PART TWO

TALENT

People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

—Jim Collins

A company that follows the prescriptions in part one will reduce organizational drag. It will save some of its people’s precious time and thereby help them become more productive. But it will not yet be reaching anything like its full potential. The best companies, as we see in our research, gain a whopping twenty-nine points on the productive power index just by attracting, retaining, and above all deploying great people in ways that maximize their output. The other three quartiles, unfortunately, gain only four points from managing their talent effectively.

So talent matters. But not just any talent. What really makes the difference is people who bring a unique set of skills and experiences to the workplace, and who can learn to work together in teams on the initiatives that are critical to your company’s success. Chapter 4 focuses on these A-level players, the ones who truly make a difference. It discusses how many you are likely to need (not everyone is an A-level player, after all) and what roles to put them in. It will help you find, evaluate, develop them over time, and deploy them where they can have the biggest impact. Knowing who these difference makers are is a job for the CEO, because there are fewer in most large companies than you might think.

Chapter 5 looks at talent from another angle. Steve Jobs probably said it best: “Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.” But how much attention does the typical company pay to assembling and managing its teams? In our experience, far too little. Executives are likely to make up a team from whoever happens to be available and then wonder why it doesn’t accomplish much. The best performers, by contrast, take a far more disciplined approach to teaming. These companies form all-star teams, as we’ll describe in this chapter. If you need to get something done, done quickly, and done right, the chances are you will need a team of A-level players.

Here, too, we’ll have some stories to tell and some controversies to stir up. We’ll offer several telling examples to illustrate how much better “the best” really are. We’ll show why the conventional nine-box assessment of managers’ performance and potential is close to useless. We’ll show why NASCAR driver Kyle Busch can win so many races, how Boeing filled a critical gap in its product lineup faster than ever before, and how Ford and Dell turned themselves around partly by paying attention to teaming.

Pretty much every company knows it should have as many great people as it can find. But if all that talent isn’t to wither on the vine—if those great people instead continue to develop, to make an impact, and to work productively with other great people—they have to be managed as the scarce resource they are. That’s where you make a difference.