Here's the Review in Brief. The Review in Depth follows.
How this book is different
The authors attempt to take a global and holistic approach to talent management.
Strengths
If your company is global, this book has lots of statistics to help you define and deal with talent management issues.
The book covers a number of issues related to talent management that don't ordinarily come under that heading. You will come across things that you probably hadn't considered.
Warnings
This book is a long commercial for Accenture. Do not expect them to cite, use, or acknowledge research by anyone deemed a competitor.
The writing and organization are bad. Ideas pop up and disappear. The book is written in the British idiom. American readers may have to research some terms.
Bottom Line
With the exception of the number of statistics, especially about issues related to global talent management, there's nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere. If the statistics will help you, buy the book. Otherwise consider this a long, poorly written commercial for Accenture that they want you to pay for.
The Review in Depth
The Talent Powered Organization, like many books, begins with an Introduction. The difference is that each of the three authors wrote their own introduction.
There are lots of places in this book where you'll feel that chapters were put together this way, but someone forgot to tell you. Prose style changes slightly from one part to another. Ideas are brought up in a way that makes you think they're interesting, but then never heard from again.
If the authors seem to be separate players and not exactly a team when writing, they do have something in common. Peter Cheese is head of Accenture's Human Performance practice. Robert Thomas is head of Accenture's Institute for High Performance Business. Elizabeth Craig is a Research Fellow with the Institute.
All of them work for Accenture, who, almost assuredly is buying a couple of carloads of this book to give away and use for promotion. That's common practice and I don't have a problem with it.
But this book covers a lot of ground where other firms, notably McKinsey and Deloitte have done quite a bit of work. This would have been a better book, though a less effective marketing tool, if the research and the conclusions weren't so "Accenture-centric."
After the Introductions, there are seven chapters. Each chapter seems intended to cover a specific area.
Talent imperatives for a new economic world. This chapter lays out the case for the recommendations that the consultants will make in the rest of the book. It seems that they've never met a statistic they didn't like and statistics and graphs and charts fill the chapter.
I would have preferred to forego interminable listing of data in favor of crisper writing. If all the data is essential it could find a happy home in an appendix where it wouldn't slow down the read without adding much insight.
This is where I started having trouble with the British English idiom. I knew what "tertiary-level graduates" were, even though it's not a term an American would normally use. But I finally had to email a British friend to find out the meaning of "The Knock On Effect," which is a major subhead for the chapter.
A strategic approach to talent. The authors outline their big idea, which is something called "Talent Multiplication." Somehow that happens if you approach sourcing talent from a supply chain perspective and then develop new capabilities in discovering, developing and deploying talent.
I liked the UPS case study that's part of this chapter. It was helpful to see what UPS did. What I still don't understand is how what UPS did is "Talent Multiplication." Maybe it doesn't matter.
The discovery of talent is about recruitment. We're introduced to Accenture's competency model and Accenture's research on what's hot and what's not (at least at the time the book was written) in terms of industries.
Beyond that it's not much different from what you'd find in a good magazine article on recruiting and far less proven than what you find in a book like Recruit or Die. In many ways, this chapter is a mish-mash of ideas about marketing applied to recruiting.
From talent development to deployment is about "multiplying talent." There's a good review of Accenture's research into various aspects of learning. There is advocacy for knowledge management without taking much account of the fact that the vast majority of knowledge management initiatives fail.
Engagement is a current buzzword. This chapter uses Gallup research but never quite gets around to defining what "engagement" actually, except to say that, like Potter Stewart said of pornography, you know it when you see it. Even though they can't' define it, the authors have identified six drivers of engagement.
Despite that, this is one of the most helpful chapters in the book. There's good, broad discussion of engagement and you can gain from reading about the six drivers without ever memorizing the cutesy words (all beginning with "C") that the authors chose to define them. This chapter makes an excellent case for the importance of line managers as drivers of engagement for the people who report to them.
Embedding and sustaining talent power is about measuring the ROI of investment in talent. It includes a framework for prioritizing and measuring human capital investments. Here we get an Accenture brand, "Human Capital Development Framework" which is immediately turned into an acronym, HCDF.
Next steps and the new imperatives. This, according to the authors, is where it all comes together. If you've read any good management books over the last few decades, you'll recognize the process.
First, top management will create a vision. Next they will develop a strategy. They will measure the value of talent, develop a talent supply chain, and a penchant for "right-sourcing." As companies discover, develop, and deploy their talent, talent multiplication, engagement, and eternal profit will result.
There are good points to this book. The international perspective sets it apart and the attempt to be "holistic" about solutions to talent issues means that many issues are alluded to. Unfortunately, this book is mostly a long commercial for Accenture and a very difficult read.
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