The Rare Find

We're all about talent- identifying it, developing it, and making it work for your business. Fulfilled people are happy workers, after all. Talent spotting isn't easy. You may obviously see a spark in someone, but what if another is hiding their light under a filing cabinet? How do you coax it out into the open and make it valuable?  People promote their abilities differently- and sometimes they don't at all. Most managers say they just feel something in their gut that tells them whether they can entrust someone with a promotion, project or particularly tricky task. That's not identifying talent- that's winging it and hoping your instinct pays off. A lot of very gifted people go undeveloped in businesses around the World just because managers believe "they know a good one when they see it." They often don't. Missing one great asset to a company is one too many. People stagnate without a challenge, or the chance to put their natural gifts into practice. Sometimes, they leave for pastures new. In turn, businesses lose out, and incur costs hiring replacement staff or even engaging consultants. (No, that's not how we work, as we explain here.) Identifying talent is a huge challenge for businesses today. The podcast below is a talk given by author George Anders, a founding member of Bloomberg View's board of editors. For twenty years he was a top feature writer for The Wall Street Journal as part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. How do we recognise greatness? The world-wide hunt for talent has never been more ambitious, more systematic -- and more frustrating. It's time to redefine how we think about talent, and to come to terms with three major blind spots in the ways that most organisations hunt for superstars. Better approaches are within reach, as shown by the successful, maverick methods of the world's best talent spotters. This event marks the publication of George Anders new book The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else.

http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publicLecturesAndEvents/20111102_1830_theRareFind.mp3