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The new era of talentism
By Christel Heydemann, VP Corporate Human Resources & Transformation, Alcatel-Lucent
I just returned from the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Mexico, as I was invited to attend the Young Global Leader event with an energizing group of 280 young leaders coming from 59 countries, with very diverse backgrounds in politics, business, arts, social entrepreneurs or civil society.
Several debates with young global leaders including the opening session with Klaus Schwab and the closing meeting with Presidente Calderon of Mexico indicated the dawn of a new era. The Human age or the new era of Talentism, in which access to talent is replacing capital as the key economic differentiator.
In his opening keynote to Young global leaders, Klaus Schwab refered to his blog “The end of capitalism…what’s next ?” and restated his conviction: “it is fair to say that capital is losing its status as the most important factor of production in our economic system. As I outlined in my opening address in Davos, capital is being superseded by creativity and the ability to innovate — and therefore by human talents — as the most important factors of production. If talent is becoming the decisive competitive factor, we can be confident in stating that capitalism is being replaced by “talentism.” Just as capital replaced manual trades during the process of industrialization, capital is now giving way to human talent.”
As head of Human Resources for Alcatel-Lucent, I can’t agree more… Any business needs talents to succeed, and talent has no age, no passport and no gender, but talents attract talents ! On a global scale, we define our strategic workforce plan to ensure the best match of our needs for specific skills with available talents in the different markets. There are obvious differences between aging Europe and very competitive China. But beyond the optimization of skills needs and available talents, we also strive to offer the best career development path in order to develop and retain our talents. I had the opportunity to explain to other leaders how we do it within Alcatel-Lucent, I explained in particular that we launched in 2011 a global Internal Job Market where employees have access to all open positions within Alcatel-Lucent and can apply for jobs easily. Actually as easily as if they were applying for a job outside… the objective being to make our internal job market as attractive as the external market for every country we operate in.
For companies all over the world, finding individuals with the right skills is a key driver to business success, yet despite access to a large population, employers in every region are still struggling with a skills mismatch. This week in Mexico, business and political leaders discussed about innovative and sustainable models and solutions to address these challenges and drive transformation.
It is crucial that businesses and governments collaborate in every part of the world to unleash the potential of the most precious scarce resource – people.
Regional priorities are very different, but as President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, himself a Young Global Leader from the class of 1997, openly discussed with us: “The world is getting old, and we need to define new ideals and get new ideas from the younger generations across the globe”.
As economists are predicting the worst economic recovery in the post-World War era, while policy-makers around the globe have put creating jobs on top of their agenda, while all leaders must adapt in a world where velocity, connectivity, complexity and transparency have become the norm… I want to remember one thing from the WEF in Mexico: we are entering a new era of talentism where people who have dreams can make a difference !
- Categories: | Corporate Responsibility
3 Responses to The new era of talentism
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In general I don’t argue with the content but let’s state it a little different as it is somewhat too grey.
The world is young and need to be shaped by the new people, they will come to do this by the need and opportunities.
One could argue that creating jobs isn’t enough and surely not sustainable at the end, more is needed as consumption is the trigger for jobs, for innovation, for unleashing the latent potential of the new people.
Conclusion, all parties have a role in this play.
Governments must take care that consumption is reinstated, the industry will take care of the jobs and new people will unleash their full potential.
Great post Christel!
McKinsey’s 1998 ‘War for Talent’ is indeed still raging – and it’s tougher now than ever. People argued that economic decline would douse the fires of the war, but the reality is that it just made it tougher. Much tougher. Great talent became even more important to businesses, and yet even more mobile… and, at the same time, under-performance became harder to tackle as the macro-economic conditions entrenched people deeper into the businesses they worked for as they sought job security over the risks associated with a possible move to a new opportunity.
So the first big question then, for me at least, is what has changed since 2007 and the beginning of the recession?
After a sustained period of growth and expansive talent strategies leading up to 2007, we’ve seen many companies ‘batten down the hatches’ in terms of talent acquisition and mobility. We’ve also seen, in some businesses, a view emerge that in a struggling economy ‘putting people first’ has become less important (after all, the thinking goes, they NEED their job right)?
The reality is that (i) the ‘War for Talent’ rages strongly and that (ii) the value chain of ‘put employees first and they’ll look after your customers – who will in turn look after your shareholders’ has long been established in best practice organizations (and written about by HBR, McKinsey & Co etc).
So what are companies doing about this? What are we doing about this?
We know we’re doing some things – but as with all things in life, we could do more. So what are we thinking about doing to reinvigorate and build further momentum around talentism in Alcatel-Lucent?
Also, I’d be very interested to hear if anything new or innovative emerged at the WEF in terms of approaches taken by other companies… is there anything we can replicate within Alcatel-Lucent or ,at the very least, learn from?
I couldn’t agree more. The world has entered an era of “skills imbalances,” caused by the growth in emerging economies, decay in educational institutions in the US, and changes in demographics. Our research shows that organizations must build very strong internal learning teams and practices to develop skills and succeed. There is definitely a new “war for talent.”