Talent Risk

By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

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In the corporate risk workshops that I run for senior managers, talent risk is becoming a growing topic of concern.  Talent risk takes many forms.  One of the obvious ones that always comes up is the roll-off of retiring boomers and the need to replace them in the corporate ranks.  However there is another talent risk that I believe is just as important – the risk that the next generation of managers is one of the most highly educated – in terms of university education – but there is an unintended risk that this new generation of students has been trained to think to a standard, rather than to think critically.  Sometimes too much education can be stifling.  Let me try to explain.

Business schools, like most things these days are becoming more and more regulated – although we do not call it regulation in academia; we call it accreditation.  Basically accreditation forces a professor to a large degree to teach to an approved syllabus.  The syllabus of course is approved by the accreditation board, which in turn is basing its standards on best practices.  However, as in most cases, what passes for best practice in academia is what in reality was appropriate best practice for 10 to 20 years ago.  Furthermore, part of best practice is to mark to a rubric – which the good professors, and the best students dislike with a passion.

Added to this is the increasing competition amongst students for the best grades.  When it seems everyone has an advanced education, such advanced education is no longer sufficient by itself to allow one to stand out from the crowd.  Thus students strive to stand out by their grades.  Of course the curse of grade inflation is well known, but what is perhaps not known as well is that many students become proficient at getting good grades by becoming proficient at working to a rubric.

While critical thinking is ever more essential for business success, working to a rubric produces less critical thinking.  In fact I might argue that rubrics kill critical thinking.  As a result business schools are producing students that know many things, but are short on the ability to think about much at all.

A related fact of most business schools is the homogeneity of their students.  Yes, I know that schools strive to insure that each cohort of students comes from a variety of experiences, and of course a variety of ethnic backgrounds.  While there is most certainly identity diversity in business schools, there is often much less cognitive diversity.  MBA students in particular have often studied the same subjects in undergraduate (often business), and come to graduate school in business with a very similar set of hopes, dreams and expectations.  They have often worked in similar type analyst roles in the two to five years experience that are usual needed for acceptance, and they dress, act and talk in surprisingly similar manner at the traditional orientation activities.  Even the speeches at orientation at the different schools all seem to be fungible (you are the best of the best, you were chosen from the select few, you will be transformed over the next two years, you will make great friends and professional relationships for life, etc. etc. etc.)

It thus should not a surprise that the students more or less lose some of their initial limited individuality at the inception of their B-school experience, and become even more homogenous when they graduate.  This creates a talent risk.

The teaching to rubrics accelerates and accentuates this trend to uniformity.  The students, most highly driven, mainly learn to succeed in business school by learning to conform to the brain dead rubric.  Thus the final product of a B-school education is often an individual who has in essence learned to succeed to become a new age “yes-man” – one who has learned to quickly learn and obey the rubric.

This I believe is the biggest talent risk.  While employers do not want all of their employees all going off in wild directions, the reality is that too much conformity, too little cognitive diversity, too little critical thinking, and too little ability to be creative is perhaps the biggest, and growing talent risk.

I realize that not everyone agrees with me – especially many of my academic peers.  That is ok – in fact that is preferable.  If we all agree, then we are really in trouble.

Apologies for such a long blog.