DOC《原文：》

原文: Every talent management process in use today was developed half a century ago.

It'

s time for a new model. Talent Management for the

21 Century Peter Cappell Harvard Business Review, March

2008 Failures in talent management are an ongoing source of pain for executives in modern organizations. Over the past generation, talent management practices, especially in the United States, have by and large been dysfunctional, leading corporations to lurch from surpluses of talent to shortfalls to surpluses back again. At its heart, talent management is simply a matter of anticipating the need for human capital and then setting out a plan to meet it. Current responses to this challenge largely fall into two distinct - and equally ineffective - camps. The first, and by far the most common, is to do nothing: anticipate no needs at all;

make no plans for addressing them (rendering the term talent management meaningless). This reactive approach relies overwhelmingly on outside hiring and has faltered now that the surplus of management talent has eroded. The second, common only among large, older companies, relies on complex and bureaucratic models from the 1950s for forecasting and succession planning - legacy systems that grew up in an era when business was highly predictable and that fail now because they are inaccurate and costly in a more volatile environment. It'

s time for a fundamentally new approach to talent management that takes into account the great uncertainty businesses face today. Fortunately, companies already have such a model, one that has been well honed over decades to anticipate and meet demand in uncertain environments - supply chain management. By borrowing lessons from operations and supply chain research, firms can forge a new model of talent management better suited to today'

s realities. Before getting into the details, let'

s look at the context in which talent management has evolved over the past few decades and its current state. How We Got Here Internal development was the norm back in the 1950s, and every management development practice that seems novel today was commonplace in those years - from executive coaching to 360-degree feedback to job rotation to high-potential programs. Except at a few very large firms, internal talent development collapsed in the 1970s because it could not address the increasing uncertainties of the marketplace. Business forecasting had failed to predict the economic downturn in that decade, and talent pipelines continued to churn under outdated assumptions of growth. The excess supply of managers, combined with no-layoff policies for white-collar workers, fed corporate bloat. The steep recession of the early 1980s then led to white-collar layoffs and the demise of lifetime employment, as restructuring cut layers of hierarchy and eliminated many practices and staffs that developed talent. After all, if the priority was to cut positions, particularly in middle management, why maintain the programs designed to fill the ranks? The older companies like PepsiCo and GE that still invested in development became known as academy companies : breeding grounds for talent simply by maintaining some of the practices that nearly all corporations had followed in the past. A number of such companies managed to ride out the restructurings of the 1980s with their programs intact only to succumb to cost-cutting pressures later on. The problems faced by Unilever'

s Indian operations after

2000 are a case in point. Known as a model employer and talent developer since the 1950s, the organization suddenly found itself top-heavy and stuck when business declined after the