Daily Archives: October 21, 2005

This blog ranks number 5 in Technorati’s Management list and 10 in Technorati’s India list ! Wow ! I’m impressed by myself Of course, the simple reason is that not too many people know about tagging one’s blog by topic. Once that catches on I guess my ranking will slip

See where I figure in the Business ranking…number 38 and falling !

Overall I am still around the 14 k ranking , but the interesting fact is that subscribers to my bloglines RSS feeds have been rising even when I was on vacation. Do you read my blog on Bloglines? Can you leave me some feedback on the comment section to this post?

Got this from Egon Zehnder’s newsletter:

Recent shortages of top managers in a wide range of industries have sparked
a war for top talent, write Nanette Byrnes and Amy Barrett in BusinessWeek.
Major oil companies are luring top players away from service providers like
Schlumberger by tripling their salaries. Yet although firms will spend up to USD
50 billion on talent development this year, many either fail to produce
homegrown leaders or, like Coca-Cola Co. pick the wrong internal candidate to
become CEO. So what are the secrets to hiring, training and retaining stars, ask
the authors?

High-performing companies create a wealth of bench talent by turning
human resources into a strategic asset, they observe. One key talent management
tool often used is a customized HR solution like a global database combining
career records with personal staff profiles. University alliances to hire top
students and graduate training programs can also help to produce talent
internally. Other strategies include recruiting top HR staff, ensuring full
C-level commitment to talent management and amplifying managers’ strengths
rather than criticizing their weaknesses, add the authors. Successful companies
treat losing a high potential as a disaster that is fully investigated via an
exit interview, they note. Talent is a valuable weapon to companies seeking a
competitive edge and deserves far more attention in the future, conclude the
authors.

Rob at BusinessPundit is getting to meet Richard Branson in person and is blogging about it too.

He writes:

He talked about hiring, saying that “The number one thing that matters, especially if you’re going to be manager at Virgin, is how good you are with people. If you’re – if you’re good with people and you’ve got – you know, and you really care, genuinely care about people then I’m sure we could find a job for you at Virgin. I think, you know, that the companies that look after their people are the companies that do really well. I’m sure we’d like a few other attributes, but that would be the most important one.”

Now that’s something ! It’s an endorsement of the strategic importance of people processes by someone who started business at the age of 16 and has learnt everything first-hand ! Rob also thinks Branson should be blogging.

While on a related note Tom Kelly of IDEO blogs in FC Now that “directing is 90% casting.” Kelly’s new book The Ten Faces of Innovation has a website here.