by Patti Anklam
January 17, 2008 at 11:01 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management
I noticed on Ross Dawson’s blog this morning that he is starting work on a new book about the global talent economy. The premises for the book are:
- Almost all economic growth will come from talent.
- The global availability of talent is exploding.
- Organizations increasingly rely on external talent.
- Top talent is scarce.
- Success is increasingly founded on the ability to get the best external talent.
Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 technologies are enabling this talent economy by providing tools for making talent visible and accessible. Within the firewalls of the enterprise, tag clouds and social network maps will indicate where talent is to be found — those who are most sought after, most tagged, most engaged in conversation.
These people are likely to be successful because their networks expand beyond (or, I should say, are exist beyond) those firewalls and hence the dilemma for enterprises: do what you can to retain talent internally or become dependent on a supply of external talent? Of course they will need to do both, and can do so only by embracing and understanding how to manage fuzzy boundaries.
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While these tools enable talent to emerge, I wonder what the actual mechanisms are for identifying, measuring and thereby differentiating good talent, no talent and false talent?
M
Good question, Matt. A couple of thoughts. First, we could look to reputation systems. As individuals work with others, create “products,” then there may be ways to rate interactions. Corporations already do this through annual performance reviews, promotion processes, and so on, but these ratings are closely held.
Some content management systems allow users to rate content, which is associated with specific individuals, so over time these kinds of rating systems (like eBay, Amazon, etc) could identify a certain type of talent. I’m uncomfortable thinking that this will (or could) extend to a free-for-all rating system in which people could rate their interactions with people. This is where transparent social networks might come into play. If you were interested in a particular person, you could find out if you had common connections and use those connections to validate data from other social tools.
The second thought is to think about talent in terms of markets. McKinsey did a paper, “Making a Market in Talent,” which is nicely summarized by Tony DiRomualdo. One of the key points is that companies would do well to let their talented people negotiate for what jobs, roles, and so on that they want. The more talented people will be more successful, as they will be more desired. The external talent market is just that — a market for resources.
Patti, Thanks to the pointer to Ross Dawson’s book in process. Curious if you’ve looked at prediction markets at all. I attended a NY event hosted by platform provider Consensus Point that made me think it was time to pay close attention. to this tool. The Bo Cowgill et al recently released paper regarding Google’s use of prediction markets was intriguing especially I thought in finding physical proximity impacted bets.
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