In Top Talent: Keeping performance up when business is down, Sylvia Ann Hewlett delivers a stark warning to employers: During tough economic times, it's more vital than ever to hold on to top performers. But she points out that many employers fail to support and sustain their best people, the top talent with the outsize smarts and dedication any company needs to survive recession and emerge stronger. There is a mistaken belief that massive layoffs and rising unemployment means that star performers have nowhere else to go. According to data collected by Hewlett’s Center for Work Life Policy, the top talent in many companies feel demotivated, over-worked, and alienated. 88% of top performers are not fully engaged. 24% of layoff survivors are actively looking for new jobs. And 64% of employees feel unmotivated even if they survive a layoff. Hewlett says that companies that want to keep top talent on-board and firing on all cylinders must urgently support, engage and re-energize them.

A comment by Sylvia Ann Hewelett in Top Talent: Keeping performance up when business is down, about the Four Horsemen of the Financial Apocalypse, of which AIG is one, got me googling to find the other three. To my surprise, I discovered that there are dozens of different versions of the four horsemen. There is Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, Washington D.C. and the media. There is Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Easy money from the Federal Reserve, Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and Mark-to-market accounting rules. There is dollar, debt, derivatives and deflation. There is credit card, automobile, TV and shopping cart. There is Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Madoff. And there is appraisers, originators of the mortgages, rating agencies and investment banking firms. I never did find the foursome that included AIG!

When Yuzo Yasuda described the Toyota Suggestion System in 40 Years, 20 Million Ideas in 1991, one US Army lieutenant general observed that evidently Toyota was in such bad shape that it needed a million ideas per year to fix its problems. I once conducted a brainstorming session at a motivation day in a third-level college in Northern Ireland, using the Toyota Suggestion System as a case study. It seems that in the 1980s, it took 10 General Motors employees to generate less than 2 successful ideas per year. During the same period, Toyota received 140 successful ideas per year per 10 Toyota employees. In other words, Toyota employees were generating 70 times more ideas than GM employees.

In 1518, Hernando Cortés set out to conquer Mexico. He discovered that some of his men were conspiring to seize a ship and escape to Cuba. To quash their plans, and to make sure such a mutiny did not happen again, he scuttled all his ships except for one small ship with which to communicate with Spain. In effect, Cortés stranded his men. There was no going back. He then led his band inland, and they succeeded against all odds – because they had to.

As a long-term patient in a burns unit, Dan Ariely frequently had to endure the painful process of having his bandages removed. Already endowed with a highly inquisitive mind, he conducted research on ways of making the process less painful, and proudly presented his findings to the nurses. However, he observed that even when the nurses were presented with clear evidence that they could reduce the pain felt by patients during bandage removal, they continued to administer the more familiar – and more painful – method. As Ariely says in Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions, his epiphany came when he realised that if nurses, who have an interest in helping and caring for patients, manage to misunderstand what constitutes reality for their patients, perhaps other people similarly misunderstand the consequences of their behaviours.