Dale's Blog

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of going to see Tony Bennett sing at Casino Rama. Now… I’m more a rock fan than a ‘big band’ fan, but let’s face it – great is great. I found the show very enjoyable and also enlightening – it was almost like taking a ‘music history lesson’. And the experience brought into glaring focus the differences between his ‘time’ and the present and perhaps, a few ‘lessons lost’.

Mr. Bennett gave credit to the exceptional song writers (like Gershwin, etc.) and while listening to these beautiful songs, it occurred to me that those ‘song writers’ did not sing the songs – they ‘wrote’ the songs – that was their incredible ‘gift’ or talent. Singers like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, etc., ‘sang’ the songs – that was their ‘gift’ or talent. Two different skill sets or talent, each doing what they did best.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some excellent singers who can write songs and sing equally well – but that is extremely rare. I just happened to catch Barbara Streisand on Oprah the other day – I had forgotten how incredible her voice is… and I can guarantee she did not write the amazing song she sang that brought the audience to tears. Her voice and that song – magic.

The point of this dissertation is that for some reason, we seem to have forgotten that different jobs require different abilities and certain types of individuals are better at certain types of jobs. I often see job descriptions in ads which are really a ‘combination’ of two different jobs that would normally require two very different people. I realize that there are ‘cut backs’, but look around – you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that this might not be working out all that well. Wasn’t there a saying ‘jack of all trades, master of none’??

Unless things have really changed in the last couple of years, you can always ‘learn’ to do ‘tasks’, but if you are ‘made for the job’, learning those tasks is easy, you enjoy your job, and succeeding is a given – everyone wins.

This may be one of our ‘lessons lost’.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 3:47 pm and is filed under About Employment, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.