It might seem a peculiar time to talk about talent. Aren’t most people these days happy just to have their jobs? Aren’t employers more concerned about outplacement than recruiting? And what company has the budget to fund expensive training programs?

Even these questions indicate a dated view of where talent is and how to get the most out of it. Sure, no one disputes the importance of talent, even in a recession. But, as a Deloitte report contends (.pdf link), companies spend entirely too much time focused on attracting and retaining talent. Moreover, as they do, they often lose sight of what appeals to and keeps hold of talent in the first place. (See John’s perspectives on the report and on the mindsets that limit firms.)

Compensation and benefit packages are surely important. But the opportunity for professional development consistently outranks money in surveys of employee satisfaction. Only by helping employees build their skills and capabilities can companies hope to attract and retain them. Talented workers join companies and stay there because they believe they’ll learn faster and better than they would at other employers.

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.

Unfortunately, most big companies aren’t set up to encourage or even allow talented workers to tinker with their work practices, nor to collaborate with other workers across the boundaries of the enterprise. Operations manuals explicitly discourage deviation from standardized practices and processes. Organizational silos and matrixed organizational designs hinder workers from easily finding and collaborating with each other within the enterprise, let alone across firms. Corporate strategies fixate on meeting quarterly financial targets through aggressive cost cutting, and too often fail to create the growth needed to offer advancement and development opportunities for talented workers.

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.

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?

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.

This kind of operational approach must go beyond the small number of businesses with which companies traditionally collaborate. To fully realize the potential for talent development in broad, cross-enterprise networks, companies will need to deploy even more ambitious pull platforms that scale easily to large numbers of companies.

Global process networks — in which large numbers of highly specialized participants work together across multiple steps of a core operating process, such as a supply chain — demonstrate the potential of these more scalable pull platforms. In industries as diverse as apparel, consumer electronics, and motorcycles, “orchestrators” are creating pull platforms for hundreds and even thousands of specialized participants.

These networks allow management to expand the scope of the core operating processes of the firm – supply chain-, product innovation and commercialization-, and customer relationship management – well beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. Only when companies have embraced a truly end-to-end view of all the activities required to deliver value to the end customer can their employees participate in and benefit from cross-enterprise talent networks.

In our next post, we’ll look at the changes necessary at the organizational level to foster talent networks on the edge. Until then, please let us know your own views on what’s needed to help talent get better faster. Are you beginning to see pull approaches coming into play? What can institutional leaders do to spur things along?

Read additional posts by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.

Read the whole story here, by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown (JSB), and Lang Davison @ Harvard Business Publishing