When research proves the obvious, why do you need it?

There is a prevalent thought in the business world about the importance of data and research. I have seen places where people can only take decisions if it is absolutely proven by a respectable research firm that a certain course of action or element brings results to the bottom-line.

I am not against data, I am in fact a rather logical and analytical person, but data can only take you so far. The worse of all is when data becomes so important that you start wasting research money on things that should be common sense for anyone with a bigger brain than a monkey. Example: I recently read in McKinsey Quarterly (definitely a place where you have a hell lot of insanely smart people) an article about how talent made the difference in R&D.

What? So you are telling me that putting smarter and more talented people with good cultural fit in a highly intellectual-collaborative activity such as research and development will bring better results than putting incompetent ones? REALLY? That is new *raising the sarcasm sign*. Do you really need a research to show something that obvious? Apparently we do, because (lots of) managers are so obsessed with data that they are completely paralyzed if there is no research that proves a point.

The McKinsey research is not bad and there are useful data there on what are the best initiatives to have a talented team (unsurprisingly, one of them is only recruiting good people, looking not only for current skill, but also potential). Look, in my first leadership role, in a STUDENT organization, we knew that intuitively - fire under performers, hire only A-players, let them work, repeat.

Besides wasting resources with such research, there are 2 main disadvantages of relying too much on data to make decisions:

1 - You start late. If there is time to make research about the results something brings, someone else already tried it and is ahead of you. And while you are trying to copy their results, they already moved on the next level. It is a never ending catch game.

2 - You will miss the insights. Old anecdote: if Ford had made a research with his customers, the data he would have got is that people needed faster horses. Data cannot predict black swams.

What the most admired companies actually do (without blablabla)

FORTUNE magazine recently released its annual list of theWorld’s Most Admired Companies and as we do every year, my colleagues and I at Hay Group took a deep look at the companies that made the list to determine what makes them “tick,” how they earn the admiration of their peers, and what organizations and leaders can learn from the practices of the “Most Admired” companies.

You can read the original article here, or you can skip the blablabla and just go straight to the point of what they do better:

1 - Empower employees at all levels to take decisions and "reasonable" risks, pushing decision making the closest to the action as they can. Less red tape = quicker problem solving (sometimes even before it become a problem).

2 - Ask employees for their input, involve everyone in problem solving.

3 - Ongoing employee development.

Now we know why just a bunch of companies are most admired, while others are ignored. The winner takes all in the war for talent.

I have no time for important things because I waste 40% of it

From the Future of Work blog:

The paradox at the heart of work

So here is the thing… last week I heard two paradoxical facts:

Fact 1 – we have no time. 

We are nearing the end of our research consortium focused on the future of work and need to ensure that the ideas that have come from the research are translated into facts, ideas and actions for the companies that have participated. That’s going to take time – perhaps four hours a week of focused team-work to ensure the translation takes place. Yet when we ask executive teams about putting this amount of work in thinking about the actions for the future, the overwhelming response is that many teams are simply too busy to dedicate this time. It’s not that they don’t think this is important for the future – but as often happens at work, the short term is overwhelming the longer time priorities. So – the first fact I heard this week is that many executive teams simply have no time for this type of longer-term work.

Fact 2 – we waste 40% of our working time.

That reality was in my mind when I worked earlier in the week with a major US based multinational company. The team was mulling over the results of an analysis of the working patterns of hundreds of employees they had commissioned. What was clear was that more than 40% - yes you have heard it right – not 4% but a full 40% of work currently being undertaken was not actually productive work. Doing stuff that was not needed, working on projects that had no significance, going to meetings that had no outcomes.

Now the paradox emerges. At the very time that we are overwhelmed by the minutia of everyday work – we are simultaneously engaged in work that has no productive outcome. Now that’s interesting. 

So how has this happened? If you want to check what Lynda Gratton think about it, just go to the original post, but here is my simple take on why is that:

1 - Strategic direction / vision is not clear enough (not 100% actionable by every employee) - "increase sales", "grow", etc can be interpreted in a million ways. If it is not clear, at best, I will have my own take to do it. Which can lead to a lot of spinning wheels or rowing the boat to the wrong shore. This leads to problems in prioritization, which end up as the "everything is a priority" mindset. When everything is a priority, then you will be counting on luck to pick the really important things to get done. Work is infinite, time is not.

2 - Bad management skills - if the above problem is more connected to leadership, this one is purely management: effective meetings with clear output, clear delegation, scraping the BS and focusing on the priorities, etc. In my short corporate life (around 8 years), I am absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of people who cannot create a simple plan, run a meeting where people know the objective, delegate something with clear deliverables and satisfaction conditions, decide something when a decision is needed, etc. I strongly believe this should be tough in schools, that is basic education nowadays: getting stuff done.

What is a great place to work?

SOURCE: thegreatworkplaceonline.com 

Could companies charge job applicants?

“If you click the ‘apply to this position’ button, your credit card will be charged $50,00”.

I never saw this, but I was wondering if companies that have an attractive brand could in fact charge job applicants as a way to reducing irrelevant applications, reducing the number for brands that get so many applications it becomes too resource demanding to sort all applications and, of course, help recruitment become a revenue stream, not only a cost center.

I am not talking about Average John Co., but to well known brands, like Google, Microsoft, Accenture, McKinsey and so on. I understand that looks too crazy, but also saying that the Earth was round was completely insane.

Would that make any sense to a company to do? Would it affect the employer brand? Could it have any positive effect?

The 12 elements of great leadership

To identify the elements of worker engagement. Gallup conducted many thousands of interviews in all kinds of organizations, at all levels, in most industries, and in many countries. These 12 statements -  the Gallup Q -  emerged from Gallups pioneering research as those that best predict employee and workgroup performance.

1. I know what is expected of me at work.

2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right. 

3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.

4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.

5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person. 

6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.

7. At work, my opinions seem to count.

8. The mission or purpose of my com company makes me feel my job is important.

9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.

10. I have a best friend at work.

11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress. 

12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

Think of great team experiences you had and count how many of those were there (or bad team experiences that those 12 were not there). Which ones?

I wouldn’t exchange my AIESEC experience for a full scholarship in London Business School

And that is 100% true. I wouldn’t exchange the experience I lived in AIESEC for anything, especially not a scholarship in any of the top ranked MBA schools in the world. This is no empty rhetoric - I had to leave attractive things to be in AIESEC. I left a career that was giving me a reasonable amount of money to get more involved in AIESEC and after I also left the business I created (and was starting to become profiting enough to put a smile on my face) to come to AIESEC Norway and get a more challenging experience.

How can this organization provide such a powerful learning experience?

It’s simple, it doesn’t use the principles practiced by most schools: instead of classrooms and teachers, AIESEC give you the opportunity to be an integral part of the business, from the very operational level to the highest leadership position. It is learn by doing. We have the opportunity to work towards ambitious goals, work alone and in teams, manage budgets, sell to students, companies, NGOs and government, solve problems, deal with crisis situations, create and execute and change process, well, basically ANYTHING that you can learn in practice in a business, we do in AIESEC. In real life. No simulation. We are out there creating value or going bankrupt.

The difference of AIESEC and a business? While in a business you would take at least 10-20 years to get to top leadership of an international organization present all around the globe, in AIESEC we do it in from the 1st year – after you learn the basics, you are pushed out of the warm nest to fly or die. How? In our 800 business units in 107 countries we change the whole leadership every year. Every single year, since 1948. Talk about learning fast, adapting and keep growing anyway. We have a saying in AIESEC that “you are never prepared to your current position. You are only prepared when you are leaving the position and going for something even more challenging”. It’s about swimming or sinking.

Example? I will summarize my own experience (ok, it’s a big summary, but it’s really only 1% of what happened):

April to November 2005 – member of AIESEC

I joined the local committee of AIESEC in Porto Alegre. I was terrible with people (I could only get things done by fighting people and threatening them). My first assignment was to explain what was AIESEC to a classroom with around 10 people. I barely knew what AIESEC was. I was so nervous I was shaking and my voice failed.

Part of the team that evaluated the students that applied to join AIESEC

At that time my local committee was in rags, there was a severe retention problem and lack of pipeline for leadership. Results were down. Randomness was everywhere. It was not pretty to see. I had 2 choices: quit as most of the people did or apply to local executive board to change that and make it happen. It was a hard decision, because if wanted to be executive board, I would have to quit my well paid job in advertising, because I couldn’t handle both. But I needed the money. What I did? I decided to apply (and I got selected to vice-president human resources of that local committee) and I also decided to open my own advertising agency with other 2 colleagues, so I could manage my own time.

Executive board selection - the people selected are pushed into the pool

December 2005 until December 2006 – first leadership role

Being executive board in AIESEC Porto Alegre (or, how we say it “@PA EB”) was my first intense team experience and probably the biggest leadership development leap I had. From a struggling local committee of 10 people, we raised AIESEC Porto Alegre to a performing LC of 60 members. In the end, we won the AIESEC-Phillips award of best local committee in Brazil. The best part is that AIESEC Porto Alegre became a sustainable local committee that today is much stronger than when we left and their results beat the crap out of our term. Well done, Porto Alegre!

The No Fluffiness executive board

AIESEC Porto Alegre, best local committee of Brazil in the year 2006

In this year my competencies had a jump: I learned a lot on results orientation, emotional intelligence, change management, building and managing a high performing team (I lead a 14 people team), focus, leading by example, coaching, training and facilitation (I was a trainer for around 100 people and I was not shaking anymore!), planning (we even used the balanced scorecard), expectation setting, well… I learned a lot. In this year I was not a common university student anymore, I knew how to get things done. During this period I also learned about finances and general management on my own advertising agency, but I can say that I much more learned in AIESEC and applied what I learned in my business than the other way around.

First time I was a trainer in a national conference

The very first team I lead

December 2006 until December 2007 – national leadership role

I got a glimpse of leadership in the previous year, I wanted more. So I applied to the amazingly fancy title of “National Strategy Leader – Brazilian People Development Framework” (or “NSL BPDF”, AIESEC has awesome titles, no?) which I translate to the non-AIESECers simply as National Learning Coordinator.

During this year as National Learning Coordinator I had basic 2 roles (each of them were 6 months):

1 – support all the AIESEC business units in Brazil to implement a development framework to increase the awesomeness of the experience lived in AIESEC

2 – lead a team responsible for creating talent management tatics and support the implementation of those in all Brazilian AIESEC business units.

And a 3rd role that was part of both roles above: design and deliver conferences/trainings. That’s where I spoke in trainings for around 600 people and I was completely fine with it. How much my comfort zone stretched.

The first national board team days

That's the amount of people I was training in national conferences

December 2007 – failing

In the end of my term as national learning coordinator, I had 2 obvious choices: 1) don’t take a new leadership role and leave the organization or go on exchange; 2) take a full-time leadership role as Vice-President in the AIESEC National Board.

I was convinced that I would take the 2nd option, but then the President of AIESEC in Brazil at the time (Mauricio, that also wrote an awesome post when he left AIESEC) asked me if I was interested for running for president of AIESEC in Brazil, not vice-president. The idea sincerely never stroke my mind until he talked to me. I gave it consideration and I decided to apply. I had faith in my skills that I could get the job done, even though it would be for sure a huge challenge. If I was elected as president of AIESEC in Brazil, I would have the role of delivering the biggest operational growth the organization ever had and also deliver the AIESEC International Congress, which is a more than 500.000 euros budget, at the same time.

3 people applied to be president of AIESEC in Brazil and none got elected. I don’t know why the others lost, but I know why I did: I was arrogant. I believed that my smarts and skills, allied to my logic would lead me to being elected. I forgot the most important lesson I learned in my first leadership experience: people don’t act/think like me, we are all different.

I learned a lot the value of emotional engagement in leadership, too bad it was late.

June 2008 until June 2009 – vice-president human resources in Norway, not exactly a fail, but feeling like a huge failure

After losing the election in Brazil, I decided I didn’t want to be a vice-president in Brazil – it wouldn’t be challenging enough for me, I had done so much in the talent management area nationally in my previous role that I wanted something different. So I decided to apply to vice-president human resources in another AIESEC country! Yes, because AIESEC is an open platform, if you are a member of AIESEC, you can apply to AIESEC anywhere in the world.

I made a list of all the countries that had open application for vice-president HR and the first earliest application deadlines were UK and Norway. I applied to both, got selected to Norway and then withdrew my application from UK. I was now a leader in the AIESEC Norway national board.

That was not an easy year and it made me learn as hell. Besides cultural shock of the country, I discovered that also the organization mentality was very different. AIESEC Norway was ill: severe cash flow problems, underperforming in every area, uncommitted members, huge retention rate problems, etc. It was not the strong AIESEC in Brazil that I had just left.

The 2008-2009 AIESEC Norway executive board

It was so hard (and our leadership was not exactly awesome) that by around January (half a year of our term) the team had a huge break down. With this I learned the importance of the right selection and also building the team early, because if you don’t build it, the team will build itself – without any control and the results might be bad, as they were.

Again in January I had another choice: leave AIESEC Norway, defeated, or rise up once again and apply to President of AIESEC Norway. I took the steeper route, applied to President. And I got selected – this time I didn’t forget the importance of emotional engagement in the vision. What I wanted for AIESEC Norway is to turn it to be AIESEC everyday. Generating the kind of experience that got me until here, every single day. At that point of time, it was only a bold statement. We were far away from it, poor AIESEC Norway.

On my president candidacy speech

Selected the 2009-2010 president of AIESEC Norway

June 2009 until June 2010 – The Big Bang Team, big success!

I am still a bit shy when people talk to me and mention that fact that I am a president. It somehow doesn’t feel right. But besides being uncomfortable with the title, I must say that I never had a better, more challenging and pleasant job than being the leader of AIESEC Norway (or, how we would say it here, AIESEC Norge daglig leder).

I was lucky to selected the most hardcore and resilient team I ever saw. We started also with cash flow problems (only 15.000 in the drift account and average monthly cost of around 100.000), people quitting, lack of performance, uninterested members, etc. In the first 6 months, I think it was the hardest time of my life so far. But my team was simply awesome, we were far far more than the sum of our individualities. We managed to use our strengths, be flexible, put ourselves together and change AIESEC Norway from down to up.

The first team days of the Big Bang team

The things that we did as a team:

•           Break the record of outgoing exchanges raises (previous year was 40+- and in our year was 70+-)
•           Break the 20 years performance record of 40-55 exchanges per term
•           Starting with 15.000 NOK in the drift account and finishing it with 350.000
•           Having operational profit! (thanks to a diversification of revenues and innovative products)
•           Had a major culture change in the organization (a problem that was there for 15-20 years). Today we only have performing members that are in AIESEC for the right reasons and working hard. (2 of the main things here were to fire the underperforming half of our membership and change the financial model.)
•           Had elected better executive boards elected than previous term
•      Exchange happening EVERYDAY (the dream came true!)

Our first national conference - in the DnB Nor Leadership Development Day

AIESEC Norway today is a different organization. Much better. Still with a long way to go to be strong, but we started it. The Big Bang Team name was prophetic - we were indeed the beginning for a new AIESEC Norway.

The first time I felt like leading a country - Fyru Fyru!

It was a pleasure to serve AIESEC Norway, but now it’s time to leave the stage to the new generation, because they also need to learn and take AIESEC to the next level. I know, looking to the new National Executive Board and the Local Committees Presidents that AIESEC Norway 2010-2011 will kick the ass of my Big Bang team in terms of results.

Most awesome team ever

Thanks you so much for my whole experience, I can only be grateful to AIESEC for all those years. They were the best in my life until now.

As musicians, we are very good leaders

Fyru! Fyru! The sound of achievement!

Companies declare: soft skills are more important than technical skills when hiring people

A recent Right Management study of close to nearly 900 senior leaders and Human Resource professionals revealed surprising insights into just what factors lead most frequently to on-the-job success. Respondents overwhelmingly pointed not to employees’ technical skills, expertise or experience, but to other, very different qualities: organizational culture and motivational fit, as well as savvy, appropriate interpersonal skills. For example, the number of respondents who felt that “organizational culture/motivational fit” contributes most to accelerated performance was more than 2 ½ times greater than those who pointed to “technical skills” or “relevant experience” as the most significant factor. (more on this on Great Leadership)

And these soft skills that are increasingly more important for employers are not taught in university . One more reason to join AIESEC if you are a student or to partner with AIESEC to access our pool of talented people.


Unfortunately for me, it looks like that Norwegian business are a bit late in this trend. But it will catch up for sure, so now it's the right time for students to catch up and learn how hard the soft skills are.

Making a newly hired/promoted to perform instantly

Organizations tend to believe that you can't get value for newly hired people. The concept is simple "they need to understand first how to get things done in the organization, then they can get it done". Even though this mentality is changing in AIESEC Norway, still some local committees have this attitude too, letting their newly recruited into "learning mode" for too long.

I have 2 good reasons for not doing this, but instead put the person in deep water from the first day:

#1 - training is overrated, no one can truly learn the work without practicing the work. Even though most organizations still put more money in theoretical learning than in anything else that should generate learning.

#2 - because Halvard Business Review said so. See part of the article bellow:

Case Study #1: Working within the first five minutes on the job

Michelle Pomorksi, started her job as a contract programmer at the software design and development company Menlo Innovations after an intensive hiring process. Within five minutes of walking into the office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Michelle was working on a project. This wasn't an "onboarding project" but a real one for clients. She was "tripled" (that's company lingo for teamed with two other people) and sent off to a client site to do interviews. Rather than observing, Michelle actively participated and was expected to contribute by asking questions.

Rich Sheridan, founder and CEO of Menlo, thinks he has created a unique process to get new people productive faster than at other software companies. Every new hire is immediately paired with a current employee to do design and development work, in what the company calls "paired programming." Pairs are switched every week so by the end of the first three weeks, a new person has three mentors to rely on for advice and help. Even better, after the initial three weeks, she is ready to mentor someone new. "The real power is in the pairing," Michelle says. "There isn't one day I've gone to work that I haven't learned and taught at least one thing."

The process is facilitated by an open work space: Menlo doesn't have offices, cubes or doors. Rich thinks his hiring and onboarding strategy gives him an advantage over competitors because he can seamlessly expand and contract his work force according to client demand. It also makes employees enjoy a task they might otherwise dread. He acknowledges that onboarding this way requires careful attention to how pairs are put together and a good deal of orchestration. But he does not see it as a loss to productivity. "I probably get four times as much work done with two people pairs than most people get with two individuals," he says.

Case Study #2: Start early and see the whole picture

Pat Lee, a top Marketing Director at Johnson & Johnson Asia, happily received a promotion to Vice President of Marketing. But, she was not fully prepared for the suddenness of the promotion and all that it entailed, including relocating to a different country. She immediately began planning the logistics of the move: deciding which town to live in, exploring job prospects for her spouse, investigating schools for her children. She expected to have all these details worked out in advance so that she could "hit the ground running" on her first day in the new job.

However, Joe, her HR business partner, urged her to begin the transition to the actual job before she made the move. He suggested she take a "transition risk assessment" to help her better understand the challenges she faced in the new role. This helped Pat to fully see the situation she was getting into and better understand herself. It uncovered several issues: she had never worked in another country before; she had never taken on a regional role; she had minimal understanding of how her company did business in other countries; and she had little knowledge of the people on her new staff, the office politics, and how things got done. She also didn't know what her new boss expected of her and what phase of operation her businesses were in — start-up, turnaround, downsizing, optimizing on-going, etc. She realized she needed to address these problems and so with Joe, developed a Transition Acceleration Plan and started working with a coach, who helped her by interviewing her boss, direct reports, and colleagues to get honest feedback about their expectations. Doug Soo Hoo, former Director of Learning and Development at J&J, explains that this intense process is "a good way to get out of 'sink or swim mode' and an investment in the company that also shows a caring for the success of the individual."

After three months on the job, Pat's boss and her peers gave her rave reviews on how quickly she had mastered the "ins and outs" of the new situation and taken actions to address them. One of her new reports said it was almost as if she had been in the division for years.

To read the full article, click here.

What I want to say with it? Simple: put your new executive board to work now and make sure that the new members joining are not expected to stay in "learning mode" for long time. Start working now!

To work better, try working less

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574429151858232582.html?mod=rss_careers (via @LinusKendall)

Proved in 1947: "High (financial) rewards lead to worse performance"

And that's why 35.000 volunteers in AIESEC, in an organization that changes it's leadership completly each year, grew 40% even with the financial crisis.

And here's a promotion video from AIESEC (if you are interested in AIESEC Norway, just go to www.aiesec.no):

Canon Japan: cruel talent management technics

Canon in Japan came up with this amazing idea:

- What if we remove all the chairs from the offices?

And they didn't stop there. They had also a new brilliant idea:

- What if we put sensors in the corridors that horn sirens and red lights if some employee is walking slower than 5m each 3.6 seconds? (talk about fast-paced business environment).

Well, Canon Japan went beyond the "if" and did it:



Check the details here.

That's the kind of thing that leads to people thinking Japan is an extreme place to work. I am sure it's more an exception than a rule, but it's a little scary that it can actually happen there and people do keep working without torching the place.

Work union, anyone?

Next time you see one jap in any touristical place with a Canon camera, offer your respect, that's a though guy.

360 competency assessment

One of the most cool tool we have in AIESEC intranet (that we call MyAIESEC.net) is the competency assessment tool, provided by Career Innovation, where you can invite people who worked with you to assess your competencies (anonimously). It's a great tool for feedback and for understanding more yours strenghs and weaknesses. I've been using this quite a bit (around 2 years now, I presume) and it made me really improve a lot my self-awareness.

But now one new feature was included: you can make your competency assessment available to some people (like managers and mentors) or completly public, so anyone can see. I went to the 2nd approach and made my last competency assessment (April/2009) here in the office completly public. The people who assessed me were my leader, 3 collegues and one subordinate. You can check it out in this link.

It's especially interesting to check the part on the gaps of perception (where you compare your assessment with the others' assessments) and super assets (where you can check written feedback on what you are outstanding or not)

As you can see, I have a long way to go in dealing with people.

Problems with hiring great people? I have a hint where to find them

If you own a business, you are probably facing this: it's harder to hire good people. And if you are a student, you probably are having some difficulties getting a good job.

In hard times, people lay off first the dead meat or the ones closer to that and they stick as hell to the A players, those stars that can make anything happen.

So if you want to hire dead meat / cheap labor, suit yourself, the market has tons of it sending CVs to you. But if you want to hire great people (especially because you don't have so much fat to spend in so-so people as in good times), what do you do? As you can see in "Why hiring is paradoxically harder in a downturn" says, if you post a job offer, most likely you will get tons of C players CVs, which are virtually indistinguishable from the few A players around.

Then you spend lots of money with tons of tests and interviews to find some good people. But shouldn't you be saving some money in a downturn? What about making the process more efficient?

The most simple solution is go to great talent sources and convince people there to meet with you (which is not always easy if you don't have a great reputation as an employer also - which is in fact the only long term solution, be an employer of choice to A players).

Where? Companies that traditionally only hire great people, competitive universities and, of course, AIESEC.

AIESEC?

Yes, AIESEC.

What AIESEC does is basically recruit the top students in the universities we are present in (and also some we are not present in, because some students seek for it) and offer them opportunities to develop leadership and tons of soft skills, such as presentation skills, team management, time management, planning, strategic thinking and so on. AIESECers are not normal students, they don't ask questions normal students do, they don't act as normal students and they don't seek normal jobs as normal students. But you don't need to trust me, you can hear some of AIESEC partners talking about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt0DxJqidwQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biz6wTwRTxY


As a business, you can interact with AIESEC in a variety of ways. Two of the most common ways are:

1) the AIESEC internship program - where you get some talented AIESEC member from another country to work as an intern in your organization. With this you get 2 things in one, first an AIESECers with all the qualities an AIESECer usually have, second an international to bring diversity and cultural awareness to your business.

2) Being an institutional partner of AIESEC - by being present in conferences, branding your name, delivering workshops, having special student events, etc, you can brand yourself as an employer of choice for both national and international students.

Most business that partner with AIESEC do both, of course, they know what they get and they are really interested in it.

What about you? Is your business in need of some young great people? Why not to try AIESEC?

If you are a student, maybe you want a great job and is not getting it? What about standing out from the crowd and get some invaluable skills while on university? Join AIESEC.

More information on www.aiesec.org or, if you are in Norway as I am, www.aiesec.no

New generation of people

From Seth Godin's blog (if you don't know him, you are losing a lot of good insights, marketing tricks, visionary guesses and cyber-shamanism in general).

The best and the brightest

Here's a piece of (quite) good news:

The smartest and most motivated young people are no longer itching to become investment bankers and lawyers. We're always hearing about a shortage of engineers or nurses--but there never seems to be a shortage of people eager to work 90 hours a week helping to move money from one pile to another.

Applications to work on the Obama team are over 300,000 (up from about 44,000 at this point in the Bush administration). Students are deciding to become fellows at Acumen or to set up innovative small businesses or volunteer their time or bootstrap a music career. Perhaps we're on the verge at getting much better at making useful things, spreading ideas that matter and helping people, and not quite so good at leveraging capital for financial institutions. Imagine what would happen if 5,000 investment bankers or 500 M & A lawyers put their talents to work doing something else...

As I look through all the notes and applications I received for the program I'm running next year, I'm not just optimistic. I'm thrilled. There must be hundreds of thousands of movers and shakers out there, people of all ages who are smart and get things done. And more and more, they're being motivated by the quest, or the outcome, or the people they work with, not just the cash payout. It's exciting beyond words. The ten people I've chosen are just astonishing, each and every one of them.

If you can't find people like these, you're not looking in the right places. And if you can't figure out how to work with them, you're missing out.

No wonder AIESEC is growing at an incredible pace (around 10,000 members more each year if I am not wrong). We are offering these young people the opportunity to develop while making something big and relevant to the world, with enough room to innovate and strive for excellence. If I wasn't in AIESEC, where would I be? Maybe in a big multinational ad agency?

And you, where you are now, are you satisfied?

From Human Resources to Talent Management

Seth Godin (marketing guru) speaks about the (bad) image of the "HR" department (which would be better to use "Talents", instead of "HR"). Well, AIESEC already did that some time ago. Read the article: Marketing HR.

Just a little part of it:

Understand that in days of yore, factories consisted of people and machines. The goal was to use more machines, fewer people, and to design processes so that the people were interchangeable, low cost and easily replaced. The more leverage the factory-owner had, the better. Hence Personnel or the even more cruel term: HR. It views people as a natural resource, like lumber.

Like it or not, in most organizations HR has grown up with a forms/clerical/factory focus. Which was fine, I guess, unless your goal was to do something amazing, something that had nothing to do with a factory, something that required amazing programmers, remarkable marketers or insanely talented strategy people.