Neil retired earlier this year, having spent his working life in the sector, and we asked for his view on changes over that time. in response, neil highlights one significant shift he has observed, sharing his view that it is important to align ambition with intelligence and skills.
When I was asked to write a reflective piece for FON on my time in the industry, I was reticent. Who would be interested in my nostalgic ramblings? And time moves on, people change.
So, instead of a trawl through the archives of the last five decades, perhaps I can share something which fascinates and irks me in equal measure. That is, answers to the question posed monthly in FON’s In Profile feature: what is more important, talent or ambition?
It may seem innocuous, but the fact that a majority of respondents favour ambition over talent seems to me to reflect a fundamental change in both attitudes and recruitment practices over my working life.
What is talent?
The question is, in itself, highly subjective: what even is talent? The dictionary defines it as ‘a natural or special skill or faculty, or having a high mental ability’. It is probably worth pausing to consider this.
It could be argued that having and managing ambition is a talent. I sense too that, for some, ambition is a retrospective concept based on perceived achievements. Can you have talent without having ambition? Of course! Can you be ambitious without having talent? Clearly! And I’m sure we’ve all worked with people whose ambition knew no bounds, and who climbed the greasy pole seemingly without having much to offer or by making much of a contribution, no matter how loud their voice.
It seems increasingly commonplace that there are those with ambition who don’t remain in place long enough to actually make a difference – good or bad – but who are nonetheless, by dint of presence or contacts book, deemed to be successful.
Context is everything, of course, and let’s not confuse talent with academic education – recognisable and useful skills are also talent. Talent should define the ‘whole person’, encompassing (for example) understanding, competence, values, attitude, behaviour, problem solving ability, clarity of thinking and, above all, credibility.
Whichever way the In Profile question is answered, individual personal success factors will have had an overriding influence. Someone who has exceeded expectations based on traditional benchmarks and their personal environment is likely to believe it is ambition that got them their rewards. Although I would like to hope and believe that there was also an element of ‘talent’ along the way.
We do, however, live in an age where, as the actor Tom Courtenay observed, a lack of talent doesn’t necessarily hold people back, and ignorance is not necessarily a disadvantage. The desire to acquire personal knowledge and the incentive to go out and learn and acquire multiple skills is now much diminished. In short, we have made it easier for people without talent to achieve, driven, perhaps, by the internet and AI, with knowledge ‘on tap’. But ‘knowledge’ is only as good as the person accessing it; for the most part, the internet provides an answer or a shortcut not an education.
Is this good or bad?
It’s definitely good for the individual who can succeed and meet their goals with neither effort nor application, nor, perhaps, even a basic education, but what does that mean for businesses and society? In other sectors (e.g. sport) this situation would be laughable. Why is the word ‘elite’ (for example) encouraged and used widely in sport, and yet in virtually every other walk of life, it is derided as signifying privilege and division. We should not be ashamed to nurture talent.
Regardless, perhaps this is where ambition does trump talent. If talent is devalued and those with it no longer command respect or are even marginalised, then we end up with people who succeed simply by being bothered, by grasping opportunity and by ‘playing the game’ – a game from which they may previously have felt excluded. And, as they rise through the ranks, it is this mentality that prevails; like begets like and it becomes the cultural norm. This results in those with real talent, competence and perception switching off, becoming cynical and stepping aside to find something more rewarding to do, leaving behind the enthusiastic amateurs. It becomes a race to the bottom.
Does this stem, I wonder, from the desire to facilitate a wider aspirational pool? By definition, this always results in a drop in standards and lowering the attainment bar does nothing for the advancement of society or of business.
How does this effect the type of people we employ, and does it matter?
The chemical company DuPont has a strategy of ‘continual re-invention’. This could not be sustained without having talented, innovative people throughout their business over many years. In the same vein, Tom Peters, one of the original management gurus (look him up, he’s on YouTube and an entertaining speaker), talks about organisations needing to be in constant readiness to abandon everything they do. To do this, he advocates promoting excellence and hiring interesting and curious people with opinions, who can teach you something and add to the business. In short, educated and talented individuals. Peters even wrote a whole book on just this topic.
So, who is the best person for the job?
I had a long and happy spell with Baker Hughes (BH). At the time when vision statements, mission statements and statements of core values were de rigueur, BH was proud to boast that “we will hire the best people”. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what does ‘best’ mean? It is almost as subjective as ‘what is talent’? One of my former VPs defined ‘best’ as “someone I like”, which, of course, led to a degree of sycophancy, which I was actively encouraged to demonstrate. A fine example of knowing what to kiss, whose to kiss and when to kiss it! For the record, I was singularly unsuccessful at managing upwards!
Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chair of Ogilvy, the advertising agency, has a slightly different take on talent, recruitment and promotion:
“Talent has nothing to do with advancement. It is argued that perhaps only 20% of people got their jobs on merit alone. The vast majority are there because: 1. They are mates or mates of mates of the boss; 2. They improve the demographic (young, ethnic and female trumps old, white and male every time); 3. They have been around the industry for years and we couldn’t let them go to the opposition no matter how useless they actually are.”
In the incestuous world of the oil industry, how many of us can argue with any of what he says?
Many work environments are now overrun with procedures, protocols and policies – it seems we now have to write down and codify that which should be intuitive, whether day-to-day activities or basic standards of behaviour.
It should concern us that companies are being wrongly judged in terms of their value, output and quality based on their list of accreditations and compliances, no matter how flaky these may be or how little they are understood by those asking for them. There are businesses out there making good money exploiting this ignorance.
There are, of course, policies and procedures that arise from a need to standardise and ensure continuity, but how have we allowed other less reputable schemes and protocols to proliferate and even become enshrined in law as measures of public policy, competence and high standard? Is it self-protection? Job creation? Commercialism? Or is it the need to legislate for inadequate, inappropriate and transient people? Any fool can complicate matters, but it takes someone special to retain or recapture simplicity and integrity.
As Peter Drucker said: “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
The truly aspirational, who have properly applied themselves, perhaps in adversity, are amongst the best of us. We need entrepreneurs and disruptors; we need people with vision and the confidence to challenge the accepted norms; we need people with drive; we need people with the willingness and the ability to make things happen and get things done. What we don’t need is people for whom ambition itself is a raison d’etre; people looking for short term gain, who chase the money or the title; those seeking to become practitioners and decision makers without the necessary hard or soft skills, or who even see their lack of core competence as a badge of honour. Regrettably, there are plenty of these people around.
This is not an essay decrying ambition. More, I hope, it is a piece that suggests that we, as a society and a business group, need to channel and align ambition with intelligence and skills for the general good.
Noel Coward died in 1973, so I’m guessing this quote comes from the early 1970s:
“I have a core of sadness for England; sadness mixed with an irritation that a country so rich in tradition and achievement should betray itself, submitting to foolish government, woolly thinking and, above all, the new religion of mediocrity”
Who would argue against the same being said 50 years later?
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m firmly in the talent camp!
Image provided by Neil Ryding
