chase, and unlike many other fad books, will stay on my desk as a reference for a long time. The examples are excellent, as are the templates on "how to do a pitch" and "how to write a business plan". What Kawasaki, a veteran of Apple, tells you not to do is as important as what he says you should do. This is the best $(CA)40.00 that I’ve spent for a long time.

Drupal Theme Garden

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Carrying on in the tradition of the original CSS Zen Garden, is the new Drupal Theme Garden. Now everyone can view the variations on a theme of Drupal! There are only a few so far, but I’m sure that the garden will grow. Not all themes are available for downloading and use.
Update Oct 2005 –  since this node gets more hits than any other one on my site, I thought that I should note that the Theme Garden link is currently dead. If you have technical skills then you can look at the Drupal Theme Developer’s Guide.
Tell me if you know of any others.
Update: Jan 2006 – New Theme Garden Link works now.
 Via Bryght.com.

More on Collaboration

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I mentioned a while back my reading of the book Collaborate to Compete, which played a role in an article that I collaboratively wrote for LearnNB. Two recent articles continue the discussion around collaboration. From Dave Pollard:

Collaboration is instinctive and selected-for in evolutionary terms because it succeeds. But we collaborate not because it succeeds, necessarily, but because it’s fun. True collaboration, in hunting, in the arts and music, in sports, in raising children, is a joyous experience, and gives you a feeling that you cannot get from any individual pursuit. That feeling is the remarkable sense of collective accomplishment. We did that.

And then I came across this from Small Business Trends:

In each story you just read, organizations that serve the same kind of consumers created new opportunities for each other.

They didn’t just forge a partnership.


They crafted what I call a "smart partnership".


Together they accomplished more than they could have in "solo" outreach efforts. They attracted and delighted their mutual market of people while spending less
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As you can tell, any kind or size of organization can adopt this trend towards joining forces to generate more value and visibility together.

Collaboration is like play – you cannot force it. I know that I like to collaborate with people whom I can have fun with. Perhaps a good way to foster more collaboration in your business is to play more. Just like in kindergarten, being told that someone "plays well with others", may be a critical business skill.

Collaboration, both at a high conceptual level (industry should collaborate) and the human level (let’s work on this together) takes up a piece of almost every business conversation that I have. I think that most people are open to collaboration, but we don’t have all of the tools or the best environment for it in business yet. Just read an RFP from the federal government, and it is set up so that only one company (usually a larger one) can get the contract. Government could become a catalyst by encouraging smaller companies to collaborate on projects, in order to prepare them for larger, global bids. Promoting collaboration on larger projects would be one low-cost way of furthering small business development and creating a more diverse and sustainable economy.

 

Creative Commons (CA)

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Creative Commons now has licenses available which are designed specifically for Canadian copyright law. You can see mine on the bottom left of every page. When you select a license, Canada is one of the jurisdictions available on the drop-down menu. The Canadian license is available in French & English, and each deed has links to both official languages. The CC license also saves on legal fees :-)

Building Alternatives

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Robert Paterson said it a while back, and Brian Alger just mentioned it. I’m referring to this statement made by Rob:

I am beginning to think that this may be the great work — to build the alternatives rather than to try and reform the existing system.

I think that this is a wonderful mission statement — To build alternatives rather than to try and reform existing systems. I know that we have systemic problems in politics, academia, and health care, to name a few. Instead of trying to tweak these systems, it may be more fruitful to build alternatives that can serve as examples. This does not mean destroying the existing system (as some may argue that managerial capitalist systems can do this all on their own) but creating prototypes for experimentation and learning. It’s kind of like early American democracy that showed many other people how it could work.

Free Culture, again

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Mark Oehlert blogs again on Lessig’s book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The book is a success, even with the free download available, as well as the audio chapters that have been completed by various volunteers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about business models and how the Internet has turned many on their heads. Making money on a book by giving away the digital version does not make intuitive sense; which is why I’m re-posting this as well. The rules have changed, but not everywhere. Today, we need to challenge our understanding of conventional business wisdom, especially when developing business plans.