ACT III: THE THEATER — Performance vs. reality
In recent years, the world of business and human resources management has been developing the idea that it's necessary to seek out, find, and enhance the talent of people.
This idea has become so big that many companies have changed the signs on their Human Resources office doors to "Human Talent."
This post doesn't intend to criticise the idea of "talent." However, talent management—and above all the message carried by the term "talent" itself (through deformation)—along with its repetitive marketing-commercial use (here lies the deformation), has generated a series of completely outlandish positions and views.
Talent as a business concept emerged after years of hegemony of the power of mediocrity, de facto and intellectual slavery, the absence of communication between organisational leaders and their workers, and the dominance of Taylorist and/or Fordist production systems.
In these systems, talent (I insist, in the deformed use of the term) was neither a requirement nor valued at all, since tasks were so segmented that all that was needed was following instructions and someone to monitor output.
Opening up, market advancement, and above all, competition, gave rise to innovation—and with it, new ways of understanding work as something freer, less pressured, less controlled, less automaton-like, and more creative.
In these times when companies have understood that talent is a differentiating value, freedoms in favour of it have surpassed controls and the application of organised systems of work.
In our country, there are countless examples of "Talents." Football is the best example. Yet year after year, sport after sport, we've seen how teams with much less talent have beaten us solely through discipline, through conduct—solely by applying tactics, a methodical and controlled system.
The same happens in today's companies. Talent has taken on such value that the value of conduct has been forgotten—of discipline, of systems, of method. Today a person with talent has enough freedom and lack of control to breach, skip, disobey any rule, any system, simply because they possess "talent."
It seems that talent ate the worker…
The Taleb Connection
The cult of "talent" is a marketing layer over an older thing — discipline, conduct, method — and the marketing has eaten the substance.
"So let us call the green lumber fallacy the situation in which one mistakes a source of necessary knowledge—the greenness of lumber—for another, less visible from the outside, less tractable, less narratable." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Book IV, Ch. 14
Talent is the greenness: visible, easy to narrate, easy to put on a slide. Conduct — discipline, a method, a system — is the part that actually moves the result, and it photographs badly. The football analogy in the article is the giveaway. The talented sides keep losing to the disciplined ones because the disciplined ones are trading the lumber, not the story about the lumber. The budget goes to the narratable label. The wins go to whoever quietly built the system.
Talent without conduct is fragility wearing a crown.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration—clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.