Talentism: Building Organizations Around Human Potential | Jeff Hunter, Revisited

Summary

Work For Humans – Episode Summary

Podcast: Work For Humans
Host: Dart Lindsley
Episode: Talentism: Building Organizations Around Human Potential | Jeff Hunter, Revisited
Date: June 9, 2026
Guest: Jeff Hunter, CEO and Founder of Talentism

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the concept of “Talentism”—an organizational philosophy and management approach pioneered by Jeff Hunter focused on designing work systems that maximize human potential rather than merely serving capital. Dart and Jeff challenge conventional business paradigms: instead of seeing employees as cogs in a capital-generating machine, what if organizations were designed as engines of discovery, where both the company and its people grow together? The conversation dissects how leadership blind spots, outdated management systems, cognitive biases, and reward structures limit both organizational and individual growth, and offers a vision for a more humane, adaptive, and fulfilling future of work.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Defining Human Potential and Its Limits

• Potential as “an observable fact”:

  • People often surprise themselves and others, revealing capacity not previously recognized (00:03–00:59, 30:02–32:13).
  • Real growth comes from curiosity, exploration, and experiences that continually challenge and expand self-perception.

• Quote:

  • “Potential is one of these words that's thrown around by romantics… but it's an observable fact that people will often do things that surprise themselves and others.” – Jeff Hunter, [00:03]

2. Leadership Self-Awareness and Systemic Blindness

• Management philosophy starts with first principles:

  • Questioning foundational assumptions is central to Talentism (02:56).
  • Jeff stresses the pain and difficulty but necessity of self-interrogation as a leader.

• Leaders as organizational bottlenecks:

  • The CEO’s neuroses, blind spots, and motivations unconsciously shape and limit the organization’s potential (13:15–17:11).

• Quote:

  • “You can't escape the reality you're creating around you. Business is a system. You're primarily creating it…if it's producing bad outcomes, it's because of you.” – Jeff Hunter, [16:09]

3. Cognitive Bias, Confusion, and False Certainty

• The ‘biased fog’ of human cognition:

  • Our minds filter and distort information, so leaders constantly operate with incomplete, biased models of reality (08:59–11:05).

• Certainty as an impediment to learning:

  • Certainty often comes from unattended confusion rather than true clarity, limiting adaptability (11:21).

• Quote:

  • “All of the things that are certain to you, you should stop thinking those are certain.” – Dart Lindsley, [11:05]

4. Organizational Hierarchy & Inequality of Opportunity

• Hierarchical structures concentrate agency and innovation:

  • Innovative contributions are often limited to those closest to leadership due to trust networks, while others are marginalized or “automated out” (18:01–24:06).

• ‘Learning loops’ and innovation:

  • True innovation happens when organizations process confusion into clarity quickly and at scale—disincentivizing or punishing confusion stalls this process.

• Quote:

  • “There is no breakthrough. There is just the process of continually turning confusion into clarity.” – Jeff Hunter, [18:48]

5. From Capitalism to ‘Talentism’: A New Economic Paradigm

• Critique of capital-first systems:

  • The relentless focus on wealth and capital accumulation is outdated and fails to account for human complexity and creativity (36:46–42:22).

• Talentism as a long-term, discovery-based system:

  • Envisioning organizations as engines of human discovery and mastery, with wealth as an outcome—not a goal (32:13–36:46).

• Quote:

  • “The speed of learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage in a commercial environment.” – Jeff Hunter, [11:52]

6. Barriers to True Talent Development

• Modern management oversimplifies:

  • Treats people as capital assets, focuses excessively on metrics (spreadsheets) which are legible but miss true value (42:22–49:37).
  • Human capital, assets, productivity—all reductive and obscure emergent human capacity.

• Transition to automation:

  • As “robotic” jobs are automated, untapped human creativity and judgment will become the greatest competitive advantage.

• Quote:

  • “We have to create the agency to change our companies so that the people at the very top…living in this blindness, this fog…We have to start changing the way we manage and the way we manage ourselves.” – Jeff Hunter, [47:23]

7. Leadership Accountability and Personal Vulnerability

• Leaders must ‘eat their own cooking’:

  • Jeff openly discusses self-experimentation at Talentism; if a philosophy doesn’t work for him, it won’t be introduced to clients (66:24).

• The emotional cost of leadership:

  • There’s a real “cost” to constantly pushing for potential—personal happiness often takes a backseat to continual self-examination and growth (68:34–69:32).

• Quote:

  • “The job that I find that I have to continually hire myself as is: I am the guinea pig CEO.” – Jeff Hunter, [66:24]

8. Reflections on Bridgewater & Hiring for Values vs. Skills

• Bridgewater as a ‘deliberately developmental organization’:

  • The intensity and design discipline at Bridgewater contributed fundamentally to Jeff’s own development (54:05–58:55).

• Cultural system, not just individual genius:

  • Growth was systemic and peer-driven, not top-down.

• Skepticism about hiring for ‘values’:

  • Values are context-contingent; skills also only matter as applied in relevant contexts (60:45–66:12).

• Quote:

  • “The application of the skill in context is what creates the result. So what you're really trying to do is figure out the context.” – Jeff Hunter, [64:09]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the pain of pursuing your potential:
  “If you can possibly avoid the path of potential, avoid it, because it’s just so extraordinarily painful. But I hope you don’t avoid it, because it really is the ultimate way to discover who you are and what you’re capable of.” – Jeff Hunter, [04:23]

• On leaders’ impact:
  “My neuroses, my blind spots, my motivations—that's the strategic tenor of the organization. Whether I want it to be or not.” – Jeff Hunter, [13:46]

• On innovation inequality:
  “You are continuing this privileged system of only the people you know get to innovate… you’ve unconsciously over time created this system that disables that and actually punishes that.” – Jeff Hunter, [21:13]

• On organizational learning as advantage:
  “The speed of learning is really the only way to unleash potential personally.” – Jeff Hunter, [11:54]

• On happiness and leadership cost:
  “What does it cost you? The tried answer is happiness.” – Jeff Hunter, [68:34]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:03 – Potential as an observable phenomenon, not an idealized unlimited trait.
• 02:56 – Jeff’s first principles approach; Dart’s intro to Talentism philosophy.
• 06:08 – Bridgewater & cognitive “trickery” of the mind.
• 08:59 – Humans live in a biased, even evolutionarily biased, information fog.
• 13:15 – Hierarchy, power, and the responsibility of CEOs for systemic outcomes.
• 18:01–24:06 – Concrete example: how CEO blind spots limit innovation, privilege trust networks, and reduce agency for most.
• 29:04 – Defining “potential” vs. productivity.
• 36:46–42:22 – The emergence of “Talentism” & critique of capital-oriented systems.
• 47:23 – The challenges and promises of automating rote work.
• 54:05–58:55 – Lessons and culture at Bridgewater; developing personal mastery via challenge.
• 60:45–66:12 – Hiring for values versus skills; context as key.
• 66:24 – Jeff describes his role as “guinea pig CEO” and the emotional burden of this approach.

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Final Takeaways

Talentism calls for a radical re-imagination of work—transitioning away from capital and control as organizing principles, toward curiosity, discovery, and the acceleration of learning as the foundation of competitive advantage. The real challenge for leaders is rarely technical, but personal: developing the self-awareness, humility, and courage necessary to dismantle their own blind spots, democratize agency, and foster a culture where every person has the opportunity to discover (and be valued for) their unique potential.

Learn More:

• Blog, podcast, and resources: talentism.com

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This summary omits advertisements and non-content sections to focus on the essential ideas and takeaways, as discussed by Dart Lindsley and Jeff Hunter throughout the episode.

Transcript

[Jeff Hunter]

Potential is one of these words that it's thrown around by romantics. It's thrown around by people like, we all have unlimited potential. I don't know if that's true. And even if that was true, how would I figure that out? Here's the thing I do know. It's an observable fact that people will often do things that surprise themselves and others. In that moment, they will have a realization that they are capable of something more. Basically, a life of curiosity and exploration is bringing those experiences together into figuring out you have always been capable of something much more. How do you build a system that is prioritizing that over wealth creation and accumulation, not as you're accumulating wealth or generating wealth? Some people get lucky and figure out they're really good at something.

[Dart Lindsley]

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. I often think back on this conversation with Jeff Hunter. I've known Jeff a long time, and whenever I think of him, I think intellectual hardass. If you say something dumb or even just overly simplistic, he doesn't let you off the hook. Jeff's management philosophy starts with the understanding that we don't just don't know what we think we know. He makes leaders identify gaps in their own worldview, take personal responsibility for broken systems, implement new ways of seeing what's really happening, and create systems in which every employee can reach their full potential. Jeff tells us to expect some pain. Jeff's the CEO and founder of Talentism. Prior to Talentism, Jeff was head of recruiting at Bridgewater Associates. Through his leadership roles at Bridgewater, EA and Dolby, Jeff found his purpose in creating and growing systems to help people reach their full potential. In this episode, Jeff and I discuss what potential even is Talentism's management approach, how current management practices limit potential CEO accountability and the ideal business system. We also talk about cognitive bias, the benefits of prioritizing talent over capital, Jeff's experience at Bridgewater, hiring for values instead of skills, as well as other topics. All right, if you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I'm very pleased to bring you Jeff Hunter. Jeff Hunter, welcome to Work for Humans.

[Jeff Hunter]

Thank you, Dart. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Dart Lindsley]

You do something in your management philosophy. It's a management philosophy that you teach and that you consult on, but you do something in your management philosophy that I really respect, which is that you go down to very first principles and you question many first principles and then you build it up from There. And so I want to explore that. And I might explore it at a level deeper than you talk to your clients about, because I want to get to the foundations of it. So much of your practice is about unleashing human potential inside companies. How is the current system limiting human potential or holding back human potential? And what are the roots of that?

[Jeff Hunter]

Well, thank you for what I will take as a compliment, because we started talentism 10 years ago, but it was born of prior 30 years of very hard work and a lot of failure, trying to figure out not only my own calling and what I was meant to do, but also the nature of the world and how it works, and then trying to come up with sort of an axiomatic approach to here's what we believe, and then build the principles on top of those axioms. But I think there's a pretty fundamental question every human being needs to ask, which is, do you want to measure yourself against what's possible or what's present? In other words, I think we go through life as a social species evaluating who we are and where we are based on everybody around us. And as technology has expanded everyone around US to all 7 billion people, 8 billion people, that's quite a sample set to take from and decide who we are. But in that you're constantly comparing yourself to others and you're thinking about, do I match up? And then I think the alternative to that is to evaluate yourself against what is possible. And that's a very different path. It's a very different life. I tell my kids all the time, all my kids are adults, but I've been telling them their whole life, if you can possibly avoid the path of potential, avoid it, because it's just so extraordinarily painful. But I hope you don't avoid it, because it really is the ultimate way to sort of discover who you are and what you're capable of. And so I would say the first principles that we got to was born of both a personal experience and also just looking at the data and looking at what reality is in an unfiltered, unvarnished way, as is possible for any human being. And the personal experience is a deep sense of frustration with my own failures as a CEO and as a founder. I've started and sold several software companies and had a number of different, very interesting experiences in that where I thought, first of all, I thought I was doing really well. When it turned out I was just lucky. I was sort of on third base and thought I was a great baseball player. And so seeing that clearly. And coming to grips with that.

[Dart Lindsley]

I'm sorry, how did you discover that? How did you come to learn that you were not the person you imagined yourself to be? In other words, that you had started off on third base and thought you

[Jeff Hunter]

were a great player? Well, you and I have talked off recording about my experience at Bridgewater, and Bridgewater is really where that experience came to me. This insight that really is at the root of a lot of what talentism is, this concept of confusion, and how cognition is primarily a confusion sort of engine, and how this system we've created around us really drives a lot of confusion and we don't recognize it ourselves. I think all of us have this facade, we have this belief about ourselves. We have this set of experiences we've had out in the world, and it feeds this belief about who we are. And it's really, as I've said in many other places, it's really not an accurate perception. What I've come to understand about cognition now, spending years and years studying it and talking to people I believe are the world's best at this, is. Cognition is a trick. It's a future forecasting of what the mind hopes will lead to goal achievement in the way it thinks about goals. And I'm third person personifying the mind. Because what we're experiencing and what we're thinking is not the mind. Right? The mind is the supercomputer that's running at the level of intuition, habit, instinct, emotion, all these things. None of that is accessible to us through introspection. And so you've got this supercomputer is basically running your life and it's collecting these experiences and it's saying, wow, you know, you were in business and you were successful. You must be a good business person. You had children and they got good grades. You must be a good parent. And really what it's doing is trying to form a picture that can help you forecast into the future to say, oh, you should keep doing these things because it'll lead to the reward that you are seeking. You should avoid these things, other things, because it's going to avoid the pain that you want to avoid. And those reward and pain signals are deeply personal and not accessible to introspection. So what you need to do is you're going through experiences, understand your mind perpetually tricking you, and it's tricking you by saying, the current experience I'm having is valid and it's obvious. So, in other words, like, it's not only valid within my mind, but everyone else is Having the same experience and everyone else is seeing the same thing. And neither of those things is true. I mean, it's a sort of illusory process to have your mind achieve its primary reward goals, which of course are survival, food, shelter, sex, you know, those kinds of things. And to avoid the pain of humiliation, being outcast, being found a fraud, all those kinds of things. And so your mind's doing this to you all the time. And so I think it just. You've got to have these sort of existential experiences that strip that away.

[Dart Lindsley]

This is one of the fundamental first principle ideas underlying your management philosophy, which is humans essentially exist in a. Well, I'm going to say it a couple of different ways. First of all, exist in an information fog, which is that we're not getting all of the information, we're not receiving all the information that's coming to us because we're filtering it. But also it's a complex world and so it may be unknowable. So those two things are true. And then the second thing is our conscious selves are essentially living an incredibly simplified model of the world based upon living in the low end world is what I've started to call it. The low end world is science looks at high end problems that we can attack with statistics and then we think, oh, we're going to use that. If I have evidence that I'm great, then I must be great. But it's only three instances of being great if you flipped a coin and got heads all three times. But it's not just a fog, the way you describe it, it's a biased fog.

[Jeff Hunter]

Yes.

[Dart Lindsley]

So is that right? Am I describing that right?

[Jeff Hunter]

Yeah. You got a job. Dart if you want to come work for us anytime. My team tells me we've got quite a large team at this point and they're like, if you could just simplify things, we'd really appreciate it. And that so far I've been completely incompetent at that. So thank you. Thank you very much. Yes. It's not just a biased fog, it's a evolutionarily biased fog that has worked for hundreds of thousands of years and is sort of maladaptive to the current circumstance. Humans have this fantastic species where we create this complexity, we create systematic complexity, and then that complexity really screws us up because we can't possibly perceive the complexity we have created. Accurately perceive it. We filter all the things you said. So it's not a mistake. Evolution created these opposing forces in our lives and our minds and got us to the Point where those things are just clashing really hard.

[Dart Lindsley]

But it's a tough pitch, right? Which is all the things that are certain to you, you should stop thinking those are certain. I mean, it's certainly dangerous to believe everything you think. And I think we know that. But it's really hard to stop believing everything you think.

[Jeff Hunter]

Oh, yeah, we can talk a little bit later about this confusion, clarity, certainty thing. But one of the things I try to teach people is like this initiating point of confusion, then it gets unattended and turns into certainty. A lot of what we think is unassailable. Not even, you know, it's that this is water sort of thing. It's just, it's so obvious why even talk about it? It's all around us, it's oxygen kind of thing. A lot of that is just wrong or it's incomplete and therefore not terribly useful, at least to the extent it could be. And yet that is quite literally what your mind is designed to do. So to say, oh, all you got to do is be in the open space about, should I be wearing clothes? Should there be light bulbs? Come on, we can't live our lives wandering around on a mushroom trip all the time, right? We got work to do. But the thing that we're trying to do in not only our management philosophy, but we've got a set of products and services that are the application of these things, these philosophies is what we're trying to underlying, say, is the speed of learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage in a commercial environment. And the speed of learning is really the only way to unleash potential personally. So what would be all the things that would stand in the way of that learning? Because the way, especially in Western society, we've been taught this concept of learning is it's acquisition of knowledge, but it's not, it's acquisition of experience and making sense of that experience to really reform or add to the mental models that drive our beliefs about the world. And reading books doesn't do that.

[Dart Lindsley]

So let's bring it to the concrete. How does this manifest in the workplace? What mistakes does it lead us to make and what are some of the ways we can avoid those mistakes?

[Jeff Hunter]

The first thing I'd say is we have to deal with the first principle or the reality that a workplace is a hierarchy and there are people who have more power than others and power to actually change the course of events, influence others, deeply affect others. Right? The generalized concept of power. And in a hierarchy, for a social species like us, that matters a lot. Some people talk about we're chimps, some people talk about we're bonobos. I love primatology and like studying all that. But hierarchically, we're really like baboons. We're deeply hierarchical species. And even when we have these uprisings against that hierarchy and disrupt the power structure and everything, we just reorient that to a different power structure. And to me, you've got this thing inside of companies where you've got all this idealized, what I would call rationalist baloney, that business is a system that almost operates independent of human beings. If you come up with the right strategy and you get the right product market fit, you have the right capitalization, you're going to win. And human beings are just sort of the cogs you swap in and out of that machine. And when people are stating that, they're drawing on a set of data that was really localized to a specific context, which I would call post Civil War America, where literally human beings were swappable cogs in and out of a industrial machine that prized mass production. And that's just not the world we're in right now and probably never will be again. So the thing is, okay, so you got this hierarchical structure or system, you've got this deeply social species. And the person at the top, like, I'm CEO of talentism, my neuroses, my blind spots, my motivations. That's the strategic tenor of the organization. Whether I want it to be or not, I cannot escape that reality. So I need to first and foremost take personal responsibility for how I am limiting the potential of the organization. And that is fundamentally different. That's not servant leadership. That's a fundamentally different way to show up at work as a leader. And frankly, it's exhausting and it's hard. And so people are like, man, that feels terrible. And I totally get it. So we try to support them and do all the things we can to make that journey less lonely and more productive. But it initiates with, you can't escape the reality you're creating around you. Business is a system. You're primarily creating it. Not solely, but primarily creating it. And if it's producing bad outcomes, it's because of you. It's not because of all of them. And then the second thing is understanding everything I just said. How do you build a commercial system where every human being who's a part of that, whether they be direct stakeholders like employees, or indirect stakeholders, like community members or whatever, but how does every member of that system have the opportunity to unleash Their potential, given this reality that the person at the top, like me, could be messing them up, because you can't surrender your agency in that system or you default to the badness of the system. Everybody has to figure out this concept of how they are autonomous within a system as a social species that is deferring to power in order to get a signal about what they're like and whether they're good or bad or unimportant or a member or not a member or whatever. And so this thing we're trying to teach, this management philosophy, which is fundamentally about unleashing potential, like you pay a dollar for work, you should get $1.20 worth of value. I'm totally. We end with that. But the way we think about how that works is just totally bankrupt, in my opinion.

[Dart Lindsley]

There's so much to take apart in there. First of all, as somebody who is fomenting systems change myself, one of the things you run across is people who don't feel that they have the agency to do that, and they don't feel the freedom. And so I really see what you're talking about. And one of the things I really like about the way you're speaking about it is it's us against the system. And yes, we created the system, but we may be blind to how we did. Especially if I'm the CEO, I might be blind to how I am creating this system. So can you describe an example of a CEO could be you, although you may not be able to see yourself enough to answer this question about yourself, but a CEO who's creating a system that is limiting potential?

[Jeff Hunter]

Yeah, I mean, I think over the last 10 years, I've worked with over 300 founders, and talentism itself has worked with thousands and thousands of founders, leaders, et cetera. We take those relationships almost as sacred obligations. And so I'm going to anonymize a bunch of stuff here, but I am speaking about a real person and a person who I believe others would know, they would say, like, oh, really? That person? So in this example I'm offering, it's a very successful software company, and the CEO founder has a real belief that innovation is key to their success. Not a surprising belief in the current environment. You know, we've been feeding at that froth since at least Clayton Christensen. So it's like a very permanent sort of fixture. And the CEO mindset that we need to be innovative, and this person is very innovative, very creative, great lateral thinker. What we call lateral thinker, like, sees connects dots that other people misses etc. And so not only says it's important, but actually demonstrates it. And yet, if you take a look at, because we work with not just the CEO in our products, we end up working with sometimes 30, 40 different people inside of an organization over an extended period of time. So we gather a lot of data about what's actually happening in the system, as opposed to what the CEO believes is happening in the system. And what the data shows is that the way we would measure innovative capability is based on how many, what we call learning loops are you processing and how short a time. There is no breakthrough. There is just the process of continually turning confusion into clarity. And that's an innovative process. And when you take a look at those measures, their learning loops are very low. The number of learning loops inside the organization is very low. So then we're peeling the onion. We're trying to figure out, trying to get back to our first principles, what's happening. And you find this persistent thing in the interactions of the people inside the organization where, when people are confused in offering up that confusion to others, the people who have power are punishing them for that confusion. And they're not doing it direct and purposefully, they're doing it indirectly. They're saying, I don't have time for that because you're not bringing me a solution, you're bringing me a problem, or haven't you got something better to do? Or there's any number of different catchphrases we've identified within the system that get used by managers who frankly are incompetent. They don't know themselves, they don't know they're doing this. They're not even aware they're doing this. And so what you see is these learning loops are the innovation goes to the people who are privileged by the trust of the CEO. And so if you took the 40 people the dots were collecting, you know, the Data points around 40 people, there's probably like 10 to 20% of that class of those people who have over time, in another context, the early days of the startup of the organization created trust for the CEO. First of all, the CEO gets the innovation information first, it doesn't go through classic management channels. And second, the CEO is predisposed to believe that they're onto something and so listens more acutely and more attentively and is willing to give them more space to go through the loops. And everyone else who doesn't have that privilege of trust, which was built again, sort of accidentally in a different context, is getting a Very different experience now when we talk to the CEO about this. But the CEO says, oh, that's just because we've made bad hiring decisions. What we did is those early ones, we really had talent density, we really knew how to pick them. And then as we scaled, our recruiting department sort of failed. And you like, it's hard to keep going with the A players and everything. And I coach the CEO and we'll be in these very difficult conversations. I'm like, that is just complete bullshit. You have told yourself a just so narrative to sort of congratulate yourself on how good you were at recruiting when you were closer to it. But the reality is you are continuing this privileged system of only the people you know get to innovate. And can you imagine how deeply confusing it is when you are saying to the world and in your talent branding and everything else, you're saying innovation is so important, but you've unconsciously over time created this system that disables that and actually punishes that.

[Dart Lindsley]

And also it punishes it and disables it at where all the innovative scale is.

[Jeff Hunter]

Exactly.

[Dart Lindsley]

Well, okay, so one of the things that's happened is you've reduced the agency of anyone you don't already know. And I guess I'm calling it agency, agency with a degree of impact, right? Which is they can be agentic, they're just not going to change the course of the company. So the impact is not there.

[Jeff Hunter]

Well, the way I think about it is you're building a system where it's got this bell curve distribution and I think this is true at company level and macro labor market. Overall, you've got 10 to 20% of the people who are just consistently and persistently disenfranchised from being productive in any way, shape or form. You've got 1 to 10% depending on how you cut the data that are accruing all the rewards or a lot of the rewards. And then you've got 80 to 90% in the middle that are just waiting to be automated out of a job. And for us to believe that this pagan of Python that's working its way through the system as AI increases the speed of automation, as social media increases the speed of confusion. To believe that this will magically work itself out in the current systemic view of what human beings are like and how business runs. Yeah, I don't buy it. I think that's wishful thinking.

[Dart Lindsley]

So that's one example. That's one example of a CEO whose self image, I mean, I think that's the right word or whose way of being is manifesting in the system. And it's invisible to the CEO. And it's partially because the surface area that the CEO has is very limited to perceive. This is a CEO who's always been successful. That's why they're the CEO. And so to some extent, the CEO is likely to believe that their past success is replicable in the current context. The current context may be way bigger than any of their preceding contexts, which may require different things, but that's just one. Right. And there's other flavors, other ways that this can manifest. So what I want to get clear, and the reason I'm bringing this up, is that we stated a big principle and then we said, here's an example and I don't want to be the example to look like that's what this principle always leads to. What this principle leads to is that different CEOs might have different structures and behaviors that result in different problems besides how innovation flows, for instance.

[Jeff Hunter]

Yeah. So I think what we're talking about is causes and symptoms. So the innovation problem was the symptom of the cause. I'd say the cause is more generalizing. And that kind of blindness and lack of self awareness, lack of self skepticism, curiosity and drive for self improvement is endemic to leadership. Because if you've won, one of the things you can say about humans as a careless primate is once you have something that is valuable to you, you do everything you can to keep it. And this always limits you. Like, I got this house, I can't lose it. Well, maybe there's a better house, or maybe this house is actually a trap or whatever. But her psychology is very oriented towards trying to keep a hold of it. And so you've got people who have worked very hard, they are very talented. The person I'm speaking of, the hundreds of people I've worked with, they're extremely talented and committed people. And one of the things we can talk about later, I never pass moral judgment on any of these people because I see the system at play. They aren't bad, they aren't stupid, they aren't lazy. I am the beneficiary of a lot of privilege and it took me 50 plus years of work to see it. And so I don't blame anybody for not having that level of self awareness. But it's also a system that what are the reward signals of the system? We talk about people like Elon Musk. We don't talk about the people who are like the quiet leaders of wonderful companies like the early days of W.L. gore as an example. These are extraordinary organizations that have been built on very different principles and management philosophies. And we all know Gore Tex, but we actually don't know a lot about those early days, but we know a lot about the early days of Tesla. And so it's a system that actually really prioritizes the signal of the bold founder, the genius, who is unassailable in their conviction of the vision that they're trying to make a reality. And it's just their grit and hard work and raw intelligence that makes that reality a true. And it's just not real. It's just such a weird narrative to put on what the data actually shows us about all of that. But this thing I'm talking about with innovation, the innovation thing was the symptom, but the root of that celebrity CEO who everybody talks about as being a genius, he wakes up every day thinking like, oh, my God, how the hell do I get here? I know that is this coach, but the outward facing thing of that is, yeah, I'm a genius and I'm going to change the world. And he better get in behind me because this is how it's going to work. And the problem with that is keep trying to relate to him is, okay, that's going to work right up until the moment it doesn't. You have really defined a narrow course, and I think this is persistent in our educational institutions. Everything is, I'm going to predict a target that's 20 years in the future. I can't even predict what's going to happen tomorrow, but I'm going to predict 20 years out, and that's perfectly aligned myself to that target. And the probability of that target being there when you get there is so infinitesimally small. What you really need to do is build up an ability to hit multiple targets based on how the future is going to unfold. And that, to me, is their root blindness prevents that unleashing of potential.

[Dart Lindsley]

This is super interesting. It relates very much to me to Colonel John Boyd and the OODA Loop. And I'm assuming, partially because of how you sound, that that's something that you're aware of as his work.

[Jeff Hunter]

Well, Dart, I don't know if you remember this. I'm not only aware of Boyd's work. I'm aware because you sent me the book.

[Dart Lindsley]

Oh, no. Okay. No, I didn't remember that 20 years ago, probably. Oh, I totally forgot that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, you're a good reader because, no, I forgot that that's so funny. So there's a couple of words that you use that I want to dig deeper into, and one of them is the word potential. One of my worries when I hear that word is that it is repackaging productivity. And I'm not opposed to productivity. I think productivity is fantastic. But I think that it's a thinner straw, a thinner slice of what a person is than I think what you mean when you say potential. So what is potential? What does that mean to you?

[Jeff Hunter]

I'll answer that question. But let me be very clear. There are so many interesting examples in the English language of where a word actually means one thing and over time gets completely bamboozled into something else. When I talk about productivity, I am not talking about it in the sense of more activity and less time. I am talking about it in terms of more output for less input. And in that respect, potential would look like I can have one good thought in a day. And I have lived to my potential as opposed to, I got a ton of shit done today and I underplayed my potential. So let's talk about potential. One of the things I said very early, because potential is one of these words that it's thrown around by romantics, it's thrown around by people like, we all have unlimited potential. And I'm like, I don't know if that's true. And even if that was true, how would I figure that out? How am I going to talk to you and say, you know what you're capable of, genius? I don't know. But here's the thing I do know. It's an observable fact that people will often do things that surprise themselves and others, positively surprise themselves and others. And in that moment they will have a realization that they are capable of something more. And basically a life of curiosity and exploration is bringing those experiences together into figuring out you have always been capable of something much more. I had this formative experience. I tell this story a lot, which is my wife. We've been married quite a long time, 33 years. My kids went to a relatively poor elementary school and they had no music, no arts, no nothing. And my wife said, well, I'm going to go get this done. I'm going to go do it. And so she established this child choir. There are about 400 kids in the school, and I think 120 signed up for this choir. And so you got all these kids up on stage and none of them have ever sung before. They don't have private music lessons. They don't like I live in a nice, wealthy community now. None of that, right? They don't often know when they're going home or who they're going home to. They sometimes don't have meals. They're living in a very, very different reality. And their parents are often struggling to try to just maintain that basic reality as it is, et cetera. So my wife, the first time she put on a production, there's 120 squirrely first, second and third graders up on stage doing all the things you would expect first, second and third graders to be doing. The first time they're up on stage in front of their parents and these kids start singing and they start singing this glorious music. It's not on pitch. Doesn't matter if it's on pitch. They have the potential to sing in front of others and they're doing it. And the thing that mattered to me most, as I turned around and I looked in the audience and. And all of their parents were looking at these kids in a totally different way. Like, that's my child. And my child can be on stage and they can sing, they can do this thing. And all of a sudden their potential is defined by this event, by what just happened in front of them, a potential they did not know existed before that. And so I boil this down into a principle that potential is, as potential does to steal from Forrest Gump. And because I think what you're trying to do is create a system of exploration and experiment where you're constantly discovering cool new things about yourself and what you can do and what you're capable of. But it can't just be like, you can imagine a person who's a vagabond and they're wandering the world and discovering, hey, I can rock climb, Hey, I can kite surf. Hey, whatever, and beautiful if you can have that experience. But I'm really worried about the millions and millions, if not billions of people can't have that experience. They can't figure out how to live their life. And even if they could, they probably wouldn't want to live that life. They have families that are dependent on them, et cetera. And so how are you going to create a commercial system that you're constantly experiencing and finding this out, like, oh, I was capable of being a great salesperson or a great marketing person or a great software engineer. Not just an okay one. Not just I got the education to do it okay, but on the path to greatness. This is something I could be extraordinary at. How do you build a system that is prioritizing that over wealth creation and accumulation. And so talentism as a name is trying to describe an economic philosophy where profit and wealth generation are an outcome of that fundamental exercise, that fundamental machine or system, not as you're accumulating wealth or generating wealth. Some people get lucky and figure out they're really good at something.

[Dart Lindsley]

Hey, everybody. On June 16th, I'll be speaking at one of my very favorite venues. It's the Future Talent Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. To get Tickets, go to futuretalentsummit.org that's all one word, T and enter my speaker promo code elevenfold, which is eleven fold to get a big discount. If you're in the area, I would love to meet you there. That's futuretalentsummit.org, promo code elevenfold. I've never thought of it that way before, which is that the ideal business system is one that is discovery. It's an engine of discovery of what people can do. What's interesting about that is that we often see companies as an engine of discovery of what product they can create, which is still true, that's a good thing. But that there's this other surface of essentially innovation or discovery, which is the people in the organization constantly coming to realization of what they might not have known about themselves that they can do. It's a very powerful image to me. And talentism, if I remember correctly, it's deliberately rhyming with capitalism. And so the capitalist version of that sees capital as the thing that a company is growing as opposed to talent or people, which is something that is growing. Is that right?

[Jeff Hunter]

Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, we can talk about what Adam Smith really intended. And I believe if Adam Smith suddenly arose from the grave and walked around Wall street, he wouldn't say, yep, this is exactly what I thought it would be. So I would dispute we're in a capitalist system. I think we're in a consumerist system, which I think is fundamentally different. But regardless, the idea of capitalism is that capital is the prime factor. How do you get it, grow it, manage it? And I like to use the metaphor of health. You cannot survive if you don't breathe. It's like five minutes without oxygen, five days without water, five weeks without food kind of thing. Breathing can knock you out really fast if you don't do it. And capital is important to organizations because ultimately we got to get paid and we got to feed our families and all that stuff. We exist inside that system. But if you're walking around all day figuring out how to breathe better, you are not a productive human being. And so when we've gotten caught in this trap of it really is all about capital, it's really about returning capital investors. And I would claim, by the way, I know there are people who know much more about Milton Friedman than I do, but I would claim like he's the devil. And I would say he's the devil because he introduced this idea that if we gave stock to employees, then the system would be perfected. Everybody out there, I know he actually didn't say that, but that's actually what it ended up being. And so you have this system that's trying to focus everybody on capital accumulation or wealth accumulation. And I'm not saying wealth isn't important. I'm very privileged to have the wealth I have and I feel grateful for it. But it's an outcome of another thing. It is not the thing. And so then I think we've existed in a low interest rate environment, post industrial, low interest rate environment that has shifted a lot of resources from like young to old and from poor to rich. And you've got this system like that's just, that's not a bunch of bad people. That's not Robert Barron's, that's just you get into the system that is going to. When you think about wealth as a primary focus, then you're going to end up with these outcomes. And what I'm trying to say is that system is fragile. It's fragile because there's a whole bunch of people that feel like they didn't get to participate in it doesn't matter whether it's accurate or not that they did. Capitalism has been a tide that has had a lot of boats go up, a lot of boats rise. I don't dispute that. But human beings as a social creature compare ourselves to others, not to the objective standard. And there's a lot of people who are like, I still can't get great health care, but you've got a concierge doctor and I still can't actually get access to capital. But you've got people throwing it at you and I can't get a mortgage, but you've got four houses. And so in that realm, in that social species sort of looking, there's a lot of people feeling increasingly disenfranchised by what they broadly term the capitalist system. And I think that I started writing about talentism 22 years ago and I coined that term before Claus Schwab did. Just. I coined that term a long time ago because I was like, look, there's a post capitalist thing that's coming. Climate change is real. It's an outcome of that system. Wealth disparity is real. It's an outcome of that system. Geopolitical dislocation is real. It's an outcome of that system. And so what is post capitalism? Everybody who is emergent in a mercantilistic system thought, this is it. This is the way it works. And then it wasn't. Then there was capitalism, then I think there was consumerism, and I think there will be talentism and what we're seeking to do and building our business. You know, I'm not just out there as an academic or whatever trying to speak to this stuff. We're building a business business based on this. The rapidly growing business is, hey, you have competitive advantage by implementing a system that focuses on identifying and unleashing the potential of the people inside your organization. That is your competitive advantage. And what we're attempting to do over hundreds and hundreds of companies at this point, probably over a thousand companies, is prove that these companies are successful because they implement that system. And then the experience we want the employees and other stakeholders in that organization to have is. Work is different. For me, work is not. I wake up Monday morning ready to have a heart attack. Work is. This is the place I go to be with the people I care about, to find out about myself, to build my personal mastery, to build my skill mastery, and to actually work towards something that is meaningful to me. And in that, I'm starting to see myself as being good at something and good at something that's valuable. And in that moment, I have a sense of self that's different. And I'm less focused on blaming everybody else for my hills and more focused on how I can keep investing in myself. And that, to me, is a virtuous cycle that could be built if we shift from focusing on wealth as a primary focus, as opposed to wealth as an outcome of focusing on unleashing potential.

[Dart Lindsley]

There's a whole lot of oversimplifications in the existing model. So the focus on capital, a part of that in the word capital, is capital. Equipment, right? It's things that you own. It's buildings, it's machines, it's things like that. And all of those things are fairly finite and limited. There's not a lot of emergent properties in a factory. In fact, you're trying to avoid emergent properties in factories. You want a factory to produce something that is very standard and so on. We've taken a lot of the ideas from capital and turned them to apply them to People and to say, let's treat people like things, which is we're going to acquire them and we're going to invest money in them. And. But still there's a human capital, just to state the obvious word, or assets or things like that. And there are two mistakes in that whole model that I see that I'd like to test with you. One of them is that people are as simple as machines. And a part of what you're saying is no people, every single person has all these emergent properties because you're not about giving them a skill like putting a new carburetor on a car. You are discovering, and they are discovering what they can be. And so one simplification is this idea of sort of objectifying or mechanizing, turning people into machines and thinking about them as machines. And the second one I just looked up recently because I was reading Milton Friedman's essay in the New York Times in 1970 or 1971, in which he set out a lot of the principles that you're describing. And I had to go look and see when Excel spreadsheets were created. And they were created in the 80s. And one of the things about Excel spreadsheets is that they make money so visible, they make it so brilliantly bright that they have come to control companies in ways that we might not have been as controlled by capital if we didn't have this incredible visibility of number as it relates to something incredibly simple, which is dollars, which is super, super simple. And so anyway, there's two oversimplifications that I hear there, which is that we look at the flow of value only in terms of dollars. And the second one is we look at people like machines and we ignore the emergent capacity of people.

[Jeff Hunter]

Yes, you said something, Darth. People ask me when they go on these rants about the future and everything, and they're like, wow, you're kind of a pessimist. And I'm like, no, I'm an optimist. I can't imagine a better time to be alive than right now. I truly believe that. And I believe that the potential of what's coming is so fantastic. It's fantastic but not assured. But the reason is because if you look at the technologies that are coming about, all the work product that is rules based and requires human beings to be linear and disciplined and non emergent, like non human in essence, like taking us and reducing us to robots, that work is going to be automated. And so I'm talking like over the next hundred years, not tomorrow, but it's going to be automated. And then what's going to be left is the field of opportunity or field of potential, of what human beings do well, which is human beings have aesthetic and judgment and creativity and perspective and a unique set of attributes. Every single one of us born of genetics and mimetics. And if you could take, well, the only job you can get is to work in a factory and make sure you just do this repetitive task a thousand times. And if you do it a thousand times and 999 times you do it right one time you do it wrong. You check the box of it's not worth it replacing you yet. But when you start doing it a hundred times wrong and 900 times right, it's probably more valuable for me to replace you with a machine. And as robots get better, as AI gets better, as all our technology sort of evolves in that direction, there is this opportunity to take that person who's sitting there on the line and doing nothing but this repetitive task, which will inevitably be brought to mechanization, and put them in a position where we can figure out what they're truly extraordinary at. That is, when I think of the arbitrage opportunity of the labor market over the next hundred years, it's going to be in the delta between the human capital potential and what's actually productive. And all the ways to make it productive by demeaning it and putting it in mass production or repetitive task or any of that stuff is going to be automated. And so that moment, which is an ongoing sort of thing, but that moment will either help us take us as a species to an entirely new level, or it's totally going to screw us. Because the reason it would screw us is because the people who have been responsible for mechanizing the human spirit and making it all about dollars and cents, because they've got a lot of reward from that system monetarily, membership, status, all that stuff, those people are going to keep believing that old system is going to keep working and working and working, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And so, again, you can think about this in terms of a manager, employee, like an employee company, or a global economy writ large. We have to start to create the agency to change our companies so that the people at the very top who are living in this blindness, this fog, as you say about if we just keep doing the same thing, it's going to work great. We have to form the agency to start changing the way we manage and the way we manage ourselves and the way we become productive in the way I not like busier, but I actually have something in myself to contribute. And when I contribute that thing, the company does a ton better. But I agree with those simplifications. The other thing about, you know, it's not just spreadsheets, which I agree with you. The feedback cycles on capital are just super fun. Why do we have increasingly like speed trades and day trades? We're just shortening the dopamine cycle. It's just like, I put my bet here, I've got something at stake. It went up, I feel good, and then I feel like a genius and all that kind of stuff. And the guys like Buffett and Munger are sit on the side and just discipline themselves. And they're not looking at the spreadsheets, they're looking at the fundamentals. They're investing for the long term. They figured out a way to not get hooked into that dopamine cycle. Either they got lucky or they're just different or they've practiced the discipline like Munger and. But money is a really short term fun reward signal and talent is a harder, longer term reward signal. And so what I'm proposing is competing against human physiology.

[Dart Lindsley]

It's shorter, it's less legible, so it's less perceptible. And the other thing is the way you've described it, I'm not in control of it. In other words, I can't control people into their full potential.

[Jeff Hunter]

That's right.

[Dart Lindsley]

And that's got to feel bad.

[Jeff Hunter]

Well, we're not in control of any

[Dart Lindsley]

of this, but we can think we are. And that feels great.

[Jeff Hunter]

Yes. Yeah. I mean it. I read the prospectus and I am a knowledgeable investor and the market doesn't matter. Sure, we're fooling. I mean, back to the original point of what we talked about. Our mind is tricking us into all sorts of stuff all the time. And control not only hoarding the stuff that we value, but feeling like we can control our environment to create an outcome that's beneficial to us. Those are very core attributes of cognition and human psychology. They're both illusory. But yes, the talent game is hard because you don't have control. It's more complex and you have less control. And frankly, a lot of times, just because of the way we're taught as managers and as leaders, we don't even have influence the way we think we do. We have influence in that hierarchy, the way I talked about. But we think we give a great speech and everybody's on board. One of my favorite stories is we had this client who had taken over as CEO of this financial services firm. I love this guy, but he's a big sales guy. And so he gets up in front of everybody every week and he talks about the vision of the company, where they're going, what the priorities are, et cetera. He's a transformation agent, for goodness sakes. Like, he's got a vision. He's going to lead him to the promised land. And so we get called in. I think he's been there about a year and a half. And, you know, I talked to him then he says, I'm going to quit. He said, okay, why are you going to quit? I'm going to quit because my people are idiots. Okay, well, why are your people idiots? I've been talking for 80 weeks, day in and day out about, here's all the transcripts from all the all hands and all this stuff. Here's all this evidence that I have been communicating to everybody where we're going. And still if I go out into this organization, people are doing the exact opposite thing. And I said, well, let me just go get some data. You know, we're very data centric in our practice. And so we gathered a bunch of data. They came back and they said, so what is something you believe you have been communicating clearly for a year and a half? Name one thing. He said, here's the central theme. And I said, makes sense. I've gone through the transcripts, you've brought it up at least 52 times. This has been a repeated thing for you. What do you think is the probability that people believe that they understand that thing? Like they actually say they understand it or we have any evidence of that? He said, well, everybody should understand it. I keep repeating it. I'm like, the data shows roughly 12% of the people understand it. And by the way, those 12% are the people who all have ongoing relationships with you. Nobody who doesn't have ongoing relationship with you understands a word you're saying. So if the goal is you want alignment, we talk in our practice about seeing you want alignment. You are failing. And that's not their fault. Your people are not idiots. You're an idiot. And so let's talk about why it took you a year and a half of standing up for hours, repeating yourself to figure out you were incompetent. Let's talk about that. And by the way, it led to all these design changes, all these things, because he took that punch. He was like, he was there with me and we turned it around, but people just are so confused about people and about talent. As a result, you have to respect

[Dart Lindsley]

somebody who would pay somebody to tell them that you do. That's a plus. That's a real, real plus. And that something was done about it. So recently we had an episode about Bridgewater. I interviewed Rob Copeland about his book the Firm. And you worked for Bridgewater and so partially to balance coverage. Right. I want to make sure that we get a complete view of Bridgewater. How did working there advance your thinking about management, about leadership? I guess a way to say it is how did it unleash your potential?

[Jeff Hunter]

And did, definitely did, I'd say in two respects. One is in the way of thinking or structure of thinking. I believe working at Bridgewater at that period of time, this was 20, 11, 12 and 13, that's when I was there. And I believe. I don't know, but I would imagine Bridgewater is a very different place now. But I was there during that period of time and it was like every day you were sort of being tested for an MBA level course and thinking you had to watch tapes, you had to take tests. Bridgewater has been called by Robert Keegan a deliberately developmental organization. And it definitely was that. There was a lot of time, a lot of attention, a lot of capital went into educating people about a better way to think about problems, to think about how you structure things, design systems, get feedback loops, measure success, look at goals versus measures, et cetera. And all of those things, or some derivative of those things has impacted me and Dalandism extraordinarily. We talk a lot about this concept of htsw, how things should work. That's really a design philosophy that I learned at Bridgewater. What's the acronym htsw, How Things Should Work. There's a whole nother podcast about how humans get confused. But we mostly play the game of business like toddlers on a soccer pitch. And if you want to avoid the toddlers on a soccer pitch, problem of everyone goes to the ball, kicks the crap out of it, it pops up and goes in the goal, and we all celebrate and say, we're genius soccer players. You really have to be disciplined in the application of design. So in that respect, it was just the intensity of that learning, the intensity of that experience really, I think, took my game up a whole nother level. There was a period of time where I think it was probably junior high. I wanted to be a professional tennis player. So I would take lessons and I'd go out and play in my class, you know, A, B, C or whatever. And And I'd do reasonably well. But what I realized is it was only when I played people far, far better than me that I got better faster, no matter how humiliating that was. And it was humiliating. It just was depressing and not fun. But, man, my game just got better faster. And I would say Bridgewater for me was a lot like you just got better faster because you were playing at a higher level with people who were much smarter than me. And then the other way, I'd say I've unleashed my potential. Because I think there's a lot of commentary about the culture really that I talked earlier about. We all have this facade about who we are and what we are and what we're good at and all these kinds of things. And I think people who go through very difficult experiences and are open to those experiences and really try to figure themselves out in the middle of it, they accelerate their understanding of themselves faster than people don't. I know people have been to war and they come back with a fundamentally different understanding of who they are than people haven't been to war. So I would say that experience for me taught me a ton about myself and taught me a ton about who I am and the facades and illusions I had about myself. Now I would say you have to decide whether you want to be on that path because that's not fun and it's not always handled well by those around you. And there is nowhere, I would say, that power is more. Obviously, if you've got somebody who's created a system and they've been saying, okay, the system is sort of an infinite game. I love that concept of infinite games. It's an infinite game. When you step onto my field, you'll play by my rules and I can change the rules as I want and all those things. And you're going to play at the highest possible level. Yeah, that's just deeply disorienting over extended periods of time. And I can't say that for that period of time made me a very happy or fulfilled human being. And yet I don't regret any of it. I'm very glad I did it.

[Dart Lindsley]

And you said one thing that I don't think I understood about Bridgewater before, which is that there's a whole lot of talk about Ray Dalio. But a part of what you're saying is that everybody there was sharpening each other. Everybody in a way that you find valuable, at least in retrospect. In other words, it wasn't just top down sharpening. It was person to person challenging. What I'M saying is it was a network of growth, not a top down push to growth or something like that.

[Jeff Hunter]

It was a system. It was an integrated system. It was a whole. I worked with Ray and I don't think it would be hyperbole to call him a genius. I don't throw that term around a lot. I don't think Ray was the smartest guy there or the smartest person there. I walked into that experience having a lot of my identity in my intelligence. Wherever you have your identity, that's where your fragility is, right? So I thought I was pretty damn smart. And I had existed in environments where a lot of people told me I was smart. So I walked into this experience thinking, I can hang with these guys. I couldn't hang with those people. Those people are brilliant, right? And I got smarter as a result. But the way you got smarter was tough because you didn't get smarter by taking a simple test. You got smarter by being humiliated in public and realizing you had to show up at a very different level each time in order to up your game. And of course, Ray as a founder, was the creator of that system and a primary driver of it. But it was a system. Every single person there was engaged in that activity. At least anybody who stayed beyond six months, I think there's a number of people stayed for six months are like, I am not going to enjoy this or be successful here. But it definitely wasn't Ray's thing. He created that system, but then that system sort of created him. And by the way, in some of the conversations I had with him, he was very clear about that. He at one point told me that this system of thinking helped him be a better thinker. And that was because he propagated that system to all these people and then they held him to account on it and pushed for it as well.

[Dart Lindsley]

And what did you learn about hiring for values? And one of the things that you've written elsewhere is that skills are illusory because context makes so many skills obsolete. Like a skill in one place is not the same skill in another. But one of the things about Bridgewater, is it hired for values? What did you learn about that? And is it related to the belief that maybe skills are not the thing?

[Jeff Hunter]

I always struggled with the values concept conceptually, because I don't think humans. First of all, as I said, if values exist, they would be visible in the behaviors of people in certain environments, right? And so you've got that well known saint in the pew, sinner on the street kind of Thing, we are immensely complicated and complex as our cognition, as our brains are. We as a species are. And I don't think you know what your values are until they're tested. So you can walk around and say, I'm really pro family. Maybe you're just like five minutes away from running off with somebody else. Who knows? We just have to see how this thing evolves and take you where you are right now. But also understand if we're trying to make a prediction about the future, we have to be sort of inherently skeptical about any statement of the future based on what happened in the past. Especially when that statement about the past is self reporting with a terrible narrator. Here's what I care about. I care about success. Well, why do you believe that? What information did you exclude to come up with that opinion? How did you prioritize this information to really highlight this, et cetera? So I've always been very skeptical of the values thing, and I think over time I've gotten more skeptical of it. What I would say is, I think if you got above the word values and really got into it, it was this thing of there are these intangibles about how we think about the world, what we care about, what we'll sort of prioritize. And those intangibles, while they're sort of unique to each person, can sort of be categorized in a way that we could say, you like books, I like books. I've read a ton of books. You've read more than a ton of books. Well, we probably value books. Now the question's going to be, and I try to teach this to people, is you've read a lot of books, but have you read a lot of books? Because you were in a context that really rewarded the reading of books. And if I bring you into this context where we don't reward the reading of books, are you going to keep reading books? And that's a very hard question to answer because everybody's going to say, yeah, I'm going to keep reading books. And most of the time they're wrong.

[Dart Lindsley]

Yeah. So essentially hiring for values, again, it's context. So some people's values might stand up to context, but many people's values won't. And skills. This is an example of something where it was something that I read in relation to the company talentism, but I'm not sure you wrote it. It's that skills are so contextual that anchoring on skills as the value of people is an error. Am I saying that right?

[Jeff Hunter]

Well, yes. So I think if you're trying to make an assessment about who's going to be good in a job, focusing on skills is the wrong way to go. So we tell this example just to illustrate this point of, I think espn, maybe it was ABC on a lark, got a bunch of major league baseball players who were big hitters. Albert Pool, all others, like really big. They could knock the skin off the ball, hit a home run. And they brought in Jenny Finch, who is a softball, an Olympic softball player. And they said, hey, we're going to pitch, Jenny's going to pitch a softball. How many of those do you think you can hit his home runs? And they're all like, it's a bigger ball, it's slower, like, I'm going to crush it. They couldn't even connect with the ball right. Because what it turns out is the problem when the result you want is a home run, the skill isn't batting. The skill is hitting a fastball. And when the ball comes in lower and slower at a different angle and it's closer, the mental apparatus you need, the like Kahneman fast thinking mental apparatus you need to hit that ball is not available to you. But if we walk around saying like, okay, batting is the skill I need, then you're going to get batters when you really need people who are good at fastballs. And this is the thing I'm talking about with, or we're talking about with regards to context, when you make it reductionist to the skill. I need a project manager, I need an accountant, or whatever you're setting yourself up for basically a random flip of the coin outcome. Because the application of the skill in context is what creates the result. So what you're really trying to do is figure out the context. Where have you had a good outcome? What was the context? And by the way, that context has a lot of facets to it, but what was the context? Okay, so if you can create that result in this context, then if I need that result and my context is the same, then we may be a match. But I'm not talking to you about the skill.

[Dart Lindsley]

Adaptability to context, however, is an enormous asset. So I ask everybody at the end of the show this question, which is what job do you hire your job to do for you?

[Jeff Hunter]

Yeah, you told me that question. I've been thinking about it a lot. I exist in sort of a weird context because we have this thing called EOC eating our cooking. This eating dog food sounds disgusting. So we talk about like we're cooking all this stuff and we're Going out and trying to sell it to people. Do we want to eat it? And so really, we consider talentism as a laboratory for innovation in many ways, because we got to make it work here first. You know, if we're failing as a company, doing what we say will create success, don't go tell other people that it's going to work. And so the job that I find that I have to continually hire myself as is like I am the guinea pig CEO. If I'm claiming that personal responsibility is the core of leadership evolution, then I hire myself to write incredibly vulnerable blog posts to the company once every couple of weeks and sometimes every day. If I am saying that we need to deploy our, well, methodology. What excellent looks like methodology, I gotta go deploy that first, and I gotta see how that works. So really, what I'm doing is constantly. We've got a company, it's a group of great people. We're growing, we're hiring, we're selling, we're getting more and more customers, more clients. We're creating more products and services and technology and all that stuff. And I gotta be the person who looks people in the eye and says it works. Because I'm a confused human being in a leadership position who is trying to build something that I'm proud of and that the people who are part of this are proud of. And we're trying to eat our cooking to make that happen. And if it doesn't work for me, I'm not going to ship it to you.

[Dart Lindsley]

I love that. First of all, I hire my job to discover the unknown. I hire my job to invent. But a part of the unknown that you discover is in yourself. And so you hire your job to operate, to do brain surgery on yourself, or at least on your ego in many cases, or some other piece that's fascinating. And what does it cost you?

[Jeff Hunter]

The tried answer is happiness. My wife is my best friend. And I'm not saying that in, like, a cute sense, like, maybe the only person who unconditionally accepts me in all my foibles over a long period of time. But for her, happiness is really important. And so she looks at what I do to myself and says, why the hell would you do this? Why would you be on this path? Because I worry about all of my clients. I worry about the people who work here. I worry about my investors. I'm trying to hopefully burn my candle bright enough that on my last day, I'm fully extinguished. And yeah, that's not a recipe for happiness. That's not a recipe for waking up every day and thinking like I've got it going on and I'm succeeding. It's a recipe for every day examining my faults and how I could get better and how I could help others more and unleash that potential. So I think that's what it costs

[Dart Lindsley]

you as experimenting on yourself, as operating on your own ego would do.

[Jeff Hunter]

Yes.

[Dart Lindsley]

Where can people learn more about you and more about talentism?

[Jeff Hunter]

Talentism at our blog, talentism.com and our website. We have a lot of content there. We got podcasts, blogs, we've got all sorts of stuff. Yeah. And I think we're in some other channels. Our marketing group now is doing all sorts of different TikToks and everything. Like, for an old guy like me, I have no clue what they're doing, but they're doing a great job at it because it's working. So I think you can find us on a lot of different channels, but primarily the website talks about who we are and what we're trying to do.

[Dart Lindsley]

Honestly, there's not an article on the website that doesn't disrupt some assumption. And so I think they're good reads and they're worth going to look at for anybody who's interested.

[Jeff Hunter]

It's perhaps one of the kindest things anybody's ever said to me. Thank you.

[Dart Lindsley]

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show and taking time to talk to us today.

[Jeff Hunter]

Of course. I was looking forward to this story. We haven't been talking a lot recently, but I always enjoyed our conversations. I had high hopes for this and it exceeded my expectations. So thank you. Dart,

[Dart Lindsley]

thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.