GyanNagpal. Talent Economics: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent. London: Kogan Page, 2013, 207 pages, $39.95 paperback.
本书整合人才管理、劳动经济学与企业战略，分析全球劳动力趋势，为高管提供基于数据的人才战略制定框架，强调人才战略应嵌入商业核心。
Talent Economics, by Nagpal, is a broadly integrative work that packs a lot of conceptual punch into its 207 pages. The central premise of the book rests at the intersection of talent management, labor economics, and corporate strategy, but in making his central points, Nagpal frequently incorporates useful perspectives from adjacent disciplines such as history. Where many business books seem to take a handful of ideas and create something book length by examining the same ideas in excruciating detail, Nagpal's book is snappily paced, typically devoting no more than five paragraphs to each of the scores of meaty topics addressed. Nagpal takes his own advice in keeping a tight connection between the wide volume of data presented and the implications they suggest: “A pond full of information can sometimes be less useful than a cup full of insight” (p. 4). Completing this book feels a bit like completing a semester-long course in terms of the sheer volume of concepts presented. A book as densely packed with concepts and insights as Talent Economics runs the risk of feeling disjointed and dry. Surprisingly, it is neither. The book is well organized, and for the most part, there is a clear conceptual thread leading from one section to the next. Liberal use of headers, graphs, figures, lists, case studies, and diagnostics help keep things peppy and break up the pages visually. Occasionally, Nagpal personalizes the concepts with a personal anecdote or observation, such as illustrating globally falling birthrates with a look back at the changes in family size over three generations of his own family (see p. 60). A crisp, 13-page toolkit is included at the end and, in addition to highlighting items like the talent strategy assessment around which Chapter 6 on talent strategy is built, also includes an extensive list of website URLs for significant global organizations and projects that are relevant to the wide range of topics included. A key differentiator for this book is that it examines the global economy and global trends from the standpoint of someone living and breathing that milieu everyday—not just for the occasional business trip or a couple years as an expatriate. Nagpal is currently based in Singapore and is keenly attuned to the complexities and opportunities of a truly global economy and workforce. Particularly for those primarily rooted in an American viewpoint on the world, this sophisticated global analysis will be eye opening. The text itself is broken in seven sections. The first three sections set up the context and conceptual framework. These are relatively shorter. The next three sections form the bulk of the book, delving deeply into macro trends, micro insights, and a prescription for strategic assessment. The seventh section includes the toolkit referenced above. The book sets off at a sprint from the beginning, neatly summarizing the challenges at hand: “In the future, the data tells us, this war for talent will get considerably works, because while global circumstances for business are converging, the 3-billion-strong global workforce is not. In some places it is ageing rapidly, in others, social, cultural or language barriers are holding talent back. And in countries full of young personal ambition, a lack of infrastructure or education is severely limiting potential” (p. 2). The first chapter is a social and political Cook's Tour of the last quarter century, highlighting the impact of the fall of the Berlin wall and the key factors contributing to the rise of India and China. Nagpal uses that contextual foundation to shift deftly to the evolution of global market strategies, the impact of technology, particularly in terms of global commerce and virtual work, and finally to reach his key point about reinvention of employment in light of these seismic shifts. Having set the context, Nagpal shifts gears to discuss the implications of these contextual factors on 21st century leadership. Here, I review the history of leadership imperatives, each aligned to a respective context. Nagpal argues that the shareholder return focus of the past 30 years is insufficient for the coming decades and suggests that innovation and collaboration are top contenders for a replacement. The balance of the chapter is devoted to these themes. The third chapter functions as an extended segue from the context setting of the first two chapters into the data-dense fourth chapter. Here, he essentially argues for a mass customization strategy, noting “centralized global strategy [is] a hazardous game to execute…. The only way to control chaos and complexity is to give up some of that control” (p. 40). In this chapter also Nagpal scolds both leaders and HR as a function, arguing that talent strategy must “sit squarely on the business leader's table” (p. 42) and scolding that “By pitching someone else's best practice, programmes, initiatives and ‘tweaking’ existing processes in the name of strategy, [HR] is distracting leadership focus from a greater goal – commercial talent strategy that is embedded at the very core of business strategy” (p. 43). Chapter 4 is a deep and roving dive into labor economics, analyzed along eight themes: (a) broad workforce changes in aggregate talent; (b) replacement and mobility; (c) age and scope of dependency, that is, the number of dependents each worker is supporting; (d) gender mix broadly and within management specifically; (e) generational trends within specific markets; (f) basic education and workforce proficiency; (g) management proficiency, especially as indicated through quality college and graduate manager preparation; and (h) corporate governance and sustainability of social systems. As you might expect, this chapter includes a great number of illustrative graphs and tables. I appreciated the generational section especially as it provided an assessment of the major generational markers in China, India, and Japan. The student of Organizational Effectiveness will find the most familiar territory in Chapter 5. Here Nagpal flits about like a bumblebee, delving into a wide variety of talent management topics. He begins by considering how to find the right, as opposed to the best, talent, including discussions of employee value propositions, culture, and organization assimilation. From there, he moves to different models for bringing talent into your organization, especially tending to unconventional talent pools and entry points. In the same vein, he addresses the importance of understanding and tending the internal labor markets within organizations. The book is aimed at business leaders, but industrial and organizational psychologists will be pleased to see him emphasize the importance of sound job analyses. The chapter also includes a discussion on the importance of removing obstacles and growing engagement in the workforce and brief treatments of topics such as the impact of cash versus noncash rewards. The work reviewed here all comes together in Chapter 6, where Nagpal addresses in detail his approach to developing and embedding a sound talent strategy. Accordingly, this chapter is the most linear, walking thoughtfully through 11 distinct talent priorities that bring together the topics addressed earlier in the book. Here, he reemphasizes his point about talent strategy as a business imperative rather than an HR problem. My favorite analogy in the book is used here: “a groundsman's goal to prepare a good soccer pitch cannot be mixed up with a coach's strategy to win the soccer game” (p. 140). Having walked through the diagnostic, he moves on an approach for creating a customized talent strategy, balancing across two axes, individual and group, and short-term and long-term. Here again Nagpal is crisp and focused, sharing key examples without belaboring the point. The toolkit with which he closes the book reiterates the key points, as noted earlier. This book is explicitly targeted at senior management, and the succinct style and speedy pacing is appropriate for that time-constrained audience. Those seeking a silver bullet will likely find the journeys into topics such as the global stack ranking of basic capabilities in reading, science, and math (pp. 87–88) tiresome. However, for those seeking to create a talent strategy based on more than the latest fad in performance management and cafeteria-style benefits plans, the broadly integrative ideas and data presented here will likely feel like a door opening into a whole new world.