New IdeasNote from Art: This post is intended to push you in the direction of thinking about “what if?” and “why not?” and “how?”  If you’re not thinking about possibilities and new approaches, you’re not really thinking.

Anyone involved in leadership and responsible for the development of leaders should read the recent BusinessWeek article, “Can GE Still Manage?” The article offers a fascinating look into GE’s traditional leadership and high-potential development practices, and raises an interesting question of whether these practices still hunt in a very different world than when they were conceived.

As someone that grew up in business during the era of Jack Welch and the emergence of GE’s Crotonville programs as perhaps the pinnacle of talent and leadership development programs, it’s interesting and a bit alarming to suddenly wonder whether the approach of convening for weeks at a time with other high-potential leaders and learning, debating, and engaging together, might just be passé in many ways.

While I’m not qualified to critique GE’s approach, the article certainly begs all of us to be thinking about or rethinking everything that we take for granted in how we find and cultivate talent and how we deploy our resources.

Questions that Must Be Asked and That Might Be Uncomfortable:

  • What are the skill sets required for success tomorrow?
  • What do we keep and what do we jettison from 20th-Century talent and leadership thinking and systems?
  • How can individuals that don’t know a tweet from a twit possibly comprehend the macro shifts occurring in how information flows, how opinions are formed and how people connect?  Whether the individual applications live or die is largely irrelevant…the seismic shift has already happened and many are still waiting to read about in the newspaper.  The point is that you need to be immersed in it to even begin to understand what is going on.
  • Most of the contemporary leadership writing and content focuses on universal leadership truths…those skills and activities that effective leaders have understood for literally thousands of years.  GE’s approach to cultivating leadership talent may be the modern representation of how to best develop around the universal truths.  It may just not be enough any longer. What’s next?
  • Is the best way to cultivate talent, simply (ha!) to hire smart, diverse (gender, ethnicity and skills/aptitudes) individuals and give them the freedom to create.  Has Google’s model replaced GE’s?

Organization and Management Speculation? In Search of Tomorrow’s Enterprise and Talent:

OK, while I’m speculating on innovations in talent development, let’s begin rethinking our traditional management systems.  Some potentially not too-far-fetched thoughts:

  • It’s not too hard to imagine that tomorrow’s enterprise must be mostly all-different than yesterday’s.  Everything that we do must enable interaction, communication, learning, knowledge sharing, idea generation and simplified paths from idea to implementation.  Today’s management systems and organizational structures often confound those objectives.
  • Every employee is a brand builder for himself/herself and for the firm. Every employee has a distinct voice inside and outside of the firm…and the boundaries are increasingly blurred between personal and professional.
  • Functionally, everything changes. Just to pick on a few, classically trained and focused marketers are museum-pieces.  IT organizations that aren’t ahead of the power curve on figuring out how to leverage the new media and technologies will be blown up and reinvented or outsourced.  HR organizations that fail to enable talent development in support of strategy as their prime directive will join their obsolete IT counterparts.
  • The role of a leader becomes fluid, with a person assuming this for one initiative and acting as follower for others. The skill sets for business and career success are increasingly oriented towards coalition building, project management and learning that begets actions.
  • Some form of Collins’ Level 5 and a Servant Leader emerges to head organizations…or larger parts of organizations.  Humility…not to be confused with weakness, plus fierce resolve are the core criteria for top leaders.
  • It appropriately will become increasingly difficult to draw an organization chart.  Given the fluidity and constantly shifting nature of the organization, the traditional boxes and lines approach to showing hierarchy and responsibility will die.

The Bottom Line for Now:

While perhaps I’ve pushed the envelope on creativity and speculation, the excellent GE article referenced above was the catalyst here. There is much of human nature that appears to remain constant over time, however,  our tools change constantly.  Finding ways to use new tools to create, connect and compete requires a good healthy rethinking of everything.   This is truly exciting.