The wealth of a company today must include not just talent but also the integrity of its people, says influential business journalist Thomas Stewart

By Cheong Suk Wai

TALENT, talent, talent.

That is the mantra of companies these days in their ongoing global war for top-notch employees. But intellectual capital pioneer Thomas Stewart says they are shooting for the wrong targets.

Character is just as, if not more, important.

'Many companies are giving those with top grades anything they can. There are so many star performers around these days, and companies are rewarding them lavishly on merit and achievement,' he tells Life!

'It's like turning these companies loose with a knife in an oyster bed.'

But he says that talent today cannot just be 'work-smart or MBA-smart'.

'Talent at work must necessarily include ethics, or ethical intelligence, along with emotional intelligence.

'Being talented in today's world means being able to inspire confidence in people, keeping your head when everyone else is panicking, making people feel good about themselves and having strong ethical values in mind.'

Which is why Mr Stewart, whose 1997 book Intellectual Capital was named one of the 50 best business books of the 20th century by the Financial Times (FT), believes true talent in the knowledge economy is scarce.

'It's not monolithic or of the high IQ, high verbal kind. It comes from people who have character and integrity.'

He cites as proof Enron, the disgraced American energy and communications giant, whose wayward employees set off the biggest corporate bankruptcy in the history of the United States.

'More than others, Enron strongly preached picking the best and the brightest, and rewarding merit and achievement lavishly,' he says.

'Enron was actually Me, Inc - its employees were within a corporation, but operated as independent contractors. And these were smart oysters.'

He adds that the twist there was people soon found out that 'far from lavish perks being showered on them because they had talent, Enron employees were rewarded there for how well they kissed the boss's a**, to say nothing of bending rules'.

'In this, they were not rewarding talent; they were rewarding toadyism - and greedy toadyism, at that,' he says.

Unfortunately, such shenanigans are more regular than rare in companies everywhere, he adds.

Mr Stewart, 54, was in town to deliver the annual Singapore Institute of Management Lecture last Thursday.

On Nov 1, he will be the new editor of the prestigious Harvard Business Review journal. He takes over from the incumbent Suzy Wetlaufer, 42, who fell from grace after sleeping with her interviewee Jack Welch, 66, the former CEO of General Electric.

The editorship is another feather in Mr Stewart's cap, after 13 years on Fortune magazine's board of editors and a year as Business 2.0 magazine's editorial director.

This Harvard alumnus began an 18-year career in book publishing at, among others, renowned American book houses like Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Farrar Straus and Giroux. He also rose to the presidency and chief editorship of Atheneum Books, but quit the trade to join Fortune magazine in 1989.

He is now recognised as one of the world's best business journalists. FT calls him one of the 50 most influential business brains in the world today.

In January, he launched his new book, The Wealth Of Knowledge, which is a follow-up to Intellectual Capital.

He was, in fact, the first thinker in the field to recognise that the wealth of a company in the post-modern world would be measured not by its size or the money it made, but by the kind of people it had.

His widely-followed monthly column in Fortune, The Leading Edge, ran for six years.

Of 20th-century business and its cookie-cutter ways to control quality, he says wryly: 'Their purpose was so any idiot could run a company, and any idiot did.'

As he wrote in a Fortune column in May 2000: 'Traditional organisations are like buses with routes to follow and schedules to meet.

'Real-time organisations are like taxis responding to a waving hand or a voice crackling on a two-way radio.'

Wielding his chopsticks deftly at The Fullerton's Jade restaurant, he stresses: 'To get ahead in today's economy, we thus have to be most adaptable and effective, and understand that something is going to happen, though we don't know where or when it will happen.

'We have to improvise, to dance with the times.'

GROWING SINGAPORE

HE WARNS that in the knowledge economy, companies will not get very far treating workers like digits.

'As far as workers are seen as digits, they may be replaced by a digital workforce.'

Skipping two beats to sip tea, he muses: 'This, then, is one of the most tricky things for Singapore to navigate - how to move away from the paternalistic trends which have served Singapore extremely well all these years, and provide it with some sense of security.'

He feels strongly that Singaporeans need to relax a little bit, 'to let their energy of intelligence schooled in ambition do what it wants to do'.

Still, he says that compared to the Singapore he saw on his first visit in 1988, 'I sense you are a lot less inhibited now'.

'I don't see too many T-shirt shops today saying 'Singapore is a FINE city', and you now have as many jaywalkers as Hongkong,' he adds with a chortle.

He feels that 'Singapore has suffered from being in a relatively run-down neighbourhood' and commiserates with the country for not being able to do much about it.

But he is quick to add: 'This island has got to find what it can do to take advantage of its uniqueness and not be dependent on both neighbours and the assembly line.'

He also hinted at where Singapore could begin doing so.

'Singapore is a first-world city which is effectively bilingual in Chinese and English, and I know of no other place that has that ability.'

As he sees it, the watchwords for the Singapore of the future are these: