An inversion exercise

Charlie Munger, the late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, famously said, "Tell me where I'm going to die, so I will never go there." He called it inversion. Instead of trying to be brilliant, you simply avoid being stupid.

In the world of workforce transformation, a lot of organizations are drawn to the "dream" of the skills-based organization. Yet, most are actually building expensive, data-heavy graveyards.

So, let’s apply Munger’s logic. If you want to burn millions of dollars and ensure your skills transformation hits a wall at 100 miles per hour, this guide is for you.

Here is exactly how to guarantee failure, validated by the very experts who are tired of watching you drown in spreadsheets.

Step 1: Treat skills as a fun HR project, not a business imperative

If you want to fail, make sure you position "skills" exclusively as an HR topic. Do not, under any circumstances, connect it to actual business agony like revenue targets or speed to market.

Walk into your CFO’s office and talk about "democratizing talent" or "abstract internal mobility." Watch their eyes glaze over. Successful companies know that skills are the currency of business agility. But you aren't here to succeed. You are here to build a beautiful taxonomy that no one uses.

Sandra Loughlin, PhD , Chief Learning Scientist at EPAM Systems, puts it bluntly:

This is not an HR play... This is a business play. People are the number one cost on any organization's balance sheet. And they are the source of differentiation and the engine of business." (source: TechWolf Podcast)

To truly fail, ignore this. Keep the conversation contained within the People team. Make sure the business thinks this is just another performance review rebrand. As Jan Duthoo , Chief Revenue Officer for SAP SuccessFactors, notes from his observations of failed initiatives:

Your business case is not big enough. Sometimes CHROs jump on the wagon, but not always for the right business case." (source: TechWolf Podcast)

Step 2: Buy the Ferrari before you know how to drive

One of the most efficient ways to torch your budget is to lead with technology rather than strategy. Go out and buy the most expensive, shiny platform you can find before you have defined a single problem you want to solve.

Assume that the tool will magically fix your broken culture.

Sarah Gretczko , Head of Talent and Belonging at PayPal, identifies this as the single biggest myth in the industry:

The biggest myth about skill-based organizations? That technology is going to be the solution." (source: TechWolf Podcast)

If you want to guarantee failure, confuse purchasing software with making progress. Kason Morris , Global Director of Future of Work at Merck, advises the opposite for success, which means for our failure guide, you should definitely ignore his advice:

I would say you don't lead with technology... think about the people and that value prop... and make sure that you have that business alignment... then start to think about how that may impact your processes." (source: TechWolf Podcast)

Step 3: Worship the God of perfect data

Tell your team that you cannot possibly launch a pilot until every single tag is verified by a committee. Refuse to start until your job architecture is perfect, and your data is 100% clean.

This is the "clean data obsession." It guarantees that by the time you are ready to launch in 18 months, the market has moved on and your data is obsolete anyway.

Lisa Brockman , Talent Management Director at Genesys, saw this trap firsthand when they tried to do it the hard way:

We were at this for about 18 months, identifying the job profile skills and employee skills ourselves... We quickly realized that that wasn't scalable. We couldn't keep that up... that data was already stale." (source: TechWolf Podcast)

To really mess this up, insist on mapping every single skill for every single role manually. Ignore the warnings of people like Meredith Wellard , former VP of Group Talent Acquisition at DHL, about the legacy mindset:

It literally used to take years to do that. And by the time you'd completed it, it was out of date, it had no value, it wasn't utilised." (source: TechWolf podcast)

The skills strategy red flag audit

How doomed is your current strategy? Check all that apply.

• [ ] The HR silo: Your Skills Steering Committee contains zero people with P&L responsibility.
• [ ] Ferrari syndrome: You bought a multimillion-dollar LXP/Talent Marketplace but haven't defined what a "skill" actually is in your organization.
• [ ] The perfectionist: You are currently in Month 9 of a Job Architecture Cleanup project with no end in sight.
• [ ] Staying in the 'shadows': You have some data, but your business stakeholders are 'skeptic scientists', so you don't present anything until good becomes close to perfect.
• [ ] The Manual Mapper: You have a team of consultants manually typing skills into spreadsheets to build your taxonomy.

Score:

• 0-1: You might actually succeed. Be careful.
• 2-3: You are building a very expensive slide deck.
• 4-5: Congratulations. You are following the foolproof guide to failure perfectly.

Jokes aside

At TechWolf, we've helped run 50+ skills strategies by infusing our data where it matters.

Our customer base is at the forefront of innovation, leveraging skills, task & job data to redeploy, hire, upskill, and plan.

What's more, they're all eager to share their learnings, and so are we. So reach out if this piece hit close to home, we can likely help!

Corporate transformations are not easy, but hopefully, using Munger's inversion concept, we can at least make it a bit less hard.

On to many more mistakes!