In the late 90’s, I had the good fortune to attend the meetings and deliberations of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. During these meetings, on the final day, a plenary session was celebrated and one of the questions posed to the six guest panelist was: “What will be the key competitive variables during the next decade?”

Invariably, all the responses included two common variables, one of them being access to talent. Actually, one of the respondents always reminded the audience: “get the best talent money can buy, but not the talent your budget allows for!”

This statement clearly indicates that at least this panelist had a clear understanding that it is the talent that makes the organization. There is, there must be, a certain level of mutual support between talents that perform better than par, and the organization that provides the degrees of freedom to do so, but clearly if the firm has the performance space but the talent is not there then value is not developed.

Talent has to be attracted, retained and developed. The scope of the relationship covers a complete time horizon of past, present and future:  before, during and after the talent established formal relationship with the firm.

The question is what companies do to manage their talent needs, and how do they go about it. Most companies do very little, and are not attuned to the value and importance of talent management philosophies. They do not realize the existence of powerful talent management approaches that could be used to improve overall corporate performance.