The Truth about Talent: A guide to building a dynamic workforce, realizing potential and helping leaders succeed

Chapter 10. Techniques for Realizing Talent in Your Whole Workforce

Michelangelo is often quoted as having said that inside every block of stone or marble dwells a beautiful statue: one needs only to remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within. If we are to apply this visionary concept to education, it would be pointless to compare one child to another. Instead, all the energy would be focused on chipping away at the stone, getting rid of whatever is in the way of each child's developing skills, mastery and self-expression.

We call this practice 'giving an A'. An A can be given to anyone in any walk of life. When you give an A you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves. Your eye is on the statue within the roughness of the uncut stone.

—Rosamund Stone Zander, Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility (Harvard Business School Press, 2000 p. 26)

As we saw in the previous chapter, the twentieth century was a period of great economic, technological and social change. Many of these changes are clear, obvious and understood, but some of them are less perceptible, perhaps because they have taken place over longer timescales. For example, in the 1990s, several important developments started affecting the way that people are employed. First, globalization began to bring people and whole societies into the world economy in a way that had not been ...