Growing Wisdom

The Goal of People Talent Professionals

Strategic failures abounded over the past 2 decades: corporate goliaths fell; “body-less” cyber companies become profitable and popular; conventional corporate strategies turned on their heads; legacy core strengths transforms overnight into weaknesses; intense “red ocean” competitions turns bloody; “blue oceans” quickly turns pinkish, becomes bruised purple before turning red ….. Exactly, what went wrong?

Knowing what we now understand to be continuous uncertainties and ambiguities in the operational space between the present here and distant there in the future, and where the only viable strategic responses are agility and flexibility, the most effective talent management response is human wisdom, referring to that boundless synergy of human cognitive, reflective and affective abilities.

The knowledge economy today replaces hitherto robot-like manufacturing workers with relationship workers in the fast-growing service industries. Leaders, managers, and workers alike are expected to anticipate and deliver consistently excellent services within a narrow 6-sigma band. Globally, technological innovation in mobility and communications also rapidly accelerates the tsunamic digital transformation of the marketplace and workplace, empowering the multiplication of social networks between peers, between strangers, and between business2consumers/businesses.

Engaging the confluence of timing, context, and capability to occupy strategic space requires wisdom. Even as learning and development (L&D) professionals have kept pace with new programs to parch organisational and talent needs of the emergent globally networked knowledge economy, the proliferation of L&D professionals, training literature, strategy consultants and strategy formulation tools have not prepared companies for the onslaught of change.

And as human talents are laid off by the thousands in traditional responses to economic downturns, it aggravates a looming talent management crisis through the associated loss of wisdom, which is a core tacit knowledge resident in the human talent within the organization. Replacing this lost wisdom is most difficult and well nigh impossible.

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