Tom Friedman Gets Talentism

5 years. Hundreds of posts. Thousand of pages. And Tom Friedman does it better in just one editorial.

Let me boil down what Friedman's piece (and Talentism) is all about:

• America cannot compete on price.
• America cannot borrow its way to prosperity.
• America is uniquely able to innovate, but nothing is inevitable.
• Organizations that commit to maximizing creative productivity (innovation) will create jobs and continue to grow our standard of living.
• Organizations that compete on price will continue to ship jobs overseas.

America is a consumerist nation. Consumerism: borrowing money you don't have, to buy things you don't need from companies you don't trust. We are experiencing the inevitable consequences of the tragic illusion that every marketing campaign has sold us for the last 20 years: that we are inevitably great, that we can buy our way to happiness and that if it feels good it must be right.

We must move to Talentism.

Organizations that are committed to innovation (Talentist organizations) will:

• Remove the artifacts of Taylor, Sloan and their progeny, including compensation plans, organizational hierarchies, job descriptions and performance management. We must summon the human spirit, its resilience and creativity, if we are to grow our way out of our present situation. You cannot achieve economic greatness by making people do things they think are wasteful and stupid.
• Do something about education to get us away from believing that by being better at math and science we will be able to compete on price. (If you want to know what education should be all about, check out Dr. Tony Wagner's book The Global Achievement Gap - I have listed his "Global Survival Skills" at the end of this piece).
• Commit to implementing the "Principles."

It is an economic certainty that we will continue to see a declining standard of living, and a precarious economic situation for our children, if we don't change the way we do business: the way we create, sell and employ. We cannot borrow our way to prosperity, and we cannot compete on price. Fortunately, we still live in the best place to innovate on earth. There is hope. But we must act.

Dr. Tony Wagner's "Seven Survival Skills"

• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving 
• Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence 
• Agility and Adaptability 
• Initiative and Entrepreneurialism 
• Effective Oral and Written Communication. 
• Accessing and Analyzing Information 
• Curiosity and Imagination 

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[mubashir]

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