Talent like flowing water

It is quite common to see companies apply the maxim "if something has worked well, why changing it?”. Thus, they perform an extraordinary financial and organizational effort to hire qualified people who land with experience and initiative but who, unfortunately, are finally unable to apply. Why? Well… Usually due to some executives or senior managers who, established on a solid past or probably present success, consider that risking with any new idea may not be cost-effective.

This formulation may have worked in the past, but nowadays it implies an enormous jeopardy. The business world moves at a vertiginous speed, like it has never done before. Consumers’ settings and contact points constantly proliferate at an unusual speed. Products increasingly fragment at an unexpected pace, aimed at ever more-reduced niches.

Talent is like flowing water. I invite you to visualize it as a huge waterfall wrapped up by the paradisiacal surroundings of the potential exuberant vegetation of the market. In this scenario, the executive’s role is to conceal and retain this precious liquid in a relatively small environment in order to make a profitable use of it.

Problems arise when this environment remains hermetically sealed for too long. Past and actual successes, like fish in a not-big enough pond, end up becoming the cause of its deterioration. Water stagnates and loses its freshness, oxygen extinguishes and it all turns up to be something you need to get rid of.

Talent needs an escape route towards which it may grow and create, even exceeding the traditional limits of the pond. A watercourse through which it may flow and descend, in search of new pools, even huge seas. This phenomenon allows for idea renovation, business environment re-oxygenation and, quite often, the discovery of new business lines never even imagined before.

Satisfying this need is now more important than ever, not only because it is the sole way to be constantly updated, but actually in order to become an active player in the creation of new ways of making business, new means to contact the consumer, new market niches.

To put an example, I could point out that not that many companies would willingly accept their marketing director’s proposal of opening a virtual island in Second Life. First, in Spain, like in many other countries, because they most likely do not quite understand what it is, even though they may have heard about it. Second because, in the best of cases, if they do, they have probably read the hundreds of articles that question the profitability of business established in this virtual world. But, most important, because it is a life fact that most seniors do not have the same capacity of vision as juniors do. Somehow it is something that, like muscles, tends to lose its flexibility.

As we grow older, it becomes more and more difficult for us to see the world through the eyes of our youngsters. The eyes of those who already infer that Matrix is not such a far-off concept from our current time, and that the parallel worlds of metaverses are already a reality. And so it is (four us?) to understand that regardless of their present commercial return, having a presence in these worlds implies starting a dialog with our clients of the future.

Henry Ford used to say that he did neither need to be extremely intelligent nor an expert in order to success in business. He said he had enough with having a vision and surrounding himself by people who were rich in the talents he lacked.

Successful executives are those who allow the water of other minds ' ideas flow (ok, not in a chaotic way) off the limits of their traditional way of doing business. Only this way they may benefit from people’s talent and vision: by listening to their proposals no matter how absurd they may seem and, to sum up, to let the water of their ideas flow full of freshness and life.