#78—Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Talent Management in the Age of AI

Thank you for inviting me.

A soccer addict or football as we call it in Argentina where I'm from. And I always say psychology was my second, third or fourth career choice. The first one of course was I wanted to be a soccer player. And as we record this is great times because my country Argentina just won the World Cup. We could do a whole session on that but I'm sure your listeners prefer to talk about strategy.

If I had to characterize it or describe it with one word, I think heroic or poetic. You are a soccer fan yourself and you have been in places where people are crazy about this. But I think to see what it means, there's just nothing rational that can describe the feeling and the sense of togetherness and craziness, which of course begs the question of the limits of rationality and irrationality etc. But I think for me, I'm 47. I was three years old when Argentina won the first World Cup, then 11 on the second. So I have good memories of the 11 one, not so much the first one which also coincided with a brutal military dictatorship in Argentina. To wait 30 plus years and see this now with my kids in the country and have five and a half million people out in the streets. I mean, it's just a very nice and special moment in time that you will never forget. And I think people are still on this high following this victory which also happened in an amazing and very unpredictable way as well.

Exactly. And look, I think one of my main professional interests is talent and leadership. And if you look at this from a perspective of Messi, our captain and main player, it's so interesting. I had written about his inability to develop into a leader in 2014 when we lost the final in that World Cup. And now with far more limited remains of talent and physical fitness, energy, etc., he has grown and developed as a leader and was able to drive his team to victory, which is I think the key piece. It's hard for me to disentangle it from my professional interests because you can talk about strategy and culture and team effectiveness etc. But fundamentally the leadership and the talent part are really remarkable and a really good lesson for people who don't want to give up wherever they are and no matter who they are, because I think that is the lesson.

Oh yeah, it's a very nice case study. We need to think about these things holistically and there are all these different pieces, right? But yeah, if we want to understand Messi as the phenomenon, yes, of course, it starts with a clear strategy. So, the Barcelona of the '90s had a strategy that was to bet on potential, identify people not based on what they have done in the past, but what they could do in the future, bring them along very early, in fact, ridiculously early because this boy was imported to Barcelona at the age of 12 or 13 and he had all these hormonal deficiencies and muscular and physical problems. But fundamentally what developed him was not the treatment but the immersion in the system of values and beliefs and breeding the Barcelona DNA which was also being shaped and developed at the time. So that's when you get the culture, right? And so if we're still repeating Peter Drucker's famous 'culture eats strategy for breakfast' line today, it's because that's how strategies go to fail mostly. And here it's the culture with the talent and the strategy that came together and that also created and made Guardiola, the Barcelona manager, and accounted for all that. So what was interesting for all these years was whether you could re-extract Messi from the Barcelona culture and that system and that strategy and that ecosystem of talent and put him in a fundamentally individualistic and chaotic organization like the Argentine national team and expect results, and that wasn't happening. So he had to find different ways and, if you like, change his strategy for succeeding, and it just about worked out after several attempts, and I think more through sweat and perspiration than through cerebral execution.

This is a great question. You know, I am in the camp that does distinguish between managers and leaders, perhaps mostly because we've accustomed to some basic differences between the two. I think when we talk about somebody who is in a leadership role, we talk about somebody who has more senior responsibilities, who has to contribute more to strategy design than execution, and who achieves by managing other managers, and who should be more focused on working on the business and on the long-term objectives. Even if we just accept the fact that you start as an individual contributor, then become a supervisor, then become a manager, then a manager of managers, then a leader, senior leader, and executive, there are these different levels of a hierarchy that are there. Now psychologically it is also true that people are either more inclined to think strategically or tactically, and I think this is a valid distinction. So you know, you and I might be individual contributors with no managerial responsibilities, but maybe you gravitate towards the big picture. You connect the dots. You think long term and that makes you more strategic, and maybe I have a knack for very detailed, process-driven, in the weeds, granular, tactical execution, and that makes me more of a tactical thinker. I think this distinction is useful, but I do think that what organizations really need and perhaps are starved of is people who can connect both things. People who can actually translate strategy into execution, who can navigate or move comfortably from the strategic end of the spectrum to the tactical end of the spectrum. And unfortunately, I think when we think about chief strategy officers or people who are in a strategy role, they are still associated too much with being in the big picture and engaging in metaphysical ruminations and being too disconnected from operations and from executions etc. So if there's any developmental recommendation for most people in those roles, it's pay attention to the details. Don't be lazy. Don't be sloppy. Understand the value of disciplined, rigorous process and connect with the people who are at the forefront of driving the execution of strategy, because otherwise you're just going to be seen like a crazy guru or philosopher who is a waste of time and a cost rather than a value to the organization.