Issue 23 (emailed version), Tuesday May 29, 2001
Made in New Zealand - twice winners of the America's Cup

An email magazine dedicated to making you a better leader, by providing:
— provocative thinking about what it means to be a leader
— the tools, techniques and best-practices that drive leadership improvement


This issue's ONE BIG IDEA
In the talent war, the talent is winning!

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ONE BIG IDEA!® Elephant Bumping in Hong Kong

New economy magazine columnist Thomas Stewart, a favourite of ours, recently filed an eCompany Now story on the talent wars, based on a couple of sessions he chaired at Fortune Magazine's annual global forum a “combo of socializing and brainstorming sometimes called "elephant bumping.”
It is (or was) at http://www.ecompany.com/barelymanaging?nl=bm

The subject: Talent – finding, developing, winning the war to keep it.
The contributors: Bill Henderson, Asian practice boss for worldwide headhunting firm Egon Zehnder; Werner Spinner, a member of the executive board of Bayer; and Narayana Murthy, founder and CEO of Bangalore, India software company Infosys.
Key points If there's a talent war, TS asked, who's winning? Henderson's answer: The talent. The U.S. economy may no longer be Goldilocks; Japan may be the Sunny von Bulow of global business; Europe increasingly looks like the big growth engine that couldn't – but all that means is that companies can take a breather from an inexorably tightening market for talent.
Why will talent continue to be scarce?
Population
- Japan's population is shrinking
- Europe's will too unless the key economies eschew xenophobia, and liberalise immigration policies
- America's baby boomers are beginning to swell the ranks of the AARP and think about Winnebagos (the Baby Boomers – born 1946 to 1964 – are entering their mid fifties … a cohort like none before them, they continue to redefine their world).
- Educated workers allowed into the United States via H-1B visas can close some of the gap, but scarcity is baked in
- The developed world has a diminishing number of experienced managerial and technical workers in the prime of life

Answers?
Automation? Hardly. The service economy is a human economy.
A useful oversimplification: In manufacturing, value is added by machines; in services, it's added by people.
Samsung CEO Jong Yong Yun: In today's economy more value is added at the beginning of the chain (in research and innovation) and at the end (in customisation and service) than in the middle (manufacturing and distribution). That gives the talent more economic clout.

The bottom line: This isn't going to change. Employers have to learn to live with labor markets that tilt towards talent. If you want to be 'head-hunter-proof', you can't do it with threats or walls, but only with, in Henderson's words, “serious, and sometimes painful, introspection,” in which you examine why more people clamour to leave your company than to work for it.

Spinner. Bayer is based in Germany, where:
- the labor market is highly regulated
- stock options at established companies as hard to find as bad beer

Bayer bled it's most-favoured talent during the dot-come drain. Drive, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial flair trickled out as the siren song of the Neuer Markt (Germany's Nasdaq) sounded in their ears.
Now, of course, some are coming back.
Good move number one by Bayer: Making it clear to departing employees that they would be welcome to return
Good move number two: “You can't say, 'Welcome back to the Stone Age.'” Bayer took a fundamentally different approach to work. A company that used to design jobs to fit the work now works to design work to fit what needs to be done. “We've got to give people a good job” – Spinner. But, making jobs good jobs isn't as easy as it sounds. It means designing them so that people learn, are entrusted with responsibility and autonomy fairly early in their careers (a big change at Bayer), enjoy some variety, and get a shot at serious wealth.

Murthy has a different set of challenges
Infosys is consulting and software services; hot on the subcontinent (best Indian firm to work for last year); first Indian company to list on the Nasdaq; first to offer stock options. At its glam HQ, SAS Institute-style, people play basketball and cricket and put on musical shows; “the art of de-desking.”
All helps, apparently, but it doesn't eliminate the talent problem. Other things being equal, most Indians would prefer to live and work in their native land, but other things aren't equal – London, Amsterdam, and Palo Alto are seductive, and big multinationals like Microsoft, CAP Gemini, and IBM come poaching.

How do you keep 'em down on the farm?
Murthy – one word: Vision. There is no tangible benefit an employer can offer that a rival cannot match and a rich rival cannot top. Vision and aspiration – a sense of being part of something bigger than oneself, a commitment to building a better company, better country, better world – inspire the kind of loyalty money can't buy. A company in a bidding war for talent has already lost.
Stewart: Three smart lessons:
- Learn to live with employees who feel free to blow you off;
- design good jobs;
- share a vision that's about more than a mere paycheck.

For more information and related links, see the online version of this story at: http://www.ecompany.com/barelymanaging?nl=bm
BOOKSHELF
(1) Grassroots Leadership: US Military Academy by Keith H Hammonds If Harvard Business School is the West Point of capitalism, then where is the West Point of leadership? It's in West Point, New York. Here's how raw cadets become resilient commanders. http://robin.fastcompany.com/cgi-bin/nph-t.pl?U=162&M=79159&MS=272

(2) Effective Teams A brief recommendation of a couple of books on this subject by Jorgen Faxholme:
Jon Katzenbach, The wisdom of Teams
Robert Cialdini, Influence - Science and Practice (4th edition 2001)
The former is a classic that no one dealing with teams should miss
The latter may be puzzling - however, Cialdini's research presents some of the most exciting material I have read for a long time, uncovering the underlying psychological reasons of effective leadership vs mere authority, followership and stakeholder-management. It was a 'page-turner' - rarely encountered in business-books! Cohen's book on 'Influence without authority' definitely needs re-writing. The light went on with me, when a) I sudddenly understood some of the deeper reasons why I have always resisted the Ra-Ra of certain training programmes - especially American Sales training! and b) I got an even deeper understanding of change, culture - and effective teams.
Comments courtesy Jorgen Faxholm
Next issue weekend of 9/10 June (ish), 2001
Reader contributions warmly received
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