Thanks to the team of the Philosophy Now magazine for having kindly accepted to publish my paper and for their extremely professional proofreading!

Mozart: a talent detected in his early childhood

I attended few weeks ago a seminar organised by the Philosophy and Management association in Brussels. It was all about talent, and how the way artists work and manage their career can be a source of inspiration for talent management within business organisations. Pierre-Michel Menger, French philosopher and research director for the CNRS, presented some of his researches in the sociology of work and art. The expertise of Pierre-Michel Menger in both fields led him to very interesting observations.

He first discerned two types of work:

• the ‘labour’: an effort, constraint with a predictable outcome
• the work as a discovery of yourself, the masterpiece of your life. Success in this type of work is more a derivative, not a predefined goal. It is unpredictable.

The later work is influenced by philosophies from the 19th century emphasising the infinite depth of consciousness and the infinite possibilities opened to us. Because of it’s unpredictability, it is a type of work that involves a lot of risks. The prestige and satisfaction you get from the realisation of a masterpiece is immense, but the risk to fail is in equal proportions. Artists are facing this risk in a hyper competitive environment. Differences in revenues between artists is huge, the small number of successful artists take most of the resources, leaving a small portion of revenues to the vast majority. If you look at just the financial situation of an artist, choosing such a career might look like a bad evaluation of the risks. But it doesn’t take into account the non-monetary value of a potential huge gratification, a relative autonomy and the diversity of the tasks involved in the job.

What influences the likelihood to become a successful artist (at least in the narrow sense of social recognition and monetary compensation) is not clear. There is something about artists that cannot be measured, cannot be put in an equation. It is not enough to make studies, work hard and accumulate experiences. You need to have ‘talent’. The same applies to business. Sure, you can find people able to perform a task by looking at their past experiences and by using rational criteria. But how can you detect the collaborators who will go far beyond, surprise you and develop considerably within the company. How can you make sure to invest more in these people and less in the others? McKinsey invented a marketing term to describe the 10% of your employees who will bring the most to the company: ‘talents’. Talent management is controversial and relates to the many meanings of the word ‘talent’.  Pierre-Michel Menger proposes to define talents as people you cannot isolate using predefined criteria or reading their CV. It helps to stick to this definition and to not take into account all the other meanings and judgements that the word ‘talent’ implies. He argues that the only way to detect talents is to compare them between each others. This is why competitions and awards in the art world are so frequent. The jury don’t know themselves what they are looking for, and the outcome is unpredictable.  It is after comparing the contestants that they can see who has a little something more, a higher potential. This is also why I think you start to see more and more contests and game-like workshops in business (hack day for developers, unconferences, Dragon’s Den kind of internal events), to detect talents you could not screen using a formal HR equation.

I think that this approach raises many ethical dilemma.

• On one hand, I want people to judge me on rational criteria that I can understand and act on. It is a system that protects all of us against arbitrary decisions and favouritism. On the other hand, I also want to be judged for who I am and for my talents, independently of any predefined list of criteria.
• Whatever your boss says, it is reassuring to know that he doesn’t judge you but only your work and your performances. With the concept of ‘talent’, suddenly your boss wants to know what you do in your spare time and wants you to reveal yourself, so that he can detect the ‘talent’. It is a much more personal relation. It surely benefits some people, but not necessary everyone. The opposite leads to the same problem but the other way around. You might have a quality that you know could help your career, but an employer looking only at short term figures and performances might not realise it.
• Is it right to invest more in the 10% of ‘talents’ in your company instead of using that money to raise the general level of expertise of the team? To use an example from Pierre-Michel Menger, if a talented researcher wins an award for a paper he wrote, his reputation will get a boost which will convert probably to a higher salary. But the paper he wrote is most likely based on data that ‘average’ workers collected. Is is fair? On the other hand, if there is no incentive for researchers to excel and be noticed, people will stagnate and become demotivated.
• Even small differences between people of the same level in a specific field, like music composition, can generate disproportionate inequalities. If more is invested to a young ‘talent’ who is a little better than the other children of his class, he will quickly gain more experiences and have more chances to explore his talent. He will then have a reputation, which will encourage people who don’t have time or the knowledge in music composition to hire him instead of someone else, which will give him even more experience, and so on. The ‘talented’ person might truly be exceptional, but was it because of his initial tiny competitive advantage or because of the investment from the community? Does it make a difference? Maybe humans are like bees and need an arbitrary hierarchy for their society to work. (Simply accepting this image of the bees is way too sympathetic with established power though.)
• As it has been pointed during the workshop, talent belongs to the category of work that is unpredictable and can be asserted for sure only a posteriori. Is it legitimate to try detecting talents beforehand? This argument is interesting but theoretical.  Of course, people will always try to detect talents, it happens since the beginning of humanity. And even if it is an inexact science, it probably lead to better results for the community than not trying to support its future ‘talents’. Even if it is not always fair for people.

How to resolve the dilemma depends on your vision of society. If you believe that there is a real opportunity for people from all backgrounds to display their talents, then selecting talents by comparing people between each other on non measurable criteria is legitimate. If on the other hand, you perceive the world as being a constant exploitation of the masses by few people in power, every privilege not based on measurable merit is a potential discrimination. Both extremes are false, the world needs both talented artists and hard workers. I personally believe that the key to resolve the dilemma is to offer multiple ways to succeed, in many different ways, with the help of many different groups of people. Diversity lowers the probability of generating systematic discriminations and enables many understandings of what talent means.

If you are preparing an award or competition in your organisation, you need to understand why you the feel the need to do so. If it is at least partially to detect talents, I hope that the points above will help you design the process in accordance to your values and goals. Don’t simply replicate what has already been done, enable participants to show their talents from a difference angle, the winners might not be the ones you expected.

I collaborated with him to prepare the photographs and Polaroids, you can find the details here.

I hope it conveys the message and the exciting mission of the Philosophy and Management association.

The conference room of PICNIC 2009

The presentation by Gentry Underwood at PICNIC 2009 was useful because it gave some hopes that employee engagement could truly be improved using the intranet. The key is to stay focus on the practical objectives of the employees and the core priorities of the organisation. It is illusionary to believe that employees will really share their thoughts on the intranet just for the sake of the organisation, and for colleagues that they never met. It is insulting the intelligence of employees to believe that they would participate in internal forums thinking they are taking part in a democratic process. I see the knowledge sharing system developed by IDEO as one that acknowledges that employees have personal ambitions and are all well aware of the competitive environment they are working in. If writing something on the intranet has no implication for my career, why would I do it? If reading the intranet doesn’t help me in my personal goals, why would I bother? In an intranet platform that IDEO developed for its own internal use, employees can create their personal pages on which they can list all the projects they worked on and why. When a new project is about to start in the company, the manager can search on the intranet for employees that are potentially either the best suited or motivated for the project. The intranet becomes a tool truly improving the efficiency of the organisation, employing the best people for each task, and an effective way for employees to influence their career within the organisation. It is furthermore much more motivating and efficient to put in touch people having complementary expertise than to ask them to write down their knowledge on an intranet document. Writing down documentation is long and boring, why would I do it for the benefits of people I don’t know? The approach requires obviously much more than the creation of a new intranet website, it changes the way the organisation operates. Intranet tools need for this reason to be adapted for the goals and culture of each organisation. It seems to me an essential step if one truly wants to motive his collaborators with practical opportunities. An Intranet based on a wishful but only superficially executed democratic model becomes a dangerous daydreaming which demobilizes people because it doesn’t offer them any realistic mean to prevail.

Another illustration of wishful thinking are intranet websites that encourage employees to post their brilliant ideas for the company, and how often they end up being broken for years because no one ever use them. If a politician or an entrepreneur has an idea, he will exploit it in order to obtain more power or revenues. What could an employee hope to get in exchange of his ideas? Nosco developed a software called Ideas Exchange in which participants not only share ideas, but can also invest virtual shares in ideas from others. Not only it makes the process more exciting, it also helps identifying good ideas, the ones considered as being the best investments by the employees themselves. If coupled with the right incentives, such as real life returns on investments or opportunities to participate in the direction of the projects, the system could also lead to a higher level of engagement.

“On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…”

It is remotely connected to a small project I did in 2007 called Intrusive Connections. I attempted to disrupt the way Google maps works by adding pictures not related to locations but to my personal connections with these locations. It was a rebellion against “collective unconscious censure of any nonoperable or inconsistent consideration”.

Both projects have in common to put some human contingency into a tool perceived as purely utilitarian. But is it really? Maps, even from Google, are cultural constructions, and only give the illusion of neutrality. See for example the debate around the treatment of historic landmarks in Google maps: Online maps ‘wiping out history’. Maps are how we see the world and Google Street View is a fantastic cultural opportunity to shape our perception. The contrast between the Google impersonal car and the people in the streets below illustrates the contrast between a dehumanized geography and one from the people living in this world.

What is the role of corporations and consumer research in this relationship? Consumer research is culturally agnostic, it doesn’t defend anything else than the interests of its commissioners, that is their  financial return on investment, most often achieved by pleasing their customers. It is these customers who are arbitrating on cultural symbols and practices, not corporations that are merely playing with cultural meanings at their own risk. The book Ethnography for marketers (a guide to consumer immersion, by Hy Mariampolski) defines the techniques now widely applied in corporations to better understand their customers. Better the customers are understood, better the services they get, better are also the intangible benefits they get from brands and marketing campaigns (such as being able to identify with a brand, use it as a symbol of belonging to a group). But as I explained in a recent lecture about the heterotopia of Walt Disney World, the risk is that cultural assets valuable in the mediation of our reality, but less attractive for brands, could slowly fade away in the profit of less effective meaning systems, more in tune with consumerism and manufactured consumer lifestyles. By observing customers instead of people, customer researches are influencing our perception of existence. It is a little like quantum theory, you cannot observe something in culture without influencing it. The issue is not commerce and its consumer persona, but the lack of other narrative forces. Or maybe even worst, it is the incapacity to recognize the significance of other systems of meaning simultaneously at play in our lives.

]]> http://bruchansky.name/2009/11/16/long-term-influence-of-consumer-researches-on-cultural-analysis/feed/ 0 http://bruchansky.name/2009/11/08/factory-farming/ http://bruchansky.name/2009/11/08/factory-farming/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:16:01 +0000 Christophe Bruchansky http://bruchansky.name/?p=402

-  -  -  -

Pain-free animals could take suffering out of farming, NewScientist

-  -  -  -

Our daily bread documentary.

Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming!

-  -  -  -

Is this post about art, innovation, governance or philosophy? I let you decide…

Alexander Beach – Inspired Architecture from The VBA on Vimeo.

Here is the stuff that caught my attention this year.

“A Child’s Grove” by Neha Choksi, Project 88,2009

The way the trees reflect nature and people’s activity around them.

—

“Your Fade to Light”, Random International, Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Ok, new media art seems out of fashion this year and this work is not even at the Frieze Art Fair, just in the Pavilion of Art and Design annexe event. But the piece is brilliantly executed and the way you see yourself in the ‘pixels’ when you move is very smart.

—

This installation was also presented, from Conrad Shawcross.

—

The canvases by Erwin Wurm were original and lead to interesting questions. (picture from Frieze 2008, but it’s more or less the same)

—

See here plenty of beautiful and poetic paintings by Aya Takano.

—

Congratulations to the curators of the greengrassi and Maureen Paley galleries. They managed to make me stop walking for a while with their sensitive selection of art works.

—

It should remind Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) to anyone who has seen the movie. Here is a clip.

When in a millennia people will try to understand how the end of the 20th century was like, I hope they will look at these. The images of a traffic jam in the countryside represent in my opinion so well this era: lost in some chimeras, consumerist, short sighted, ‘free’ to do the same than anyone else. It seems there was much more than that in the 60s. Traffic jams were also the symbol of social progress. Public holidays were not that new and most people could afford to travel thanks to their new car. But as Jean-Luc Godard illustrates in his movie, cars didn’t mean the  end of conflicts between social classes. And most of the illusions from the 60s are now gone.

I see these images as part of history. I don’t feel much personal attachment to them. Nonetheless, they are still part of today’s world. The car culture is still contemporary. Why is it still there?