August 26, 2012 2:34 pm
A manifesto for the new rules on human capital
I recently spoke at the World Strategy Forum event in Seoul, where the theme was “The new rules: reframing capitalism”. Predictably, the discussion focused on global financial infrastructure. But, as one of the few non-economist speakers, I instead argued that employment/unemployment is even more affected by the changing nature of work – and the wildly accelerating effectiveness of technology, which is encroaching on activities that employ tens of millions of people, especially in the developed world.
This is, I believe, in the mid to long term, both the number one problem and the number one opportunity for businesses and wider society. But the specifics of what follows were triggered by the debate at the event and were eventually encapsulated in what I grandly call: “A human capital development manifesto at the enterprise and national government level”.
● Maximising what I’ll call “gross domestic development” of the workforce, driven at the level of the individual enterprise, is the primary source of growth, productivity, wealth creation and social stability.
● Development of “human capital” should always be the top priority – albeit a commandment all too often honoured in the breach. But this is an inescapable imperative in an age in which imaginative brain-work is de facto the only plausible survival strategy for individual enterprises of consequence and higher-wage nations in their entirety. Generic “brain-work”, the traditional and dominant white-collar activities that now employ the bulk of us, is increasingly undertaken by exponentially enhanced artificial intelligence applied at ever increasing speed.
● Generals and admirals (and symphony conductors and sports coaches and police) obsess about continuous training. Why is it an almost dead certainty that in a random 30-minute interview with a CEO you are unlikely to hear a word on this? I would hazard a guess that most CEOs see an IT investment as a “strategic necessity”, but training expenses as “a necessary evil”. This must be set on its ear, with training in its broadest sense placed atop the enterprise agenda, on a par with capital expenditures. Moreover, the imaginativeness of the training must be subject to a quantum leap.
● Proposition: the chief “training” officer becomes the top staff job in a business, with a charge equivalent in gravity to that of the chief financial officer or chief information officer.
● It is imperative, and long overdue, that we maximise the rate of development of women leaders at every level. Among other reasons, evidence suggests they are more likely than men to champion the imperative of maximising human asset development.
● The educational infrastructure must be upended to underpin support for the creative jobs that will be more or less the sole basis for employment, economic growth and wealth creation. Central to this would be a dramatically enhanced, appreciated, compensated and accountable role for teachers; teaching should be a career of choice for a nation’s best and brightest. Instilling insatiable curiosity, the foremost attribute of a creative person, is no easy task; but it cannot be avoided if one looks at future definitions of employability.
● Most of us work in smaller enterprises; hence growth objectives based on human capital development must extend even to single-person enterprises. Collective productivity improvement through human capital development among small businesses has an unimaginably large, and undervalued pay-off. Many small businesses appreciate this, but they are typically unprepared to take the steps necessary to engage their employees in seeking improvements in productivity and creative work.
● Associated with the above is a radical reorientation of leadership education and development throughout the enterprise/education/ continuing-education establishment. The MBA and executive education will require open-heart surgery – aimed at shifting focus from finance and marketing to human resources. To deal with the most probable future employment scenarios, leaders will need to be masters of the liberal arts – a clear-cut determinant of responding to the universal need to pursue creative work.
The agenda implied by my “manifesto” is a long way from where we are now. But in my opinion this, or something like it, falls into a category of “not optional”.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012
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