Yeah, What He Said

The other day I posted a meandering attempt at not ranting about information technology and the manufacturing sector. Today, Seth Godin wrote a post about basically the same thing. The difference is, his post actually makes some sense.

Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.

Stop whatever you are doing and read the whole post. If you don’t read Seth, you probably should. Whether you are the guy running the show or the guy who sweeps the floors at night, he has great insight delivered daily for free.

And here’s a nice bit of irony for you…Seth Godin’s blog (for whatever reason) is blocked by our corporate IS department. Luckily, the concept of RSS feeds and readers hasn’t trickled down to them yet, so we can still read whatever we want through them.

Give them a few years and they’ll get Google Reader blocked as well.

Similar Posts:

5 Replies to “Yeah, What He Said”

  1. I’ve heard of the “Talent” vs HR concept. It’s really semantics unless the strategy and focus is changed and embraced, not just lip service.

    On a similar note (from my personal experiences) I have always been willing to tolerate “high maintenance” people and behavior much more if the person is talented, watch out if you are high maintenance and don’t bring the wood.

  2. Funny, I am part of the Global Talent organization at my company. We changed the name last year, but it hasn’t started working yet. I’ll keep you posted…

    Most companies have figured out that they need to hire the best possible talent for critical roles in order to differentiate themselves from competitors and drive success. It’s identifying, attracting, selecting, managing, and retaining that talent that is the hard part.

  3. It’s a difficult problem for managers. As a consultant to a couple of large manufacturing industries, I could recognize the problems because, for some reason, people at all levels of the company would confide in me. Somehow they figured out that I wouldn’t rat them out and my contract wasn’t to work on management.

    I created and taught a software engineering course where I tried to let the students know what kinds of things they were going to experience. I got some feedback years later from the successful ones, but I never heard from the ones who struggled.

  4. HM, maybe you were such a great teacher that they all were successful? 🙂

    Obviously, you guys have a lot more experience than I do from the other end of this issue. All I know is that I wanted to put on a big fireworks show last year, and the most talented pyrotechnics guy I know had figured a way to get his finger out of his gas tank and had moved on to greener pastures.

    It’s not so much me that was let down–it was the kids.

  5. Based on your description, I can name that so-called talented pyrotechnics guy. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he may have also been the the least talented (and only) pyrotechnics guy you knew.

    I hope you managed to find alternative entertainment for the poor kids.

Comments are closed.