«Creative talent comes from relationships: the future depends on teamwork»
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«Talent is a creative process that needs good teachers to be nurtured. Mentors are sources of advice and inspiration, figures committed to constantly improving their actions and consequently those of the community with which they come into contact. Their value increases in the digital age: previously a mentor’s power was usually limited to the people he could meet in face-to-face meetings, but now his influence is exponentially greater.
Tyler Cowen, economist and co-author of the American best seller translated into Italy with “Talent” by Egea, Bocconi University’s publishing house, has no doubts. Banning free hitters, today the future of work belongs to those champions who however know how to play as a team: these are guides that indicate the way forward, sometimes not yet beaten. Because for Cowen – professor of economics at George Mason University, editorialist for Bloomberg and the New York Times, editor of the world’s most widely read economics blog Marginalrevolution and for a few weeks now among the hundred most influential global thinkers according to a survey by the Economist – for develop your talent to the fullest, you need to be in the right environments and with the right people.
Once again, it is the context in which you were born or grew up that determines who you are and what you do, but talent comes from the ability to relate to others. So human capital, before economic capital, makes the difference. «Talents need the initial endowment at birth and a favorable environment. Michelangelo had an extraordinary visual sense, but he honed it working first in Florence and then in Rome. All that talent would have gone to waste if he had been born a few centuries earlier. The right environment gives you people to learn from, a sense of the importance of your work, useful connections and a network of alliances. Not surprisingly, success is so clustered across time and space. This is true for Renaissance Florence and Venice, for Germanic classical music, for Silicon Valley», explains Cowen.
Thus talents are not solitary, but are strengthened together with others, transforming organizations into open and plural realities. «True and unconventional champions are those who know how to play as a team. It is no coincidence that Elon Musk started with Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel at PayPal. Or again, let’s think of the revolutionary scope of the Beatles. But there’s more. Today it is possible to scale knowledge and therefore learn much more than before and more quickly thanks to digitalisation. The world has more possibilities to generate comparison and awareness. The key lies in managing the flow of information: to accomplish great things, you need comparison with others. It is the theory of small groups: the entire history of contemporary man is shaped by smaller networks working together. We must confront each other and never be alone ».
In the book, co-written with young venture capital prodigy Daniel Gross, Cowen explores the people who can transform an organization and make those around them better. It all starts from their experience as recruiters. What windows do you have open on your browser right now? This is the favorite question to break the mold and overcome pre-established filters and barriers to get to know something true about the candidate: the intellectual habits and the way she uses her free time. “We are what we read. A few decades ago I would have asked more like, “What books do you borrow from the public library?” I usually read about economics, technology, history, chess and basketball. Open browser windows give a very clear idea of how I spend my time. And then I am convinced that personality reveals itself on the weekends: if you are looking to hire a writer, look for one who is also honing his craft on the weekend », concludes Cowen.
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