Tomorrow's Talent Networks - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org

Talented workers join companies and stay there because they believe they'll learn faster and better than they would at other employers.

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But how, exactly, does talent get better faster? Formal training programs, we would argue, are increasingly marginal to the talent race. And they're expensive in a recession.

Talented workers develop instead by:

- Trying new things.
- Experimenting with what they do in their jobs and how they do it.
- Tackling real problems with talented people who have different backgrounds and skills.
- Participating in talent networks, the largely invisible matrix structures that run within firms and, with increasing frequency, between and across them.

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Talented workers develop instead by:

- Trying new things.
- Experimenting with what they do in their jobs and how they do it.
- Tackling real problems with talented people who have different backgrounds and skills.
- Participating in talent networks, the largely invisible matrix structures that run within firms and, with increasing frequency, between and across them.

Highlighted by bertrandduperrin

Because talent works at every level of the corporation, the changes necessary to develop talent extend into nearly every aspect of the firm's activities. Operations, organization, and strategy must all be reconceived through the talent lens. They must be re-thought as part of pull platforms that treat all workers as capable creators who are continuously improvising in response to unanticipated situations. In this view, talent isn't just the highly trained and deeply skilled knowledge workers one typically thinks of as talent: they're just about everybody.

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In what remains of this post we'll discuss the pull-based operational changes necessary to create the talent-driven firm. In subsequent posts we'll look at the implications for strategy, organization, and technology.

As we argued before, many big companies have been built around the concept of "pushing" resources into the areas of greatest anticipated need. Whether it's the shelves of a retail store, the activities of a manufacturing plant, or the people of a services firm, push approaches try to forecast demand and then deploy the right resources to the right place at the right time.

Push programs have enabled scalable, cost-effective operations. But they've come at a steep price: the rigid standardization and specification of activities and tasks they require. What if instead companies were to create more flexible pull platforms to help employees access resources whenever and wherever they are needed? What if, rather than treating exception handling as a nuisance to be eliminated, companies welcomed these problems as opportunities for participants to tinker and experiment?

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Pull platforms are essential to fostering learning on the job since they can make it easier to access unexpected resources in unexpected ways and thereby encourage participants to try new approaches that simply would not be feasible in more rigid push programs.

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Pull platforms are essential to fostering learning on the job since they can make it easier to access unexpected resources in unexpected ways and thereby encourage participants to try new approaches that simply would not be feasible in more rigid push programs.

Highlighted by swarnasras