General introduction (1)

Abstract

The history of the notion of talent and its uses is a very long one, but it has undergone two modern waves of intensive dissemination: in the 18th^centuryEnlightenment, with the contestation of hereditary and heavily arbitrary inequalities, and with the celebration of creative originality in activities with high potential for the differential valorization of personal qualities; from the last decade of the 20th^century, with the conversion to talent management in companies.

What is the link between these two key moments? Are the characteristics of talent highlighted by Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetics simply being transferred to the corporate world?

One difficulty is common to the entire history of the notion and its uses: the exact definition of talent. The notion circulates, spreads, but its substantial characterization is beyond the reach of the usual tools for measuring value. The difficulty increases when we realize that talent is both an explanans and an explanandum. Are we close to sophistry when we try to explain visible successes by a factor that is difficult to define and therefore to observe?

There are two possible approaches. The first is to consider talent as an "individual function of production", and to lodge in it innate or acquired characteristics(e.g. intelligence, aptitude for judgment, determination, motivation, skills), the list of which is not fixed, making the holistic meaning of the notion functionally vague. Talent is then a metonymy: each individual is endowed with at least some of the characteristics mentioned, and the entire workforce of an organization or company becomes a sum of talents. This approach is inclusive.

The second approach adopts a purely hierarchical definition: the 10% or 20% of individuals at the top of the performance distribution in the activity or business in question are considered "talents". This is an exclusive conception of talent.

We examine the relationship between these two definitions. A very old qualification of talent associates two vectors - a differential quality, called intelligence or creativity, depending on the field, and a gradual quantity - effort. The composition of these two forces obeys the law of least effort, according to Daniel Kahneman:

Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity. A general "law of least effort" applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature [1].

The massive spread of the semantics of talent in the corporate world would be misunderstood if it were reduced to an act of social magic, substituting a more valorizing vocabulary ("talents") for an axiologically-neutral vocabulary ("personnel", "human resources"). Added to this is a qualification of jobs and business sectors according to their strategic position and "scalability" (understood as the ability to rapidly expand their area of action and profitability). Let's take the example of Silicon Valley's talent traffic, and the outbidding that goes on there to attract the most talented engineers and researchers to star companies. The scale for valuing individual abilities is considerably distorted. In 1990, Detroit's automobile manufacturers employed 1.2 million people. For the same total profit, Silicon Valley companies in 2014 employed almost a tenth as many people, yet achieved a market capitalization thirty times higher.

Today, talent is a performance-producing equation, and its management has led to a re-dimensioning of profitable individual value. It also corresponds to a new social physics (this is the lecture's subtitle), that of a reticular conception of individual performance, one of whose well-documented manifestations is associated with the management innovations of the Bell Labs research teams, a breeding ground for Nobel Prize winners and remarkably fertile engineers. We present and comment on some of these analyses.

We conclude this introductory lecture by examining how the qualification of individuals through their talent destabilizes long-standing categorizations of the workforce. The quality of the diplomas held by individuals is openly immersed in a positional competition that sets the value of these diplomas not only as a function of their relative scarcity, but also as a function of the dispositions that the possession of such and such a diploma suggests in their holders. Hence the assimilation of graduates of the most selective grandes écoles to "talents" in recent works. The capability vocabulary of talent is thus distinct from the static, monodimensional vocabulary of qualification and the multidimensional vocabulary of competence.