Talent Wins

These are my initial notes after reading the book "Talent Wins: The new playbook for putting people first" written by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, Dennis Carey. All the text is owned by the authors/publishers and these are my favorite snippets from the book, I do not claim ownership of any content.

•  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.
• Questions on CEOs minds today:

-          Are my company's talent practices still relevant?

-          How can we recruit, utilize, and develop people to deliver greater value to customers?

-          How do our practices make us better than the competition?

-          How can I be sure that I have the right approach to talent and the right HR to drive change?

-          Do I gather best of my team/assets into a single team abutting your opponent's weak spot?

-          Do you spread them widely to distribute risk?

-          Do you emphasize your strongest sectors?

-          Are your best people all gravitating toward a certain trend, and should the company steer that way?

-          Who are your future leaders?

-          What companies are wooing you best employees, and what does that tell you about your industry’s direction?

-          Who is holding back the creation of more business value, and why?

-          Why are some of your businesses positive or negative outliers, and how much of that performance is attributable to the executive you have put in place?

-          Does compensation match performance? How might specific personnel changes affect the bottom line?

• Talent is even more than strategy, it is what creates value.
• Traditionally, companies that reallocated financial capital aggressively from one division to another, based on market opportunity and performance, were worth 40% more after fifteen years than companies that had been relatively passive. [Think this is the motivation for digital transformation efforts?
•  Deploying human capital is very different from deploying financial capital. Dollars and Euros will go where you send them - and they won't complain. People, on the other hand, want to have a say in their fate.
• A two-by-two: On one side of the vertical axis list the issues relating to business performance; on the other, organizational concerns. Above the horizontal axis note things that are going well; below, things that aren’t
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•  Getting the people who manage those resources in the same room with you is the only effective way for you to link the company’s financials with the people who produce them.
• Top executives must dissect past events to understand the root causes of a business’s failure or success.
•  Talent consideration must be a critical part of every important decision.
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• Talent technology: Software applications that elevate your ability to identify, recruit and support talent both inside and outside your company. Without a strong, effective, and supportive core at the top, a thorough sense of your most valuable talent, and the digital tools that any modern company must have, your transformation will fail.
• To * Talent * Strategy * Risk[Disruptive framework] from Total Shareholder Return [Organic Growth]
• In most corporations, everything – work, decision making, compensation, career paths, even who gets the best computer – follows a vertical path. But hierarchy can isolate and bury talent. Instead, a people-first company relies on the work of small, cross-functional teams that come together, disband, and reform as suits the nature of their work. Flattening the organization creates speed.
• Bring people and numbers together.
• Value creators aren’t necessarily inventors of new products, great strategists, or those most adept at ascending corporate ladders. Whatever their position, they are people who get to the heart of issues, re-frame ideas, create informal bonds that encourage collaboration, and make the organization healthier and more productive. Often, these are veterans whom newcomers turn to for advice on how to advance through the organizational cross-sections.
•  If the company’s value agenda was to increase earnings from $600 million in EBITDA to $1 billion, while shifting the multiple from 8x to 10x – how would such a message translate to various levels?
• According to a McKinsey study, one pharma CEO who decided to spread a message about change via the company’s informal influencers needed only 2.3 steps to reach an employee, versus the 4.5 it would have taken through traditional channels. This means your message moves faster, without the degradation of an extended game of “telephone” and “email”.
• Suggestions can come from anyone in an employee’s network… At it’s core, the approach depends on continuous dialogue and share accountability.
• The biggest problem: cleaning up old databases that have different formats and inconsistent information is a time sink.