Life Sustaining Organizations as Talent Magnets

 David Brook's terrific column, "Talent Magnets," appearing in the January 25th, 2011 Op-Ed section of the New York Times deserves attention and appreciation.  Brooks describes a virtuous feedback loop that Anticipatory Leaders can generate by creating conditions in organizations that attract and hold creative talent:  "The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century."
There are many creative centers in the United States.  Take Greenville, North Carolina, for example, a city of about 85,000 people, named one of the nation’s “100 Best Communities for Young People” by America’s Promise Alliance.
Greenville doesn't get a huge amount of press, but it is home to East Carolina University and the site of an excellent medical school, with specialists like Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood, who performed the first mitral valve repair surgery in the United States in 2000.  This far off corner of North Carolina that you probably never heard of is one of the best places in the world to learn robotic surgery.
Our point: While 47% of the US population presently believe that China is the world's largest economy, there is still a tremendous window of opportunity for the planet's leading democracy to demonstrate the competitive vitality of its more open system.
Unfortunately, there are many ways in which the United States is squandering its key advantages in the competition to nurture creative hot spots.  Its children have not learned the fundamentals of science, for example, and this is clearly a weakness to the country's prospects for continued influence as the 21st century unfolds.
A problem in the present doesn't foreclose the prospects of improvements in the future.  In fact, the recognition of a short-coming can incentavize needed change.  Will it in this instance?  U.S. scores in science have been lousy for quite a while; so, that's not a good sign.  But, it could change.  The future of science education and the importance of scientific understanding to educators in the  public school systems is uncertain.
It's a Critical Uncertainty.
In our book, Life Sustaining Organizations–A Design Guide, we show how anticipatory leaders can play an essential role in energizing  organizations and societies by exploring alternative futures.  They do this by asking big questions to which there are a lot of legitimate answers, each one of which can lead to a different kind of future.  "What role will science play in the United States in 2025?" is an example of that sort of question.
Ideally, a set of these questions are looked at simultaneously, like looking at several striations of soil to understand what might grow.
For example, we think that the future of women's rights and political power is a world-wide critical uncertainty.  It's up for grabs and, as others have noted, it's a fundamentally important political, economic and moral issue of our era.  Art of the Future as an entity is four-square in support of women's rights on a planetary basis.  That and $3.50 will buy you a latte at Starbucks.  The rights of women are certainly not guaranteed in a global context where women own less than 5% of the planet's assets. 
The power of women is interacting with many, if not all, dynamics on the planetary stage.  So, what happens with women is going to have a big impact on what happens with science education. Women are key to creative hot spots.  The organizations and the societies that have no problem with that have an advantage over those that do not.  That doesn't mean that they're going to come out on top, it just means that we think they've got a head start.

The future will not look like the past.  The slope of change is dramatically accelerating everywhere.  Thoughtful observers like Ian Morris anticipate that the level of social development that will occur in the next 100 years will equal that which humanity achieved in the last 15,000 years... if we don't kill ourselves first. 
As a species, we may be reaching lift off velocity, moving through an opening that will make the present seem like a very distant past...and, then again, maybe not.  Anticipatory leadership entails helping us explore where we are and what that means for where we might be going.  It is the catalyst for insight and learning.  It requires a willingness to take a real risk.

Too Much Time Away!

We've been hard at work on our book, tentatively entitled Life Sustaining Organizations: A User's Manual, which describes how Structural Dynamics can be applied to the conscious design and maintenance of organizations that affirm the vitality of the workforce, rather than draining life out of people by demanding the fragmentation of skills, character and spirit.

The good news about this entry is that we're making headway; the bad news is that we haven't had a lot of bandwidth for blogging!

To remedy our absence from the web, we're going to try something different and more Twitteresque than what our entries have been to date, i.e., short and, hopefully, more frequent references to items of current interest. We have some concern that the graphic quality of our posts may decline, but we're willing to accept that risk for a while and hope that you will still find some relevance here to your interests.

1. The NYT continues to be one the great information bargains available, as far as we're concerned. People at this institution have spent generations thinking about how to organized huge volumes of data across a wide range of categories and present it in a compelling way to people like us. It is full of useful information virtually every day. For example, one of the lead stories today concerns the way in which MIT uses its students' blog to recruit new applicants by conveying a first hand experience of the school, rather than simply a formal presentation of institutionally vetted data.

In discussing the "blogosphere" at MIT, student Cristen Chinea exclaims: “M.I.T. is the closest you can get to living in the Internet,” and Ms. Chinea reported, “IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.” [Emphasis added] The concept of living in the Internet strikes us as being very important. It seems to be a vivid manifestation of someone who has transcended time and place to take up full-time residency in the cyber world. Of course, this way of being is customary to millions, but, as the article indicates, the fact that so many young people are living in (as contrasted with "on") the Web, is viewed with alarm by institutions used to more rigid boundaries of who's in and who's out.

2. Youth Magnet Cities is a recent piece from the Wall Street Journal that also explores what Creative Class young people want in the way of a home town. Richard Florida, creative class sociologist, (at right) is one of the panelists who developed the metrics that led to the selection of Washington DC as the current top destination city for charged up men, women and others in their teens and twenties. Here's a list of the panelists, all of whom are probably worth knowing more about:

Steven Cochrane, managing director, Moody's Economy.com, head of the Web site's U.S. regional forecasting service and editor of its monthly Regional Financial Review.

Ross DeVol, director of regional economics, the Milken Institute, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit, and researcher on technology and its impact on regional and national economies.

Richard Florida, author of "Who's Your City" and "The Rise of the Creative Class," and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Rachel Franklin, senior lecturer, public policy, at the University of Maryland; former deputy director of the Association of American Geographers, and author of a 2003 Census Bureau report on migration patterns among young, educated workers.

William Frey, demographer and senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., and a research professor in population studies at the University of Michigan.

David Plane, professor of geography and regional development, University of Arizona, Tucson; a senior editor of the Journal of Regional Science, and researcher on age-related factors in migration.

3. The influence and freedom of women is one of the key drivers of global change to which we pay attention. There is a fairly wide-spread assumption in liberal, Western circles that the political and organizational power of women is growing, and there is a lot of data to support that view. For example, the Financial Times recently published a "definitive ranking of the world's 50 most powerful and successful female chief executives," including power houses like Areva's Anne Lauvergeon, a French woman who is responsible for a workforce of 75,000.

However, as the graphic below indicates, there are many continents where women play an infinitesimal role in private sector power, and only 3 per cent of Fortune 500 chief executives are women.

So, it is certainly not inevitable that women will achieve anything like full equality with men in the halls of power. In fact, some international conflict scenarios would result in significant reductions of the gains made by women, e.g., those that involve armed forces dominated by men. A force such as this, which is clearly important but whose exact direction cannot be known is called a "critical uncertainty."

Can Success Get In Your Way?

Promoting life sustaining work environments [LSE] is one of Art of the Future’s key commitments and organizing principles. We believe people should live and work in contexts that lead them to feel alive, creative, focused, energized, reflective, at ease, stimulated, loose, natural, engaged...sustained. To that end, we are constantly scanning information and talking with clients and colleagues about their strategies for attracting and holding the creative talent that differentiates organizations from one another. What follows is a distillation of ideas from our conversation with Warren Ashton, Group Marketing Manager/Staffing Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. Ashton is responsible for crafting Microsoft’s communications programs to recruit prospective tech hires, and he has made a study of branding the company's message in a way that will be attractive to this highly sought-after workforce. We have put Ashton’s precepts into a systemic framework and added other, sometimes contra-veiling, forces that are logically related to Ashton's thinking to present an intriguing picture of how a strategic initiative might be affected by unintended and unnoticed consequences. We use data from a conversation like this one or a published source to analyze driving forces suggested by the data to develop an awareness that opens up new possibilities for strategic thinking and action.

Ashton’s team identified the key factors that make Microsoft one of the best places to work in the United States and throughout the world (according to the Best Places to Work Institute):

“Compensation and salary are the primary drivers. But it isn't all about money. We look at our own strengths and weaknesses, where are we strong and weak. Three things pop out where we are very strong or it is very strategic:

1. Working with high quality people - “I want to work with people who are on a par with me.”
2. Career upside - “I can get promoted, make more money, grow my technical skills.”
3. Big impact on team, company, and, sometimes, society - “I’m looking to work on big projects with volume impact - something that will affect millions of people; impacting the future by coming up with new ideas.”

Ashton also pointed to two “proof points” in the organization’s ability to hire and retain the people critical to their success, i.e., factors that may not be the most salient to a decision but reinforce an inclination and “close the deal.”

• Reputation: “Everyone is aware of us. Now we're seen as sort of an old school company. We were missing the reputation of being a place with real people. People didn't know we had a personality. Where we did have a personality, it was a negative one. We needed to get the story out that we are a company of real people. When people meet us for the first time, so many of us have the experience that people tell us that they are pleasantly surprised.”

• Workplace environment: “Most people in our business get personalized private offices for employees. We're mixing those things up. Some people would really like to work on open floors or environments with petitions that can be opened and closed. We're creating flexible environments. The Vice President running a facility can get the sort of space they want; kitchens, couches and chairs - customizing the environment for a particular team but being able to reconfigure it to something else after a period of time.” Microsoft’s Copenhagen facility is an experimental design organized around many small teams with a project incubation focus. “It is a vibrant, compelling, teaming environment. There is nothing there that looks like cubicle hell.”

Let’s take a look at how these factors interact with each other. [The factors that Ashton focused on will be highlighted in dark yellow in the following diagrams.]

1. Working with high quality people
Ashton’s analysis begins with a simple set of reinforcing elements: the stronger the reputation of the company, the easier it is to hire and retain top-notch creative talent. That creative talent bolsters the organization's reputation which, in turn, enhances the organization’s ability to hire the best talent. This is a virtuous cycle or reinforcing loop. 2. Career upside
The ability to hire & retain leads to a larger workforce. The quality of those people will improve the product and process quality, innovation and speed to market. This will have an impact on business results and grow revenues. As the company expands, it will find it necessary to introduce more levels of specialization, with differentiated functions and roles. As the number of levels in the organization increases, the likelihood of being at the top of the hierarchy decreases; even star performers are apt to experience the number of levels between themselves and the CEO increasing. This can be seen as improving opportunities for promotion, which adds to the attractiveness of the job; and, thus, positively impacting the organization’s ability to hire and retain talent. You can follow this logic in the diagram below. The result is another reinforcing loop. However, there are at least two other dynamics occurring [shown in blue in the diagram] that would make a job offer to a complex organization like Microsoft less attractive and leave current employee open to competitive propositions:

• While it is true that a large, prosperous organization is able to offer training to its employees, increased specialization diminishes the diversity of tasks and, thus, reducing learning opportunities on the job. In a smaller company, there is a lot more ambiguity about the specifics of the job and all hands are encouraged to “pitch-in” as needed, increasing learning opportunities on the job.

• As specialization increases, we’ve seen that positional level in the organization is likely to decrease, negatively affecting salary, stock options and other compensation. In a smaller, fast-growing company, the recruit has an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. So bright, young recruits will see real trade-offs -- both in terms of learning and compensation upside -- between joining the large firm vs a smaller one. [Of course, as the reader may now be thinking, “What about risk?” While a hot, young company might not be around in twelve months, there is no assurance, in today’s business environment, that your job won’t be eliminated in the next corporate reorganization. This is another one of the trade-offs entailed in the employment choice.]

3. Big Impact - Larger company, larger projects, more opportunity to have an impact; that's a natural sequence of consequences. But, if specialization and functional differentiation make you a relatively small part of a large team with relatively limited responsibilities, your individual contribution and the recognition it receives may well be limited. [Note the blue causal link in the diagram.] The individual’s position in the hierarchy mitigates his/her potential impact. The organization may even blame the individual for not meeting expectations without seeing how the system drivers affect personal results.


Reputation and Workplace Environment:
At any size or stage in its life-cycle, positive business results enable an organization to invest in its people - both in terms of a terrific work environment and the best tools for the job. These enhance productivity as well as the organization’s reputation as a desirable place to work.Other factor’s impacting a organization’s reputation include the quality of its people [as we’ve shown], and its products and processes. These things are also independent of organizational size or maturity.

Macro/environmental forces:
Ashton also pointed toward one more factor that will impact all organizations competing for technical talent - "Fewer and fewer students are studying computer science in college. The U.S. is facing a perfect storm." Add to this the increased number of retiring baby boomers in the years ahead and the number of companies vying for the best and the brightest. Large companies like Microsoft do have the advantage of being able to locate in multiple countries around the world to take advantage of low cost, high skilled labor markets; countries like China, India, Russia and Israel where technical degrees make up a relatively high percentage of recent college graduates.


Above we have linked all of the factors we've been discussing. Of course, this doesn't present a full picture of the structural ingredients contributing to Microsoft's ability to hire and retain key talent. We couldn't define that on the basis of one conversation. But, we do believe that this type of systemic thinking has a sort of holographic quality, in that any one data point like our interaction with Warren contains elements of the whole, if you know how to look at the overall situation holistically.

Skillful designers of recruitment strategy like Ashton understand the importance of whole systems thinking: “During our period of hyper growth we didn't have problem hiring the best and the brightest. Microsoft never had an employment story that defined the core anchor of our message to the market place. It was very ad hoc. But as we became more mature, we … had to come up with the marketing plan and a value proposition [that would appeal to those] in the technical field...that distinguishes us and would lead people to join us, especially since a lot of people think of us as 'The Evil Empire!' [laughs].”

To sum up, Microsoft is obviously pursuing a powerful and well-considered strategy to hire and retain skilled technologists. However, a systemic analysis reveals ways that its competitors can turn the company’s own branding approach against this dominant player, perhaps in a manner that is not being anticipated. Rivals may be able to make the case that Microsoft is a Goliath that is less able to utilize creative talent to its full potential and less apt to recognize and reward them for outstanding performance than a smaller, more nimble David. If so, smaller firms win the battle for the star performers and the next Bill Gates won't be working in Redmond. On the other hand, if Microsoft can produce example-after-example of employees who have made a big difference -- in terms that are truly meaningful to the high talent prospect -- it will demonstrate that they have a better story to tell to key players who can keep it performing at the top of its game.

Beduoins to the Rescue

On the occasion of Starbucks annual meeting, it seems appropriate to consider the state of the wireless office. Anyone who is a Starbucks shareholder knows that the price of the company's stock has declined by 50% in the last year.

Starbuck's experience economy scene is quite pleasant, but the company must be doing a lot of things wrong. And one of them--for sure--is the creation of any sort of barrier to wi-fi access by patrons. Until recently, anyone wanting to hop on the web at Starbucks had to pay $9.99/day for the privilege to T-Mobile.

While this bar seems to be dropping slowly (with an assist from the iPhone/ATT alliance), it is emblematic of the sorts of unnecessary transaction costs that seem to rear their ugly heads so regularly in the US economy--an economic system which, by the way, needs to truly encourage the members of the industrious creative class who are its best bets against the devastating Depression that lurks just beyond today's headlines. It is both an oversimplification and an accurate observation to assert that the short sighted interests of the power holders of the current status quo are obstructing the work of the world's problem solvers. The absence of national (let alone international) free wi-fi is bad enough. The fact that it is not even an issue in the current presidential campaign, where it is once again supposed to be about the economy, is outrageous.

The creative class is always "fired up and ready to go." As Arnold Toynbee Study of History argued so powerfully, over and over again, civilizations depend on the ability of a creative minority to face and master the great challenges of the day. Ours is undeniably an era of great turbulence and complexity, putting not only American civilization on the line, but also challenging the West as a totality and potentially world as well. (One nuclear exchange can ruin your whole day.) So, to Starbucks or any other entity that is putting plaque into the circulatory system of communication by inventive, productive people Art of the Future say: Get out of the way! You're holding up progress, and we really need it!

Okay, do we all feel better now that the diatribe is over, because it is becoming easier and easier for anyone to become a 21st Century Bedouin, who can set up shop anywhere. Nomadic people capture the imagination of everyone with a spirit of adventure. Increasingly, our tools of production allow us to have a hydroponic economics, where we don't have to be planted in a particular place to be gainfully employed. New tools are being devised daily to support a humanity with ever-greater freedom of movement.

Daniel Casciato's recent review of the emerging wi-fi ecology provides a helicopter flyover of the state of the new nomad's art. In addition to having a device that provides easy access, e.g., a MacBook with a built in AirPort that seeks out available networks or an iPhone, knowing where to find access is obviously important. (This reflection could lead back to the diatribe against Starbucks and society in general; so lets be careful.) Unfortunately, having some clue in advance of arriving at a new destination regarding where access can be found and how much it is going to cost is a problem that R&D still seems to be working on. Each of the options we looked at is kludgey. For example, TechNewsWorld's WiFi Hotspot Locator has a somewhat cumbersome interface and may cost money and Google's WiFi net map, didn't seem to recognize any hot spots outside of New York City.

However, assuming that you're linked in, Casciato mentions a number of applications that help the new Bedouins get the job done, such as:

• Amazon Web Services, such as Digital Chalk which gives anyone the ability to create on-line video-based training services. Over 300,000 developers use Amazon's web services to create computer based products, sometimes within minutes.

• Portable Apps, which allows the user to carry multiple applications on a USB jump drive that can be plugged into any (Windows-based) PC and used without leaving any personal data behind: "Your computer, without the computure™." Free; no advertising. (Pretty cool, huh!)
  

• Spinvox, which appears to be a British voice recognition service that enables the user to convert voice mail to several forms of text, including emails. (How many times have I had to call myself from the road with an idea or remember to go back over an audio tape to find a key note!? Grrrrr.)

• Vonage V-Phones mean no roaming charges and can be an especially powerful application for the internationalist. (This is noted by one who recently paid something like $2.00/minute to make a call just outside of the Verizon wireless network to which he is tethered. Grrrrr again.)

• An IquaSun solar powered bluetooth headset that, essentially, makes sure that the conversation never ends just because you're running out of juice. (I'm not sure of the whole kissing-while-getting-your-voicemail-via-a-solar-power-headset approach to marketing as per Iqua's website, but, hey, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.)
  

Intuition leads some to hypothesize that existence is the experience of mass floating in time. If there is any truth to this concept, corporeality is weightless. We are not tied down. Increasingly, we occupy two realms, the bounded domain of physicality and the infinite virtual world of cyberspace. New workers, new work and new artifacts are bridging these realities.

Changing workplace demographics

A recent study by Intuit and Institute of the Future highlights three dramatic trends affecting the evolution of entrepreneurialism over the next ten years:

1. People from the edges of middle age (teenagers, "mompreneurs," non-retiring Baby Boomers, immigrants) will increasingly start new businesses in the US and elsewhere. As in so many other instances, the stereotype of entrepreneurship in the US as a white male dominated field is evaporating.

2. The Internet's "long tail" will enable many peole to launch new businesses reaching specialized international niche markets that, previously, would never have been served because there was no mechanism to connect providers of goods and services with prospective users. Instead of a thousand flowers blooming, there will be millions!

3. Focused entrepreneurial education will add to (and sometimes replace) the learnings that come from the school of hard knocks. High schools, art schools, vocational schools, language training schools, and so on may all start to add entrepreneurial education components to their curriculum. Students who want to start their own business will learn about topics like accounting, marketing, logistics administration systematically, rather having the reactive experience so many of us entrepreneurs have when we realize that we should have understood some general business topic...yesterday!

These trends are important to us personally at Art of the Future because we are an small entrepreneurial service shop that currently works with many different types of people and eagerly looks forward to doing a lot more of that.

And, of course, these developments are significant at a larger strategic level: A multiplicity of new employment options are opening up. This means more competition for key talent, more diversity in lifestyles and workplace culture, more social and economic complexity, and more freedom of choice.

Proponents of laissez-faire capitalism herald the proliferation of entrepreneurialism as a demonstration of human capability, especially when it is unfettered by government bureaucracy and regulation. It is not clear to us what sort of net gains are actually being achieved in small business employment, however. Keeping the doors open is very hard to do for most entrepreneurs. Restaurants are the most frequently started small business, and most of them don't make it, for example. Plus, it could be argued that many small businesses add little to the overall dynamism of the American economy, e.g., franchise operations that are ancillary to the internal combustion engine. So, the jury is still out on this aspect of the goodness of entrepreneurialism.

But, smart city and town planners can take advantage of these emerging trends to make sure that they attract and hold the sort of small businesses that can revitalize communities and/or further secure their position as attractors to innovative businesses. Instituting truly universal WiFi access within the boundaries of a particular community seems like a very logical and easy first step in this direction, for example. Make it easy for young people, mompreneurs, and self-motivated people without much income to work anywhere. Rehab unused industrial facilities and turn them into low rent creative bee hives driven by a set of tenants integrated by some form of common interest and/or market. Be the first in your state to offer entrepreneurial education at the high school level! Have the media celebrate local entrepreneurial firms that crack into an international market.

These are just a few of the strategies that towns, cities and regions can use to align the entrepreneurial energy of their citizens with the desire to put themselves on the map as a thriving, destination community.

Click here to see the original Intuit/Institute of the future article.