I shared yesterday three types of employees I want for the modern organization. Different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are the second trio:
4. Synthesizers
I suggest you stop hiring for analytical skills, salami cutting experts and extreme specialists of little bits. Whether it’s big data, small data or in between data, what we are lacking is people who can make sense, extract meaning, not who can read the parts and pontificate. We are seriously short of synthesizers (not the keyboard things) We don’t distinguish signal and noise any more. These people do exist, but are hard to find. Our education systems do not produce them.
5. Designers
Of ideas, departments, products, services, teams, campaigns, social movements, structures, networks, dialogues ,conversations, processes, HR policies, strategy. Also buildings. It is a mentality. A way of seeing . Certainly not a commercialised process. At the cost of annoying friends and irritate people -I know that for a fact- I confess my inability to understand the glorified surge of ‘Design Thinking’. Believe me, I have tried.
6. Re-inventors of wheels
Oh boy! How annoying this may be! How many times I have heard, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. How many times I have used this expression myself. I have changed my mind. I think the wheel needs to be reinvented as a counter-epidemic of Cut-And-Paste. Cut-And-Paste ideas, presentations, off the shelf answers, the-ways-we-have-always-done-it, templates, SOPs, follow the process. I want people who can reinvent a wheel. Who can look at alternatives and reinventions. Who can come back and say, I have tried to reinvent that wheel, and, you know what, our wheel seems pretty good, so we should keep it.