As the sole executive of a cornershop with a score shareholders and a half-dozen staff, every minute of my day is preoccupied with the arrangement of talent. The preceding sentences describes the layout of my graph... a sort of hourglass, with myself at its waist.
Within my own person, each minute of consciousness tracks the layout of my bones, muscles, and some nerves (I rarely remember them all, but I never forget them all). In the somatic sense modalities, I track the various effects of food, sleep, sex, conversation, entertainment, social studies, and risk taking upon my flesh... heat, pulse, the shape of the sensation referred to as pleasure, the volatility of tone... the shape of signals in the motor nervous system, and the shapes of sounds, smells, sights, pressures, etc. The fundamental substrate of this flesh as it perceives itself is, a seething, rolling boil, of particles lunging through the abyss. Ah, I find that I am a human, and I am here. And now I am the executive of a firm.
On a daily basis, I wake up and find myself challenged in my gamble of how to spend the first few minutes and hours of awakened consciousness... to improve the preparation of the body for work (I manage the mind as a part of the body), or to simply lurch into work? This has changed over the four-point-five-years of our operations. At the beginning, the shape of work was narrow, and cut out, and we only had to go to market, and along the way I had only to build the factory engine, or become the factory engine when the built engines failed. That was so easy. Over the years, various assets were acquired, and certain other assets were let go, resulting in a complexification of our operations. For the last two years, for example, I have progressed daily with urgent reminders to myself that shareholders no longer protect the corporate interest, and so I have to bear the burden of added concern for their recently stated sensitivities on behalf of all of us.
Whereas for the first two years of operations, I would have to consider for each Ringgit spent whether it improved the profitability of our firm or not, in the second two-year period I have added a layer of consideration for each Ringgit spent... I check how much is spent promoting our business, and how much is spent avoiding the promotion of our business in order to preserve the special sensitivities of our people. Despite these gymnastics, I am yet told to my face that I am bad politician... I think, it is not that so much that I have a low degree of skill in politics, but rather that I only strive to achieve political goals which cannot be predictably acquired at my skill-level. In other words, I think, politics is not a bad challenge, and it is quite a part of business in general, so it must be taken seriously. And in order to grow as a small business, we must only attempt challenges - ignoring non-challenges. Success at non-challenges is a non-investment of talent.
Challenges must be welcomed with open arms.
Beyond my own person, I am then tasked with plumbing of motivations and emotions, for the many fleshy objects which constitute our staff. First the talent of each individual must be analysed and understood... and coached to be internally coherent with itself. And then the interface of each individual must be exposed and made coherent with the interfaces of all other individuals in the firm. Some individuals view themselves grandly, whereas their quality of work is objectively poor and measuredly so; others view themselves hardly, but their measurable work is of admirable quality. All of these myths woven around each mind must be tuned to fit the myths of one another... and that is the other challenge I face, beyond the management of my own talents.
In every individual operator in our firm, I must audit the accounts of knowledge past. And then I must hedge against the probabilities of knowledge that will soon be lost to each individual in the future. I may impute upon each one of us the thing which we must remember tomorrow, and if it has never been read it must be read before tomorrow in order to be remembered tomorrow. That is tactical allocation of wits, on a daily basis. We use tools to help us - modern communications provides us with the 'corporate chat app', instant messaging, categorised by project, or business function, or interest group within the firm. We also use larger documents for long-term storage of organisational lore - the manuals for this and that. The engineering diagrams of what goes where. For each visual design we put into the competitive space, we have our draughts and dozen models from before the final art was culled for production. So on, and so forth. Once a year, we do third-party financial audits, which we prepare for with weekly bookkeeping. Once a year also, we report to the government agencies on various aspects of registration and compliance. Every so often, we liaise with external parties, suppliers, and customers, to poll their knowledge and to keep it in synchrony with our own.
A lot of this work is done by myself, as my staff do not typically concern themselves with the depth and breadth of study that I require. And that too is a gamble of talents. Here we are, on we go. These are the thoughts that consume my minutes, and hours, then weeks, and now over four years.
This is a brief meditation on work, through the lens of one business function. To some degree, my religion is to do work, and so pieces like these serve both a personal and professional application.
Talent is a word from antiquity, which refers to a sort of money, in weight, sort of in the way that we throw the word 'kilo' around today, to mean something of value. Through a literature of poverty, the Christian tradition brought into use the word talent to refer to human resources in general. If I'm not mistaken, management consulting brought the phrase 'talent management' into the modern vernacular somewhere around the 1960s, hitting a popularity peak towards 1975, a trough in 1983 (the year I was born, incidentally), followed by a constant climb in popularity towards the present (2019).
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