Misplaced Talent: A Guide to Better People Decisions

Foreword

When Joe asked me to write a foreword for his book, Misplaced Talent, the request arrived on the very same day that I completed an article I was working on with a colleague from another university looking at the relationship between science and practice (“the science-practice gap”). We reported on some research we had been doing on the ways in which practitioners bring scientific evidence to bear in their practice within the field of “occupational psychology,” as we Brits call it, or, for those with a more European or North American background, work or industrial-organizational psychology.

Despite differences in name, what comes through from the wealth of international experience upon which this book is based is that there are many more commonalities than differences when we look at how psychology has been applied to the world of work across the globe, but yet practitioners can sometimes struggle in their attempts to translate and apply to their own practice the very rich body of scientific research and theory upon which the profession is based. This is why Misplaced Talent is such a useful book.

Recognizing that the fundamental drivers of performance in the workplace stem directly from the most basic and deeply held set of motivations and desires that we all share in common as members of the human race, Joe's ability to see beyond the surface details, through to the very heart of what drives human beings in a work context, and then to use the insights thus gained to see ...