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Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First
Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First
Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First
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Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First

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Radical Advice for Reinventing Talent--and HR

Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of human capital, and yet the talent practices their organizations use are stuck in the twentieth century.

Typical talent-planning and HR processes are designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where "lines and boxes" still define how people are managed. As work and organizations have become more fluid--and business strategy is no longer about planning years ahead but about sensing and seizing new opportunities and adapting to a constantly changing environment--companies must deploy talent in new ways to remain competitive.

Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent--for today's agile, digital, analytical, technologically driven strategic environment--and for creating the HR function that business needs. Filled with examples of forward-thinking companies that have adopted radical new approaches to talent (such as ADP, Amgen, BlackRock, Blackstone, Haier, ING, Marsh, Tata Communications, Telenor, and Volvo), as well as the juggernauts and the startups of Silicon Valley, this book shows leaders how to bring the rigor that they apply to financial capital to their human capital--elevating HR to the same level as finance in their organizations.

Providing deep, expert insight and advice for what needs to change and how to change it, this is the definitive book for reimagining and creating a talent-driven organization that wins.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 6, 2018
ISBN9781633691193
Author

Ram Charan

Ram Charan, who learned the art and science of business in his family's shoe shop, has consulted for many well-known companies, including GE, KLM and DuPont and is a bestselling author. He recently bought his first flat in Dallas, Texas, aged 67.

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    Book preview

    Talent Wins - Ram Charan

    Authors

    Introduction

    Memo to the CEO:

    Your Talent Playbook

    What is the key to the future of your company?

    Better yet, who is the key to the future of your company, and what are you doing to unleash his or her potential?

    Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of talent, yet the talent practices their organizations use are vestiges of another era. They were designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where lines and boxes defined how people were managed. As work and organizations become more fluid—and business strategy comes to mean sensing and seizing new opportunities in a constantly changing environment, rather than planning for several years into a predictable future—companies must deploy talent in new ways. In fact, talent must lead strategy.

    That’s a radical departure from the past. Something this big is a job for the CEO. Simply put, reimagining and leading a people-first company cannot be delegated to anyone else in the organization. In the past, some people initiatives were viewed as soft or feel-good efforts that didn’t merit the CEO’s full attention. That won’t suffice. What’s needed now is something altogether different, and far more demanding. In our opinion, putting talent first means a complete transformation of the way most companies have done business for decades.

    That’s why the time has come for you—and every CEO who intends to succeed in his or her job—to take charge of talent. You must deploy talent as successfully as you deploy capital. You must know your employees as well as you understand your finances. You must shape an organization that empowers those employees to create as much value as possible.

    This is complicated stuff. But companies that manage the transition from strategy-first to people-first will reap enormous rewards.

    That’s why the three of us have come together to write this book now. We have spent decades helping top business leaders execute their strategies. Ram has been a confidant to the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest corporations and their boards, advising them on how to create value and helping them execute their most significant strategic shifts. Dominic, as the Global Managing Partner of McKinsey, has hundreds of CEOs who turn to his firm when it comes time to change strategy or transform their business model. Dennis, the Vice Chairman of Korn Ferry, a premier recruiting firm, works closely with boards and CEOs to ensure that their companies have the right directors, chief executives, and top leaders in place.

    We have never come across a moment like this, when virtually every CEO we work with is asking a daunting set of questions: Are my company’s talent practices still relevant? How can we recruit, utilize, and develop people to deliver greater value to customers—and do so better than the competition? How can I be sure that I have the right approach to talent—and the right HR—to drive the changes we need to make?

    These questions recognize a basic truth of our time: Talent has never been more important to the success of a corporation. Talent is king. Talent, even more than strategy, is what creates value. The implications of this are profound, and are what this book is about.

    You Must Manage Human Capital as Wisely as Financial Capital

    Consider the board game Risk. Players have a simple goal: take over all the countries of the world by using their army to wipe out the armies of the other players. When several players compete, there almost always comes a point when the weakest have been destroyed and two or three players are left to face off. None of the survivors of the early skirmishes is an overwhelming leader; with armies strewn across the continents, each competitor has a chance to win.

    Luck, in the form of good or bad rolls of the dice, will have a part in determining the winner. But the outcome will most depend on who best deploys his or her armies. When so few competitors are left, each player may get a fistful of troops each turn. Do you gather them into a single country abutting your opponent’s weak spot? Do you spread them widely to distribute the risk? Do you emphasize your strongest sectors? You will win or lose depending on how you deploy your troops.

    The analogy to business is clear: deployment of assets is the way you win or lose. But which assets? Most businesses have focused for years on the deployment of capital, with good reason. McKinsey consultant Stephen Hall, along with his former colleagues Dan Lovallo and Reinier Musters, studied more than 1,600 US companies, looking at how their financial results lined up with their movement of capital. They found that companies that reallocated financial capital aggressively from one division to another, based on market opportunity and performance, were worth 40 percent more after fifteen years than companies that had been relatively passive. The top third of their sample returned 30 percent more to shareholders than the bottom third.

    The best CEOs constantly review and reallocate financial capital, withdrawing funds from some places and adding more somewhere else. Security analysts watch this closely, rewarding companies that aggressively move capital, like Alphabet, Google’s parent. But Google is just as bold when deploying its other critical resource: people.

    Now, let’s be clear: Deploying human capital is very different from deploying financial capital. Dollars and euros will go where you send them—and they won’t complain, of course. People, on the other hand, want to have a say in their fate. And at a time when talent is in such high demand, you must allow—and even encourage—people to have their say if you hope to attract the very best in your field. So, the successful deployment of talent is now largely a matter of creating an environment where the interests, ambitions, and innovations of people constantly shape the strategy and future of the company. Companies manage this challenge in myriad ways. In Google’s case, for example, talent deployment emerges from a workplace where people have considerable leeway in deciding what projects they want to work on. In other companies, like Haier and McKinsey, a talent market determines deployment.

    Our goal with Talent Wins is to provide a playbook that will help you deploy human capital as effectively as you deploy financial capital. The structure and practices that make sense for your company are not necessarily the ones that will work for another company. This is not a one-size-fits-all kind of book, because there’s no one-size-fits-all, universal solution for maximizing the potential of something as complicated as talent. Yet as the three of us interviewed hundreds of top leaders for this book (CEOs, CHROs, CFOs, directors, and others), we discovered a set of principles shared by the most forward-thinking companies, principles that provide the foundation of such talent-driven organizations as ADP, Amgen, Aon, Apple, BlackRock, Blackstone, Google, Haier, Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, PepsiCo, Telenor, and many others you will encounter in this book. Talent Wins will show you how these principles can drive exponential growth at your own

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