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Talent

How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World

Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross

St. Martin's Press

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ISBN10: 1250275814
ISBN13: 9781250275813

Hardcover

288 Pages

$28.99

CA$38.99

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How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears?

Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.

Cowen and Gross guide the reader through the major scientific research areas relevant for talent search, including how to conduct an interview, how much to weight intelligence, how to judge personality and match personality traits to jobs, how to evaluate talent in online interactions such as Zoom calls, why talented women are still undervalued and how to spot them, how to understand the special talents in people who have disabilities or supposed disabilities, and how to use delegated scouts to find talent. Talent appreciation is an art, but it is an art you can improve through study and experience.

Identifying underrated, brilliant individuals is one of the simplest ways to give yourself an organizational edge, and this is the book that will show you how to do that. Talent is both for people searching for talent and for those who wish to be searched for, found, and discovered.

Reviews

Praise for Talent

Talent is what happens when two brilliant and profoundly iconoclastic minds apply their imagination to one of the hardest of all business problems: the search for good people. I loved it.”—Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia and The Tipping Point

"Talent is everything—whether in investing and building startups, or in other creative endeavors. Between product, market, and people, I've always bet on the last one as the biggest predictor of success. But while talent may be everywhere, it's unevenly distributed, and hard to 'find.' So how do we better discover, filter, and match the best talent with the best opportunities? This book shares how, based on both scientific research and the authors' own experiences. The future depends on this know-how."—Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz

"The most important job of any leader is to find individuals with a 'creative spark,' and the potential to discover, invent and build the future. If you want to learn the art and science of spotting and empowering exceptional people, Talent is brimming with fresh insights and actionable advice."—Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO of Google

"Two of the premier talent spotters working today, Cowen and Gross have written the definitive history of identifying talent. Anyone who is interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, or the roots of America's start-up economy must read this book."—Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta

"I do not know of any skills more worth developing than the ability to find exceptional undeveloped talent. I have spent many years trying to get good at that, and I was still astonished by how much I learned reading this book."—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

"A useful and entertaining map for companies looking toward a creative future."—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] thoughtful guide . . . Managers looking to shake up the interview process will find this worth a look.”—Publishers Weekly

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross

TYLER COWEN (Ph.D.) holds a chair in economics at George Mason University. He has authored many books—including The Complacent Class and Big Business—and writes the most read economics blog worldwide, Marginal Revolution. Tyler is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, has written regularly for The New York Times, and contributes to a range of newspapers and periodicals.

DANIEL GROSS is an entrepreneur and investor. At 18, he was accepted into Y-Combinator, the youngest founder ever at the time. He founded Cue, an AI-powered search engine, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. In 2018, Daniel founded Pioneer, a search engine for the millions of “Lost Einstein’s” — extraordinarily creative people around the world who have the talent, but lack opportunity.

Mercatus Center

Daniel Gross

Official Links

Subscribe to Tyler Cowen's podcast

Marginal Revolution Website