The Simon Kjaer problem

I shall start with an admission: if everything in my life had gone as I hoped and believed it would, this book would never have been written.

I spent my boyhood in rural western Denmark, in a little town in the middle of nowhere. It had a population of 35,000 and its only claim to fame was as a hotspot of the Danish textile industry.

With the focus of that industry rapidly moving away to Eastern Europe and China, there seemed little sense in dreaming of a future as a textile magnate. Instead, I fantasised about being a footballer and playing on famous pitches across the world. The walls of my room were covered in posters of great players. After school every day I played on the street with the other boys in the neighbourhood. I even promised my dad I would buy him a Mercedes once my professional career took off. And at the age of eighteen I was made captain of one of Denmark’s best youth teams. Life was good.

But just one year later, my dream was over. I smashed up my knee so badly in my first league match at the age of nineteen that I would never be able to play professionally again. A promising career ended before it had even begun.

I have to admit that as a footballer I am now nothing but an injured-then-forgotten has-been. Like many other injured and forgotten players, I ended up working as a coach. The best coaches are often frustrated players with pent-up ambitions.

In 2004 I helped establish Scandinavia’s first football academy. In those days we didn’t have much more than a couple of grass pitches with cows grazing on the other side of the fence and a primitive building where we could put the players up for the night. Our ambition of creating world-class players at this desolate location in western Denmark must have seemed naive. I still remember how we had to struggle to attract players for the academy’s first intake. As newcomers to the business we were unable to entice those players considered to be the most talented in the country – we simply had to take what we could get. It was rather reminiscent of the way kids pick their teams at school. We were the last to pick and had to take what was left over when the other clubs had made their choices.

Eventually we had signed contracts with fifteen or sixteen boys and were only short of one player. One of the candidates was a fifteen-year-old boy from a town 50 kilometres from the academy. His name was Simon Kjaer. He belonged to the anonymous majority the Danish club scouts had no record of in their archives. In fact, we had already decided that we didn’t want him. Several of the academy’s coaches had seen him play, myself included, and all were agreed: ‘He hasn’t made a mark and he never will.’

But the season was about to start. We didn’t have much time, and we didn’t really have any other options, so we decided to give Simon Kjaer the last place anyway. He was the quickest solution, and his father had a job as materials manager at the club (read: he was good at his job and we were willing to go a long way to keep him). Simon Kjaer was accepted on the condition that he paid for his own keep. As Simon remembers it himself: ‘My impression was that they only accepted me because they couldn’t hire players who were better than me. The best of them had turned the opportunity down.’

He was absolutely right.

The big mistake

Flash forward seven years. I am sitting in the stands at the Olympic Stadium in Rome watching an Italian Serie A match between Roma and Juventus. The match is not only special because it is between two of Europe’s very best clubs, but also because it is the debut of Roma’s new 22-year-old centre back.

It is this blond-haired Dane I have my eye on from my seat among the euphoric Roma fans. As he jogs about clapping at the crowd, I think back to the first time I met him. It was at FC Midtjylland’s football academy in Denmark, where I was coach.

Things have moved fast since then for Simon Kjaer.

He was first sold to Palermo in Italy for £3.3 million when he was just eighteen years old. At twenty he was sold on to Wolfsburg in Germany for £9.2 million. And now, still in his early twenties, he is with Roma – a major club. Playing in a position that most players only master in their late twenties or early thirties, he has rapidly become one of the stand-out players in the Italian league, a league which historically has produced some of the world’s best defenders. Every weekend he is matched against enormously accomplished strikers, and his first season in the Serie A has culminated in his selection for the team of the year alongside players such as the legendary Paolo Maldini. Experts have called him one of the world’s most promising defenders, and major clubs like Manchester United, AC Milan and Liverpool have been down on their knees begging to sign him, and still are.

The big shock

According to conventional wisdom, Simon Kjaer’s success should be the story of a boy born with an extraordinary innate talent coming in to his own. This is certainly the explanation coaches, journalists and experts resort to when trying to explain his performance. They are, however, mistaken. His story is of anything but raw, inbred talent.

I still remember the day back in 2004 when Claus Stenlein, the director of the FC Midtjylland Football Academy, came into the coaches’ office with a pile of paper slips in his hand. It was just six months after Simon Kjaer had joined the academy. All the coaches were present in the room, myself included. Claus dealt out the slips and asked us each to write down the names of the five players we thought would go furthest in five years, in order of priority. At that time we had sixteen players to choose from. One of them was Simon Kjaer. When we had all written five names, the academy director sealed them into an envelope and put them away in a drawer.

Five years later, just after Kjaer was sold for £3.3 million, Claus Steinlein reopened the envelope. Out of eight coaches, how many do you think had Simon Kjaer’s name on their list?

Not one of us!

World War Three

You have to understand that none of the eight coaches that rejected Simon were amateurs. On the contrary; we were intelligent, highly trained, and we all had a UEFA A-license. Although between us we had more than a hundred years of experience in talent development, each and every one of us well and truly screwed up. How could we have been so mistaken? What exactly did we overlook? I have been asking myself that question every day since.

The case of Simon Kjaer is more responsible for the birth of this book than any other experience I have had and, as you will realise the more you read, his story is by no means unique. Coaches, managers, parents and teachers, in any field whatsoever, all have to deal with their own Simon Kjaer problem. He confronts us all with numerous questions, which need to be addressed regardless of what industry you work in or where in the world you find yourself. What is talent? Do we actually know what the word means? Do we even know what we are looking for? How can we identify talent? How is it grown? And how can we grow it more effectively?

The answers to these questions are more valuable now than ever before. Talent is an absolutely crucial factor in the economic struggles taking place in the 21st century. Success or failure for both organisations and nations in the global marketplace is decided by their TQ (talent quotient) – the ability to capitalise on the talent they have at their disposal. A new world war is already breaking out, one that will be fought not with weapons but with talent. Anyone who does not take this challenge seriously will be crushed in the global competition. According to calculations by the World Economic Forum, for example, Europe and the United States, usually number one on the Global Talent Index, will not be in a position to maintain their levels of prosperity unless they develop their workforces with 72 million more qualified workers before 2030. As Anna Janczak, the World Economic Forum director says: ‘No-one will escape unscathed. Everyone will be confronted with the global lack of talent over the years to come.’

Aggressive talent strategies

It may seem like a luxury for Western nations to prioritise talent development in these times of crisis when they are suffering from low growth and stagnating productivity. But talent development may prove to be one of our most important tools with which to dig our way out of the economic crisis, not least in the light of the fact that rapidly growing, ambitious countries like China, South Korea and Singapore have all launched national talent strategies – recognition of the fact that their TQ is one of their greatest assets. Although these nations are already enjoying high growth rates, they are obviously aware of the fact that without constant and effective capitalisation of their talent mass they will not be able to maintain their current rate of progress.

The Chinese government, for example, has launched what is probably the most comprehensive national talent strategy, with a ten-year action plan. According to President Hu Jintao, who spearheaded the strategy himself, over the next ten years China must transform its current labour-intensive economy to a strong talent-based economy. This means, among other things, that by 2020, 15 per cent of the country’s GDP must be invested in education and research. The number of scientists must be increased to 3.8 million. By way of comparison, the 27 EU countries presently have 1.4 million scientists at their disposal. The Chinese plan includes numerous other initiatives, such as spreading the talent mass by motivating more well-educated people to migrate to poor rural areas, and boosting the recruitment of top management talent for the country’s many state-owned enterprises.

Talent development in Singapore is even more aggressive. The country’s talent strategy, which goes under the name ‘Managed by Elites’, is intended to identify and attract the greatest talent in the world to Singapore over the next few years. The country has already allied itself with a number of the world’s best universities in order to attract foreign scientists and students by means of lucrative tax schemes and the offer of free education if they stay in Singapore for at least three years. The declared goal is to attract 150,000 top foreign students in 2015. Several teams of talent scouts have already been set up in neighbouring countries to monitor primary and secondary schools, youth training schemes and universities in order to spot the best brains and entice them over to Singapore.

Meanwhile, companies in Brazil have recognised that losing talent overseas is a real problem, and have organised massive campaigns to attract talented citizens back home from the US and Europe.

Even if you cannot keep all your talent at home, you can exploit the fact that it is spread across the global labour market. India, for example, is currently trying to establish close contact with some of the 25 million Indians who live elsewhere in the world. The goal is to gain access to the knowledge of the nation’s ‘foreign stars’ and make use of their business contacts, expertise and networks to create growth back in India.

Everyone has their own ‘Simon Kjaer problem’

On a slightly smaller scale, individual forward-looking businesses are working intensively to develop their TQ. They have realised that without talent, organisations cannot prosper. As the American business author George Anders has pointed out, this is the reason that 208,000 full-time recruiters are working in the United States today, everywhere from General Electric to a three-person firm that specialises in pulp mill operators. Big companies like AT&T, Pfizer and Deloitte now even have ‘chief talent officers’. Recently, IT giant Cisco established a talent centre in India with the ambition of sextupling its recruitment of Indian engineers over a period of just five years.

Nobody can afford to lose the global talent war, which these examples demonstrate has already broken out. Every company and every nation has its own Simon Kjaer problem to grapple with and my purpose in this book is to present some specific ideas as to how people in the worlds of business, sport, education and beyond can take concrete steps to improve their TQ.

Having witnessed the remarkable story of Simon Kjaer unfold, it became a personal obsession to crack the TQ code. I decided to quit my job, and used all the money I had left to book six plane tickets. In the seven months that followed, I travelled round the world to live and train in six ‘Gold Mines’ – small, geographically defined locations which are pumping out top performers assembly-line fashion.

These Gold Mines are:

It is these six Gold Mines, and the remarkable people I discovered at each, that you will encounter in this book. Permit me to be your guide on a round-the-world trip to solve the mystery of what lies behind world-class performance.

My hunt for answers started early one morning on a dirt track in Kenya.