How to make a Talent Strategy

I've been reading Made to Stick by the brothers Heath and one point struck me in the book. In the book they quote Antoine de Saint Exupéry on design :  You know you've achieved perfection in design, Not when you have nothing more to add, But when you have nothing more to take away.

Brilliant! What a thought. The Heath guys link that thought to an idea's core principle. 

That's what I've been thinking too.

When you stike away all the wishy-washy vision and mission statements, when you remove all the fluff, when you un-layer all the layers your organization has put on itself all these years - what are you left with with? Or are you left with anything at all?

Hopefully what you will be left looking at - will be the core of your business. The one thing that guides the decision making efforts of all people in the organization. The book gives the example of Southwest - "THE low cost airline" Then there are the other layers around it "It's great to have fun at work", but not at the cost of the core strategy, not by spending money and messing it up.

So that's the link for HR folks. To know what should your talent strategy be - ask if you understand the strategic core of your business. Are you into producing the best designed watches or the best selling ones? The first makes designers center piece of your talent strategy, the second places branding and marketing and sales in the foreground.

So let's say it in plain English - your talent strategy has to reflect your business strategy. Understand that and the rest will follow.

HR certifications not any great help says reader

apeksha left a comment on "Talent shortage in HR in India?":

We have a whole lot of graduates being churned out each year..unfortunately most of them though talented, are not from a "recognized" college, or lack the right 'attitude'.

as for having a body like CIPD, i dont know. I just became a graduate member of CIPD, will get my degree from the university of Edinburgh..and i still cant find anyone who wants to hire me becuz i do not have "adequate" experience

Last Friday I attended a meet of SHRM India at the Satyam School of Leadership in Hyderabad. Nina Woodard head of SHRM in India, was talking about the PHR, SPHR and GPHR certifications that SHRM's HRCI body offers. While PHR and SPHR are very US specific certifications, GPHR certification seems to be the only one for non-US professionals to take. However the eligibility for that seems limited to HR leaders who are already delivering global HR processes.

Of course, there exists the other route to develop HR professionals, which is by building their skills like CII, National NHRD Network and XLRI are trying to do together. However, in my view that is a much slower model and might not take newer competencies that are becoming essential to HR professionals into account.

100 Talent specific sites

Amy Quinn sent me an email about an article "Where the Talent Is: 100 Sites to Find the Elite in Any-Given-Field" that they have painstakingly set-up to focus on niche jobsites for different kinds of talented people from design folks to lawyers to management to healthcare etc.

The list is US centric of course, but I see a lot of scope for a list of the same type focussing on the other English speaking parts of the world.

For HR jobs they list only one site :-)

Workforce HR Jobs: Sometimes HR personnel need to be hired as well. Help yourself find the best employee for the job with information you can find on this site.

And for management sites there are quite a few:

The Ladders: Looking for new executives or higher level employees can be difficult. You can find employees and place listings on this site which specializes six figure jobs and up.

Executives on the Web: Find your next corner office resident through this site. Check through thousands of high level resumes to find the best person for your job.

6 Figure Jobs: Make sure you're paying out the big bucks to the right person. This site will help you find qualified candidates for your high level positions.

ExecuNet: Find CEOs, vice presidents and other high level management through this site. Post your job and get responses from interested candidates.

hundredK: Whether you're looking for a new director of sales, a vice president or even a CEO, you'll find qualified applicants on this site to help you get the best for your business.

Manager Crossing: Make sure your management is top notch by drawing from candidates on this site. Posting jobs is free so there is no loss if you don't find exactly what you're looking for.

So if you are looking for US based candidates in a specific field of specialization you should check out the 100 sites listed there.

Coaching growing in the UK

From the Times

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than three-quarters of organisations now invest in coaching, including performance and personal coaching, for their employees.

At Lloyds TSB, the corporate-banking division in Scotland was one of the first of the bank’s departments to embrace performance coaching. “Many people wrongly assume coaching is about addressing underperformance,” said Manus Fullerton at Lloyds TSB Scotland. “In fact it is of greatest benefit when coaching your best performers. All the top sportsmen and women have coaches to help them improve.

“We are taking the same approach in our business, not just coaching individuals, but training our teams to coach one another. We have witnessed growth in business levels, staff engagement and a real appetite for further coaching.”

Despite the touchy-feely image, Cartwright, a former sports coach and psychologist, agrees that coaching is not for failures – quite the reverse. “Tiger Woods has five different coaches and nobody would say he is a failure,” he said. “But we have this macho British idea that chief executives ought to be able to just get on and do the job. In most businesses, once you reach partnership level your training and development stops.”

With a few more executive coaches there would, he said, “be fewer people quitting, getting the sack or jumping out of windows. It’s lonely at the top – who else can these people talk to?” Cartwright points out that senior executives can’t talk to their peers – because they will be after their job – they can’t talk to their board because that would be seen as a sign of weakness and they certainly can’t confide in their subordinates.

Coaching poor performers may or may not get you results. However coaching a high performer could send out a signal that you are interested in developing them and that he/she has never really 'arrived'.

Satyam tries to buy consulting skills

The Talking Outsourcing blog feels the deal of buying Bridge Strategy Group was a knee jerk reaction from Satyam:

It seems like the team at Bridge has negotiated a great deal, but I’m not sure how this helps Satyam to start competing with the likes of Infosys and TCS – who are both well down the road of developing their consulting offering, but in a more organic fashion. If they can afford to throw a few million around here and there then why not go for some big name hires and develop the consulting service more organically? It takes guts to do it because there will be a long lead before the business rolls in, but in the long term surely that is where the real value lies, building your own brand to be a trusted source of advice.

I have to agree. Buying a 36 people firm for $35 million sounds extreme. I also don't see a fit between Satyam's strength of IT service delivery and Bridge's professed expertise. There are bits in their Operations design and Performance Improvement area, like Outsourcing and Global Sourcing/Offshoring and IT Planning and Management. There is mismatch even in Bridge's differentiated approach and the approach of a IT firm like Satyam. Things like partner involvement, not taking large projects, deploying small experienced teams are the exact opposites that outsourcers like Satyam offer. If there's a fundamental clash in the values of an acquiring firm and the firm getting acquired then I don't think there's a chance of that acquisition delivering too much value.

The acquisition by Satyam would also raise questions about how objective the advice offered by Bridge Strategy Group in the Outsourcing and Global Sourcing/Offshoring areas to their clients is. As the Talking Outsourcing blog says:

Satyam plans to continue using the Bridge brand in the US, but anyone who is an existing or potential customer will know that the company is really just a subsidiary of Satyam now. That can be seen as a positive - access to a large resource pool, proven expertise etc - or a negative - they can no longer give an impartial recommendation about the best place to get some IT work done.

The shepherd of indigenous Indian Innovation

There are some people whose name equals innovation in India. And a lot of them are unsung. However, a lot more of them might have remained unsung if it were not for Prof. Anil Gupta and his HoneyBee network. His former student and CEO of Naukri.com Sanjeev Bikhchandani writes:

In the last twenty years HoneyBee has documented in its online database more than 70,000 inventions by innovators in rural India. These include – a cotton stripping / plucking machine, a manual milking machine, a coconut tree climbing device, a garlic peeling machine, a device to draw water from wells, herbal remedies, a cowdung powered cell phone charger, a plow and weeding device that can be attached to a motorcycle, a low cost cell phone based switch for household appliances and farm pump sets, a beach cleaner made from an adaptation of a groundnut separator, and a walnut peeling machine among others.

The Network has filed for more than 142 patents and more than twenty have been awarded.

HoneyBee gathers ideas by staying in touch with people in rural India. Apart from a continuous stream of ideas that now walk in through the door the Network conducts Shodhyatras every six months. Basically a group of Networkers led by Prof. Gupta travel through selected parts of rural India over several weeks meeting people, uncovering innovations and recognising and rewarding inventors.

Several companies have come forward to license some these innovations and commercialise them. The Network thus is able to disseminate the innovations while protecting the intellectual property rights of the inventors and ensuring that they get a financial reward.

So how did the Network come about. Prof. Gupta was working in the area of agricultural economics and rural development at IIM in the mid eighties. He spent a lot of time in villages talking to farmers to gather data for his research studies. He would publish his research papers and would travel all over the world to speak at conferences. However he was always plagued by a sense of guilt – he was doing all this but the farmers who gave him the knowledge were getting nothing out of it. He wanted to rectify this injustice.

When I was his student at IIM around that time Prof. Gupta once told me that there is a lot of indigenous knowledge in rural India that is undocumented and may be lost to future generations with the advent of modern technology from the West and he was planning to document it. At that time I did not realise the importance of what I dismissed as a noble idea casually suggested over a cup of tea in his home.

Over the years however from a small beginning in a cubicle at IIM Ahmedabad, the HoneyBee network has created an entire ecosystem where indigenous knowledge and rural innovations are documented, inventors are recognised and rewarded and innovations are marketed to companies.

My earlier post on Indian Innovations.

Prof. Anil Gupta is doing a remarkable service to document and share the Indian's traditional way to innovate - which some call jugaad. A work around - because resources are scarce and work needs to be done. In a world which some say is going to be characterised by a scarcity of resources, are Indians better prepared because of our "jugaadu" ways? Here's something I wrote on a similar topic around two years ago.

Paul McKinnon joins Citi as Chief Talent Officer

I noticed a lot of searches today landing on my blog for Paul McKinnon who I met earlier when I was working at Dell. Paul who had quit Dell 11 months ago was hired by Vikram Pandit the new Citi CEO as their first Chief Talent Officer.

On Monday, the bank announced that Paul McKinnon, formerly senior vice president for human resources at Dell, would become the company’s first head of talent management. The appointment represents a lesson learned for the company since it fired CEO Charles Prince without having a ready successor and reflects the new priorities of Pandit, who was named CEO in December.

In a memo announcing the position, Pandit wrote: “Attracting, developing and retaining people at the most senior levels of our company is one of my top priorities and requires concentrated attention.”

McKinnon will be responsible for recruiting, developing, reviewing and retaining Citigroup’s senior talent, Pandit wrote in the memo.

Interesting move. I wonder if there will be any turf battles between Paul after he joins from1st February and the current HR head John Donnelly. And would someone with Paul's experience and profile report to John or will a separate power center be created?

Top 10 risks for Global Business

From the Big Four Blog:

1. Regulatory and compliance risk
2. Global financial shocks
3. Aging consumers and workforce
4. The inability to capitalize on emerging markets
5. Industry consolidation/transition
6. Energy shocks
7. Execution of strategic transactions
8. Cost inflation
9. Radical greening
10. Consumer demand shifts
    

E&Y looks at risks in three broad categories across multiple industries:

1. macro threats arising from general geopolitical and macroeconomic environments
2. sector threats from trends or uncertainties in a specific industry
3. intense operational impacting the strategic performance of leading firms

I'd like to draw your attention to these risks:

Aging Consumers and Workforce

Areas such as asset management and insurance are experiencing dramatic shifts in demand as their consumer age. The auto sector is facing severe competitive challenges as a result of their aging workforces. Numerous industries are experiencing dramatic shifts in demand, often dramatic growth, as average ages rise in Europe, North America, and Japan. To be competitive, companies need to better understand specific needs of these new consumers

Emerging Markets

Emerging markets, while great areas for new growth, they also pose great risks. Global companies will need to partner/form networks with firms in many markets. There are also currency, operational, regulatory, language, and cultural risks in these countries, especially as firms manage outsourced business and supply chains in these markets.

Execution of Strategic Transactions

There is a major risk that transactions undertaken in response to industry consolidation may fail to deliver, not because they are poorly conceived, but because of a failure to meet operational challenges. Also, new types of strategic transactions, including divestitures in real estate, spin-offs in auto, and separation of telecom companies into utilities and service providers are driving further risk.

Consumer Demand Shifts
The failure to anticipate and respond to consumer demand shifts driven by
demographic shifts, such as growing consumer aging could be a strategic risk when the changes are significant, fast or unexpected.

The Next 5

E&Y spells out their next 5, equally critical, yet not making the top 10 list, and my choices amongst them are:

War for Talent - shortage of technical expertise; asset management and
real estate, which are seeing talented staff poached by alternative investments; and pharma, which is facing a ‘skills crunch. Especially in emerging markets , growing regional concentration/clustering of talent – while expertise can be found in more nations than ever, within nations it is becoming more concentrated in a small number of clusters. This phenomenon is particularly true in biotech and other high-tech areas. This leads to increasing wage rates, property rental, and competition for expertise.

Threat of Private Equity’s Rise. Especially in auto, where Private Equity firms are leading unplanned, hostile takeovers by consolidating, and forcing restructuring and creating spin-offs.

Inability to Innovate is significant for business in 2008. Innovation is becoming an increasingly crucial strategic challenge as markets mature. Stagnation in mature markets means that companies have to innovate to find profit. However, innovation is a substantial risk as nine out of ten new products fail.

Threat of a China Setback. China might experience volatility as it continues with an
extraordinary pace of development. A growth slowdown in China could leave oil & gas companies suddenly facing a low oil price environment. A severe slowdown could add to turmoil to world markets or threaten banks or insurance companies with large China exposures; or a natural disaster in China could disrupt global supply chains.

To effectively combat these risks, Ernst and Young recommends that company leaderships must:

• Conduct an annual risk assessment that defines key risks and weights probability and impact on business drivers.
• Go beyond financial and regulatory risk to consider the wider environment in which the organization operates and the full extent of its operations.
• Conduct scenario planning for the major risks that can be identified and develop a number of operational responses.
• Evaluate the organization’s ability to manage the identified risks, specifically that risk management processes are linked to the risks that the business actually faces.
• Effective monitoring and controls processes to provide both earlier warning and improved ability to respond.
• Keeping an open mind about where risks can come from.

If you are an employee of a global corporation how can these trends impact your career and employer personally?

What are you going to do about it?

Talent Management is a fad?

So says Professor and Organizational Psychologist Rob Briner from the University of London in an interview in People Management this month called "Tried and Attested."

(link via Bob Sutton's blog)

"Management fads are attractive, as they promise to deliver a lot and do it fast. The alternative approach of a careful, sober, systematic consideration of the problem, potential solutions and the evidence can seem, in contrast, both boring and too slow. From the snake-oil salesman or quack to sub-prime loans and fad diets, we show a strong preference for the quick fix. On the other hand, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. Empowerment, TQM, excellence, downsizing, emotional intelligence, business process re-engineering and, my current personal favourite, talent management, are just some of the fads that have been rapidly adopted and, as many observers have argued, probably done more harm than good. Fads and fashions are also confusing to managers because they offer completely contradictory advice."

And Prof. Sutton adds

The comment from March (plus my unfortunate experience in academia and business where mediocre scholars and business gurus are constantly claiming that they deserve credit for ideas that have been around for decades) led me to propose Sutton’s Law: “If you think that you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either; I stole it from someone else.”

That makes me feel better about my ignorance about Talent Management !

Low relation between HR practices and Employee Satisfaction

According to the news from the CNBC-TV18 Employer of Choice award apparently there is a tenous linkage between adoption of HR "best practices" and the employee satisfaction scores.

70% weightage is given to the employee perspective. So it is an Employer of
Choice awards but based on the employee perspective. The Employer is judged on
the HR practices, he has put in place for which 30% weightage is given

The Jury comprising K Ramkumar, Group Chief Human Resources Officer, ICICI
Bank, Madhukar Shukla, Professor, XLRI, Jamshedpur, Ganesh Chella of Totus
Consulting, Chennai and Tarun Seth of Shilputsi debated the findings day long, throwing up learning’s for everyone.

The key revelation from this debate was that the adoption of well known HR practices do not necessarily bring in the highest employee satisfaction scores. This threw up surprise findings, where companies known to adopt the best HR practices did not figure in the top ten as their employee satisfaction scores were low.

So what does that mean for us HR professionals?

The reason in my view is that "best practices" in HR become "expected practices" very very soon. If you had to use OB jargon (from Herzberg's motivation theory) factors that are considered "motivators" become "hygiene" very very soon.

Consider the case of a great boss. When you work with a great boss in a firm, any boss you would work with later has to compete with that image of a boss in your mind. And you might end up dissatisfied with every subsequent boss after that :-)

So what is considered a "best practice in HR" gets assumed and taken for granted very soon. Open communication? Transparency? Cab pick-up and drop? Pool tables in the office? Free food and laundry? Stock Options? 120 percentile of market salary?

They'll make news when they get introduced in the organization or noticed when a new employee joins.

But eventually what will keep an employee satisfied and motivated and working in the organization is the nature and quality of work.

The organization that can provide a context for their employees to make their own personal meaning will actually succeed in doing HR's real role.

Reward or Performance

My friend Udayan Dutt asks a very interesting question on Linkedin:

What comes first - Reward or Performance? In other words, do I ask employees to improve performance before a quantum leap in reward or do I commit a quantum leap in reward and ask employees to promise superior performance?

The question focuses us to think about performance and its context for people's pay and rewards. It is usually assumed that performance management is linked to pay only. When I see this question my intuitive answer is performance comes first. That's because performance is determined by the job role, the competition, the other employees in an organization. Getting people to focus on reward first for performance to take place, seems a misplaced priority.

What do you think? Check out the other answers to the question. Interesting insightful stuff on how people think about rewards and performance.

Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk lives up to my prediction

Well what did I tell ya ?

I got a press release today (normally I dutifully delete all such PR stuff) but since this was about Penelope I had to blog it :-)

Ninth House, Inc., the leadership solutions company, and nationally syndicated career columnist and Yahoo! Finance career expert, Penelope Trunk, have teamed up to offer the industry advice about employee recruitment and retention as it relates to an up-and-coming Generation Y.

Well, here's wishing Penelope best of luck in her consulting avatar ! More power to people like her !

Looming Leadership Crisis says IBM study

According to a major new IBM study of over 400 human resource executives from 40 countries released today, more than 75 percent of HR executives say that they are concerned with their ability to develop future leaders.

Companies in the Asia Pacific region are most concerned with their ability to develop future leaders (88 percent); followed by Latin America (74 percent); Europe, Middle East and Africa, (74 percent); Japan (73 percent) and North America (69 percent).

Rotating employees across divisions and geographies is also an important way to hone future leadership talent. Yet, according to the study, 36 percent of HR executives state rotating leadership talent is a significant challenge in developing future leaders. Another key challenge is the generation gap -- passing on knowledge from older to younger employees (28 percent).

52 percent of HR executives say a significant workforce-related challenge facing their organizations is the inability to rapidly develop skills to address current and/or future business needs. Furthermore, the study shows that more than one-third of study participants state their employee skills are not aligned with current organizational priorities.

Forty-seven percent of the organizations surveyed said that employee turnover has increased over the past two years, while only 16 percent said it has decreased.

Many believe their corporate reputations will allow them to attract and retain the people they need. While 52 percent indicate an inability to rapidly develop skills is a primary workforce challenge, only 27 percent state the inability to attract qualified candidates is a problem.

Retention also seems to be less of a concern; only 18 percent state this is a high priority workforce issue. However, changing trends in workforce demographics and mobility patterns suggest they may need to invest more resources in recruiting, selection and retention.

An underlying cause according to the study is that HR executives believe that despite the ongoing war for talent, they are more capable of attracting and retaining talent than their competitors. Almost 60 percent of HR executives surveyed feel they attract and retain talent better than their peers, while only 10 percent state they are less effective.

So, looks like some folks are deluding themselves :-)

Employee Value Proposition webcast HCI

When the folks from the Human Capital Institute approached me to do a webcast for them on Talent Management, specially focussed on Employee Value Proposition I was more than glad to agree.

The session focuses on:

• The importance of EVP to business success
• The drivers that shape your EVP
• Aligning EVP with your attraction message and sourcing strategies
• Connecting the dots to create a focused EVP strategy

If you'd like to register for the webcast you can register here. This live event is free, on a first-come, first seated basis.

For those pursuing HRCI certifications, here's a little bit of incentive: Each HCI Webcast is approved for 1.5 hours recertification credit towards PHR, SPHR and GPHR recertification through the Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI), and towards HCI's Human Capital Strategist (HCS) designation.

My co-presenter would be Mitzi Adwell, Talent Management Practice Leader for The Newman Group.

Hope to interact with you on the webcast :-)

Sudhanshu Pant moves to Gurgaon

It's not just Indian business leaders who are relocating from the US and other western nations back to India, but now even an executive search consultant like my blog buddy Sudhanshu Pant who's decided to move from NY to Gurgaon !

India is a tough market for recruiters with many job offers chasing fewer talented candidates, and here's wishing Sudhanshu all the best for his new role ! Hope he blogs about his perspective and take on things in India. He already says how amazed he's about the change in the Indian mindset over the last one and half decades:

There is a positive feeling in the air, with a high level of confidence and a "can do" attitude. People I speak to believe that tomorrow will be better than today which already is better than yesterday. This attitude is infectious and a great morale booster when you are working with others in a team.

The new look Indian cricket team and the movie "Chak De" epitomise this new India and the change in culture. This is the reason why both have attracted such fanatical fan following for they seem to reflect people’s aspirations to succeed.

Find more on diversity in the workplace at DiversityJobs.com.

The real business of organizations

Is to build leaders.

At least that's what this Fortune survey of the Top Companies for Leaders 2007 says:

Of the many powerful forces driving companies to develop leaders more effectively, the most important is the world economy's long-term shift from dependence on financial capital toward human capital.

Even given the credit crunch, money for investment is more abundant than ever. It isn't the scarce resource in business anymore; human ability is. Hewitt global-practice leader Robert Gandossy, who oversaw the Top Companies for Leaders study, says, "Organizations need talented people a lot more than talented people need organizations."

You don't build leaders on the cheap, and you don't just bolt a development program onto existing HR procedures. Indeed, the biggest investment involved may be the time of the CEO and other executives.

Lots of companies claim they're interested in developing leaders, but the University of Michigan's Noel Tichy, a top authority on the subject, says that checking their commitment is easy: "Just show me the CEO's calendar." Yet the CEO's time is only the beginning. As those who report directly to the boss see what the focus is, they also become devoted to developing talent, as do their subordinates. It's called the cascading effect. Not that these companies rely solely on the power of example. Virtually all of them evaluate executives partly on how well they're developing people.

Spotting leaders early means working on their development early. That's a big change at most companies, where programs were long reserved for an elite group several years into their careers.

Many of the companies on this list are trying to move past that. They believe that nurturing future leaders earlier than other companies creates a competitive advantage that lasts for decades, as their talent pipelines become bigger, better, and more reliable.

It's the most elementary principle of learning: If you don't know how you've performed, you don't learn and you soon stop caring. Yet at many companies, feedback is rare, candid feedback even rarer. The companies on our list combine frequent, honest assessment with plenty of mentoring and support. So when people are told what skills they need to improve, they're also offered programs or coaching for doing it.

Though executives at these companies talk about their leadership-development programs, they realize the term isn't quite right. Developing leaders isn't a program; it's a way of living. For example, honest feedback has to be culturally okay. At many companies it isn't. Devoting significant time to mentoring has to be accepted. Working for nonprofits has to be encouraged, not just tolerated.

Such cultural norms can't be dictated; they have to be in the air. That's a big reason GE tops this list. Charles Coffin (CEO, 1892-1912) realized that GE's real priorities weren't light bulbs or electric motors but business leaders; developing them has been the company's focus ever since. All these companies are working on that kind of culture.

If this interests you, you might want to check my article on developing leadership. Let me know what you think about that :-)

The Global Talent Index

The US under challenge from the UK and China.

The USA's status as the world's biggest talent hotspot is under threat from the UK and China, according to the first ever Global Talent Index (GTI).

The US will maintain its position as the world's leading country for nurturing and developing talent over the next five years, the Index developed by executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles and the Economist Intelligence Unit reveals. But it faces increasing competition from the UK, which rises to second place in by 2012, and China, which moves from eighth to sixth.

China is set to exploit its natural advantage as the world's most populous country by significantly improving its compulsory education system and developing a much better environment for producing and nurturing talent. This will enable the country to build on its manufacturing base and attract increasing numbers of foreign-owned businesses.

Despite the strong performance of the US overall, its labor market is set to become less open and flexible over the next five years amid fears of terrorism. It will rank 9th worldwide on this measure -only one place above China.

The GTI is the first survey of its kind to be undertaken. It is aimed at providing businesses with comprehensive evidence of where talent is located across the world. Thirty countries were chosen for the survey based on a representative geographical spread and the quality of available comparative data.

Kevin Kelly, CEO of Heidrick and Struggles, said: "Until now, companies may have sensed which countries attracted and developed talent most effectively, but objective data to support their impressions was simply unavailable.

"If talent is the oil of our future, we need to pinpoint the hotspots, identify the reserves and know how fast the pipelines can get up and running. The Global Talent Index will enable us to do this."

The GTI shows that the much fabled 'BRIC' (Brazil, Russia, India and China) phenomenon should more accurately be expressed as 'IC' when it comes to talent. While China and India rank among the top 10 talent hotspots worldwide, Russia will fall from sixth to 11th place by 2012, while Brazil will slip from 18th to 19th.

Overall, the survey confirms that talent follows where money leads. After the US and UK, the next best countries for attracting and developing talent are relatively small but open economies of Canada, the Netherlands and Sweden. Another noticeable trend is that several of the least promising performers do not yet boast fully functioning democracies.

Asia performs strongly overall, with Malaysia, South Korea and Japan accompanying China and India in the top 15 by 2012. Ukraine will overtake Russia and Argentina will fall dramatically over the next five years.

Filling the Talent Gap

How to Fill the Talent Gap - WSJ.com

Interesting article that focuses on the truth that really matters:

Successful companies understand and exploit the capabilities that let them provide unique value to their customers. Your talent-management initiatives should focus on building those capabilities among your employees.

The best-in-class firms that we examined had talent processes that were marked by deep commitment, high levels of engagement and widespread accountability among senior leaders, line managers, human resources and the talent prospects themselves.

P&G for instance, focuses on identifying and developing talent at the local level and then integrating those people into regional and group talent pools as their careers progress. The company has an automated tracking system that can identify candidates inside the company who have the skills and experiences required for important assignments around the world -- letting the company fill key roles much faster and more efficiently. The company also tracks its hires and monitors the success rates of these people placed into key roles.

The issue is, business tactics and strategy changes from month to month and year to year, however the result of serious talent management interventions only come to light in the long term. So when the direction of the firm changes, the talent management systems need to be evaluated and changed as soon as possible, and calls for change management efforts to address uncertainty amongst the minds of employees. Hence if a business really wants its strategy to be executed as it plans then thought has to be given to how the talent management systems will also change. And this conversation has to be proactive and not reactive.

The Brand is the Talent

Tom Peters on why the second best players make the best coaches, and why in the world of business and government we don't follow that thumb rule.



Great video to see on a Monday morning and to think about for the week. He blogs about the same issue today as he says:

it's not an externally directed "war to snatch talent from the other guy" by "being more aggressive than the competition"—but an internally directed competition against ourselves (and our outrageously strong beliefs about people) in which we aim to create an unimaginably attractive workplace. Think Apple, BMW, Cirque du Soleil, Wegmans. And back to the Royal Navy, the Brits built a model of Excellence that had no parallels in its sphere in human history—it was a model about what could be that had never been before, and it was "the other guys" who were forced into the externally aimed "competitive," inferior, reactive, copyist mode.

Yep, don't think of only recruiting.

Think about great retention. And great recruiting with happen.

There is an I in Team

At the BNet Blog there's a post about five teamwork myths.

Well actually, it's quite common sense. Teams are not instant panacea for any problem. For actions that are needed to be taken quickly and decisively teams might be the wrong way to approach it.

Teams that have lots of hierarchical structure might be dysfunctional too as group think can occur quite rapidly.

Choosing a team and giving roles in a team is an art. Not all team leaders can do that very simply. In fact sometimes genius performers cannot really lead a team. Or it gets too much for them... take a look at Rahul Dravid.

Being a great team member starts with not others but by being aware of one's strengths, weaknesses and role. What role one chooses or is given is dictated by one's strengths. So there is a big "I" in the team. In fact, this was shown by Belbin Team Roles research too.