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BOOKS ON THE TOPIC
Workforce Wake-Up Call - Your Workforce Is Changing, Are You?
ed. R. Gandossy, E. Tucker, N. Verma
Before jumping to talent management solutions, you need to understand the specific “war for talent” dynamics for a particular type of talent. This was my message in an article I wrote last year called “Cutting through the Fog – Navigating the Messy Wars for Talent.” Thinking in terms of a broad homogeneous war for talent isn’t very helpful. Nor are broad-brush prescriptions on how best to manage people. For example, the kinds of talent strategies that are needed to build a strong pool of architects or business leaders are different from those needed to stock an organization with sufficient numbers of nurses, pharmacists, or industrial electricians.
This article was published in a compendium book titled Workforce Wake-up Call: Your Workforce is Changing, Are You? It formed the basis of a speech I delivered to the Human Capital Institute’s annual summit in April 2006. That speech, “Hot Spots and Cools Spots in the War for Talent,” can be accessed on my website using the link. Don’t mind the mixed metaphors (wars, fog, and heat thermometers) across the article and the speech!
By the way, if you do pick up the Workforce Wake-up Call book, I believe the Preface and Introduction are the best parts. Two chapters I also recommend are “Staffing for the Future” by Robert Gandossy, and “The New Deal with Employees” by Peter Cappelli.
Flight of the Creative Class
Richard Florida
Is the United States in danger of losing its most crucial economic advantage? That’s what Richard Florida asserts in his latest book. Flight of the Creative Class is a fascinating account of how the United States is making itself less attractive to immigrant talent that has been a critical driver of its economic success. Florida claims the United States is truly in danger of losing its status as the world’s greatest talent magnet. Beyond its obvious interest to American audiences, this book exemplifies the deep, strategic thinking and analysis so frequently lacking in the field of talent management. If you haven’t read Florida’s previous book, The Rise of the Creative Class, you should – it is an excellent treatise about the impact talent has on a city’s economic development.
Executive Intelligence
Justin Menkes
In this book, Justin Menkes describes the general skills needed in all executives: reasoning and analytical judgment, social skills to understand what concerns others, and self-reflection skills to learn from feedback and question the course one has taken. He makes the case that our assessment processes have underestimated intelligence and over estimated things such as communication and presentation skills. Around the time the book came out an HBR article titled “Hiring Smarts” was also published which gives a good synopsis of some of the key ideas in the book. Some of you may recall my recommending Justin’s assessment service to you in 2004 when he started under the firm name MenkesStark. Since publishing the book, Justin Menkes and Bob Stark have renamed their firm The Executive Intelligence Group.
Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work
Dick Grote
At first glance, Forced Ranking is the kind of book we need in talent management literature. It describes in some detail the importance of the talent review process and how it works in practical terms. Unfortunately, I believe Dick Grote makes a fundamental error that undermines the value of this book. He equates forced ranking with a talent review process. In my view, every company should have a talent review process that brings together multiple leaders to discuss the performance and development of managers below them. This review process should use some form of rating scheme to identify those who are high, average, and low performers and those with high potential to advance to more senior roles. But only a small number of companies should use forced ranking as the rating scheme. Many of the benefits Grote ascribes to forced ranking are benefits that come from conducting a highly effective talent review process. An informed practitioner will get something from reading this book if they notice and read around this confusion. Less informed readers could be confused at best, misled at worst.
Moneyball
Michael Lewis
This bestseller is a fascinating look at how baseball teams recruit talent and the mistakes many organizations make in how they define and assess talent. Lewis tells a compelling, insightful tale of the resistance encountered and successes won as the managers of a major league baseball team develop new ideas about what it takes to win in a talent intensive business. Assessing business leaders isn’t as easy as assessing baseball players, but there are some interesting lessons that are transferable. I am not a baseball fan - in fact I just barely know what an RBI is - but I loved this book.
Leading the Way
Robert Gandossy and Marc Effron
This is an insightful look at how the best companies grow leadership talent. The style and key messages of this book are very similar to The War for Talent, but it goes deeper into assessment and development than we did in our book. What I like about this book is that it talks about the essential things that really make the difference such as commitment from the CEO, taking risks on the high-potential people, and thoughtfully managing job experiences for development purposes. It sheds light on these critical but subtle elements, and describes how they look and feel in a number of great companies. If you want to get your executives more engaged in developing a strong pipeline of leaders, this would be a great book to share with them.
Boards that Deliver
Ram Charan
There have been a number of books lately about corporate governance but this one is, in my opinion, the best. Ram Charan doesn’t talk about the many compliance or structural issues - he assumes the reader already knows about that stuff. Instead he talks about what truly differentiates effective boards from ineffective ones. He describes three phases of a board’s evolution: the ‘ceremonial’ board that takes little time and adds no value; the ‘liberated’ board that demands lots of management’s time but adds little value; and the ‘progressive’ board that adds lots of value. He offers many practical suggestions for how to get your board to the progressive level, such as getting the most out of your scarce meeting time, making the information the board gets more useful, and getting more involved in strategy and talent issues. The chapter on CEO evaluation and succession is a particularly good primer.
Revolt in the Boardroom
Alan Murray
Talent on Demand
Peter Cappelli
Switchpoints
Judy Johnson, Les Dakens, Peter Edwards and Ned Morse
The Leadership Pipeline
Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel
High Flyers
Morgan W. McCall, Jr.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Marshall Goldsmith
The CEO Within
Joseph L. Bower
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