With the season underway, the problem is that they have 120 people sitting on the bench. They excel at identifying talented soccer players, and at convincing them to sign on to the team. In the weeks following the event, the idea of talent capitalization was still running through my mind -– and while on a road trip north from California to Seattle, the following analogy came to mind: most successful companies are like a soccer team. He agreed that there was no simple answer to this question, but that a company must find that balance between talent identification and capitalization, with most companies failing on one or both fronts. Gladwell how he would apply his ideas to the business environment, where few companies have mastered the ability to harness, much less capitalize on, the potential intellectual property floating around in the heads of employees. Ethiopia and Kenya have both learned to capitalize on this outpouring of talent by offering various levels of training and competition, starting at early age, to refine and develop their Olympians from a wide and deep pool of talent.ĭuring Q&A, I asked Mr. But having the talent available is only half of the equation. It's now part of their culture to run - something that will be difficult for other nations to overcome. And with that large of a base to begin with, it’s no wonder that there are more qualified runners - and far superior runners - than every other country. It has become a way of life for millions of youth. ![]() However, in Ethiopia and Kenya, there are a few million youth who are running 10+ miles a day, every day. Gladwell provided some insight into why this was happening, sharing with the audience that while there are hundreds or even thousands of prospective runners in the US, only a handful qualify at the level necessary to compete at the Olympics. But now? The sport is completely dominated by one geographic area (in case you’re wondering, the last time the US medaled in the 10,000 Meter was 1964). The US, UK, German and Russian athletes, for example, have competed evenly for decades, with very little differentiation between them as far as advances in training, results, and, arguably, raw talent. ![]() But something has changed over the last couple decades - the quality and quantity of runners out of two African countries has eclipsed the talent of these other historically dominant countries. For the last century, the relative quality of athletes in the major developed nations was, all things considered, equal. ![]() He went on to share a number of examples from his book - but the story that resonated with me was around his research on long distance runners. In fact, he shared that the topic was so pervasive in his mind, had he been able to go back and amend his book, he would have included this new insight as a chapter. His idea surrounded the capitalization of innovation, or, more specifically, our ability to capitalize on talent. A few years back while working at Microsoft, I was able to attend a briefing with one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, who opened his presentation by sharing with the audience a topic that had been on his mind since writing his newest book at the time, Outliers.
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