Gold-Collar Workers: Living Assets, Volunteer Workers

Guido von Rossom sounds like the name of an avant-garde artist, but he’s actually the “Benevolent Dictator for Life” of the Python programming language community and uber-Geek at Google.  As author of the popular Python language, he’s an extremely scarce human asset who chooses to rent his labor to Google.  Because he’s a programmer’s programmer, and famous for authoring a major language, he could easily work for himself, or another employer in a heartbeat.  The Scientific Leader’s recent blog coverage has been disproportionately focused on executives, so it’s high time I detail about the high-valued talent who make excellent innovations in technology and science. In many cases, these folks are worth more than their bosses, and take home bigger paychecks because of it.

Guido isn’t the only “gold collar” employee around.  As highly skilled, innovative, extremely intelligent and highly valuable employees, they’re they’re distinct from their less skilled white-collar counterparts.  They’re wealthy, and very techno-literate, according to USA today.  Gold collar knowledge workers represent a quintessential example of a scarce, difficult to replicate asset in the “Resourced Based View of the firm” (RBV), a model for business strategy.  The RBV argues that firms can earn sustainable profits that exceed the competition if and only if they have significantly better resources that are tough to copy by competitors.  Barney provides four tests of whether firm resources can gain sustained competitive advantage:

1. Valuable – is the outcome or output that they produce (directly or indirectly) something customers pay for?
2. Rare – are the resources scarce, and ideally dwindling in availability?
3. Imperfectly copied – is it hard for competitors to imitate the performance?
4. Non-substitutable – are there other assets that can do the same job?

The Resource-based View has its’ proponents and opponents, and Jay Barney has done some of the most extensive research worth reading.

But recent work presented in last year’s Academy of Management Conference, January 2007 suggests that these brilliant gold-collar workers are able to use their own ingenuity, mixed with existing hardware and software to create large amounts of value and fundamentally represent the secret to business strategy.  This view – that assets mixed together create value – is very consistent with my own paper in next year’s Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference, introducing and testing empirically the “Cue See(TM)” model. I developed the model to help define and manage just this sort of intangible asset value, of white and gold collar workers, mixed with other assets. Cue See is also useful for detecting and mitigating risk in operations.

Are you systematically hiring and retaining these extremely scarce sources of competitive advantage? Who are the pivotal talent pools that, without them, would evicerate your ability to create value?  Are you systematically mitigating these risks?

Gold Collar, Human Capital, Risk, Enterprise Risk, Programming, Information Technology, IT, Computer Science, SIOP, Psychology, Retention, Engagement, Cue See, RBV, Resource-Based View, Strategy