Performance improvement is entering a new era, raising difficult questions for companies and individuals. Already, millions of people are taking performance-enhancing drugs—not just for athletic performance but to improve cognitive skills. Suppose that a drug company offers a relatively safe and legal “brain Viagra” that stimulates superior cognitive performance, and millions of hard workers in emerging economies start taking them. That’s just one scenario raised by Michael Schrage. Given current research, the enhancement situation may go well beyond this to include neural implants that improve memory, concentration, and reasoning skills. The top-performers in the best-performing organizations will always seek to “get better at getting better”. Should companies encourage, ignore, or discourage their people from doing this? Should they subsidize new performance enhancers? Schrage very plausibly states that “any serious discussion about the future of managing talent demands a leadership debate about the future of enhancing performance.”
The new challenges of human-capital investment resulting from emerging technologies are many. This article explores a wide range of them. It’s clear, for instance, that talented people want the recognition and rewards that go along with better performance and may vigorously pursue newly available shortcuts, perhaps creating conflict with their organizations that bear attendant risks. Schrage looks to sports and education for possible guidance for companies. In the case of sports, he notes that it has been the highest performers that most committed themselves to chemical self-improvement. Elite sport provides a model in which this kind of performance enhancement is highly regulated, with innovative technologies constantly racing against new testing methods. However, in the case of college admissions, “the educational performance-enhancement market is remarkably laissez-faire.” In the end, “neither the school nor sports model appears to offer much help to CEOs and their boards.”
One reason why neither schools nor sports tell us enough about the future of performance-enhancement challenges in business is that we don’t yet know how government will influence new agreements in the workplace concerning enhancement. Then there’s the effects of global economic competition, which make it difficult to set national policy independently. The most significant reason why neither a tightly controlling nor a hands-off approach can tell us much, Schrage suggests, is that “tomorrow’s performance enhancers—and their impact—are simply unknowable”, as shown by a few thought experiments.
In the midst of all these unknowns, Schrage says that “the most productive approach is for a company’s leaders to seriously ask themselves this question: What do we want “leadership by example” to mean?” In the absence of “an articulated and demonstrable performance-enhancement ethos”, individuals will inevitably take their own individual and arbitrary initiatives. As the range of performance-enhancement options expands, executives will have more opportunities to lead by example. Talent management will increasingly have to focus on how to share these examples. Leading by example in this case is complicated by the fact that “policies and practices around improving the self invariably become debates about fundamental values.” Schrage’s paper will not answer all (or even many) questions about the future of performance enhancement, but it does ask many of productive questions.