The Hindu Business Line : Discover the pivotal jobs

Perhaps, it is time to forget leadership, and think ‘talentship’, a new decision science that John W. Boudreau and Peter M. Ramstad propound in ‘Beyond HR’ ( www.crosswordbookstores.com).

The authors are aghast that most organisations don’t know which jobs are pivotal – “they are not always leaders, salespeople, or technical professionals.”

With most strategy and planning processes leaving these critical roles virtually uncharted, what your company may be suffering from is a dangerous blind spot!

“Right beneath the surface of virtually every organisation’s formal strategy are opportunities for competitive advantage that are overlooked and untapped every single day.” Reason: the organisation may be adopting the peanut-butter approach of ‘spreading the same investments over the entire organisation’, and making decisions about “people’s talents and how those people are organised with far less rigour, logic, and distinctiveness than their decisions about other resources, like money and technology.”

Boudreau and Ramstad offer help in the form of the ‘human capital bridge’ framework, which has three anchor points (or, ‘supports for the suspension bridge’), viz. impact, effectiveness and efficiency.

“Efficiency captures how investments affect programs and practices. Effectiveness captures how programs and practices affect talent and organisation pools. Impact captures how talent and organisation pools affect sustainable strategic success.”

Continuing the bridge metaphor, the authors speak of seven ‘spanning connectors’ between the anchor points, or ‘linking elements’, beginning with investments and ending with sustainable strategic success.

Stunning findings.

D. Murali

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