Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edward E. Lawler III is director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California (USC) and distinguished professor in the USC Marshall School of Business. Named one of the country's leading management experts by BusinessWeek magazine, Lawler is the recipient of the top career achievement awards given by SHRM, ASTD, WorldatWork, and the Academy of Management. He is the author or coauthor of more than forty books, including The New American Workplace, HR Business Process Outsourcing, Treat People Right!, From the Ground Up, Rewarding Excellence, and most recently, Built to Change. His writings have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Financial Times, as well as many academic journals.

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TALENT

In today's global business environment, it is more and more difficult to gain a competitive edge, but it is not impossible. Talent, potentially the most powerful source of competitive advantage, is available. But how should organizations be designed to make talent their key source of competitive advantage?

In this follow-up to his best-selling book Built to Change, Ed Lawler shows how organizations can combine the right organization design, management practices, and talent to gain a critical performance edge.

Talent offers a blueprint that succinctly maps out the best approach to organizing and leading a talent-focused organization. The organizational features needed to create a talent-focused organization are identified and their operation explained. Special attention is paid to:

• Leadership
• Corporate boards
• Talent management
• Performance management
• Information and decision making

Lawler shows how organizations can determine which talent-focused management approach best fits their business: a high-involvement approach that has long-term employment relationships and a high level of employee involvement in decision making, or a global-competitor approach where there is a constant influx of new talent and technological expertise. Drawing from his expertise and providing insights into today's most innovative companies, Lawler describes the human capital strategy and organization design for each approach. He provides the foundation and tools for creating effective and innovative organizations.

A timely, much-needed resource, Talent defines how companies can be managed for competitive advantage today.

Aus dem Klappentext

Talent

In today's global business environment, it is more and more difficult to gain a competitive edge, but it is not impossible. Talent, potentially the most powerful source of competitive advantage, is available. But how should organizations be designed to make talent their key source of competitive advantage?

In this follow-up to his best-selling book Built to Change, Ed Lawler shows how organizations can combine the right organization design, management practices, and talent to gain a critical performance edge. Talent offers a blueprint that succinctly maps out the best approach to organizing and leading a talent-focused organization. The organizational features needed to create a talent-focused organization are identified and their operation explained. Special attention is paid to:

• Leadership

• Corporate boards

• Talent management

• Performance management

• Information and decision making

Lawler shows how organizations can determine which talent-focused management approach best fits their business: a high-involvement approach that has long-term employment relationships and a high level of employee involvement in decision making, or a global-competitor approach where there is a constant influx of new talent and technological expertise. Drawing from his expertise and providing insights into today's most innovative companies, Lawler describes the human capital strategy and organization design for each approach. He provides the foundation and tools for creating effective and innovative organizations.

A timely, much-needed resource, Talent defines how companies can be managed for competitive advantage today.

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Talent

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

In the last several decades, an avalanche of business books, articles, speeches, and seminars have stressed the importance of human capital-people-in gaining competitive advantage. Executives seem to be paying attention. According to a recent survey of senior executives from all over the world, the two most important management challenges are

Recruitment of high-quality people across multiple territories, particularly as competition for top talent grows more intense

Improving the appeal of the company culture and work environment

Fifty-five percent of the respondents to that survey reported that they expect to spend more time on people management than on technology in the next three years. More than 85 percent of the respondents said that people are vital to all aspects of their company's performance particularly their top strategic challenges: increased competition, innovation, and technology.

What's more, according to another recent survey of over a thousand global CEOs, 72 percent are more concerned about the availability of individuals with key skills than they are about energy and commodity prices and intellectual property rights.

Apparently, people are front and center on managers' radar, as well they should be. Increasingly, companies in a wide variety of businesses are finding that people can be their number one source of competitive advantage. But it is not enough for leaders to say that people are important, or to put people issues high on their mental to-do list. What is needed are organizations that are designed and managed-from the boardroom to the front line-in ways that optimize talent attraction, retention, and performance. I call this type of organization human-capital-centric, or HC-centric.

Today, most organizations are still managed in a bureaucratic, structure-centric manner, and they have been managed that way for decades. In these companies, you'll often hear managers at all levels talking about the importance of people, but the walk really doesn't follow through on the talk. Their managers do make an effort to see that they attract and retain the people they need to make their bureaucratic structure operate efficiently, but they are not designed to make their human capital a competitive advantage.

In one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons, the boss says, "I've been saying for years that `Employees are our most valuable asset.' It turns out that I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset. Employees are ninth." When asked what came in eighth, he says: "Carbon paper." I realize that not everyone remembers carbon paper, but I hope those of you who don't still get the joke-and the real point: Lip service and window dressing are not enough.

To be clear, a bureaucratic, structure-centric approach to management can still work. A modest effort to attract, retain, and motivate talent is all that's needed in some organizations, because it achieves good enough performance from their human capital, and people are not their primary source of competitive advantage.

But for companies that are truly competing on the performance of their people-their human capital-it is not enough. They need to adopt an HC-centric approach to organizing. It is not just about controlling people costs because they are a major expense-it is about how well people perform, because their performance is the critical factor in determining whether the organization is effective.

Competitive Realities

So how do you tell whether an organization should be HC-centric or not? Multiple factors have contributed to the creation of the knowledge economy and the rise of talent as a potential source of competitive advantage. The extent to which an organization has been influenced by these factors is the major determinant of whether it needs to be HC-centric.

One of these factors is access to financial capital. Having access to financial capital used to be a major source of competitive advantage, but today financing is easily obtained and therefore is rarely a potential source of competitive advantage. In developed countries, financial capital moves quickly and efficiently and is easily accessed. Evidence of the ready availability of capital is prevalent. More and more corporations are buying back their stock because they have an abundance of cash, and private equity funds are buying major corporations with their large cash positions. Oh yes, new public offerings continue to be common, even though they are not as hot as they were in the dot-com era.

Another factor in the creation of a new competitive landscape-perhaps the most obvious change-is the information technology that has been created in the last decade. It has reshaped the global economy as well as the internal operations of corporations.

Information technology (IT) has contributed to the growing need for technical knowledge as well as to the development of new technical knowledge and businesses. Perhaps equally important is the impact of IT on the ability of organizations to move work across internal, external, and geographic boundaries. It is now possible to outsource manufacturing, software engineering, and many other activities to other companies and countries, and to coordinate the results on a global basis.

IT has made it possible for people to work more flexibly and to change what they work on with increased rapidity. It also can give people a better understanding of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Time Magazine recognized the impact that IT has had when it made "you" the person of the year for 2006. According to Time, the World Wide Web is about people being able to do new and important things. It is about the "many" gaining power-and not just changing the world but changing how the world changes. In the case of organizations, it is changing what people do, how they do it, their importance to organizations, and how they are managed and organized most effectively.

Closely tied to the evolution of information technology is the increased amount of technical knowledge required for many of the products and services produced and offered in developed countries. This increase is fueling a parallel increasing need for knowledgeable, skilled, and motivated employees. It's also a major reason why the market values of S&P 500 companies are over three times their book values, and why the value of publicly traded companies' intangible assets has been growing for decades. One estimate is that in 1982 intangible assets accounted for 38 percent of company assets, and that by 2000 they accounted for 85 percent.

Another factor in the creation of a new competitive landscape is the result of the changes just described: The U.S. economy is increasingly service-driven. IBM, for example, once a computer and office equipment manufacturer (do you even remember IBM typewriters, or better yet, time clocks?), has evolved into a predominantly service-oriented organization. There also has been tremendous growth in food service organizations, such as McDonald's, and retailers, such as Wal-Mart (the largest U.S. employer). As a result, manufacturing employment now represents only 8 percent of the U.S. workforce, down from over 30 percent just a few decades ago.

Why is the growth of service organizations important? The major reason is customer...