Chapter 6 Waging the first world war for talent
How do you attract the best talent the world has to offer to your business?
CEOs reveal that, alongside the battle for the customer, the most important battleground for competing global companies is now for talent. This decade will see the first world war for the globe’s top 1 percent of talent. The key drivers are poor demographics in the West, shortages of skilled workers in the East, and the lack of global leaders.
Chief executives do understand the importance of recruiting and promoting exceptional talent and claim to make it a top priority, but we found that many give it insufficient focus or time. In fact, many CEOs believe that their firm’s current talent development activities are ineffective.
Top CEOs reveal that the first world war for talent will require a fundamental rethink of ways of attracting and developing talent. Chief executives will have to be much more heavily involved in development and new breeds of human resources professionals and external search partners will need to step up to the task. CEOs explain how they are responding to the big challenges posed by a new world of work which increasingly involves directing a diverse and remotely located talent base, and dealing with the inevitable tensions generated by a global workforce containing a new mix of babyboomers, Generation X, and Generation Y.
The collective and related impact of the new global business realities will be fundamental and on a scale not previously experienced in our lifetimes. These new facts of life will mean that the majority of international companies operating traditional Western management techniques, even those run by highly capable professional CEOs, will not be able to cope without changing the way they operate. Most of the new champion companies from Asia and Eastern Europe will also be severely tested.
Extracted from The Secrets of CEOs, © Steve Tappin and Andy Cave, 2008
