Being interviewed to work at McKinsey was one of the more interesting experiences of my earlier life. Ten rounds of interviews, rigorous analytical tests, bizarre psychometric probes and a final cup of coffee with a senior partner of the firm that felt like a scene from a John Grisham novel - and voila, I was in. The story about how I never actually turned up for work is one I'll save for another day. But I do remember one thing from the process - McKinsey were obsessed with finessing their strategy of hiring and retaining 'smart people'.

After one of the interviews, a manager at the firm described their ideal archetype as a 'spiky integrator'. In essence, their perfect candidate was someone who had an extraordinary talent spike (e.g genius chess skills, Olympian athletic discipline or knowing six languages), but were also capable of integrating that skill across a range of other capabilities and in association with other team mates. Or to put it another way - they wanted freaks with social skills. The only problem with that personality type, as many companies discovered when they put former high flying management consultants into leadership teams - is that spiky integrators need to be surrounded by other super smart people in order to thrive. Out of the fish tank, they don’t survive too long.

For companies today, hiring smart people is still a critical priority. And it’s harder than ever. The digital revolution has had two major impacts on the war for talent. Firstly, you are now competing with the fact that the best candidates can earn significant incomes as free agents. With the Web offering a global customer base and infinite opportunities for fame, being a digital ronin or an entrepreneur has never been more seductive. But the second impact is just as profound. The concept of work has never been more challenging. Traditional industries are being disrupted, competition more nuanced, and the demands on managers more pronounced. Your old school spiky integrator might be able to draw up some rather pretty strategy slides describing your industry - but will they have the level headed poise to ruthlessly execute and get things done in an increasingly ambiguous and uncertain operating environment?

In the future, I think there will be three capability attributes that senior managers will need to look for in their top performers:

1. Super Synthesizers

In the old days, smart employees gathered competitive information in traditional ways - phone interviews, focus groups and industry surveys. Basically - you were clever if you knew how to pick up the phone and make some calls. Now we have the opposite problem - too much information. Super synthesizers are people with the capability of scanning and processing huge amounts of information. They are like human meta filters. With enough technical savvy and familiarity with blogs, social platforms and search algorithms - they can assess the topography of available data, see patterns and collate them as trends, prioritize and then act.

2. Hyper Connectors.

One of these days we will laugh about the fact people used to get fired for using Facebook or LinkedIn at work. Hyper Connectors are people that know how to swiftly build and exploit relevant networks to get things done. They won't necessarily have the largest collection of contacts, but they will know how to use digital platforms to find and nurture just the right set of people to reach their goals. These could be internal networks in a huge enterprise, or external webs of journalists, industry influencers and taste makers. You will recognise them in meetings because they are the first to say in the answer to a problem, 'I think I may know someone who..'

3. Change Optimists

The final quality of the future super smart might sound a bit soft but in some ways it is the most vital personal attribute - positivity. The pace of change is accelerating and there are people for whom that is good news, and others who, if they are honest with themselves, view that fact with dread. You can reassure the change pessimists about the future all you like but believe me - in the end, when faced with disruptive change, pessimists fight for the status quo not for future growth. Your best performers may not know the future, but they should be happy to meet it head on.

What do you think? Are there other attributes of what would make someone ‘super smart’ in the future?

I've enjoyed playing with Lion, the new Mac operating system, this week. The native apps really fly, interface gestures have matured and desktop spaces finally feels intuitive enough to allow me to navigate multiple screens of work with ease. My computer doesn't just feel faster - I feel faster. So in a way, my mind got the upgrade. And that perhaps is really the most significant part of the Lion launch - the upgrade process. It was seamless. I clicked buy on the Mac App store, went to bed, and woke up with a new operating system.

Compare that with the glory days of Microsoft. Now this may test some of your memories, but I can still quite clearly remember the launch of Windows 95. If the Baby Boomers got the summer of 69, for us Gen Xers - we had to make do with August 24, 1995. With the power chords of the theme song ‘Start Me Up’ - Bill Gates did his best to channel Rolling Stones cool, there were 

huge tech launch parties, and a promotional campaign that in the modern age, would have put a geek in the White House. The marketing circus was excessive but necessary - because a bit like an election, you had to persuade people to get out of bed and into stores, hand over a $100 (in nineties dollars) and then spend hours of their lives figuring out a complicated software upgrade process.

Now consider the Lion experience - $30, no retail packaging or disks, and an automated upgrade process that took me about 30 minutes. Good news for consumers, but maybe not for everyone. Because whoever wins the operating system wars in the future, you can be sure that retailers stand to lose. Already video games are disappearing from shelves, and now that enterprise software is moving to the Cloud - I doubt you will find any shrink wrapped products on shelves within the next five years. But don’t get too excited. If you really believe the Cloud manifesto - in the future, the whole concept of client side ‘software upgrades’ disappears too.

If a stock market rally was a colour, what would it be? Strangely, enough there is a group of people on the planet with a condition who might have an idea. Synesthesia occurs in one in 10,000 people and is, at its most basic level - a blending and co-ordinating of the senses. Those with the capacity can literally ‘see’ sounds and ‘taste’ colours. The roll call of famous synesthetes includes Russian painter Kandinksy, physicist Richard Feynman, inventor Nikola Tesla, and founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett.

I was reminded of this phenomenon when I started playing with an interesting new iPad application this week called StockTouch. It takes a radically new approach to presenting stock movements and sectors - using colours and spiral patterns to visually demonstrate market movements. Thinking back to the revolutionary impact of ‘quants’ to stock trading in the late 70s, this app made me wonder whether in the future we would see new types of trading rooms with massive visual displays and synesthetic interfaces. It might take a math genius to write an equation that predicts market movements, but what about a savant that could look at a sea of colour and predict an impending credit crisis? Perhaps one day the world’s greatest funds manager will be an artist.

A key trend to track this year is social mining - the intelligent collation and cross-referencing of machine accessible data on your social graph and personal content. It is a controversial area and you can be sure the trouble will only escalate once the general public really understands how powerful these new data matching tools have become. Leaving aside the privacy issues for now - I’d advise you to spend some time thinking about how these technologies can be integrated into your business - and in particular your sales cycle.
Here are three tools to start with:

1. Connected
Connected is a Cloud based address book that connects and syncs with all of your potential sources contacts and leads. Once the system identifies duplicates and merges records you are left with a new contact database gleaned from your email address book, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even your mobile phone directory. Where Connected is smart - is that it begins monitoring these connections and sends you a daily email with useful communication triggers like job changes or impending birthdays.

2. Tout
If you currently use Mailchimp or a similar advanced newsletter distribution platform - you would be familiar with concepts like open rates, click throughs ratios and bounce reports. Tout takes these reporting concepts and combines it with web based templates. Connecting your web based CRM tool to it (e.g HighRise, Batchbook, CapsuleCRM) imports all of your sales leads as contacts. You can then begin firing off business development or follow up emails from your template list and then track which versions are the most successful. The team edition is particularly useful, as you can monitor how many of the emails your team are sending out are generating positive responses.

3. Rapportive
Rapportive is a magical addition to the Gmail experience. It uses social data from Rapleaf to automatically identify the people you are communicating with. If you are already connected with them on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn it will load up their picture and recent status updates in a right hand column - or alternatively will prompt you to connect with them. In a sense - it creates the kind of information rich, business focused social network from your email inbox that Google+ should be doing for you.

One of my favourite airports in the world is Charles De Gaulle in Paris. Its sweeping concrete lines and internal transport tubes seem to promise an optimistic super sleek future that even decades later, never seemed to quite materialise. Certainly, I’m sure the original designers of the airport would have sooner conceived of space faring jets docking by 2011, rather than having to herd flocks of discount airlines and their attendant rabble of dollar diving tourists. I’m not saying that the future is more likely to be easyJet than than Jetset - but what is interesting is how our perceptions of the ‘futuristic’ are really an embodiment of our hopes and fears about the present. You could almost argue that there is an archaelogy of the future just waiting to be explored.

Some time ago I came across a wonderful clip of Orson Welles narrating a documentary based on Alvin Toffler. From its psychedelic opening titles, to its melodramatic opening featuring Welles walking down an airport terminal smoking a cigar - it seeks to astonish with an array of now mundane statistics of rapid change. Of course, it is easy to laugh at yesterday’s future visions, but I wonder how well turgid web virals like ‘Did You Know?’ will hold up to scrutiny in ten years time?

Predicting the future is hard enough. But even more tricky is finding ways to talk about it. Futurists have to walk the precarious line between highlighting the forces that will genuinely change the word, and the ones that sound like they will. Imagine being a futurist fifty years ago and identifying penicillin, refrigeration and shipping containers as the three forces that would underpin modern civilisation. Neither very sexy nor a great theme for selling books - and even if you turned out to be right, no one would remember it. I’d argue that we still revere theorists like Marshall Mcluhan today, not because he accurately predicted the future - but because, like Andy Warhol - he managed to combine stylish self promotion with enough ambiguity, that even years later - we can adapt his slogans to whatever point we are trying to make. Future Schlock indeed.