I needed to put a new feature into testing this past Tuesday. Our new QA dude has been hanging long enough that it's possible that he could potentially pick it out the queue. All the same, three measely hours of product "training"--a polite term for being water-boarded with an information fire-hose--is hardly enough to equip him for nuance. The upshot was that, in the time it took me to type out testing instructions & parameters, I could quite realistically have done it myself--perhaps all the way up the server food chain. But there's no way he'll ever know where the proverbial bodies are buried if there's no dirt under his fingernails. That's just the cost of doing business. That being said, it's a non-trivial cost, and one that shouldn't be paid more than absolutely necessary.
I imagine that anyone who manages people in just about any industry will nod and smile in recognition. What, then, to make of Harvard Business Review's Daily Stat: Economics Degree is Best Route to CEO Job? If, as conventional wisdom holds, the workforce whose main job is to innovate (meaning synthesizing creativity and problem-solving) may not be best organized by a value-system largely driven by supply-and-demand, and relentless optimization of inputs and outputs. Understand that I'm not trying to create a strawman picture of economists, but that's what I recall from my exposure in college, and from a healthy dose of business-related reading in my daily news-cruise.
Yet I think we can agree that--short of a skunkworks project and those have their own fallout--innovation typically isn't something you can inject into an organization from the outside. Maintaining a reliable level of creative problem-solving requires context, and that requires longevity of staff. A frothy churn in headcount means that wheels will be reinvented more often and the wrong problems will be attacked, simply because the understanding of why things are being done won't permeate the organization as quickly, if at all. And the longer it takes, the harder that context has to fight its way past pre-conceived notions.
Granted, it's been well over two decades since my last (100-level) Economics class, but I'm nevertheless skeptical that workforce-retention skills dominate the curriculum. And if the US economy looks to innovation to remain competitive, that's a problem.
- - - - -
Apologies for the lateness of Thursday's post: We lost our internet connection sometime between Thursday morning and the time I arrived home. Hopefully it'll be fixed tomorrow.
