Talent Wins

Charan, with Dominic Barton and Dennis Carey, argues that talent should be managed with the same rigour and the same board-level attention as capital, and that the human resources function as currently constituted cannot do it.

Their central proposal is the G3, a core group consisting of the chief executive, the chief financial officer and the chief human resources officer, meeting regularly to make talent and capital allocation decisions together. Their argument is that these decisions are inseparable, since a strategy is executed by specific people and moving money without moving people accomplishes nothing, and that separating them into different processes and different meetings is why strategies fail in execution.

They argue for identifying what they call the critical two percent, meaning the roles rather than the individuals that create disproportionate value, which are frequently not the most senior positions and which most organisations have never identified. Talent should be deployed to those roles and measured there.

The operational content covers redesigning the chief human resources officer role from an administrative function to a strategic one, restructuring the annual talent review to be as rigorous as the capital budget, building an organisation of small teams that can be reconfigured, and changing what boards examine.

The book has no empirical base and rests on consulting experience with large corporations. The G3 proposal is specific and testable, and the identification of high-leverage roles rather than high-performing individuals is the most useful idea in it.