Not so. The latest edition of The Economist has run a story on an ingenious scientific experiment that has sought to do just that - with fascinating results. The story can be read here.

For my own part I think this offers a real breakthrough for management science. For too long it has languished in a pseudo-conceptual mire where very little of the real culture of an organisation is quantifiable, and the secrets of an effective human resource - which accounts for a huge competitive difference between companies - remain a mystery.

The 'blink' school of management, where employees are recommended to use their intuition, simply cannot work in large-scale organisations where feedback of what is effective is essential so that those  ideas, actions and behaviours can be replicated easily.

This is the space I feel Waber's and Pentland's study can occupy. Using their technology and approach companies could, for example:

Talent Talk

• Adapt their corporate cultures to local ones, ensuring employee engagement across diverse cultures.
• Discover linkages between corporate effectiveness and employee behaviour, then drill down and identify the causes of these.
• Manage the many 'intangibles' including employee selection and engagement, linking these to financial outcomes.

Of course many people might find this all a bit scary, but I would consider such studies in the light of trying to achieve a harmonious and dynamic working environment, where everyone stands to gain. It's really little different to a doctor's stethoscope, only on a much grander scale. The alternative however is to continue with overbearing bosses, processes and concepts that may have little or nothing to do with reality. Science like this, properly-used, is surely positive.

Talent Talk

'It's a company that really really cares for its employees…'

'What I love about working here is the energy of the people. People are so motivated and have so many ideas…'

'People come from all over the country to work here…'

These are just some of the comments offered by the staff of Google's new wunderoffice in Zurich. And it's not only insiders who have been raving about the place - industry professionals also have taken their hats off to the dynamic and liberating corporate culture achieved by the company.

So in a time when many of us in Asia are complaining about the talent crunch, employee disengagement and staff turnover - is there anything we can learn from the innovative design of their office and attitude towards their own people?

This Talk has collected a  number of photographs from Google Zurich and we are delighted to present to you, dear reader, the office of the present…

The meeting room…

Preparing for a presentation

The corporate ladder

The project meeting

Management silos

The local cafe

The office waiting room

Having a creative and refreshing workplace is not in itself the golden grail of employee engagement. However it goes a long way towards creating the kind of environment that boosts productivity, spurs innovation and encourages great communication and enhanced commitment.

Google itself invited the wrath of Wall Street analysts last year due to its rising costs (many relating to its staff) but it has clearly calculated these are not costs but an investment, and it would be interesting to compare their human capital figures with those of their competitors.

I would be very surprised if their human capital strategy isn't already paying dividends. But don't take my word for it, here is what the employees think…

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.

You might wonder why this is the subject of the latest Talent Talk.

After all, many sporting prodigies have followed in their family's footsteps. Nelson Piquet junior and Christian Fiitipaldi (both from Brazil) are just two, but there are numerous examples where there are those who follow their family to the highest level in a sport.

What is interesting with Bruno Senna's situation is that he hung up his helmet when he was 10 - banned, it is said, by his father after the shock of Ayrton Senna's car crash and death at Imola.

Bruno did not get in the saddle again until he was 20: a gap that many would say would be a catastrophic blow to anyone's chances of success in a sport in our hyper-competitive day and age.

Within that age bracket, Lewis Hamilton (who is younger) had already won a number of grands prix and came within a whisker of being crowned Formula One Champion.

Yet, in spite of his ten year hiatus from the sport, Bruno is on the verge of entering the top flight. How is this possible given his extended absence?

Talent, as we know, is a result of the hardwiring of our brain pretty much fully-formed in us by the age of about 15. Some of it is hereditary (DNA / nature). Some of it is due to our early experiences (nurture).

Much of talent is truly 'instinct'. Someone who is talented and applies effort and discipline to his or her tasks, and when those tasks match the talent, will almost always gain greater results than someone who is merely disciplined in that area (but lacks the talent). Perhaps depressingly, someone who is talented in an area and applies zero discipline and effort will also usually gain better results than the person who is untalented in that area even if they are disciplined!

Hence the expression 'form is temporary, class is permanent.'

Highlands offers individuals the opportunity to identify their talents objectively. It would be fascinating to take readings from families where success is passed down to see if there are correlations.

Motorsport is a curious combination of physical and mental attributes. For example, from the physical, one's body would need to be well-adapted to withstand the huge G-force around corners, as well as have lightning quick reactions and motor abilities.

The mental attributes (which Highlands captures) essential for success in motorsport would include, I would imagine, high rhythm memory and pitch discrimination (timing, braking) as well as spacial relations visualisation and theory.

Research conducted over the decades has shown that these factors are hardwired and do not change much over time, nor can they be markedly improved through training. This might explain why Bruno Senna was able to return to competitive racing without the loss of his ability.

It will be fascinating to see whether Bruno will be able to ascend the heights of late, great Ayrton Senna.

As his uncle said: 'If you think I'm good, just wait until you see my nephew.'

We certainly hope he is proved right.

It's a familiar cry in companies, and often comes from the CEO. But the sorry fact is that innovation is something many companies do not do particularly well.

This may come as a surprise to the casual observer, since many of these companies spend tens of millions of dollars in targeted recruitment every year - but fast forward to the year end, and the situation remains stubbornly the same. A lack of innovation.

The Big Deal about Innovation

Why should these companies care anyway? It's a good question. Take Big Oil, for example. What could any of these companies possibly innovate that wuld make a measurable difference to their bottom line? Nothing in the 'sunrise industries' of Green Energy comes close to the profitability of refining and selling oil.

But even in this industry, nobody wants to lose out in the search for the 'next big thing' once oil stocks are gone. And there are plenty of examples where innovative thinking can literally create a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Food is one area that may not strike us as offering stellar returns from innovation. Yet the Big Mac was created by a franchisee and remains, to this day, the most successful (and profitable) consumer product ever. Many of 3M's most successful innovations came from employees not directly responsible for product innovation, while Apple's 'siloisation' of its innovation (read 'keep the beancounters out!') arguably makes it the only company that can be called a brand in today's mass consumer electronics industry.

At the top end, meanwhile, Bang and Olufsen defies gravity by placing all its chips in the hands of top designers. This strategy has served it well. In an indusry where products are often obsolete within two years, B&O still has items in its catalogue selling well that date back to the 1960s.

Survivor

Survey after survey place innovation (or the lack of it) high up on the list of critical issues among CEOs in their companies.

Yet look at what companies do, and it's little wonder why this is the case. A favourite approach is to have 'innovation core values', 'innovation competencies' and 'innovation KPIs'. To the casual observer, this might make sense. Yet peel back the layers of the onion and we begin to question this approach.

First of all, companies usually don't have a way of hiring candidates for innovation. In fact, most companies' selection methods are remarkably uncorrelated to the kind of behaviours CEOs keep saying they want. Put simply, they boil down to two approaches.

Approach 1 is the popularity contest approach, where the most likeable person gets in. Likeability might be important in some areas, but it tends to be quite marginally correlated to innovation.

Approach 2 is the 'trial by rigour approach'. Here it is more of a case of 'Survivor', where the most determined candidate hangs on through trials of form-filling, interviews and so on, as well as hopefully ticking the box in other areas which are also not necessarily correlated, for example which university the candidate went to, or how much experience he or she has had.

The trouble with these approaches is that, in themselves, they don't assess innovation.

Worse, both these approaches tend to suit and breed conformism, which is usually a trait most innovators find frustrating.

All the above approaches form part of the architecture most companies use for their talent management. To summarise: 1. Core values. 2. Competencies. 3. KPIs, and 4. Conformity (and being a non-conformist myself I call the above the 4Cs). Let's look at these in further detail:

1. Core values. Kouzes & Posner have discovered that having core values can actually be a negative factor if they are not congruent with those of the employee (because cynicism sets in). Having an 'innovation' core value is meaningless unles those in the organisation take the right actions to encourage a climate of innovation and, more importantly, a talent management system that attracts, nurtures and rewards innovators.

2. Competencies. These are unscientific and unnatural. No wonder they create confusion. Quick question: if you see a psychiatrist, does he or she diagnose your condition in terms of competencies? Of course not. This is because competencies are an artificial basket of skills, knowledge and behaviour that bear no scientific relation or use to the human being.

Still, senior management somehow seem to think that by having them employees will somehow acquire those traits. Nothing is further from the truth. Behaviours at work heavily derive from natural abilities, which are hardwired. I also find it remarkable when I see 'innovation' or 'creativity' competencies in companies when they do nothing to assess these traits at their selection process (often because they have no idea how to do so).

3. KPIs. Some companies have KPIs where they expect individuals, teams or business units to come up with ideas. This approach may have some merit to it, though I wonder how likely it is to expect a positive effect in some types of firms, for example auditing companies.

4. Conformism. Conformism is a real danger to innovation, is contagious, and costly.

Take Sony, for example. Its Walkman was a breakthrough product in the 80s and 90s and helped earn the company tens of billions of dollars in bottom-line profits. So why is it not a brand now? Simply becasue the engineering department pushed the 'mini disk' concept, even though that's not what consumers wanted. The company continued to do so, with the result that when Apple eventually came along with its digital alternative (the IPOD), Sony effectively gifted this lucrative profit stream to their rival. All this because of the closed minds or 'structural thinkers' in one department.

'Structural thinkers' exist in many companies. Structural thinkers are very useful at processing repeated tasks (for example ensuring Walkmans are on the shelves in every retail outlet in a country), but change that task to 'dream up an alternative to the Walkman' and structural thinkers are at sea. That's where non-structural thinkers (or innovators) come in handy. But often due to points 2 (competencies) and 4 (conformity) above, organisations unwittingly drive innovators away. Structural thinkers proliferate, and because there is no incentive to hire innovators, they will often in turn look for people who 'fit' (being structural themselves) so it's not difficult to see how a creeping 'genocide' can take place in a company. Slowly but surely, you see structural thinkers filling the ranks of these cmpanies with innovators forced out.

Where Ideas Come From

Some say that ideation is a skill, and can be trained.

I agree, but this can happen only to a small degree.

To understand ideation, we need to start with the formation of the brain. As the brain grows, it makes synaptic connections which, as we mature, become like the hard wiring of the 'electrical system' in our 'house'. All information in our brain is channelled through these wires, so how they have been 'laid' greatly determines our talents - and ideation is one of these.

This is supported by Research conducted by the Johnson O'Connor Institute which has shown that ideation is a natural ability - something that will change very little regardless of any amount of training. Training can make a person susceptible to ideas, but it's unlikely to increase a person's idea productivity by any meaningful amount.

This also explains the problem with competencies. No amount of them will lead to change in a area of talent (for example ideation), nor, try as they might, will they be able to make a rose grow blue petals.

What companies can do to nurture innovation

If the above strikes a chord, companies need to take only two actions to encourage innovation.

1. Use the Highlands Ability Battery for employee selection, with especial focus on those who score highly in Idea Productivity.

2. Scrap artificial constructs (like competencies) that get in the way of real innovation. Ensure your talent management system supports innovators at every stage of their career. Talent Technologies creates TMS's for companies in a number of different industries which are innovation-friendly.

Companies often rely too much on directives when people are the true source of innovation. The more companies connect to their employees' natural abilities, the more effectively will they be at building an 'inno-culture'.

If there ever was an epithet that sums up the failings of capitalism, Warren Buffett's comes pretty close.

In previous Talks we've looked at the make-up of entrepreneurs and the impact of 'The System' on one's individual talent. In this Talk we combine the two themes and ask whether the way the economic system is run rewards the right values. Does the economic system encourage creation, a 'preparing of the meal', or does it lend itself to incrementalism, a 'scraping the crumbs off the table'?

Feed, Fed, Fed

The starting point is inevitably corporate America, and particularly its supposed guardian, the Fed.

George Bush recently came on record to say that America had got drunk in the last few years, and I'm sure that we all find his analogy interesting given that George Bush has been in this time effectively the barman and the Fed, the brewery.

In economic terms, he was happy to keep serving up cheap beer while the Fed continued to fill the pumps, the result of which is the current hangover. And I'm sure the strongest drinkers will need more than a few alka seltzers to get over it.

All this is very interesting, because it's not gone unnoticed that those involved in running the Fed, including the top brass of JP Morgan and others (the identity of these folk are supposedly a secret) have done spectaculary well out of America's misfortunes. Last year the senior management of JP Morgan took home record bonuses, and more than the whole company made in profits. This begs the question whether they could even be trusted to run a local co-op, let alone the icon of American capitalism.

This raises two more questions. The first is whether the top brass of the likes of JP Morgan deserved the financial rewards they have been receiving. The second is whether the Fed has really encouraged wealth creation or parasitism - the baking of the cake or sweeping up of the crumbs?

'Let them eat cake' - Part Two

America is going through no revolution. Its system is too well-developed for that. But it's worth recalling a time when, in spite of an economic downturn, the rich continued to get richer and the poor slid ever more surely towards poverty.

A great example is the French Revolution, and when they ascended the throne, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette said that they were doing so too soon, and feared they were not prepared for the challenge. Such modesty, doomed as perhaps it was, would certainly be welcome in such places as modern-day Wall Street, where you're never likely to get so much as a qualified apology for the greed and incompetence that has been a hallmark of the last twelve months.

The French King and Queen were woefully out of touch, certainly a consequence of the system they had been born into, and while Marie Antoinette never said 'let them eat cake', on many occasions she attended social events with her hair coiffured as one, the effort of which took ten courtiers.

Today's Wall Street though has created a layer cake of its own, and it comes in the form of a derivatives market some say exceed $500 trillion. As impressive an achievement as this may sound, when you peel back the layers you will notice that much of this has been built of the 'crumbs' Warren Buffet spoke of, and the proof of this is apparent as the derivatives market comes tumbling down.

Many in Wall Street will have you believe that this is a cyclical event, and has little to do with individual choices and actions, but I beg to differ.

Burning Bush

Rewind to January 2001, and the picture was very different. I'm sure many Americans now look back to that time as if it were a golden age. The Clinton administration had left the economy in a reasonably strong state, with record gains in productivity, a healthy fiscal position and a balanced budget. And, above all, with a sound dollar.

It's this last factor that, eight years from now, many will in turn look back and say was George Bush's single greatest failure. America is only in the early stage of a slide which will cause widespread job losses and in many communities poverty, coupled with a drastic loss of spending power. America has, in short, got poorer, and will continue to do so in relative terms for years to come. Some drinking binge!

This happened because, early on in George Bush's first presidency, he departed (in collusion with senior Fed officials) from the sound money policy practised to such good effect by President Clinton. In usual cases it would have been an 'okay folks, I think you've had enough to drink' from the barman. And there would have been the odd hospitalisation. But what has happened since at least 2006 has been greater and greater encouragement to get seriously drunk, some would say to a reckless level, and now we have almost everyone who is leaving the bar in such a sorry state that they are getting run over - all because those running the Establishment were serving their own agendas.

The problems facing the American economy is not entirely a human factor, but I would say the values, strategies and decisions taken by the Fed, the US Government and Wall Street largely determined the recession America is now going through. I am no doubt that the loss of a sound dollar will be seen as George Bush's greatest folly in years to come.

The System

Confronted with this view (it is only a view), some Americans may feel a certain despair.

Many may feel hard done by, because while 'the System' has rewarded those who have been reckless, greedy and incompetent, many of those who have been thrifty have been punished, and continue to be punished, by a double whammy. Their savings are being watered down by inflation, while their purchasing power has been chopped in half as the dollar collapses against almost every other currency.

All this because a small and unrepresentative group of politicians, financiers, businessmen and officials have embarked on an economic programme that favoured incrementalism - the crumbs, and their own self-interest - rather than true wealth creation for the benefit of all Amaericans. Adam Smith said it: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." A conspiracy it has been. The loser has been those who have had similar values to those of Warren Buffet.

The Human Factor

History is cyclical, and during downturns you will notice that many analysts and mainstream economists attribute the misfortune to factors beyond their control. Namely 'the increasing prices of commodities' and so on. They forget that much of those increases have been caused by the weakness of the dollar itself.

What I find interesting is the damage the 'human factor' has caused, and, from a system point of view, Wall Street and the Fed seem to attract and promote those who scrape crumbs rather than bake the cake.

It's this factor which is in my view central to America's ability to 'bounce back'. It's essentially a matter of talent management. America's institutions and leading businesses need to do more to hire the kind of people who care about 'baking the cake'.

In the next Talk we'll look at how that can be done, with especial emphasis on innovation and value-creation.

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.

He classifies these as follows:

*

1. 'You need to be able to correctly identify the most important challenge, opportunity, or problem you face at any given time'
2. Coming up with ideas
3. Selling products
4. Managing systems
5. Developing superstars
6. Taking action

These may seem fairly straightforward, but Masterson's guidance is that we need to be good at the above (not just mediocre or passable) if we want to have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

He offers these criteria based on his extensive experience building a number of companies, as well as consulting entrepreneurs in many others. All in all, I would say he's in a great position to give advice!

What I find interesting is whether anyone can be an entrepreneur, so long as they develop the above skills, or whether there is something more to it than that - whether entrepreneurs are in fact 'born and bred'.

Skills or Talents?

We return to the age-old debate of whether entrepreneurs are born or made. This time, however, I would like to bring some science to the table. That science is the near-century's worth of study carried out by the Johnson O'Connor Institute and made easily available through the Highlands Ability Battery.

This research started shortly after the end of World War One. Dr Johnson O'Connor was interested in performance differentials first of all among assembly line workers. The company he worked for (GE) could train and train their operatives but stubborn performance differences would remain. How could you account for this? O'Connor's research discovered that this performance differential boiled down to one thing: finger dexterity. His research also discovered that this was a 'talent' - something people either had or didn't have, to which training would make hardly any difference.

The 'human engineering project' was born.

In the course of the years that followed, Dr Johnson O'Connor as well as other psychologists tested and studied areas of talents and natural abilities in humans. The results can be seen here.

All of the areas in the chart are abilities we either have or haven't got. They relate to the hardwiring in our brains and, it is argued, cannot be easily trained or changed. In short, they are us and the research has shown we are better off acknowledging the effect our talents have on us instead of trying to buck the trend.

The Entrepreneur's Talents

The research conducted by the Johnson O'Connor Institute and incorporated into Highlands has indicated that the following natural abilities are advantageous to anyone with aspirations of becoming and entrepreneur. They are:

1. Specialist

Entrepreneurs have a tendency of being specialists (as opposed to generalists) as they will need to go 'deep' into their subject matter (or business) in order to fully understand it.

A preference to be either a specialist or generalist is elemental within us and isn't something that can be trained.

2. Extrovert

There are many entrepreneurs who are introverts (Bill Gates and Howard Hughes being just two), but generally speaking, most entrepreneurs get their energy from people and hence tend to be extroverts. This is a 'personal style' factor rather than a talent, but it is an important characteristic which cannot be overlooked.

3. Time Frame Orientation

This is a crucial factor in entrepreneurship. Do you need instant results, or can you create a vision and work patiently towards it, even in the face of setbacks or pressure to deliver results?

Most entrepreneurs have at least a mid-range time frame orientation (2 years or more) and this makes sense as most start-ups don't yield much success before that timescale.

4. Idea Productivity

Research carried out by the Johnson O'Connor Institute has shown that there are three natural abilities we may use when problem-solving: classification, concept organization and idea productivity.

The latter is essential to the entrepreneur. It's point 2 of Michael Masterson's list but I doubt it's just a skill. Ideation is greatly hardwired and it's unlikely that someone without this talent will be able to come up with the volume or quality of ideas that an entrepreneur frequently has to call on to surmount seemingly impossible challenges.

While strong concept organization may help with his point 4 (managing systems), idea productivity, or the ability to come up with ideas easily, is essential to most entrepreneurs' likelihood of success.

The importance of great partners and teams

Clearly, if you lack any of the above talents, you can still be successful. Sheer effort and discipline may help, but research has also shown if you are striving in areas of natural weakness (i.e. where you don't have any natural abilities) you are likely to lose energy and feel stressed as a result.

This is where bringing in a partner can help, and identifying your partner's talent set is important. A good match is someone who has talents in areas you may lack. This factor is frequently overlooked but is crucial - relationship factors are, in my experience, of central importance to the success of a small business.

It would be great to hear from any of you whether the categories above apply at all to your personal situation - please feel free to give feedback!

Yours, Nick

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'?

In their book Don't Waste Your Talent, Dr Bob McDonald and Don Hutcheson described many of us being trapped in 'the lemming conspiracy' (Tal Ben Shahar in Happier calls it 'the Rat Race'). They describe us as having two selves - our 'true selves' and our 'system selves'. The pull of the Lemming Conspiracy makes us lose our True Self and replace it with our System Self. This is turn sucks us into a 'stress cycle' which feeds off itself, taking us further and further away from our True Self.

The question is - how can we escape the pull of our System Self?

McDonald and Hutcheson advocate renewing the systems around us, by going through an eight-step process. One of these steps includes identifying our talents.

Recent studies conducted by Gallup have found that only 18% of the people in the global workforce agree with the statement that 'they get the opportunity to do what they do best every day'.

The upshot of this is that most of us are in jobs that do not use our talents - and are essentially willing to place our 'system self' before our 'true self'. Identifying and using our talents is central to the experience of living our True Selves, since most of us will spend most of our lives at work. Yet so many of us are unaware of our talents, how to discover them, and how to use them.

What the System taught us

This goes back to our time at school. Learning, growth, progress - that was a process of gaining knowledge and some skills, and passing a bunch of exams. Many of us were already in the grip of the Lemming Conspiracy then, when somehow we came to believe that better grades made us a better person.

The System reinforces this when companies hire based on qualifications (as opposed to talent, or natural abilities) and assume that this correlates with performance. In spite of overwhelming evidence that it does not, many companies continue with this practice.

And, in spite of overwhelming evidence that learning without reference to the learner's innate abilities (created by their hardwiring or synaptic connections pretty much fully-formed by the time we reach our mid-teens) is unproductive, too many schools and curricula continue in this way.

The Empire strikes back

I'm amazed at how many people are unaware of the above. Even Peter Drucker, writing forty years ago, was taken aback when he wrote that 'Most people think they know what they are good at… they are usually wrong', and 'Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.'

The practice of people working in jobs that do not give them the opportunity to do what they do best is bad business both for the individual and the company. The individual gets demotivated and disengaged (as studies have shown) and the company gets significantly lower levels of productivity… yet both soldier along without really addressing or recognising this sorry state of affairs.

It is akin to buying a DVD player, and using it to wash the dishes. Not good for the DVD player, and not good for the owner either!

So what can you do to rediscover your True Self in the midst of this institutionalised stupidity?

The first recommendation I would make is to discover your talents in a structured, scientific way using the Highlands Ability Battery (contact us here for more details).

Once you have done so, you can zero in on those tasks that use your talents and reduce those that do not. This is essential as the work experience takes up most of our lives.

Don't Waste Your Talent has some great exercises to reconnect your True Self to supportive (rather than destructive) systems which include anchoring the change with your family.

The central point made by Hutcheson and McDonald is that change can only happen if we work at the systems all around us. As EE Cummings wrote, the world is pulling us away from our true selves. By discovering our talents we can start the process where we can allow it to pull us towards them.

Is my job helping me fulfil my potential? Do I have the opportunity to use my talents every day? Is my work engaging my strengths?

These are the questions that we ask ourselves from time to time and are central to our experience in the world of work. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review picks up on these questions, with some advice on how to reach our potential.

Writing in the latest issue, Robert Kaplan shares his view that it's important not only to identify our strengths, but also to become aware of our weaknesses.

A previous article here on Talent Talk (Drucker: Focus on Strengths) stressed the importance of strengths and how few people are aware of their own strengths, let alone their weaknesses.

Robert Kaplan gives some useful tips on how to do this: through asking your team members in a structured way. You could almost call this approach 'an informal 360° feedback session'.

This is nothing new, and we recommend the approach wholeheartedely. The problem with asking others is that you're going to get at best behavioural feedback, and not really feedback about your strengths.

As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet ' We know what we are, but not what we may be'. This tension is very often the cause of stress and unproductive behaviours simply because we may feel we are not fulfilling our potential, or even what that potential is.

It's important to be clear about this. Our behaviours are so often an effect of our talents being used or neglected (and the combination of our talents with skills and knowledge, our strengths), rather than an end in themselves. So let's say that your team members have given you feedback that you are often impatient or frustrated - recieved wisdom would be to try to take actions to 'fix' those weaknesses.

This may be helpful sometimes. But usually these behaviours are due to an underlying cause: that you are not working in areas that play to your strengths. In this case it's important to treat the cause, not the symptoms.

This brings us back to the importance of identifying our true strengths, which we discover through our talents and natural abilities.

The question is: how do we do this?

Highlands has an excellent tool which zeroes in on our natural abilities. Developed over ninety years, the Highlands Ability Battery is scientific and offers a validated way of identifying these 'underlying causes', which are our talents.

What is great about the Battery is that you can also find out whether your job is really right for you.

It's as simple as this: once you have completed the Battery, you will get a set of scores which tells you which natural abilities you have. A 'low' score in any one of these abilities is an indicator of an ability in another area.

A Report follows, and this gives recommendations as to what kind of professions and activities you are likely to excel at.

I have been able to help people, using Highlands, identify exactly the kind of activities that play to their strengths - and also those that constantly work their weaknesses. Removing the latter and enhancing the former is the central key to job satisfaction.

If someone has more than three weaknesses they do on a daily basis, then the job is not right for them. Usually, it's not a case of changing job, but remoulding it to the person's strengths, then managing out the weaknesses. But if the job's very structure plays to a person's weaknesses then the likelihood is that a change of focus is needed.

In many cases I have heard the 'negative behaviours' then becoming a thing of the past. This is because our talents are essentially our synapses - the hardwiring of our nervous system - and if we are in harmony with these synapses then a lot of stress is removed.

Highlands is a scientific approach to finding out if our job match is strong. I always find it fascinating when I read these articles in places like the Harvard Business Review, but it's always worth bearing in mind that with Highlands there is a very simple solution.

It now involves Manchester United and Real Madrid, two of football's most successful teams; FIFA, the governing body; and one man, a prodigious talent by the name of Cristiano Ronaldo.

Let's start with Ronaldo. Two years ago, few people had heard of him. Manchester United picked him up from Sporting Lisbon for just over £12m. Many people, arch talent-spotter Arsene Wenger himself included, thought that a tad expensive for a kid with untried ability.

But Manchester United's manager Sir Alex Ferguson took a gamble on the transfer and it worked. Ronaldo scored a record 42 goals last season (for a midfielder) and was the bane of every team he faced. Which leads to Real Madrid. For wherever there is tried and tested talent, this club are not far behind.

The recent European Championships were overshadowed by gossip as to whether Ronaldo was going to join Real Madrid or not. The row is taking place because his own intentions are unclear, Manchester United don't want to sell him, and, here's the rub… he's under a contract with four years still to run.

Now, if you or I had a contract to do something, I am sure that, if you entered into it freely and were aware of all that it involved, you would honour it. Moreso if that contract was paying you a whopping £120,000 (or over $200,000) a week. Enter FIFA.

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FIFA is football's world governing body and supposed to protect the interests of the sport. Sepp Blatter, the man in the hot seat, yesterday came out with an astonishing diatrabe comparing Cristiano Ronaldo's situation to slavery and that Manchester United should 'let him leave'. It is all the more remarkable because Ronaldo hasn't purportedly asked his Club for a transfer and Blatter, no stranger to primadonnaship, has got himself into an argument that could turn the sport into anarchy.

Blatter's argument essentially means contracts should be irrelevant. If that were the case, let's look at the matter from the other side of the coin. If the player had an injury that would put him out of action for three years, would the Club be justified in ripping up the contract paying him £120,000 a week?

Blatter's outburst makes me wonder how some of these institutions are run. Based on hearsay, his statement has no place for a man in his position of responsibility. Throughout the above saga, Real Madrid have also been arguably 'tapping up' the player, to try to engineer a move, but it is notoriously difficult to prove this kind of behaviour. For Blatter to come down on the wrong side of these issues many would regard as a disgrace.

But the real outrage is how Mr Blatter can claim there is slavery in modern football when the 'plight' of these modern footballers on £120,000 a week or more cannot be compared to modern-day slavery, which is a very serious and understated global problem.

The real slavery or servitude that exists is in the modern institutions themselves and those who run them (including FIA, the motorsport federation, whose President is involved in litigation concerning allegations of his involvement in Nazi-style orgies) and the way that they seem to drift into a situation where they become totally unrepresentative of the people whom they are meant to serve.

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.

Writing does not come especially hard to me. However, this kind of writing I found almost impossible. Witness statements involve reading what other witness statements have said and rebutting them, referring to evidence, assembling evidence, mixing logic, narrative and classification, and working with detail… ugh!

I believe I did a reasonable job, but members of the Court should know that I loathed every minute of it.

Yet, as the saying goes, 'one man's meat is another man's murder', and I'm sure there are millions of people in the world who would have revelled in that challenge. And not because they were paid, but because it engaged the sum of their talents.

Let me share with you what has really happened this last week for me. Essentially, my whole life changed. I woke up dreading the mornings. My blood pressure and stress levels escalated. I had to take many more breaks. I had to pep talk myself to get the job done. In other words, I had to 'motivate' myself.

You might think this is strange. We all have to 'motivate' ourselves, right? And there are thousands of 'how to' books telling us how to do it.

This is not the case according to the research carried out by Dr Johnson O'Connor and available in the Highlands Ability Battery, as well as much of the new findings of the Happiness Brigade and positive psychology movement.

The long and the short of it is that we all have our hardwiring in place (these form as synaptic connections in the brain - think circuitry in a building) by the time we reach our mid-teens, and among other things these determine what tasks we can do best, naturally, effortlessly, almost by magic, and how we can best do those tasks. Education doesn't teach us to find these abilities. Education teaches us skills and knowledge, which can build on these, but never replace them. The trouble is, education does so uniformally for all people. So if a class learns maths, they all learn the same thing together, rather than starting with the individual's abilities and working up.

A simple analogy is like building a house on rock or sand. If what you learn (skills and knowledge) and what you practise and do is built on your natural abilities, you are building on ROCK and building strengths. But if your skills and knowledge is not built on your abilities and talents, than you are building on SAND and either building on your weaknesses or trying to fix them.

So you are probably wondering - what has all this to do with motivation?

The point is this: the research carried out by the Johnson O'Connor Institute and positive psychology movement has shown that when we do what we do best (ie using our innate talents) we tend to be less stressed and also feel a greater sense of satisfaction.

That is to say, discovering your talents and working to them and making that part of your life is a natural motivator. A virtual spiral is created within you which feeds on its own natural energy.

This is what I rediscovered this last week. Because while I have been doing a lot of writing and reading, it left me absolutely stone cold. Lacking the internal feelings of motivation that I've been getting, I had to resort to external measures, like short-range goal-setting, self-motivation and at times sheer will and determination, in order to accomplish my tasks. My output went down. Five long days produced ten pages of A4. Normally, I would be able to reel that off in a day, almost without effort.

And, as I said, when I was done there was no sense of accomplishment at all, just an emptiness devoid of meaning.

To me this goes to show that discovering one's talents is a real motivator that is completely intrinsic, that doesn't deplete, and works like an abundant fountain, always being refreshed.

Not all of us are fortunate to be able to work to our talents, but we can try. The first step is identifying them and that is why I am a great advocate of the Highlands Ability Battery.

In future posts we'll look at what talents lend themselves to which kind of tasks - and why that is.

Now, where are those documents…?