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Published on 2025-06-10 23:45:00 | words: 5844
This article has been standing by for a while, as a concept.
Actually, if you look at this website, you will find 64 articles and plenty of posts on Facebook and Linkedin about talent and talent management in the XXI century.
On this website, I left online only what was posted since 2012, albeit you can also access a 2013 reprint of my 2023-2005 e-zine on change (that was part of my plan to return to Italy, abandoned in 2005, when I decided that after London would be better Brussels- did not know that it was the Berlin of post-Cold War, and that my curious knowledge-based career across Europe would raise brows).
Otherwise, on Facebook you can see posts since 2007, and on Lindedin since at least 2009, and also a book that was an evolution of a book on commission, about integrating social media in business activities.
I will eventually resurrect also the articles from 2008 that are now offline, but also material that I prepared as position papers decades ago for customers, on cultural transition and talent management.
Specifically on talent management, a decade ago instead published something close to the subject of this article, #SynSpec - XXI Century Expert Team Building and Management (vol. 1 of "Connecting the Dots") ISBN 978-1499798074 2014-07-26.
Few days ago, on Linkedin shared this comment:
I will share a more personal side and collection of cameos later this week on my monthly blog
What are those 64 articles? Mostly about talent management from the business side.
But, after a short historical and cultural reference, this article will be on the other side of the equation: the talent perspective on talent management in the XXI century.
Or, at least, my view on the subject based on my business and business-like experience since the 1980s across cultures, businesses, countries, and, of course, business domains and businesses.
Few sections:
_ the old balance of knowledge
_ intra moenia, extra moenia
_ a different social contract
_ moving forward
The old balance of knowledge
When we talk about talents and companies, often the framework of reference is a direct (mild) evolution of post-WWII 1950s corporations, but reality was more complex even before the 2020s.
Yes, the mythical "Organization Man", described in a 1950s book- a cog in a larger wheel, which was jokingly represented within a funny movie about corporate life and corporate succession, The Hudsucker Proxy.
Corporations, and their legal status, within human history are a relatively recent way to organize workforce and production.
Long before the Industrial Revolution, we had already ways to organize mass production, e.g. ships from Carthage as in the famous retelling about how Rome became a seafaring entity after retrieving a wrecked Carthaginian ship that had its parts marked to allow easy assembly and replacement (Lego ante-litteram- see a similar example of construction techniques from a shipwreck recovered in 1969).
So, mass production and also specialization plus work breakdown structure, that often many assume were inventions of the industrial era, did exist before.
What evolved in the XX and XXI century (so far) was the relationship between work and workers- no, I am not going to echo or even quote Marx or Piketty: interesting, but different Weltanschauung.
Yes, WWI was the first real mass-production conflict of the industrial era, but it also generated, along with WWII, consequences in the way we organized work, and mutual expectations of the roles of employees and employers.
In the late XX century, the knowledge content of many occupations increased at a faster pace than before- and that pace is accelerating, courtesy of the easier access to facilities to connect knowledge.
Yes, the Internet but also our globalization and supranational entities that ensure global sharing of domain-specific knowledge, e.g. UN agencies.
Which should imply continuous learning for most jobs.
In the past, often knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation, and work did not necessarily imply a free choice.
Talent? Did not necessarily imply having the recognition that our sportspeople, musicians, writers, actors, etc are used to.
I could go back in centuries, e.g. when in Ancient Rome talents were sometimes not really free men, and used to train the next generation of their owners.
Or further back, to the trial of Socrates- where his talent was part of his damnation (read here, but could suggest a few books- including, of course, the "Apology" by Plato, and more modern fare).
Anyway, to make a long story short, will jump in time to few centuries ago in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, when owning the land implied also owning the people dwelling on that land- up to deciding who could move, who should be married, ownership, etc.
Shift to Renaissance, and some areas in Italy (Piedmont, my birthplace, included) still took a while to drop the "servitù della gleba", something that e.g. Bologna dropped centuries before Renaissance.
It seems ancient history, but old habits still linger on, just change form of representation within some concepts of employment.
For example, I consider "zero hours contracts", that first heard of in UK, and then saw in the early 2000s in Italy, just a transformation of indentured servitude.
If you do not know what I mean: are contract where the employee or external workforce commit to unpaid exclusivity for a definite amount of time, but are paid only if and when asked to formally work.
Actually, I saw just last year a similar offer: 24/7 availability to the CEO, but paid as a freelance only for the hours effectively worked.
A more ordinary modern incarnation is the concept of hiring out of school, and keeping until retirement, as if each company were a microcosm of truth separated from the world.
Which, in company towns, sometimes took on unusual consequences, as if people "belonged" to the territory.
Personally and through others, since I was made to return in Italy in 2012, repeatedly heard as if switching job were a treason or could generate negative consequences (but I saw that also in the late 1980s, in my birthplace).
Annoying if you started working in a company in your first job and then decided that you could have better opportunities elsewhere, puzzling if you are actually bringing along with you decades of experience that you developed elsewhere as a result of a significant investment, both personal and from those your worked with.
Anyway, as I wrote above, old habits.
In the 1980s, before officially started working from 1990 on cultural and organizational change for my own customers, and then for a couple of years to develop a business within a company, before again working with my own customers (in Italy and abroad), saw instead a small chink in the old corporate corporate habits armor.
Or: companies hired external talent to cope with technological and business changes (remember that, at least in Italy, the 1980s were not just when PCs started appearing on desks, but, in many cases, was the first phase of digital transformation- moving from typewriting machines to computer keyboards, also in the State administration).
If you have a knowledge need, you cannot wait to develop it, when technology or regulatory frameworks change once or twice a year: you scout the market for already available talent.
Unfortunately, in many cases, following a pure "hire to retire" instinct, companies assumed that their knowledge, experience, talent was crystallized, and did not require any (expensive maintenance).
As I said to customers in the 1990s, if you hire a talent because brings a specific mix of expertise and mindset (what, in my view, should be talent in a corporate environment- ivory tower geniuses who disdain thinking about consequences, including commercial and implementation, should be a "common", not an employee), and then do not provide "fuel to the fire" (activities to keep applying that talent, and opportunities to evolve)...
... in our times (remember, was saying so in the 1990s to early 2000s) you risk transforming an expensively acquired asset into a liability.
Still, companies had way too often the "our way of doing things" mindset- assuming that form was more important than impacts, and piling layer upon layer of minutiae reinvented in each company to achieve the same result, up to renaming standard regulatory or accounting lingo.
Side-effect: a tunnel vision that basically implied that really anybody entering should be a "tabula rasa"- wasting tons of hours just to restart from the basics.
Anyway, since the 1980s I saw changes- albeit still overlapping with old habits.
Hence, after this introduction blending the corporate and talent "universes", time to shift to the purpose of the article.
Intra moenia, extra moenia
The 2000s and 2000s brought about a flourishing of compliance, regulations, etc- each one with its own lingo.
All those elements then converted into "certifications" for experts on each specific slice.
Certifications do not replace experience, and, actually, could be detrimental if, being the result of a committee choice on what is sensible by those who have both knowledge and experience, somebody were to learn "chapter and verse" without understanding the underlying rationale or choices, and then try to implement it verbatim.
To paraphrase: resistance to compliance is futile, but verbatim compliance coupled with ignorance of the organizations' strengths and weaknesses is a march to folly (a book that most people in decision-making roles should be compelled to read, to pre-empt falling prey of biases, and then piling up more biases to avoid reversing bad choices).
Anyway, there is a silver lining: increasingly, working across multiple companies in different industries and countries between the late 1980s and the early 2020s, saw "domain specific lingo associated to compliance and standardization" spread around.
Up to the point that, beside those instincts to reinvent lingo and bureaucracy just to show that you had a structure, interoperability of talent became increasingly feasible.
Or: if you have a specific talent (again, blend of expertise and mindset), chances are that in the 2010s and 2020s you could work with multiple customers not just on merely operational activities, but also on strategic issues, with minimal "acclimatization".
Which is what both I and others were doing already in the 1990s, usually having either the customer or other colleagues provide the "contextual" information needed to avoid what I called above "march of folly".
It would require a book to discuss then talent retention, but, frankly, the purpose of this article is to discuss talent management from the talent side.
True, there are still (for now) many activities within any organization large enough to require repetitive work that require instructions, maybe limited induction training, and then very limited on-the-job training, to start producing results, and do that until a further low-cost update is needed.
Anyway, if those activities are desk-bound activities, are increasingly going to be replaceable.
Including many of those that for now still cannot be automated due to the lack of manual dexterity of cobots and robots.
And the more we automate (at the current status of AI capabilities), the more orchestration of human and automation-assisted activities will become critical.
Moreover, not just critical, but one of the few complex activities that will require continuous investment in updating, relearning, unlearning, learning.
The title of this section will be immediately familiar for my Italian readers: yes, it is in Latin- but means just "within the walls" and "outside the walls".
In Italy, over the last few decades has been applied to allow doctors use public structures to deliver private services to customers, so that they will keep working also within the public sector, as we have a shortage of doctors and medical staff (in a country whose inhabitants are getting older and older).
Within the context of this article, it is actually a recognition of the current state of affairs, and an evolution of what I wrote in the past (e.g. 2003-2005 and 2015-2016), leading to a modest proposal that is really an evolution of the concept of "sabbatical".
Even many occupations that are based on structured, repetitive processes and procedures, while will be gradually replaced by an evolution of current automation capabilities, will generate a gap in capabilities that will be filled by specific talent.
Talent that will not be needed on a continuous basis, but on-demand, maybe even identified by those orchestrating or involved in redesigning processes from scratch to benefit from the true potential of our current state of technological and social development.
Because, as shown during the COVID crisis, as a society we routinely jump the gun due to lack of preparedness: going lean meant in many venues of social life going "skeleton force"- but this approach to was a routine also in the 1980s and 1990s, not just during a major pandemic.
As it is easier to transform a process digitally "as is" than to redesign it according to the new capabilities.
As I wrote in previous articles, in the 1980s and 1990s (and frankly even in the 2000s-2020s) I kept finding processes that had been "digitally transformed", but really were the digital edition of pre-existing manual processes, sometimes going back centuries (in Italy, also millennia).
What did deliver digital transformation? Often the capabilities to add more data points within each task.
So, when hand-written, paper-based processes might require four-five pages, at most with a typewriting machine and printed in three copies, having a keyboard and a screen allowed to multiply questions, data points, data history, and, of course, pages- with gusto.
In other cases, it wasn't just the pages- it was the offices that, courtesy of the intrinsic traceability and ease of audit activities via non-modifiable information, made layer upon layer of oversight and segregation of duties irrelevant, or at least potentially enable streamlining, downsizing, etc.
So, the current state of affairs is that we have often talent is hired and then put into a straightjacket of procedures and rules to be followed manually across multiple systems, each one (be it corporate, State, local authority, or government agency) slicing and dicing information.
Multiple layers of overhead that do not allow talent to optimize their delivery unless they are "in the known": hence, hiring talent that you would need really occasionally but assume to be easier to manage on payroll.
Which, as I said to customer already decades ago, was, it is worth repeating, an expensive way to get something useful in its current status, and then doing everything to make it obsolete while still formally "gate keeping" a specific domain.
An expert in A hired and acknowledged to be an expert in A often would react to any proposal to switch from A to B by showing more reasons to stick with A.
Once becomes an employee, could leverage also on the knowledge (by now) of the internal culture and rituals, often condemning the organization that hired that expert to stick to obsolete choices.
In the first half of the 1990s, for legal reasons, as a freelance in Italy I had multiple customers, and with each customer where I was a management consultant of course "embedded" in their culture.
Which implies: assessment, understanding, and suggesting adapting before adopting whatever I contributed- including looking for internal resources within the customer who could take on the concept, and planning on each mission my own phase-out.
As my customers and partners were both in Italy and abroad, and across multiple industries, had the chance to compare different cultures and reactions plus interactions with the same elements.
There are cases when I suggested hiring and retaining talent as structural elements, in other cases to build a relationship with external talent to be involved both as a routine and on-demand, and even other cases just to get on-demand, but under the supervision of somebody who could "shield" from all those internal and external bureaucratic (and internal politics) layers.
The point is: adopting an "intra moenia" and "extra moenia" paradigm, e.g. having a talent on full-time allocation to you but allowing time off to work elsewhere in order to keep alive skills is feasible, but requires a lot of trust and maturity from both sides, as could generate piling up of conflicts of interest.
We need a different approach to employment and missions.
A different social contract
I do understand that many companies are going back to onsite working: unless you groom people and build a culture and processes that enable that level of win-win (retaining talent that is motivated but at the same time keeps up-to-date by using talent elsewhere while prioritizing your organization), working remotely could generate lapses.
I have been actually working remotely even pre-Internet.
In the late 1980s, while acting as in-house expert on decision support systems model design and check on PCs, and pre-sales solution consultant to senior management, my communication channel with the company was neither email nor a mobile phone.
I and others used Andersen's offices around Italy as "drop boxes", where I was leaving messages and files, or found messages and files.
The company even offered to set up a telephone line at my home and pay for it- something that politely refused, as I was already going often on a tune of 15-18 hours a day, between work at customers and prospects sites, travel, preparation.
Still, it worked.
Then, in the 1990s, set up a phone answering box at home that I could call from outside, beep in a code, and listen to recorded messages.
Ditto 1990-1992, when, after being hired to stay in office, was instead, after a passage in Paris, shifted to Milan at the company expenses.
I was even given an apartment nearby the office, around the corner from the Bocconi University.
As I was almost everyday in a different location (my role was consulting but also business development, direct and in support of other business units), ended up purchasing at my own expenses an Apple PowerBook 100 and a fax-modem to be able to drop diskettes in the office that the secretaries, using Mac Classic, could convert into documents, proposals, presentations, print on paper, etc.
I did not have a formal non-competition rule with my former employer, an Andersen unit that left in January 1990.
Still, turned down requests from former customers that I had served for them and Comshare (their partner providing the decision support systems software) for 12 months, also if, in the meantime, they had moved to other companies (i.e. were not anymore working for customers of Andersen).
So, when those 12 months expired, I was contacted again by a former customer who had already contacted me and turned down for that self-imposed rule, and asked my support on models for financial controlling and management reporting (eventually, also for financial data consolidation and multinational reporting).
I turned to my non-Italian CEO of the Italian branch, and offered to start a new business line that I would develop, providing the expertise needed, adding to methodology and associated change services also financial controlling and management reporting (which are closer to methodology and change management than you think, if you consider methodology from inception of activities, and change as covering also transformation in a sustainable, budget-aware, way).
But he turned down the offer (as I did years later when asked by a customer to help them by following the initiative to certify for ISO9000) as that would have required people that were not available.
We made an agreement: I was authorized to use my excess overtime to work as a consultant in my spare time, so that I kept alive and develop those skills, under the gentlemen's agreement that, if my skills in that domain were needed to support my employer, I would that as part of my activities (and so I did, until I left the company).
From 1993, with my management consulting customers across Europe, often for confidentiality reasons (or to reduce costs), we limited to a minimum the onsite meetings and activities, whenever I was asked to deliver an organizational or business development activity or a feasibility study, and worked remotely from home.
From London even remotely coordinated an RFP for an international tender, and from Brussels a pro-bono business and marketing planning and business and organizational development for a non-profit US-based startup.
Therefore, if it was feasible even before Internet and smartphones, now should be even easier: it just requires clear rules of engagement.
And whenever a customer questioned my billing (as in Andersen, I billed hours and fractions- introduced in Andersen the billing by percentage of an hour, as I had too many accounts to follow, so the minimal "time slot" I agreed to was 15minutes, i.e. 0.25 hours), simply turned down any additional remote activities.
Anyway, the basic need is not just trust, but also to allow to evolve a basic concept that now is accepted for large companies and e.g. outsourcing also for individual talent contributors.
Or: when you buy a software license, or use an outsourcing service, you do not expect exclusive rights.
You expect to benefit from using a service as a pay-per-use or licensing, thanks to investments being spread across many or considered (from your perspective as a customer) as a sunk cost that you will not be asked to contribute to.
Billable related to use, not to the investment needed to generate what you could then use.
How to implement? From a talent perspective, you should identify if this approach is applicable, and to which level- i.e. if a pure free agent, or something similar to the agreement that I had in the early 1990s.
Many freelance would consider that this is something really old- and it was, for some, there even before I started working in the 1980s.
The concept here is different: any employee that can be considered a "knowledge worker" (which I consider also some on the factory shopfloor"), whose talent is underused by her or his employer, should consider, in my view, in the XXI century, if it makes sense to renegotiate the employment agreements along the lines that shared above, from my own experience.
Caveat: as I wrote in previous articles, already in the 1980s I was continuously investing out of my own pocket time and money on self-training.
It could be a mere purchasing of few books to better understand the business of customers whose financial controllers or CFO I had to work with, in that specific industry.
Or it could be, from 1993, choosing to have a micro-sabbatical to attend workshops, conferences, or do a pilot project in my own spare (i.e. not billed to customers) time.
If your skills are more or less fixed and their evolution is linear (e.g. in software, you follow a specific "stack"; in compliance, you are an expert in a specific subset of the compliance universe), it could still make sense- but beware: the narrower your expertise, the easier is to automate, unless you bring to the table something more than mere efficiency in replication of a pre-set collection of "canned answers".
There is another element that should be considered, again from a talent perspective: what is your unique talent that makes this approach feasible.
Which is not just the knowledge or experience- is, as I wrote repeatedly, the mindset (something that it will take a while for AI to replicate), i.e. what allows you to develop not just Pavlovian reflexes (action-reaction), but tailored intuition that cannot be easily converted in a simple mix of pre-digested patterns.
As you can see from what I shared in this and previous sections in this articles (and in previous articles and publications), it is not just what you can do, but also how you understand that this can become an interesting proposition for your customer.
You need to understand their business enough to be able to tailor your offer to them in such a way that your are perceived as different from others providing a similar set of expertise and mindset.
Paraphrasing what, at the end of a negotiation, a customer in Paris told me decades ago: you did not win because you had the best product, or because you had the largest team, but because you were those who understood best our business.
And that should be your mantra, in my view, if you want to adopt a talent-based approach as a talent on the XXI century market.
Now that discussed the new "social contract" between talents and final customers or employers, let's talk about blending and aggregating.
Moving forward
I already commented online a current trend- AI enthusiasts shouting that consulting is dead.
Why? Because they confuse the byproduct (that Powerpoint presentation, or position paper) with the process and blending of customer knowledge and talent that goes into it.
Yes, it is true- some of those, on the consulting side, who went a bridge too far into standardization, risk sounding increasingly a lot like those intellectual property paper mills that generated 10,000 pages patent applications with just a bit of information, relying on the scarcity of time available to process each patent application.
Or: if you just "fill the gaps" within a template and "paint by numbers" following the chapter and verse of your certification(s), AI can do it faster, once they have an example of your work (or of the standard and some samples).
In a world when paper mills will be downsized, in the end the differentiating factor will be content that is tailored, and being able to interface with somebody who understand the business, not layer upon layer of interns, juniors, managers that are just piling up billable hours until the partner (the only one who understands really the matter at hand) appears.
Still, if you are going to be a talent operating across multiple customers but integrated in their culture, you either will need local antennas that are embedded at each customer organization, or integrate with those who have, and keep being focused on your own talent.
Because being a talent that can work across customers to optimize time and keep in prime (business) shape does not imply that you have, as I was asked often, to become a "one person band".
For example: I routinely turned down offers to do "cold calling" to get new customers, and actually either hired somebody who was able to do, or partnered with others.
Then, I could quickly qualify, carry out feasibility with an assorted mix of people assembled for the specific purpose, manage and negotiate accounts, audit activities, manage or resurrect and complete activities, carry out "forensic" style activities on processes, organizations, suppliers.
But cold calling is something that always delegated to others: they open the door a bit, and the I continue.
If you want to follow the approach, just being an expert in whatever does not enable to bypass the cultural barrier that would make you attractive.
Decades ago, for a test on a product integrating data with an ERP, was put in touch by a partner with a small boutique consulting company specializing in a specific component of that ERP.
Their opening salvo was: we are small, but we have as many experts as the whole of *** (a specific Big4) has in our country.
Which implied few things:
_ yes, they really were focused
_ no, they did not get what the market really needed.
Because that Big4 needed a handful of in-house experts fully allocated (minus time for update and research, of course) on multiple accounts, to be able to leverage on them to cover dozens on customers.
A small specialized outfit that is able to project a limited workforce on each project instead risks, if it tries to take over a full project, risks allocating plenty of time to what, from a talent or expert perspective, are minutiae that could be handled by non-experts (better: from experts in those minutiae).
If you have such a proposition, my advice is to find partners that could "translate" your talent in business language, and keep your own focus.
Because since the 1990s I saw routinely, in Italy and abroad, such boutique companies getting greedy and trying to reinvent themselves.
In the process, undermining what was their real differentiation (a technology, or a "techné"- structured knowledge, a specific mix of experience), diluted into piles of second-hand management consultant wannabe that copied the big ones and ended up having a Wunderkammer (a bit of everything) of copycats, instead of a coherent method.
At the same time, current trends generate a conundrum: if you are focused, you have the advantage that you can actually groom talent within your own niche.
If you are a consulting supermarket, you risk being unable to justify to customers the cost of those that will be needed to keep growing.
And this is the real risk of our current incarnation of AI: despite Apple that recently released a report that to me sounded a bit as the usual Apple reports.
Nobody with a modicum of brain, not necessarily an expert, assumed that pattern matching using a probabilistic approach was "thinking".
Still, it can identify patterns in data that we humans cannot, as we are constrained by the patterns that we already know, as shown recently in different fields.
And it is certainly quite efficient in recovering or blending patterns from what it "learned".
I can give you an example: in 1986, I had already studied and used PROLOG (which is deterministic) for fun and personal interest in previous years and, in the Army, had been planning services and organizing activities (including monitoring and proposing schedules).
So, when in my first official project, in July 1986, was asked by my branch manager to prepare a budget for the project I was going to work on, I was given a pile of documents about requirements (yes, it was waterfall times, COBOL mainframe), and a methodology book on how to convert specs into a budget, based upon deliverables (screens, reports, etc- by level of complexity etc).
That methodology book was basically a collection of "patterns" derived from the collation and digesting work done nearby Chicago by a part of Andersen, based on the material that each project had to deliver into what was a "knowledge base" (thousands of people focused just on that, training, and other "backoffice" activities).
Now, I was used to plan and schedule on a daily basis, as my Army outfit was routinely in training fields, so between training fields, barrack services, illness, AWOL, etc it was a daily nightmare. And before that, for a political campaign and for other prior political activities, I was used to structured clerical work
I had my own structured approach on routine demands plus impromptu requests, so when asked to budget that project (in the end, the result was around 3,000 m/d), was relatively efficient in producing the documentation- also if it was the first time that I had processed that kind of documentation and had had seen that methodological reference.
Still, for that budget and other similar activities in controlling, auditing, etc, sometimes when I test or learn a new bit on AI with current models, I wonder how little would be required to simply remove the need for that newly hired intermediary that I was.
Which, in turn, would create an issue: if you had never done what I had done before 1986, and then on business you would never be asked to do what I was asked (in your case, with some coaching, not just dropping on you paper weights), when would you learn?
Many companies will be tempted to take such shortcuts, but, frankly, it would be self-defeating.
Therefore, the way forward for a talent probably would have at least three elements to consider:
1 how to position
2 how to develop that position (including spotting and grooming further talent)
3 how to blend and integrate both with customers and partners that would deliver the talent or expertise needed to deliver 1 and 2.
So, if you are a talent in whatever, and are on the market, or within an organization, and wonder what your role and structural position should be...
... try to consider also where you should be: inside the structure
... or outside the structure
... or negotiate a restructuring of your current agreements to maximize benefits for both you and your organization.
Obviously, it takes two to tango.
Next: will prepare more material on this subject.
Meanwhile: good luck!