Human Resources: Thought Leaders, November 20, 2006

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Thought Leader: Jim Swartz on Seizing Opportunity (Seeing David in the Stone)

For the last 20 years Jim Swartz has been a consultant to many companies including 11 of the Fortune 100. He recently spoke with David Creelman about his work, including his book "Seeing David in the Stone".

DC: Jim, why don't you start off and tell me a little bit about your book, Seeing David in the Stone?

JS: It's a book that I have been researching for about 20 years and in the meantime, I have written two other books, but this one has been my passion all those years. Although I started as a physics researcher, I also spent a lot of time as a product design manager, a plant manager of three different plants and a director of Lean Productivity Movement for Improvement for a $3 billion corporation. For the last 20 years I have been a consultant to many companies including 11 of the Fortune 100. So this has come about in a lifetime where I have been running and leading inventors and trying to find our way competitively in the lean area. But there is no particular lean content in this book; it is a broader book.

DC: HR professionals ought to be getting beyond the areas like training, rewards, recruitment and so on, and into these bigger issues. How does an organization innovate? How does an organization grab new opportunities? And does HR have the ability to understand how those things happen? That is really the bigger win, not what is going on in the narrow functional areas.

JS: I have been searching for the answers to three timeless questions:

- How did some people find and seize the great opportunities of their times?

- What can we learn from them to help us find and seize great opportunities?

- How did great leaders help others to find and seize great opportunities?

I had interviewed many very innovative people and over a period of time, I discovered a lot of things also in myself. And as I watched the more innovative ones, I realized their success had nothing to do with what was in the existing books. So I spent 12 years studying the lives and writings and past research of many people. I also interviewed over 100 living successful people. I selected 70 people that, I believe, had the greatest opportunity finding and seizing ability of all of them.

I had chosen 11 different fields and I thought, I will find out what people do in sports, in business, in medicine and so on and then separate those into different categories and attributes—like Howard Gardner at Harvard did for those different professions. I was tracking that down when it all came together about three or four years ago. It was pretty clear that the great innovators all took the same actions to find and seize the great opportunities of their time. And when they didn't take those actions, they didn't succeed.

DC: So what is nice about this is that you went in to find out what is going on but what came out of it was a fairly well defined set of findings, much like when Jim Collins did his work in Good to Great. He was able to find some very consistent things that existed across all the different cases he looked at.

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David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research and a well-known writer, research and speaker on critical issues in human capital management. David’s previous work includes Chief of Content and Research for HR.com, in addition to working as a management consultant in Canada and Malaysia, most notably with the Hay Group.

David holds an MBA from the University of Western Ontario and has also taught Rewards and Performance Measures at the University of Malaya executive MBA program. David’s clients include think tanks, consultants, academics and organizations from around the globe. His current focus, in collaboration with Dave Ulrich, is on what organizations should report about human capital intangibles to the financial markets (see www.rbl.net "What the Fortune 50 Tells Wall Street").

David Creelman can be reached by email at creelmanresearch[at]gmail.com

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