The Truth about Talent: A Guide to Building a Dynamic Workforce, Realizing Potential and Helping Leaders Succeed - Hardcover

1. You can't manage talent: it is mercurial, easily bored, opinionated and often lost.
2. The talented few are the overwhelming priority: while there is a top 10% of high performing employees – people who look good, work the system, attract the best investment and get to the top – focusing your attention exclusively on the top 10% while neglecting the rest is clearly flawed. Invest in your core, the talent right under your nose.
3. Getting people to fulfil their potential is a global challenge: if you don't invest in your people's skills, someone else will, and they are on the other side of the world. India and China continue to develop and their growth is no longer about cheap labour, outsourced call centres and mass manufacturing. Their economic model is shifting with more consumers, a growing middle class and more millionaires, scientists, research and development. The growth is sucking talent from the West.
4. Technical specialists matter as much – or more – than generalists. Why do we still lavish our attention on elite general managers? Specialists are invariably a firm's source of differentiation and competitive advantage. It's time to take them out of the backroom and onto the catwalk.
5. Talent, development and people management are part of the same issue: we need to find new ways of adapting to engage our people and help them to succeed.

Jeremy Kourdi is a writer and business consultant. His experience includes commercial leadership, writing and publishing expertise gained with leading brands, professional institutions and business schools. Clients include The Economist Group, KPMG, HSBC Group, London Business School, IMD, PwC and the Chartered Management Institute. Jeremy has held the post of Senior Vice-President with the Economist Group, leading international teams based in London and Vienna and expanding the conference business of this premium-value brand. He has also work as Head of Publishing and Research at the Chartered Management Institute and has established several successful publishing imprints.