A good point from Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:
To attract, retain, and obtain the most from Awesome Talent, organizations will need to offer up … an Awesome Place to Work: A place where people not only get paid “their due,” but also … get to initiate and execute great things.
Peters then offers up his “Talent 25” for how to do this (he expands on each of these points; I won’t do that here, but do recommending getting the whole book):
- Put people first! (For Real.)
- Be obsessed!
- Pursue the best!
- Weed out the rest!
- Focus on intangibles!
- Change the profile of HR!
- Forge a bold HR strategy!
- Take reviews seriously!
- Pay up!
- Set sky-high standards!
- Train! Train! Train!
- Cultivate leadership aspirations from the get go!
- Foster open communication!
- Lead by “winning people over”!
- Reward “people skills”!
- Show respect!
- Embrace the whole individual!
- Measure for uniqueness!
- Honor youth!
- Create opportunities to lead!
- Relish diversity!
- Liberate women! (There is a talent shortage — do not overlook 50% of the population.)
- Celebrate the weird ones!
- Provide a setting for adventure!
- Revealing the big secret! (Although Malcolm Gladwell might want to nuance this [see his Outliers: The Story of Success], Peters puts it this way: some people are more talented than others in an area, and some are way more talented in that areas.)