Ask any CEO or senior level executive what his or her biggest challenge is, and the answer is almost always finding and keeping good people. Yet most executives fail to manage their company's needs in a way that recognizes the unpredictability of the global marketplace. In a book titled, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, proposes a new approach to this issue based on applying the principles of supply chain management to people. He and Joyce Bradley -- senior vice president and general manager, Delaware Valley region, of Lee Hecht Harrison, a global human capital consulting firm headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. -- spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about talent management, including the challenges of managing employees in a recessionary economy. An edited transcript of the interview follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: Peter, could you define talent management and summarize how it relates to supply chain management?
Cappelli: Talent management is a simple issue. We're trying to anticipate what the needs and the demand will be for people, for human capital, into the future, and then set up some sort of plan for meeting it. It is pretty simple. It's the same problem that you see in lots of different parts of business: What do we think we are going to need? How are we going to go about meeting that?
The complication is that in the old days, this was really seen as an engineering problem.
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