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When Joe asked me to write a foreword for his book, Misplaced Talent, the request arrived on the very same day that I completed an article I was working on with a colleague from another university looking at the relationship between science and practice (“the science-practice gap”). We reported on some research we had been doing on the ways in which practitioners bring scientific evidence to bear in their practice within the field of “occupational psychology,” as we Brits call it, or, for those with a more European or North American background, work or industrial-organizational psychology.

Despite differences in name, what comes through from the wealth of international experience upon which this book is based is that there are many more commonalities than differences when we look at how psychology has been applied to the world of work across the globe, but yet practitioners can sometimes struggle in their attempts to translate and apply to their own practice the very rich body of scientific research and theory upon which the profession is based. This is why Misplaced Talent is such a useful book.

Recognizing that the fundamental drivers of performance in the workplace stem directly from the most basic and deeply held set of motivations and desires that we all share in common as members of the human race, Joe’s ability to see beyond the surface details, through to the very heart of what drives human beings in a work context, and then to use the insights thus gained to see the bigger organizational picture is what characterizes both his own work as a practitioner and this book.

I recall a time over a decade ago when I invited Joe to make a presentation at the university research centre I was running at the time. Duly armed with enough data to satisfy the hardest-nosed of empiricists, along with a PowerPoint presentation of accompanying statistical analyses that would leave even the most eager of statisticians similarly sated, he scrolled effortlessly through his slides, pointing out the key findings to the varied audience of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and other assorted disciplinary specialists that are to be found in most university-based business schools.

After the presentation, the usual round of questions and answers began, whereupon, of course, I expected the conventional criticisms to emerge – the sociologists taking one point of view, the economists another, and so forth. Instead, I was surprised that, although each group had a range of challenging and probing questions, they all seemed to agree on the main points that he had managed to distill from the data.

In Misplaced Talent, Joe achieves a similar effect – firmly evidence-based and drawing from well-established research findings while at the same time highlighting the key points that are most useful for practitioners when considering how to apply these ideas to the particular talent management issues they are facing. His book is very clearly a product of his own personal embodiment of the scientist-practitioner model to which all work and organizational psychologists aspire.

The scientist-practitioner model, which emphasizes both methodological rigor and also relevance to the reality of work organizations, on the other, reflects what has been termed the “rigor-relevance debate. According to this debate, the research-practice gap arises through academics engaging too often in what has been termed “pedantic science” (obsessed with meticulous theoretical and methodological precision, but of little practical value or relevance to those working in organizations) and practitioners sometimes resorting to popularist science, based more on commercial interests and client acceptability than sound scientific research.

A similar debate on the relationship between science and practice has taken place within the field of management more widely. Denise Rousseau, in her presidential address to the Academy of Management, called for practitioners to adopt an evidence-based approach, defining evidence-based management as “translating principles based on best evidence into organizational practices” and positioning the approach as a response to the research-practice gap that was bemoaned by both scholars and practitioners. Both seemed to acknowledge that management practice was often, if not usually, based on something other than the best available scientific evidence – a suspicion supported by research indicating that less 1 percent of HR managers regularly read the academic literature. It is for this reason that Misplaced Talent is such a timely and useful book.

Based on sound evidence, but at the same time questioning the suitability of some tried-and-tested approaches within their contexts of application, the book advances practice-based knowledge by drawing key lessons from the academic literature and scrutinizing the ways in which they have been applied or, on occasion, misapplied in practice. A key feature is how these have been summarized into practical, useful pointers for practitioners, illustrating relevant issues and dilemmas through copious examples from the author’s own practice that bring to life the challenges facing practitioners in the contemporary, fast-changing workplace.

The picture emerging from our work at the Centre for Progressive Leadership of the role that business leaders and top talent of the future will play in this changing landscape is very different from the one played out in organizations today. We live in exciting times, and the increasingly networked context in which organizations find themselves means that their scope will only become wider as complex networks of suppliers, partners, customers, and other stakeholders emerge and interact in increasingly sophisticated and unpredictable ways.

Those at the top of the organization will, as I have argued elsewhere, need to become both “business model innovators” and “social facilitators,” while the way in which roles are continually reconfigured will present a challenge to those lower down in the hierarchy, even as those hierarchies themselves shift their shapes.

Those charged with matching people to these new roles must align a more diverse set of people through networks of “open innovation” and, while we cannot predict exactly how the story will unfold, the only certainty is that the organizations of tomorrow will be radically different from those of today in ways that we have yet to imagine. Misplaced Talent provides a valuable resource for any practitioners faced with the immense challenge of responding to these trends as they negotiate their way through this rapidly changing backdrop to develop the dynamic capabilities upon which the organizations of the future will depend.

One of the central themes of the book is person-environment fit (P-E fit), which is often misunderstood as being concerned simply with the degree of match (or mismatch) between a person and his or her environment. This is structural and static, whereas a more transactional framework has the potential to be process-oriented, taking account of the dynamic nature of the relationship between the person and the environment as the individual engages in “commerce” with that environment.

Such a conceptualization engenders a systems view of people at work, with each component of the system being dependent upon the others. The adoption of a P-E fit perspective presents a challenge to both the practitioner and researcher. Compromises will have to be made in the short term, as currently available tools and techniques account for only a static perspective. While the profession of occupational psychology may be some way off from realizing the full potential of P-E fit, it does at least now have somewhere to begin in Misplaced Talent.

The book represents both a valuable resource for the practitioner and a forward-thinking contribution to the profession as a whole as it begins rising to the challenge of a greater understanding of how an individual’s personal values, goals, and commitments express what is important to him or her in particular transactions with the work environment and what this, in turn, means for him or her personally, in terms of their significance for the values and beliefs that are held dear.

In this sense, then, Joe offers the reader a chance to consider how people’s personal characteristics and belief systems act as a “perceptual lens” that enables them to create meaning out of their work lives. This focus on individual subjectivity and personal meaning goes some way toward providing a foundation for a fuller understanding of how people perform at their best at work, based on a genuinely cognitive-phenomenological account of human functioning.

The book provides readers with an opportunity to consider how well they understand the drives and desires of those around them, and also invites a critical evaluation of how work is designed and how they select and develop those who do it.

Professor Dean Bartlett, Ph.D., C.Psychol., FHEA, AFBPsS, HCPC, Registered Occupational Psychologist

London, April 2015