My sister runs a pottery studio Earth to Fire and is quite short-staffed. On our weekly jaunt to Karjat, we got talking – and I found myself advising her on scaling up her business. The thought process was quite simple. Hire a few more assistants, train them, expand the number of classes, get more students and so on…pretty straightforward excel sheet modelling.
Now, unlike other businesses, where you can hire staff and train them, pottery is an art form that requires aptitude and attitude in addition to skill. You need to be creative and passionate in addition to being trained. And as she explained with much frustration, you just cannot train someone to be a potter – they must want to be one!
In another conversation with a PE friend…he’s just invested in an animation training company as part of an educational thrust. For being a bright idea on paper, turns out that it’s painfully slow progress – the reason: students line up to join, pay a fancy tuition fee, are even assured employment but they just don’t have the creative talent to become good animators. Again, animation desperately requires creativity & passion in addition to plain skill.
To quote Ross Johnson, “it’s BGO – a blinding glimpse of the obvious” – that some industries, especially creative industries require that the famed X Factor be a critical component of the candidate’s resume.
So you can train pilots and engineers and doctors, but to be a potter, painter, musician and actor – it’s got to be in you…of course, you still the need the training and practice and experience, but if you are tone deaf, you ain’t makin’ music 🙂
No wonder then the recruitment philosophy we followed at NewsCorp “Hire attitude, you can always teach skill. But rarely the other way around”
SAMEER NAIR 