Talent Talk

Speculation is brewing that a legendary sporting name may be about to return to Formula 1.

Bruno Senna, nephew of the great Ayrton Senna, is cutting the mustard in GP2 (the feeder series for Formula 1) and looks set to move onto higher things.

I have just finished reading Michael Masterson’s Ready, Fire, Aim, which takes the reader through the exciting and sometimes perilous stages of business growth.

It’s a great read for anyone with a small, medium or large business (he covers all the stages of growth), and I’d also strongly recommend it to anyone in a managerial position faced with the kind of challenges that all businesses face from time to time.

This Talk is not about business, however. Instead I’m interested in the kind of qualities and skills that Masterson has highlighted which, he says, are essential for success as an entrepreneur.

‘To be nobody but yourself when the world is trying its best night and day to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle any human will fight.’

So wrote the poet EE Cummings.

The quest for authenticity is high on the agenda among social philosophers today. Positive psychology has been in the ascendant for at least two decades now (and rightly so, in my view), while the search for ‘Happiness’ has been making headlines and selling books at an unprecedented rate.

But what exactly did Cummings mean when he wrote that ‘the world’ was trying night and day to make us ’somebody else’?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am guilty.

Not, you may be relieved to know, of any crime or misdemeanour, but of spending big chunks of my working life doing what I love doing, as opposed to working with money as the prime motivator, and being paid for it.

This week I rediscovered how fortunate I have been to do so. Called on to write and submit a witness statement, along with a raft of supporting documents for the court, I emphatically re-learnt something I have known, pretty much all my life, that one’s talents are very specific.

This recent article by the folks over at Harvard has really touched a nerve. Asking why managers don’t think more deeply, the article partly reviews the Zaltmans’ new book on the subject, Marketing Metaphoria. At the time of writing, the article had generated a remarkable 134 responses.

So why the ballyhoo over such a seemingly mundane topic about how deeply we think at work?

There seems to be no obvious explanation. Judging from the responses, a number of people feel quite passionate on the subject and hold management, organisations, and the whole professional landscape squarely responsible for the malaise of ’shallow thinking’.

Happiness is back in vogue.

It has taken some time to happen, two and a half millennia in fact, but the pursuit the Ancient Greek philosophers said was central to human existence had been largely forgotten among the ranks of academia and the general public alike - until recently.

Bestselling books by Tal Ben-Shahar and Martin Seligman have put Happiness firmly back on the agenda. A BBC series late last year on the subject was also a big hit among viewers. Self-help books have for a long time been telling us about ‘The ten best ways to…’ but this is different. The movement taking place now is deeper, and includes top academics who, pointing to research, tell us that the conscious pursuit of Happiness really can change our lives for the better.

TT

Are geniuses born or made?

Made, says the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Performance emphatically.

A good summary of the arguments can be found in this New Scientist article (’How to be a genius’) which argues that anyone can be a genius, so long as certain key factors are in place.

Those factors are: