What Katy Perry can teach us about Human Capital Management

Love or loathe, Katy Perry is pretty remarkable. Not for her unconventional dress sense. For the songs or the videos. For recently becoming the first artist in history to spend a whole year – 52 consecutive weeks – in the top 10 of Billboard Hot 100. For being the first artist in digital history to have six songs sell over 3 million copies. Not for her romance with Russell Brand. Or that she’s now got her own perfume – called, wait for it – Purr.
Without rehashing the bio on Wikipedia, the thing that stands out about KP is hard work, persistence and independence. The highlights:
  • In 2001, at 15, spotted singing in church, she went to Nashville and signed up with a Christian label. Learning to write songs and play the guitar, she recorded her first album.  The album bombed.  
  • Undeterred, aged 17, she moved to LA and recorded an album for Island. It went nowhere, and she was dropped again.
  • In 2004, she signed for Columbia, only to be used as a vocalist on an album that was also shelved. Deciding to record her own stuff – and 80% done – Columbia dropped her.
That kind of three strikes and you’re out disappointment might have ended her dreams of pop superstardom, but hard work + persistence + independence are rare traits, and while being ditched by Columbia, one of their publicity executives, Angelica Cob-Baehler enthusiastically recommended Perry to Virgin Records chairman Jason Flom. Virgin were on the up, but needed a breakthrough global act. Despite misgivings by the board, in 2007 KP signed to the newly created Capitol Music Group, a merger between Virgin and Capitol. As part of the deal, the label secured the masters to the unfinished Columbia album that would go on form a significant part of her official mainstream debut, One of the Boys. The Columbia recordings were seen by Flom as being “very strong but lacking an undeniable smash or two that would work both at U.S. pop radio and internationally”.  Adding the hits, the rest as they say is history.
The learning here of course is that ‘talent’ is hard to spot and hard to maximise. Many people saw talent in KP, but put it to the wrong use. At the same time, even those trusted with spotting talent and nurturing it can get it very wrong – think of all those publishers (all of them) that similarly turned down JK Rowling’s little book about a bespectacled wizard. And yet, even willing to go it alone and record her own music, some people recognise talent when they see it, or at least recognise that it doesn’t always come in shiny destined for the top packages (until it’s famous of course). 
An organisation can have a dozen KP’s or JK’s in it. All hard working, willing to work independently if they are not being heard, keeping at it even when they are knocked back again and again. Looking for – actively looking for and taking this persistence and independence into account when measuring talent – is probably more useful a skill to have than the ability to stick with looking for the next Madonna.  
Of course, it’s natural for us to think in formulas and models. It’s natural to rate more highly those that conform to these preconceptions too. But real talent is much more real than that. And it’s underpinned by the kind of hard-working independent-thinking human capital foundations that are much more telling about future potential than anything else you might measure.  
Original post – http://tiny.cc/t21et 

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