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The Word of the Day (or Perhaps the Year) Is …

May 9, 2008 — Just back from a quick trip over to Los Angeles and the 30th annual sponsors meeting of the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO). WorldatWork is a supporter of this outstanding research center (which includes legends Ed Lawler and John Boudreau) at the Marshall School of Business at USC. It was a two-day session that convened a group of very senior-level human resources professionals to discuss new research and horizon issues.

So on the short flight over to LA, I was perusing the book that I recently ordered from Amazon: Peter Cappelli's newest book, Talent on Demand. Then, when I arrived at the meeting registration table, I was provided with Ed Lawler's newly-published book, Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage. I also received the binder of materials for the meeting — which told me on the cover that one of the meeting's themes was: "Beyond HR to Talent-Centric Strategy." On the second day of the meeting, I had the opportunity to listen to John Boudreau present his "talentship" research and slides. Then, when I returned to the office yesterday, two of my colleagues de-briefed me about a conference they had attended this week here in Phoenix, sponsored by Talent Management magazine.

… Does anyone see a theme emerging here? There seems to be one particular word that keeps popping up. Yes, you probably got it by now: talent.

So the question in my mind is: Is the word "talent" merely the word of the day, the week, the month, the year or the decade? When names like Cappelli, Lawler and Boudreau use it, that tells me that it's probably got some staying power. My guess is that the word will be quite prominent in Philadelphia in two weeks at the WorldatWork conference, too.

But what does it mean? For instance, is everyone in an organization "talent," or is it merely the cream of the crop of employees (as in, "talented")? Is this just the new way to talk about succession planning, or is it something different? Is it a subset of human capital and human resources, or a different concept entirely? How does total rewards connect to it, or not?

After looking around for approximately 3 minutes, I found that Cappelli's book offers a definition of "talent management," there's an entry for it in Wikipedia that attributes the coining of the term to McKinsey, a Google search returned 18,500,000 items (literally), and the WorldatWork Glossary of definitions doesn't even contain the words 'talent' or 'talent management.'

So what do you think about talent and talent management?

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The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork.