Article based on the bestselling book Talent Economics - the fine line between winning and losing the global war for talent.

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Who do you think will win the global war for
talent?
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HRM 04 Jul 2013
Early in 2012, the global workforce quietly traversed past the three
billion mark. Given that we have just over four and a half billion
people of working age across planet Earth; what this means is that
roughly two thirds of our talent wakes up each day seeking to
pursue an economic endeavour.
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Yet for all this abundance of human potential, businesses across the
world are waking up struggling to get their talent management
agenda to work. Both CEOs and HR heads commonly report supply
constraints, widening skill gaps, eroding loyalty and escalating labour
costs as their most pressing concerns.
In reality though, these are all symptoms, brought on in part because we haven’t invested
enough in understanding the true nature of our global workforce, and how it is transforming
in line with shifts in demographics and global business. A couple of years ago, I began
researching and writing my recently released book Talent Economics – The Fine Line
Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent for precisely this reason. I wanted to
present a fresh and deeply commercial insight on how the global workforce has changed over
the last two decades, and more importantly - what will it look like in 2020?
Using economics as a construct seemed a natural fit to this task. - In its simplest form economics is the study of how the forces of demand and supply allocate scarce resources.
Talent, just like gold or any other precious commodity, is subject to the same market forces,
and hence behaves along set patterns. If we recognise these patterns and study the nature
of a country’s workforce, we begin to understand these symptoms from a causal level.
During the research phase of the book, I interviewed several C-Suite executives and General
Managers to gather their opinions and thoughts. Every single one rated talent as a top-three
concern. Common refrains included: “employees just aren’t as loyal as they used to be,” or
“new competitors in our market poach our talent by offering a better title or a few dollars
more,” and “Generation Y employees expect rapid growth and won’t commit to a company
for very long”, amongst others.
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My natural next question was: “so, what are you doing about this?” And what I got in return
was a laundry list of solutions and initiatives, from improving incentive and top talent
programmes to leadership development workshops and employee engagement schemes. Yet
underlining all the activity people spoke about, I could also sense an underlying dissonance.
Quite like swimmers valiantly trying to swim against the tide, many leaders accepted that in
spite of all the effort, talent management continued to be an escalating concern.
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It is clear we need a fresh perspective. We continue to look at the competition for talent as
a problem which needs a solution. Like a gorilla, which has grown too big for its cage, we are
looking to fix the gorilla, and not the cage.
When Mckinsey wrote its iconic research paper “The War for Talent” in the late 1990s, it
focused on the competition between one company and another for the best and brightest
employees. Yet over the last 15 years, another dimension of this war has emerged: the war
between resignation and pinkslip.
It is indeed true that employment loyalty has eroded, but it has eroded at both ends. Over
the last 30 years, we have seen the emotional bond between the employee and employer
weakening with each passing decade. On one hand, companies have become more
comfortable laying-off employees at the first sign of economic turbulence. On the other
hand, with historically low economic disincentives for leaving, employees today have an
expanded career horizon and look well beyond their current organisations for career
opportunities.
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This isn’t an extension of the old war for talent. This represents a whole new reality. And
organisations interested in finding a future ready talent recipe to fuel growth ambitions will
need to transform on three vectors.
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•
Evolve the employment equation – We must accept that the employee is evolving
and hence the very concept of employment must evolve to keep pace. This requires us to
think well beyond old-fashioned “buy” or “build” mechanisms of finding and keeping talent,
and move towards making the organisation more fluid and attractive to both young and old
workers alike.
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•
Reboot management –A prime reason for our pain today is the deeply entrenched
legacy of command and control management mindsets. The 21st Century employee turning
up to work today is more aware, assertive and empowered than ever before; a fact which is
challenging the traditional supremacy of 20th Century supervisory practices. If managers
don’t change, the best talent today finds it easier to quit and walk across the road. The
worst talent on the other hand chooses to quit and stay.
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•
Make talent agendas truly strategic – By this I mean eschew the list of random talent
initiatives, programmes and practices, in favour of well-researched and truly long-term talent
strategy. Or for that matter, the need for talent strategy which balances global ambition
with the vastly divergent ground realities in Seattle, Seville, Shanghai or Singapore. The best
way to get there is through deep diagnosis, and by studying what the workforce of the
future will look like.
Achieving this transformation will require the will to challenge several “holy cow” practices. It
will also require a shift from blindly copying prescribed “best practices”, towards empowering
leaders and giving them the means to experiment with new age ideas which transform the
workplace.
Remember: innovative solutions to new challenges, seldom come from familiar places.
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3. Author Bio
Gyan Nagpal is an award winning talent strategist and commentator, who is deeply invested
in researching ongoing changes to the global talent pool. Over the last decade he has
helped some of the largest and most ambitious international organisations build significant
business franchises across the Asia Pacific region.
His recently released book Talent Economics - The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing
the Global War for Talent went to number 1 on Amazon.com’s hot new books in HR list, a
day after its global release.
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