Communications of the ACM
Re-Framing Talent For Our Times
Credit: The Economist
Leading management gurus John Hagel and John Seely Brown weigh in how companies need to re-define "talent" for the current generation. Today's economy, characterized by rapid, volatile change and mounting competitive pressures, places a new set of demands on firms. Yet, companies have not yet risen to these challenges, leading to declining performance. Companies realize that recruiting and fostering top talent is crucial to their performance; indeed, firms are paying increasingly high premiums for knowledge workers in an effort to attract those they consider to be talented employees. Hagel and Brown suggest that firms must broaden their view of "talent" from a static set of skills and relationships held by a few to a much more dynamic set of dispositions that can drive sustained performance improvement.
While companies invest heavily in recruiting, most firms employ a static view of talent, focusing largely on one or two dimensions: skill set and network. The most prevalent view of talent, particularly at lower levels of an organization, is skill set. In this view, an individual's value to the organization is defined by the information conveyed on his or her resume. A two-dimensional view of talent takes into consideration both "what" and "whom" a person knows. This view of talent is often employed when recruiting for senior positions. While these two dimensions may convey an individual's value at a given point, they fail to capture how he or she may develop over time or how the individual might cope when faced with an unexpected challenge or change.
From The Economist
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