"We're all in the talent business"

Recently I heard Walt Jocketty, the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, give a luncheon presentation in St. Louis. He had just flown back to St. Louis from a game in Los Angeles the night before. He arrived in St. Louis around 6 AM. His voice was almost gone as he spoke to the audience. His opening line was, "We're in the talent business." He went on to explain how every aspect of the Cardinals is focused on putting the best possible team on the field. He explained the Cardinals approach to scouting, free agency, and following up on every lead. He has an outfielder, So Taguchi, from Japan, an infielder who played poorly for years in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, but whom blossomed with the Cardinals, another infielder he found from Dave Stewart, one of manager Tony LaRussa's former players, and an infielder from a small town in Indiana. Their best pitcher, Chris Carpenter, sat out the year before he joined the Cardinals with an injury. And they found their superstar, Albert Pujols, at a high school in Kansas City. No one else went after him.

Over the past two seasons the Cardinals have won over 200 games.

In essence, Jocketty gave the finest speech I've ever heard about finding talent. His point was that the most important job in any organization is to attract and retain talent. In clear and vivid terms, he explained how you have to look into every nook and cranny to find talent. He didn't say the player had to come from a certain geographic area or have a certain background. He said he simply looked for talent that could play together and compete for a championship.

It quickly dawned on me that every organization is in the talent business. Talent is the capacity to help your organization add more value to customers and generate significant, sustainable and profitable growth.

We live in a society obsessed with labels: men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, extraverts, introverts, tall people, short people, fat people, skinny people, number crunchers, a people person, gay, straight, liberal, conservative, atheist, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Christian, Baptist, Muslim, etc., etc. However, none of those labels mean anything relative to whether or not they are talented. I'll never forget the time another consultant wanted to work with me on a strategy project and she asked for my Myers-Briggs personality type so she could match me up with a corresponding personality type in her office. Yipes, I went running away.

I encourage you to toss out the labels and search for talent. Now some people might read that and say, "Fine, let's go back to the 1950s and just have white males make up my entire organization. Since labels don't matter, let's not bother trying to have a diverse workforce." I would say just the opposite. If you want to compete in the current world of digitization, globalization, outsourcing, insourcing, opensourcing, supply chain management, and informing that Tom Friedman talks about in "The World Is Flat," you best learn to look for talent under every imaginable label. Personally, I have worked with or observed first-hand enormously talented people whom have an endless list of labels. Thirty years ago an organization in the U.S. could thrive while not looking for talent regardless of the label. But folks the world has changed. The American Century has become the Global Century. The Information Economy gave way to The Creative Economy when Google democratized information. What you need now is an army of talented people who can figure out how to add more value to your customers. That army should not depend on any label other than the label that says talent.

Identify the characteristics you want in your employees. Here are characteristics I hear people mention frequently: technically strong, honest, acts with integrity, stays customer-focused, can collaborate with others to generate a desired outcome, willing to search for best ideas in other industries, can stay focused long enough to get the job done well, can effectively influence others, and is open to improving as an individual and as a group member.

Notice that none of those characteristics have anything to do with gender, race, height, size, geographic area, culture, sexual orientation, or spiritual orientation. The goal is to attract and retain as much talent as you possibly can. The organizations that do will continue to thrive in the years to come.

Job one: find talent!

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

Accelerate Update This section is always current to the current month

I suppose every book changes an author's life to a certain degree. My first book, which was self-published in 1995, was called Inside Out: A Catalyst for Conscious Living. It's out of print now for a number of good reasons. The layout, which yours truly did, looks like something a first grader could do today. And the ideas are very theoretical, which doesn't fit my approach anymore. However, I read the book a few months ago, and I was pleased by how clearly I had explained my early thoughts on improving performance.

My second book, Corporate Catalysts: How to Make Your Company More Successful, Whatever Your Title, Income, or Authority was published in 2005 by Career Press. That book was a step forward in clarifying my ideas on improving performance and understanding how to write a whole book. It's one thing to dream about getting a book contract and another thing to write a 70,000 word manuscript.

My third book, ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Momentum, which was published in May 2007 by Kaplan Publishing, has changed my business dramatically. Up until that book was published, I mostly did projects for four companies: McDonald's, Marriott, GSD&M, and Toyota. In the past 12 months, I've worked with business owners, executives, and managers within dozens of small, medium, and massive organizations in more than 20 industries ranging from boats to banks to software to financial services to trucking to lighting to home healthcare to hospitals to optometrists. It's been an exciting adventure.

If you want to see my speaking calendar for 2008, which we'll try to update every two weeks, please click here.

Currently, I have 66 speeches scheduled for 2008. If you would like for me to speak at one of your events in 2008 or 2009, feel free to contact me at dan@thecoughlincompany.com and I will be glad to see if we can make it work.

If you want to see my speaking topics and a video of footage from some of my keynote speeches, please click here.

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