TALENT Is the EDGE Ram Charan（人才是Ram Charan边缘）.pdfVIP

Chapter 1 TALENT Is the EDGE No Talent, No Numbers f businesses managed their money as carelessly as they man- I age their people, most would be bankrupt. The great majority of companies that control their fi nances masterfully don’t have any comparable processes for developing their leaders or even pinpointing which ones to develop. No matter how much effort they put into recruit- ing, training, and assessing leaders, their talent management remains hit- or- miss: governed by superfi cial criteria and out- dated concepts, dependent as much on luck as on skill. These are the companies that wake up some morning suddenly real- izing they need a new CEO but don’t know where to start looking. More pervasively, by repeatedly putting people into the wrong jobs, they waste both human and fi nancial capital when those people don’t perform. How did this come to be? After all, it’s clear enough that people make the decisions and take the actions that produce the numbers. Talent is the leading indicator of whether a business is headed up or down. Everyone agrees that it’s a company’s most important resource. But a spreadsheet full of numbers is a lot easier to parse than the characteristics unique to a human being. You can control what you’re doing; the numbers are unambiguous, the outputs are clear. People, not so much. Better to leave that to the HR staff or search fi rms, particularly since the pressure to make your numbers quarter after quarter is s