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4 reviews for:
The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
3.23 AVERAGE
4 reviews for:
The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
3.23 AVERAGE
informative
fast-paced
The Talent Delusion is a book on understanding, finding, recognising and developing talent within a modern company. The book opens different propositions on talent and how to discover it, nurture it and develop it for the best results within a company, especially for return on investment. The author repeatedly emphasises the fact that our own intuition is useless when it comes to discovering talent, which is a great premise that more HR professionals should work on. I will definitely come back to my notes from this book in the course of my HR career.
Videos with titles mainly to make you click on the video are clickbait and books with titles mainly to make you pick up the book are pickbait. This book is a pickbait.
The title says 'Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential.' But in the book which has eight chapters, only ONE is about data! Of the other seven, one is about defining talent where the author writes talent=performance-effort. In other words, talent is effortless performance. In the same chapter he writes,
"This rule (a rule he has put forward) equates talent to an individual’s maximum performance, defined as the level of performance .. one can produce .. if one chooses to exert maximum effort. This definition is so intuitive that it is almost unnecessary to discuss it further."
Yes it is very intuitive to call talent 'effortless performance' AND 'performance produced my exerting maximum effort' at the same time. From previous experience with other business books, these apparently impressive equations (talent=performance - effort, revenue-profit= expenses in Profit First) authors come up with are often nothing more than empty gimmicks.
Major portion of the books goes on talking about personality personality and personality. One thing I liked though was highlighting the importance of the dark side of talent, that is, why we need to think about about Machiavellianism, Narcissism and psychopathy too if we want to measure and develop talent. Tomas does a good job at pointing out the flaws of the strengths based personality assessment. But in the chapter about the usage of data and technology, he presents us what he thinks "probably the most comprehensive public version of a scientifically robust gamified assessment, Red Bull’s Wingfinder game" and it is a strengths based assessment.
There was little cohesion among different chapter of the book. He does talk about the importance of the dark side of personalities but no mention of how to incorporate it into data based assessments. The author's view on Lumosity, an online game claiming to boost intellectual abilities also seemed very ambiguous.
The Lumosity app and Red Bull Wingfinder are a small portion of his discussion on data based HR. The other methods he talks about in this section either categorically depend on intruding employee privacy or categorically compromise in accuracy. In one portion the author literally writes this:
"Too often we are quick to criticize computers for being prejudiced when they are only replicating human prejudice, which we happily ignore!"
If computers make the same prejudices as humans, we do not need computers to do the job. Humans should be good enough. This prejudice we're talking about is basically a computer filtering out people based on how 'beautiful' their voice is!
The author does acknowledge that the newer methods he's talking about might not have an acceptable level of accuracy. But he also has a justification for it:
"... accuracy is not the only thing organizations care about. As a matter of fact, many companies and talent management consultants don’t seem to care about accuracy, which explains why the Myers–Briggs test is the most widely used assessment tool in the world."
Since we don't care enough about accuracy, it's fine to go on with less accurate digital methods. If that's the case, why don't we just go on with our less accurate intuitions? The point of incorporating data into HR doesn't make sense if these methods aren't accurate. And given the awfully shallow and disorganized sporadic discussion of using data in HR, putting "Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential" in the title of this book makes no sense either.
The title says 'Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential.' But in the book which has eight chapters, only ONE is about data! Of the other seven, one is about defining talent where the author writes talent=performance-effort. In other words, talent is effortless performance. In the same chapter he writes,
"This rule (a rule he has put forward) equates talent to an individual’s maximum performance, defined as the level of performance .. one can produce .. if one chooses to exert maximum effort. This definition is so intuitive that it is almost unnecessary to discuss it further."
Yes it is very intuitive to call talent 'effortless performance' AND 'performance produced my exerting maximum effort' at the same time. From previous experience with other business books, these apparently impressive equations (talent=performance - effort, revenue-profit= expenses in Profit First) authors come up with are often nothing more than empty gimmicks.
Major portion of the books goes on talking about personality personality and personality. One thing I liked though was highlighting the importance of the dark side of talent, that is, why we need to think about about Machiavellianism, Narcissism and psychopathy too if we want to measure and develop talent. Tomas does a good job at pointing out the flaws of the strengths based personality assessment. But in the chapter about the usage of data and technology, he presents us what he thinks "probably the most comprehensive public version of a scientifically robust gamified assessment, Red Bull’s Wingfinder game" and it is a strengths based assessment.
There was little cohesion among different chapter of the book. He does talk about the importance of the dark side of personalities but no mention of how to incorporate it into data based assessments. The author's view on Lumosity, an online game claiming to boost intellectual abilities also seemed very ambiguous.
The Lumosity app and Red Bull Wingfinder are a small portion of his discussion on data based HR. The other methods he talks about in this section either categorically depend on intruding employee privacy or categorically compromise in accuracy. In one portion the author literally writes this:
"Too often we are quick to criticize computers for being prejudiced when they are only replicating human prejudice, which we happily ignore!"
If computers make the same prejudices as humans, we do not need computers to do the job. Humans should be good enough. This prejudice we're talking about is basically a computer filtering out people based on how 'beautiful' their voice is!
The author does acknowledge that the newer methods he's talking about might not have an acceptable level of accuracy. But he also has a justification for it:
"... accuracy is not the only thing organizations care about. As a matter of fact, many companies and talent management consultants don’t seem to care about accuracy, which explains why the Myers–Briggs test is the most widely used assessment tool in the world."
Since we don't care enough about accuracy, it's fine to go on with less accurate digital methods. If that's the case, why don't we just go on with our less accurate intuitions? The point of incorporating data into HR doesn't make sense if these methods aren't accurate. And given the awfully shallow and disorganized sporadic discussion of using data in HR, putting "Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential" in the title of this book makes no sense either.
This book starts off with a premise I greatly disagree with regarding the concept of talent and connecting it with effortless performance/success. So basically anyone who is dealing with societal bias or intersectional crap, who have to work harder to achieve success, are thus magically not talented, and thus it is ok for the author's talent search company not to identify them for potentially new cool/lucrative jobs.
And the author doesn't really consider that perhaps companies need to be rejigged to enable new groups of people to be successful.
The rest of the book is boring and unremarkable. Employee engagement is important. People's 'negative traits' can be linked to success too.
ETA: for a book about data, the author doesn't spend much time dealing with the issues of systemic bias within most data sets, and for a book about the future of work and 'what to do about a millennial workforce' the author doesn't think much about diversity and inclusion. I mean, suggesting that someone's spotify list would be a good measure of whether they would fit in with the new organization? Great way to get sued, and to hire more of the same.
And the author doesn't really consider that perhaps companies need to be rejigged to enable new groups of people to be successful.
The rest of the book is boring and unremarkable. Employee engagement is important. People's 'negative traits' can be linked to success too.
ETA: for a book about data, the author doesn't spend much time dealing with the issues of systemic bias within most data sets, and for a book about the future of work and 'what to do about a millennial workforce' the author doesn't think much about diversity and inclusion. I mean, suggesting that someone's spotify list would be a good measure of whether they would fit in with the new organization? Great way to get sued, and to hire more of the same.