Talents and personal destiny

I will announce a new workshop: 'Discovering your talents.' As so often, once you are into a subject, you meet entries and references at unsuspected places. A fortnight ago I was at the book presentation of 'Coporate Entity,' the posthumous life work of Karel DeVries, who was a colleague and partner in Ansoff Joele Associates, consultants in strategic management. His book is about the corporation as an entity with its own personality and its own life forces. A healthy corporation contributes to its stakeholders, internal and external. Its managers and employees contribute to the corporation. Viable systems within viable systems.

The whole of nested systems is more or less alive, it is vital. Individual vitality and individual contributions rest on the talents of the people involved, having functions in which they can express those talents. It is the responsibility of people to maximize the use of their talents. Their talents determine where they fit. So, in the view of DeVries, Talents are destiny.

This is interesting when we compare it with the well-known dictum: Character is destiny. This is used mainly to explain failures and apparent bad luck as the consequence of character flaws. But also that successes and apparent good-luck are to a large extent the consequence of good character. We have many - also very recent - examples of public figures whose careers crashed by character flaws.

But we can also look at careers from the point of view of talents. Now exactly what are your talents? What can you do better than most people? What can you do better than almost anybody? What can you possibly do better than anybody in the world? Or, more to the point: what can you do while being perfectly in flow? Reflecting on this is more useful, as it avoids clumsy comparisons and avoids ego inflation, a condition less common, but more irritating to others than ego deflation. Less than a century ago, Alfred Adler coined the terns inferiority complex and superiority complex. When you are in flow, you hardly care about how good you are and you don't care s.... (you know what) about how good others are.

Your talents are not necessarily what people say they are or what you think they are. They are in where you are in flow. One of my favorite quotes is from Tom Peters: Real success comes from the soul and the market place simultaneously. How about that as a definition what in flow really means? In flow with yourself and with the world at the same time. Of course. Realizing that this is what it is, is a blinding flash of the obvious.

Anyway, discovering and freeing your talents is the surprising twin to market intelligence.

Effectiveness is a miracle

I am busy preparing with colleagues a program on transformational leadership. Pretty pretentious. What does really transform a business, a mission, a work situation?
I remember a client, a Brazilian engineering firm, who, in the seventies, spent 1,5 million dollars on a motivation program for its employees by a prominent US consultancy firm. What difference did it make? Half a year later, bosses and employees couldn't tell.
I think of seminars I attended by famous authors. What did I really learn from them? From a lecture by Carl Rogers I just remembered one example he gave. That example stuck in my mind and taught me something.
I recently met a Finnish colleague. In the early eighties I gave a workshop for his new consultancy firm how to do strategic consultancy. He remembered only two things I taught them. Interestingly, those were exactly the only two items I remembered teaching them. At least, I didn't teach them wrong things, because they became the premium strategic consultancy firm in Finland. But the encounter reinforced my general impression that teaching that is not part of the real daily work, has a moot chance of being remembered or, more important, having effectively improved practical work. Therefore, I am a great fan of Action Learning. If people have been to a 3-year MBA-program and they are asked years later what it meant to them, quite a few mention first and foremost the contacts and business relations they won, not the course content.

Though I don't come across as a particularly modest person, I have always felt very modest about the real and durable effects of my seminars, training programs and consultancy assignments. I am relieved when I hear years later that at least some people had some real benefit.
Few subjects are more important than leadership. Few subjects are more slippery and more intangible. So to start a program on leadership that really will make work situations more effective, more meaningful, more rewarding and more successful, is pretty pretentious.
I want to concentrate on the few interventions and exercises that at least have helped some managers or some consultants in my experience. I did (and I still do sometimes) with a colleague a program called 'Management and Intuition.' How more intangible can you get? To my amazement, I got the highest evaluations on any management program I ever did, on the item I expected it least: practical applicability. That taught me something.
Once a prospective client asked an other manager what kind of a consultant I was. The answer was "a no-nonsense consultant." That was a great compliment, especially because I deal in intangibles: strategy, mission, leadership. If a new type of gearbox in a car is nonsense, it wont survive the test phase. But in consultancy and coaching the difference between meaningful and meaningless, effective and ineffective is much more difficult to establish. And it may change between one person and the next, one situation and the next.

I want to present a program that is effective. That may be pretentious, but that's my ambition.
I think I am about ready. I will blog and tweet about it when it's presentable.

Meanwhile, if you have any experience of a lesson you learned that really changed your way of working, share it in a reaction to this blog. Others may learn from it, I may learn from it.