The Talent Pool Your Company Probably Overlooks

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2017

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Robert Austin, a professor at Ivey Business School, and Gary Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, talk about the growing number of pioneering firms that are actively identifying and hiring more employees with autism spectrum disorder and other forms of neurodiversity. Global companies such as SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are customizing their hiring and onboarding processes to enable highly-talented individuals, who might have eccentricities that keep them from passing a job interview — to succeed and deliver uncommon value. Austin and Pisano talk about the challenges, the lessons for managers and organizations, and the difference made in the lives of an underemployed population. Austin and Pisano are the co-authors of the article, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage” in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you
0:20.2	listen. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish in Forcera Green
0:38.9	Carmichael. There's a parallel universe out there where the people applying for jobs at your organization are major contributors helping it to grow, transform, and succeed.
0:49.0	But in this universe, in reality, your hiring process is probably rejecting these
0:54.8	candidates after the very first interview if they even make it that far.
0:59.9	Now there are always hires that you wish your company had made and others you wish that it hadn't.
1:05.6	But our guests on the show today say there's a population of highly talented workers that
1:10.6	your company is probably overlooking and that it's time for that to change.
1:15.0	We're talking about people with autism spectrum disorder and other conditions
1:20.0	sometimes associated with higher than average abilities, like dyslexia, ADHD, and social anxiety disorders.
1:28.0	One term for all of this is neurodiversity, people who can have eccentricities that can be challenging in a workplace, but also
1:36.8	people who can bring singular skills to their work.
1:40.5	That's something a growing number of pioneering firms around the world has been learning to manage.
1:46.0	Here to help us see how these organizations are learning to unlock the potential of this often
1:51.0	untapped workforce is Robert Austin, he's a professor of
1:55.4	information systems at Ivy Business School, and Gary Pizano, a professor of
2:00.8	business administration at Harvard Business School.
2:03.8	They wrote the article,
2:05.0	Neuro diversity as a competitive advantage.
	...

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