Talent Is Beautiful
Ask yourself
Does every person have the capacity to be creative?
Do you ever doubt your talent?
How often?
Do you strive to be unique?
Or is uniqueness overrated?
Is inspiration overrated?
What does it take for you to reach a flow state?
What is your favorite color?
What horrible experiences (if any) influence your work?
Where do you find beauty?
Do you place hidden messages in your work?
Does it help or hurt to have a creative rival?
Is it important to know what the end result will look/sound/feel like?
Is there a correlation between the work you’ve made that you’re most proud of and how well it’s performed commercially?
What does fearlessness get you?
Takes on talent by our talent
1. Talent is transformation
Talent without hard work is nothing. But without talent everything looks like nothing. Talent is universally admired both inside and outside of the criteria of commercial success. Talent is beautiful per se.
So business commodified it in the form of talent management—the HR practice that broke talent down, first into jobs, then into skills.
But more recently, skills have begun to seem a bit quaint. The pandemic and its effects on the workplace have shifted our notion of talent even further: from technical mastery to the “whole person,” from action driven by external goals to more inward-looking character study, including traits such as active learning, resilience, and stress tolerance. Moving beyond a narrow skill-based notion of talent, companies are increasingly looking for cultural matches based on shared purpose and (often progressive) values. The late former president and CEO of Porsche, Peter Schutz, said: “Hire character, train skill,” and his credo has gained relevance. Talent is character, and work ethos and personal ethics are expected to go hand in hand.
While a person’s ethics need to be firm and consistent, other aspects of their character needn’t. Instead of soft skills, soft personalities are in-demand as even the greatest subject-matter experts or managers try to figure out their role in a movie they haven’t seen before. The future of work will be driven by personalities that are moldable.
Underlying all these is a quality crucial for artists and actors, now relevant for all professions: imagination. Workers need the moral imagination to see their role in the world in relation to others, and the artistic imagination that supports transformation.
It no longer suffices for companies to create workplaces where employees can bring their “full selves.” We need workplaces that enable employees to become different versions of themselves.
For ultimately talent is just that: the capacity to become somebody else.
—Tim Leberecht, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business
2. Talent is micro-talents
“I don’t have enough talent” may be one of the bravest affirmations one can make. Or perhaps it is cowardly. It is a recognition of a genetic, intelligence, or capacity failure. But we cannot know with certainty if talent is genetic or as it’s said, comes from the principle of openness.
Then there’s hard work. Or not enough work. Elite musicians like Branford Marsalis would simply say of a performer whose performance disappointed him, “he didn’t do his homework.” You don’t hear musicians say, “he doesn’t have enough talent.” Their concern is whether someone is serious in their commitment to their art.
I guess in many cases individuals don’t try enough. Talent is composed differently for everyone, and it’s made of many micro-talents that contribute to a bigger “talent.” In arts as in sports, you have the muscle talent, or muscle memory. What about the micro-talent of being social, the micro-talent of appearance, of conversation, of connection with an audience, of scouting the best manager, agent, colleagues? Two of the biggest successes of Miles Davis were his talent to create a sound (style) out of his technique problems with the trumpet, and his “talent hunter” talent, as he could scout the best “cats” in town who could help him achieve his musical ideas.
—Mark Aanderud, musical director, House of Beautiful Business
3. We need talent to close the gender gap
The Harvard economist Claudia Goldin has demonstrated that women joining a given profession tends to “reduce the prestige” of that profession; she calls this the “pollution theory of discrimination.” Other research shows that pay starts dropping when women show up. Meanwhile, the latest Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum shows how the global pandemic has contributed to increasing inequality. The longer-term trend of automation and digitization is to blame, plus the overall lack of female talent in high-growth areas including cloud computing, engineering, and data and AI, all technologies used across multiple industries.
Germany has implemented a mandatory boardroom quota for women, which is a promising move on the policy level, and yet also gives me pause. If we truly desire an intersectional, just future of business, the occasional tokenism that may benefit women is most likely part of the price.
So if gender-agnostic talent management were to happen, what would it look like? LinkedIn, positioning itself as the platform that can act as a connector of talents, recently launched a new feature called Economic Graph Data, representing labor market insights drawn from its 740 million members globally. Sue Duke, vice president, head of global public policy and the economic graph team at the company, points out that lack of talent, particularly in tech-related jobs, is not the issue: “We can see very clearly from LinkedIn’s data... that there is a large female talent pool…. And we can also see very clearly that where women have equal skills and equal skill-levelling as men, they are not getting those same opportunities.”
At LinkedIn they’re developing a “skills-based hiring approach” where candidates are assessed based on “skills, transferable skills and potential.” From policy to platform to you: how can you contribute in favor of the talent that will close the gender gap?
—Monika Jiang, head of content and community, House of Beautiful Business
4. As “micropreneurs,” we all need a talent agent now
“Why Every Creator Deserves an Agent” is an interesting thought piece on an utopian vision of collaboration, patronage, and mutual aid (and profit) wherein you might invest in, say, your local barista. It’s by upcoming Concrete Love speaker Luke Burgis.
I love Luke’s ideas, and they dovetail with something that’s been on my mind and also seems to be part of an emerging zeitgeist: the sense that we need to change how we think about talent, including when and where it shows up.
There have always been innately gifted people who don’t develop or even realize their “talent,” as well as people who may not be naturally gifted but nonetheless find a place for themselves among the ranks of those considered talented through stubbornness and hard work. I used to think the former group was tragic—what a waste, right? I thought of my mother, and how she didn’t discover she was a skilled jewelry designer until age 60. Now I’m less sure that it’s so sad—it’s not as if she was mucking around, wasting time, before then—and wondering more whether the greater tragedy is the belief that what she did for decades, which was mainly administrative work, organizing, and caregiving, were not jobs done by people with talent. She herself doubted her intelligence, even seeing her résumé as proof that she wasn’t that bright.
This wonderful piece by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic argues the above with more analytic rigor. As Lowrey sees it, as a culture we deem certain jobs low-skill, and both policymakers and consultants wring their hands about how to “upskill” these jobholders for a demanding 21st century. “The issue is in part semantic,” Lowrey writes:
“The term low-skill as we use it is often derogatory, a socially sanctioned slur Davos types casually lob at millions of American workers, disproportionately Black and Latino, immigrant, and low-income workers. Describing American workers as low-skill also vaults over the discrimination that creates these ‘low-skill’ jobs and pushes certain workers to them.... It is a cancerous little phrase, low-skill. As the pandemic ends and the economy reopens, we need to leave it behind.”
—Megan Hustad, editorial director, House of Beautiful Business
Talent intelligence
A&R and AI
Who’s got it? Whereas the era of A&R was all about scouting and hunting down the latest records, it’s now as simple as plug-and-playing a machine-learning-powered tool like Chartmetric that filters through 1.7 million artists to return a list of artists it deems most likely to have a big career break within the next seven days.
The definition of “success” is shifting with emerging media like TikTok, and along with it the process of A&R as the company explains with a selection of key takeaways shared in a blog post:
We set a numeric threshold that we considered to be a notable-level of success (“Upper Threshold”). Any artist that started below a certain point (“Lower Threshold”) and then passed the Upper Threshold within a Specified Time Frame made it through the first round of filtering.
We wanted artists that “made it” and then stayed there. The second stage of filtering excluded a number of undesirable patterns: “15-minute of famers” that fell back into obscurity quickly, artists that rose and fell repeatedly, and many more.
Because the best upper-threshold for success is subjective (largely varying based on the type of artists you want to find), we created multiple versions. Users are able to pick the thresholds that they feel are the most effective for their use case.
With FN Meka, an AI-powered robot rapper who has nine million followers on TikTok, we can even question the definition of an artist, as Anthony Martini, co-founder of virtual record label Factory New, the company behind FN Meka, does. Particularly when they sell an NFT, a piece of digital artwork, for $6,500, as Martini points out:
“It’s probably the first time in history that an artist is dropping an NFT before releasing actual music, but these are the types of rule-breaking models we’re embracing.”
Martini also fancies accelerating a new type of A&R that can “literally custom-create artists using elements proven to work, greatly increasing the odds of success.” To us that’s reminiscent of the technologically cruder project by conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who used professional polling companies to conduct surveys whereby they created the “most wanted” and “least wanted” paintings for residents of various countries. You can see some of the results here.
Under scrutiny: Emotion AI
Even before the pandemic, AI had been increasingly used during the interview process, and last year brought the rapid growth of virtual recruiting studios and events. Basically, employers screen candidates by having them answer interview questions on a video which is then examined by AI—analyzing language, speech, and facial expressions—to assess the candidate’s cognitive abilities and emotions.
This practice is controversial. HireVue, a leader in the AI-based job screening space, recently dropped its facial analysis feature after facing fierce criticism from privacy advocates (the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint against the company with the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019).
“Facial analysis has never been an independently and scientifically validated predictor of a person‘s ability, capacity or success in a role,” says Merve Hickok, a lecturer and speaker on AI ethics, bias, and governance, and former senior HR leader. “Facial expressions are not universal—they can change due to culture, context, and disabilities—and they can also be gamed,” she points out. “So, accuracy in correctly categorizing an expression is problematic to start with, let alone inferring traits from it.”
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor at Northeastern University and leading expert in the analysis of emotion, agrees: “Just by looking at someone smiling, you can’t really tell anything about them except maybe that they have nice teeth.” She continues: “It is a bad idea to make psychological inferences, and therefore determine people's outcomes, based on facial data alone.”
House Resident and ethnographer Jonathan Cook has also raged against the Emotion AI machine in a series of blog posts. He argues that “Diving into the world of Emotional AI will be like a descent into the quantum realm, where the very act of being measured changes the reality that’s being measured.”
Some regulators have begun to address the issue. A bill in New York City, if it passes, will make it mandatory for employers to inform candidates when they are being assessed by AI, and require them to audit their algorithms at least once a year. An Illinois law goes a step further and requires consent from candidates for analysis of video footage.
And last week, the European Union proposed new far-reaching new AI regulations that would limit facial recognition and other “high-risk” applications, including the use of facial screening in the hiring process.
Genetic testing and talent
Andre Agassi started playing tennis around age four, Elon Musk learned about programming when he was 10, and Arish Fatima, a four-year-old girl from Karachi, Pakistan, just made history by becoming the youngest Microsoft professional.
No doubt, talent must be discovered at a young age in order to accelerate to exceptionalism. What if you could detect your child’s promise from as early as birth with a genetic test that ranges from 10 talent indicators for $160 to a full genome sequence for $4,500?
Aside from the U.S., where companies such as Orig3n and 23andMe offer “child development” tests for genes linked to language, math, and perfect pitch, interest in direct-to-consumer DNA testing for children is growing in Shenzhen, China. Chen Gang, CEO of WeGene, however warns against drawing premature scientific correlations. He had his son’s genome sequenced and is observing what the latest discoveries say about the youngster:
“When my wife and I read some literature on genomics and traits, we check it against our child’s genome, but that is just out of curiosity, we don’t ask our boy to change his interests according to his genome. Currently, I don’t think it is a good idea to promote this kind of talent testing to the public, but I believe due to the rapid development of genomic techniques and AI-based data analysis methods we will have a better understanding of ‘talent’ in the near future.”
To go a step earlier, would you predetermine a child’s talents in a “genetic supermarket” based on CRISPR technology, if you could? Or rather give them the gift of being ungifted?
“Your talent is in your choices.” —legendary acting coach Stella Adler
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