March 8, 2024 · 3 min read
Escaping the Feedback Loop: When Talking Stops Working
As a leader working towards complex goals, you likely find yourself giving directions, explaining, checking for understanding, setting expectations, and the like. You think you're doing everything right and thus find it incomprehensible when things don't quite go according to plan. Deadlines are slipping, quality is poor, and you wonder what happened. Your mind naturally
September 7, 2023 · 4 min read
Authentic or Not? It’s a Bad Question
Should I be authentic at work or not? Should I bring my “whole self” or not? I recently read an article that was challenging the advice to be yourself at work. The author was making a full-throated defense of playing a role at work to get ahead. I don’t think the world needs more fear
August 31, 2023 · 4 min read
Culture: A Tool of Protection or Potential
I have worked in and for organizations that prioritize culture. They talk about it ceaselessly, spend millions codifying it, make it a priority in hiring and firing, and make consistently bold pronouncements about how culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is queen. I agree with them. They do this because they understand that culture is
August 28, 2023 · 3 min read
Goals, Emergence, and Braces
This week, I am reflecting on the funny paths we take to look like we knew it all along. I met a wonderful person this past week. We told our stories to each other. That happens many times a week: introductions, and then the canned narratives about our respective genius. But this time was different.
June 7, 2023 · 3 min read
Declining Productivity or Bad Design?
It is common for companies to experience a productivity decline as they grow. We hear it consistently from our clients, regardless of industry, growth, or tenure. They find themselves having to do and spend more, only to get less. Faced with this confusing experience, most leaders see the natural next step as doubling down and
May 9, 2023 · 3 min read
Clarity Coach Spotlight: Greg Kim
Greg first encountered Talentism while employed at a company whose CEO worked with a Talentism coach. When he was offered the opportunity to work with a coach himself, he was initially resistant. Looking back, he now recognizes that resistance as reluctance to engage in learning about his blind spots and limitations. Once he agreed to
May 2, 2023 · 2 min read
Anchored to Learning
Observing someone discover a passion is fascinating. My 6-year-old is currently consumed by building and toppling dominos. Not the classic white dominos with black dots, but colorful dominos that have been made expressly for building structures or lines and then knocking them down. That’s right. My kid sets up tiny rectangles only to knock them
April 18, 2023 · 3 min read
Clarity Coach Spotlight: Angie
Before joining Talentism, Angie was running a startup that was attempting to evolve standardized testing, to align it more closely with the realities of the world of work today. That mission meant they needed an incredibly diverse team: people who came from the education world, from developmental psychology and learning science, from the game design
April 4, 2023 · 2 min read
Navigating Choppy Waters
At Talentism, we've long believed that the companies which learn the fastest will win in the long run. As we all experience the macroeconomic currents becoming increasingly choppy, active and intentional learning – as individuals, leadership teams, and organizations – becomes more critical and more challenging. There are two non-negotiable components to effective learning: action-taking
March 7, 2023 · 2 min read
The Productivity Plateau
Companies experience a productivity decline when they surpass 150 employees. We hear it consistently from our clients, regardless of industry, growth, or tenure. They tell us that they have to hire more people to get the same amount of work done, or spend more time and attention to get the same result. They have to
March 2, 2023 · 2 min read
Fixes that Fail
I have trouble saying no. Lots of reasons. Chief among them is that I've gotten reward signals for a long time that are basically along the lines of “if you say yes and solve the problem quickly, the more people would like you, the more value you will add, the more money you will make.”
February 21, 2023 · 4 min read
For Sustainable Success, Prioritize Potential
The recent waves of sweeping layoffs in large tech companies are deeply unfortunate and painful, but not surprising. We've talked about the fallacy of the ‘wartime' CEO, and the free flowing capital markets that made tech companies believe that growth was never-ending. Those companies could overinvest, manage poorly, and largely ignore what wasn't working. When
February 16, 2023 · 2 min read
Growth, Not Change
In my early days of working with Talentism I encountered the distinction drawn between unleashing potential, and changing people. “Not trying to change people, that's nice,” I thought, but it wasn't an element that immediately drew me in. Over time, as I've applied Talentism concepts and frameworks to the real world, I've come to see
February 7, 2023 · 5 min read
Context Over Skills
At Talentism we often reference the idea that context, rather than a static slate of strengths, is what you're good at. This is in opposition to general wisdom, which posits that skills are the things you're good at. In this latter framework, people are a blank slate. They go to school and get training at
February 2, 2023 · 2 min read
Clarity Coach Spotlight: Fabio
Fabio was introduced to Talentism in 2019, when he was invited to receive complimentary Clarity Coaching as a component of the training program for a new cohort of coaches. He immediately saw the appeal in a coaching approach that wasn't rooted in simply making a client feel better or providing advice, but rather was about
January 24, 2023 · 2 min read
The 4D Model: Scaling Your Company
Of the many challenges that our clients encounter, a persistent one is the frustration that founders and leaders experience when they attempt to move from “doing the thing” themselves, to enabling others to execute. In some cases our clients are perplexed by how difficult this is. In others, they don't even realize how much their
January 19, 2023 · 2 min read
What Great Managers Do
We have the benefit of talking to hundreds of executives every month about their fears and challenges, and unsurprisingly, themes emerge. We're hearing that people expect their leaders to be coaches, not “just” managers. What does that mean, and how do you do it?
January 10, 2023 · 3 min read
Blind Spots Are What Kill You
In the flurry of intentions and goal setting for 2023, we're talking about blind spots. Because no matter how disciplined you may be, your blind spots sit alongside you, undermining those goals. And you have no idea.
December 6, 2022 · 3 min read
Culinary Compulsions and Finding Meaning
My partner Matt has loved cooking since he was a child. But in college, he studied advertising and marketing, then got a job at the local radio station followed by a big think tank in Washington DC. For more than five years he stayed in a relatively low-level position, doing the basic job requirements but
November 29, 2022 · 3 min read
Why Is Everyone Stupid or Lazy?
Talentism ran an analysis a few years ago of 90 failed strategic initiatives and missed plans at growth companies. More than 80% of CEOs at those companies blamed bad hiring: employees with a lack of capabilities or character, or both. In a pre-pandemic study, it appeared that laziness was endemic in the workforce. 75% of
November 22, 2022 · 2 min read
Learning Doesn't Feel Good
The human species didn't plan to use fire. Fire happened. It was probably scary. And then someone or some group decided to see what they could do with it. The wheel didn't happen because a genius set out to make one. Someone made a mistake and got confused. Instead of dropping the whole business and
November 17, 2022 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in WSJ on Twitter Under Elon Musk
Your company culture is defined by the behavior you reward, tolerate, and punish. Talentism Founder and CEO Jeff Hunter talks to the Wall Street Journal about the hardline culture cues and commands coming from Twitter head Elon Musk.
November 15, 2022 · 3 min read
Your Brain on Threat
You're feeling strategic, thoughtful, creative…until it hits: that one thing that plunges you directly into reactivity. Or maybe you're already in freefall, and that one thing was the last straw. You find yourself shutting down, getting angry, feeling despondent – whatever your flavor of threat response happens to be. All of us have threat triggers that hijack
November 10, 2022 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in WSJ on Tech Industry Layoffs
Talentism CEO and Founder Jeff Hunter weighs in on the fast and furious happening layoffs across the tech industry: "They're bringing in a ton of money. They don't want to lose the talent war. And then the party just stops."
November 8, 2022 · 2 min read
Dancing with Chaos
I was the type of adolescent who said things like, “human beings are a parasite upon the earth.” Not because I was going through a significant goth phase, as I likely said this while wearing bright baggy trousers and a Jurassic Park t-shirt, but because I had been highly influenced by my mother's environmentalism.
November 1, 2022 · 3 min read
What's New About Quiet Quitting?
Working with thousands of leaders and their organizations, Talentism is deeply familiar with the power dynamics of work. Quiet quitting is the latest in a long line of those power dynamics to spark a frenzy of attention, inspiring thousands of takes in one of three categories: here's why it's great!, here's why it's horrible!, or here's how to
October 25, 2022 · 4 min read
What Are You Afraid Of?
A preschool karate lesson reframes what courage really means — and invites us to stop hiding our fears and start feeling them as the first step to doing it anyway.
October 24, 2022 · 14 min read
What Clarity Coaching Can Do For You
Transcript below, for those of you who prefer reading over listening! Jeff Welcome, everybody. It's my great pleasure to be here today speaking with Joshua Walsky. Joshua is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Broadway Technology. We got to know each other when a mutual friend introduced us, and said, Hey, maybe Broadway and Joshua could
October 11, 2022 · 3 min read
The “Right” Choice vs. the “Next” Choice
Most people are taught through our educational system, managers, and culture that there are “right” answers. A failure to find the right answer is often chalked up to an issue with someone's intelligence or character. At Talentism, we call this a BSL narrative: it's common to attribute mistakes to your own or someone else's bad,
October 4, 2022 · 6 min read
Swimming to Shore
Transcript below, for those of you who prefer reading over listening! Angie Jeff, I've often heard you use the analogy of swimming to shore against a strong current to describe the role of leadership. Can you say more about what that means? Jeff The origin story is that I was on a family vacation down
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Ask More Questions
Talentism founder Jeff Hunter explains why asking questions is such a powerful strategy for leaders and how to apply it when things feel out of control.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Former Head of D&I of Compass, Chloe Drew
Chloe and Jeff talk about the value of empathy in the workplace, and using self-skepticism to catch personal blind spots in a leadership role. Chloe has 20 years of experience in designing, scaling, and leading strategies in corporate social impact, philanthropy, and diversity and inclusion. At Compass she launched the firm's first social impact and
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Co-Founder and President of Andela, Christina Sass
Christina and Jeff discuss seeking out inherent blind spots in the corporate world. Christina shares lessons she's learned from her personal experiences as a founder and activist, and ways that we can invest in people and handle growth, both personally and as a nation. Christina is the Co-Founder of Andela, which scales high-performing engineering teams
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Founder and CEO of Capsule, Eric Kinariwala
Eric and Jeff talk about hiring great talent, honing your craft, helping others unlock the context they can succeed in, and contextualizing intuition.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Founder and CEO of Shift, George Arison
George tells Jeff about staying humble in the face of success, how he's learned from his many mistakes, and his experience of growing up in the former USSR.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Division President of Sequential Brands Group, Jameel Spencer
In the inaugural episode of Coaching In the Clear, Jameel talks to Jeff about addressing systemic racial injustice, takes us inside the world of working with icons, and shares his perspective on how coaching unleashes potential. Jameel has been a force in the world of fashion and brand management for over 20 years. He has
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
President and COO of Andela, Jess Hunt
Jess and Jeff talk about the emotional toll of seeking self-awareness, remaining goal-oriented, and how defining expectations can make all the difference.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
PE Advisor and former CEO of Roland Foods, Jim Wagner
Jim and Jeff talk about learning for learning's sake, turning the goal into the process rather than the outcome, and how hearing someone's story can unlock your ability to understand their perspective.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Chief People Officer of Oscar Health, Kerry Van Voris
Kerry and Jeff talk about inspiring individuals and aligning loyalty to an organization's purpose, recognizing when different coaching styles are necessary to bring out the best in people, and how focusing on someone's blind spots can be the best approach for increasing effectiveness. Kerry held leadership positions at Amazon, Microsoft, and Bridgewater, and now manages
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Co-Founder and CSO of Casper, Neil Parikh
Neil and Jeff talk about accepting shortcomings and leaning into strengths, catching frustrations at the root of the logical fallacy, how safety plays into acceptance, and discovering capabilities that the perfectionist in us wants to hide. Neil is the Co-Founder and CSO of Casper, one of the most popular mattress manufacturers in the US. He
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
COO of EL Cap, Renee DeAngelis
Renee and Jeff talk about the responsibilities facing a coach, fear of the unknown, and sitting with discomfort.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
What's A Confusion Loop?
Talentism founder Jeff Hunter examines why work is so terrible — and how the mental narratives we invent to bridge cognitive dissonance trap us in confusion loops.
September 28, 2022 · 1 min read
Why Start a Business?
Before you can ask yourself or others how to find a job, instead ask yourself: how can I unleash my potential?
September 27, 2022 · 1 min read
Founder and CEO of Teal and former Chief Growth Officer of WeWork, Dave Fano
Dave and Jeff talk about the education, community and tools that help people build successful and fulfilling careers.
September 27, 2022 · 1 min read
Finding Your Potential
Jeff Hunter introduces the Big 4 framework for seeking the types of work and organizations that will help you build uniquely human competitive advantage and unleash your potential.
September 27, 2022 · 3 min read
Your Org is Full of A-Players
When aligned to the right context, most people can be A-players — but four common problems in leadership, role design, self-knowledge, and hiring consistently stand in the way.
September 20, 2022 · 6 min read
The Myth of A-Players
The belief that hiring "A-players" will solve everything is not only misplaced but dangerously off-base — performance can't be divorced from context, and the myth blinds us to why people excel in some settings and fail in others.
September 13, 2022 · 7 min read
No One is Doing Just Fine
Jeff Hunter and Angie discuss why leaders must acknowledge and deal with emotions openly — hiding them is both scientifically unfounded and practically dangerous for organizations.
September 6, 2022 · 4 min read
A Confused Person Confuses Everyone Else
Three dynamics — unrecognized self-confusion, power dynamics, and apophenia — explain why deliverables come back wrong and how building a culture of clarity can break the cycle.
August 30, 2022 · 7 min read
Hard Times or Good, the Opportunity's the Same
Jeff Hunter and Angie explore the "pony principle" — how economic disruption is a forcing function to practice the good management, honest feedback, and tough conversations that were always necessary.
August 23, 2022 · 2 min read
Clarity Coach Spotlight: Renee
Renee DeAngelis transitioned from CEO of Planet Granite to COO of a merged climbing gym entity — and how clarity coaching helped her define her intuition, trace team confusion, and ultimately find her way to Talentism.
August 16, 2022 · 14 min read
Fallacy of the Wartime CEO
A transcript conversation between Angie and Jeff unpacks why adopting a "wartime CEO" mindset is a psychological trap that orients leaders toward fear rather than goals, and why the real opportunity lies in staying clear, learning fast, and making smaller bets.
August 9, 2022 · 4 min read
Setting Up for Success
Six actionable steps — from anchoring on a compelling "why" to doubling down on what works — that help leaders orient their teams toward opportunity rather than fear during a market downturn.
August 2, 2022 · 4 min read
A Recipe for Clarity
Six-step sensemaking framework — see reality, accept it, reorient to goals, build around unknowns, look for opportunities, and create clarity for others — offered as a practical guide for leaders navigating a market downturn.
July 26, 2022 · 4 min read
Lions, Tigers, and Bear Markets
Economic uncertainty triggers the same fear response as a charging lion, but requires the opposite of survival mode — four strategies help leaders make meaning, stay goal-aligned, synthesize frequently, and deal openly with emotions to lead through downturns.
July 10, 2021 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in WSJ as Key Advisor to Compass CEO
Jeff Hunter, Founder and CEO of Talentism, is a key advisor to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin. "Mr. Reffkin said he's learned key lessons from Mr. Hunter, who helps Mr. Reffkin find blindspots and keeps him accountable."
July 6, 2021 · 3 min read
What Have You Left Unsaid?
Silence in the face of confusion — driven by fears of seeming incompetent or uncooperative — erodes alignment and invites failure; this piece explores why we swallow our doubts and how voicing confusion is the first step to avoiding bad outcomes.
May 25, 2021 · 6 min read
Clarifying Problems / Effective Feedback
A step-by-step process for giving timely, non-judgmental feedback — syncing on expectations, identifying what happened, exploring the gap, resetting to what great looks like, and agreeing on next steps — to build fast-learning, high-performing teams.
May 4, 2021 · 5 min read
When in Doubt, Call a Sync
A five-step framework — game, goal, field position, play, and sync check — for pausing and realigning a team before mismatched expectations snowball into wasted work and confusion.
March 23, 2021 · 1 min read
Presence Through Discomfort
Talentism Partner Jake Bornstein was featured on the Healing Ground podcast, discussing purpose alignment through his professional journey, his experience with chronic illness, and the intersection of cognition, complexity, and business.
March 10, 2021 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in Anchor on How to Find Your Calling
Jeff Hunter, Founder and CEO of Talentism, shares perspective on how to find your calling, how to manage well, and what it really means to accept reality.
March 9, 2021 · 4 min read
Inspiration and the Upper Limit are Just a Click Away
Because imagination is built from experience, you cannot pursue excellence without first being exposed to it — Roger Bannister's four-minute mile illustrates how seeing what is possible unlocks a cascade of achievement in those who follow.
March 2, 2021 · 4 min read
Experimenting is a Fun Way to Fail
Reframing the pursuit of excellence as a series of experiments rather than a test of identity disarms the fear of failure and lets curiosity — not willpower — power the search for your unique potential.
February 23, 2021 · 2 min read
When Life Feels Out of Control: Embrace Agency
When reality diverges from expectations, the instinct is to grasp for control or retreat into false certainty — but embracing agency, our capacity to act freely within our actual context, opens a path back to productive learning.
February 16, 2021 · 10 min read
You Don't Have to Do It Alone
Human cognition, survival, and sensemaking are irreducibly collective — the myth of the heroic individual limits our potential, and investing in shared clarity is the key to tackling complexity together.
February 2, 2021 · 4 min read
Whatd'ya Expect?
A team's deflating first meeting with a new boss — who left without learning anyone's name — illustrates how unexamined, unshared expectations are the invisible engine of workplace confusion and missed connection.
January 26, 2021 · 11 min read
Trust
Trust — broken down into honesty, alignment, and capability — is a shared common resource that enables human coordination, and clarity-focused businesses are uniquely positioned to rebuild it at a time when societal trust is at historic lows.
January 12, 2021 · 7 min read
Can We Get Back To Work?
Drawing on the story of a wildly dysfunctional but ultimately successful software team, this piece argues that the workplace — not politics — may be the last arena where people with opposing worldviews can learn to collaborate and rebuild our fraying social fabric.
December 22, 2020 · 2 min read
2020 in Review
Talentism closes out 2020 by thanking clients and sharing the year's five most-read Sensemakers and five most-listened podcasts, spanning pandemic leadership, confusion, clarity, crisis case studies, and coaching conversations.
November 17, 2020 · 5 min read
The Sticky Bear Problem
Leaders and managers constantly convey far more than they intend through their words and behaviors, creating "sticky bear" dynamics — a pattern of costly confusion rooted in unrecognized self-confusion, the power of hire/fire authority, and our compulsion to find meaningful patterns in noise.
November 3, 2020 · 8 min read
Q&A: Helping Struggling Colleagues (and Yourself)
A Q&A Sensemaker edition addressing how to support a struggling leader, how to help a grumbling colleague, and how to regain clarity about your own value when uncertainty and isolation have eroded your confidence.
October 20, 2020 · 8 min read
Lessons From a Knife-Sharpener
Jeff Hunter draws on a fish-counter job from his college days to explore how keeping your mind sharp works exactly like sharpening a knife — not by adding to it, but by deliberately removing the confusions, distractions, and dull edges that daily use accumulates.
October 6, 2020 · 11 min read
Confusion and Clarity in the Era of Exponential Information
As data creation grows exponentially, the bottleneck is no longer access to information but the sensemaking capacity to make it meaningful — and companies that build clarity structures to convert data into goal-relevant action will outperform those that simply collect more.
September 22, 2020 · 6 min read
The Need for Management
Jeff Hunter argues that discarding management in favor of flat structures or self-organization ignores an irreducible reality: things fall apart, confusion begets entropy, and what organizations actually need are "syntropists" — people skilled at turning chaos into clarity.
September 8, 2020 · 5 min read
The Responsibilities of Management: Design
A deep dive into the first of the six DECIDE management responsibilities — Design — explaining how converting goals into responsibilities, jobs, process, and ownership creates the organizational machine through which people achieve their shared goals.
August 25, 2020 · 8 min read
The Enterprise Clarity Model
Talentism introduces the Enterprise Clarity Model — four areas every organization must continually clarify to work effectively together: Goals, Leadership, Management, and Culture, each addressing a distinct source of the confusion that derails human performance.
July 28, 2020 · 10 min read
Decision Making Under Stress and Uncertainty
A seven-step framework for making better decisions during a crisis — moving from recognizing your own confusion and surfacing hidden fears, through accepting reality and finding creative options, to making the call when your thinking is actually at its best.
July 21, 2020 · 4 min read
Tired and Overwhelmed
For high achievers caught in pandemic-era guilt spirals — pushing harder as output drops — a five-step reset: recognize the confusion trap, reconnect to what really matters, sync on priorities, ruthlessly trim the to-do list, and communicate honestly with those around you.
July 14, 2020 · 4 min read
Providing Clarity for Grieving Employees
When an employee experiences loss, the manager's job is not to provide therapy but to eliminate work-related confusion — through proactive disruption planning, explicit cultural signals about grief, and thoughtful check-ins — so the person has space to actually process their emotions.
July 7, 2020 · 5 min read
Purpose
Talentism introduces the Purpose component of the Big 4 framework — breaking it into Compulsion (what you can't stop doing) and Meaning (why the outcomes matter) — and explains why aligning work with these two drivers is essential for sustained high performance.
June 30, 2020 · 4 min read
Two Questions to Ask Every Day
Jeff Hunter has asked himself the same two questions for 34 years — "Do I want to improve?" and "How will I measure myself?" — and shows how placing any executive or team on this 2×2 reveals why high aspirations paired with low standards silently produce the same failures over and over.
June 23, 2020 · 4 min read
Threat Triggers
A deep look at the seven hardwired threat triggers — physical security, providing, relatedness, membership, autonomy, influence, and fairness — that hijack our best intentions at work and in life, and how naming them creates room for understanding and effective action.
June 16, 2020 · 4 min read
Reflections on Leadership
In a moment of widespread fear, anger, and institutional doubt, Talentism reflects on what true leadership actually requires: clarity of self, vision rooted in genuine conviction, and a willingness to cultivate virtue — not just profess it — so that others are inspired to discover their own greatness.
June 9, 2020 · 5 min read
Culture is the Worst Behaviors You'll Accept
Using the Enron Code of Ethics as a case study, this piece argues that stated values are meaningless without the behaviors leadership actually rewards — and that your organization's real culture will always be defined by the worst behaviors you're willing to tolerate.
June 2, 2020 · 2 min read
A Reflection from Jeff
Jeff Hunter's personal reflection written in response to the pain and protests of 2020 — a leader stepping into the role of follower, accepting responsibility for his own blindness, and committing to listen, study, and continuously improve rather than fix or prescribe.
May 26, 2020 · 5 min read
Three Essential Principles for Clarity
Last week covered the basic process of turning confusion into clarity. This week takes a deeper cut on the three underlying principles required to create and sustain clarity over time: seeing what's true, accepting what's true, and taking experimental action.
May 19, 2020 · 4 min read
Talentism Fundamentals: Clarity
Clarity is the state of purposely updating our expectations to understand reality and act on it toward our intentional goals — and the ability to turn confusion into clarity is the fundamental requirement of active learning and achieving potential.
May 12, 2020 · 6 min read
Talentism Fundamentals: Confusion
Understanding confusion is vital because it determines whether new experiences are converted into learning or increased fragility — a split that determines how businesses and individuals unleash or block their own potential.
May 5, 2020 · 3 min read
A Masterclass in Crisis Leadership
New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern demonstrates how compassion for self and others, designing to your strengths, humble action, and enterprise-wide clarity combine to produce one of the world's most effective COVID-19 responses.
April 28, 2020 · 8 min read
Compassion is Advantage: Bringing Out Your Team's Best
A leader's ability to be compassionate to others is the speed limit on an organization's ability to learn — and this piece walks through the context, investigation, clarification, and help sequence for turning struggling employees into contributors.
April 21, 2020 · 6 min read
Compassion is Advantage: Starting with You
Compassion — curiously and charitably exploring another's experience — is not just an ethical ideal but the mechanism that transforms confusion into clarity, and it starts with the person many leaders struggle with most: themselves.
April 14, 2020 · 3 min read
Principles for Purpose in a Pandemic
Context is queen — culture is scrambled by COVID-19, and clarity-rich firms will see outsized returns; this piece shares how Talentism's founder created explicit cultural principles to help his team make sense of their new context.
April 13, 2020 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in HR Examiner on Leading in a Pandemic
Talentism Founder and CEO Jeff Hunter shares his thoughts on leading effectively and with compassion through an unprecedented time of uncertainty.
April 6, 2020 · 5 min read
Navigating the Perfect Storm
Four factors — rapid context shifts, escalating surprises, constant ambient threat, and an uncertain timeline — combine to make COVID-19 a perfect storm of confusion, and the path forward starts with creating clarity for yourself before creating it for others.
March 30, 2020 · 5 min read
Fear as Fuel
Fear is a fungus that grows in the dark — but when you name it, surface the confusion behind it, and run it through a "Lemonade List," you can transform fear from a driver of reactivity into a source of creative fuel.
March 10, 2020 · 7 min read
Creating Clarity for Remote Teams
As COVID-19 pushes companies to remote work, Talentism shares nine practices for maintaining clarity across distributed teams — from acknowledging the shift and watching your threat triggers to explicit sync points, channel rules, and leaving space for being human.
March 2, 2020 · 3 min read
Covid and Confusion: Learning to be with Uncertainty
COVID-19 is a stress test of our personal relationship to uncertainty — this piece compiles perspectives on the virus and offers a 2×2 matrix exercise for turning the confusion of an unknown threat into awareness and clarity.
February 25, 2020 · 2 min read
Effective Feedback
Feedback is the most powerful tool for achieving goals together, yet most managers treat it as an afterthought; this piece describes a six-step process — from recognizing your own confusion to figuring out together why the gap happened — and links a five-minute video walkthrough.
February 18, 2020 · 3 min read
Self Doubt vs. Self Skepticism
Self-doubt directs "bad, stupid, lazy" narratives inward and masquerades as humility, while self-skepticism is the conscious habit of asking "what am I missing?" — and only the latter is the path to clarity.
February 10, 2020 · 3 min read
Certain and Wrong
Certainty — the emotional-cognitive attachment to a way of seeing that shuts out learning — feels like righteousness but is actually a threat response; and the hardest part is that it is virtually invisible to the person holding it.
February 3, 2020 · 2 min read
How to Unleash Potential
Jeff Hunter's interview with Shane Parrish at Farnam Street is the fullest end-to-end articulation of the Talentism approach — moving from accomplishing goals by controlling resources to unleashing potential by asking how we create ongoing clarity for ourselves and others.
January 27, 2020 · 8 min read
Syncing on Goals
Goals are the fundamental building block of shared expectations, but genuine goal clarity requires sync across five levels — awareness, understanding, alignment, care, and trust — and confusion at any level can derail execution.
January 20, 2020 · 4 min read
MLK on the Pursuit of Excellence
On Martin Luther King Day, a reflection on MLK's lesser-known "Life's Blueprint" speech and how connecting to personal compulsion and meaning is the only sufficient fuel for true excellence.
January 20, 2020 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in Farnam Street on Embracing Confusion
CEO and Founder of Talentism, Jeff Hunter, teaches how to rewrite damaging narratives that hold us back, how to give and receive helpful feedback, and why confusion can be a good thing.
January 13, 2020 · 5 min read
Blind Spots
Most businesses are killed not by threats they see coming but by blind spots — and Talentism maps the seven categories of blind spots every leader faces, from simple knowledge gaps to the hardest emotional ones.
January 6, 2020 · 4 min read
Behavior Change
Willpower alone fails at behavior change; research shows that understanding the "protection goals" behind bad habits and redesigning your environment around them is what actually makes new behaviors stick.
May 23, 2016 · 37 min read
It's Just the Culture
Through the contrasting stories of Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher and Enron's Jeff Skilling, this essay argues that organizational culture is not values on a poster but the behavioral signals leaders emit — and those signals determine whether companies fly or die.
December 3, 2015 · 3 min read
A Different Future of Work
Responding to a Forbes roundup on the future of work, Talentism argues that the real shift is from creating places where people must show up to places where people want to show up — and that starts with designing for individual purpose, not data dashboards.
December 3, 2015 · 6 min read
But How Will We Manage?
Zappos' Holacracy experiment prompts a deeper question: when we throw out bad managers we may be throwing out the function of management itself — and what we need is not no management but a new kind, the syntropist who turns confusion into clarity.
November 3, 2015 · 9 min read
Most Interviews are a Waste of Time: How Hiring Managers Can Improve ROI
Hiring managers waste time interviewing because they confirm first impressions rather than assessing real fit; eight concrete steps — from owning the process end-to-end to probing for cultural congruity — dramatically improve the odds.
October 30, 2015 · 18 min read
Finding Greatness
Performance assessment methods have stubbornly failed for decades because they ignore context — and new research shows performance follows a power curve, not a bell curve, meaning stars shine brightest only in the right environment.
October 21, 2015 · 7 min read
How Pervasive is the Amazon School of Management?
The Economist's "Digital Taylorism" critique of Amazon reveals how a century-old management paradigm continues to stifle human potential — and why Designing for People, not scientific management, is the only path to competitive advantage in the modern economy.
October 8, 2015 · 7 min read
Why Recruiting Bets Don't Pay Off
Recruiting fails because companies hire for expertise and past motivation rather than for fit with the context — culture and work — in which the person will actually have to perform.
September 25, 2015 · 4 min read
The Disengagement Epidemic
The Amazon culture exposé is a symptom of a systemic problem: disengagement is everywhere, and the root cause is not bad incentives but a fundamental misalignment between the culture people work in and their essential nature.
August 7, 2015 · 5 min read
Make the Most of Talent Markets with Social Proof
LinkedIn Endorsements are nearly useless because they optimize for volume, not credibility and conviction — unpacking those two variables reveals what a genuinely useful social proof platform for talent decisions would look like.
July 25, 2015 · 9 min read
So What Do You Do?
The question "what do you do?" has come to define our identity — yet study after study shows most people are deeply unhappy at work; tracing the history from artisan apprenticeship through industrial mass production explains why, and points to a new kind of job designed around individual passion and talent.
July 19, 2015 · 5 min read
Clarity When Confrontation Doesn't Feel Right
When you feel you can't address a difficult person or situation at work, three practices — starting with yourself, staying calm, and asking "what if I am wrong?" — can convert quiet frustration into productive clarity.
July 12, 2015 · 6 min read
What It Means to Design for People
Designing for people means building organizations optimized from the outset for what the people in them are actually like — their passions, talents, and biases — rather than slotting humans into pre-defined boxes, and it requires tolerance for experimentation as each person discovers where they create magic.
July 3, 2015 · 8 min read
Design for People
Rules-based jobs built for the assembly-line era are being consumed by computers; competitive advantage now belongs to companies that design around what individual humans are actually like — reducing confusion and threat so that creative, agile brains can do work that machines cannot.
June 28, 2015 · 7 min read
New Business Playbook: Strategizing
Once you have envisioned a new opportunity, you need to figure out how to turn that vision into reality — and the New Business Playbook says the winning strategy flows from the leader's own strengths, not from data alone.
June 15, 2015 · 12 min read
Competitive Advantage? Envision You
In a world where information and analytical methods are commodities, the only true competitive differentiator left is you — your purpose and talent are the key to better envisioning.
June 7, 2015 · 5 min read
Evaluating "What is a Playbook?"
The Skeptic examines the science behind Talentism's "playbook" concept, finding that the sports metaphor maps well onto the psychological literature on heuristics, priors, and prototype-based decision making.
June 5, 2015 · 9 min read
Elements of the Business Playbook
A walkthrough of the nine common elements every business playbook contains — Envision, Strategize, Design, Jobs, Recruit, Pay, Incentivize, Change, and Manage — and how the Old Business Playbook addresses each one.
May 31, 2015 · 4 min read
What is a "Playbook"?
Your business playbook is a hidden set of unconscious rules guiding every decision you make — written over 150 years ago for a world that no longer exists, and responsible for the widening productivity chasm leaders face today.
May 16, 2015 · 3 min read
Evaluating "Why We Need a New Business Playbook"
The Skeptic examines Talentism's claims about flow, the amygdala hijack, and the relationship between fear and productivity, finding strong scientific support for each assertion.
May 14, 2015 · 5 min read
The Learning Leader: You
As followership grows less effective in a world of accelerating change, the new definition of leadership must start with guiding yourself first — making everyone their own Learning Leader.
May 10, 2015 · 6 min read
Why We Need a New Business Playbook
Businesses keep failing to achieve important goals because they keep adding new ideas — like flow — to an outdated playbook built on 110-year-old thinking; the real problem is that fear-based management kills the very flow it seeks to create.
April 2, 2015 · 3 min read
Evaluating "The Learning Leader: Overview"
The Skeptic examines Talentism's neuroscience claims about the brain's information limits and finds the evidence largely supports them — particularly the role of working memory and pre-attentive processing in filtering what we can perceive.
March 24, 2015 · 5 min read
The Learning Leader: Overview
Talentism introduces the Learning Cycle and Speed of Learning as a new framework for business leaders — starting with the premise that you are your most important business tool, and continuous improvement is the only way to keep that tool sharp.
December 19, 2014 · 2 min read
Jeff Hunter Featured in Forbes on Entrepreneurship
Talentism CEO Jeff Hunter was formerly Head of Recruiting at Bridgewater Associates, and is deeply familiar with Ray Dalio's principles and approach. For company founders looking to form a start-up team, Jeff advises, "Don't assume chemistry equals success."
May 6, 2014 · 6 min read
Talent Shortage or Management Challenge?
When leaders complain about a talent shortage, the data suggests they should look inward first — most hiring problems are really management problems in disguise, solvable by clarifying, redesigning, and predicting before recruiting.