Interestingly enough, Peter Drucker was writing about talent management as early as 1945. He was clearly decades ahead of his time, and his earliest writings still contain lessons for all of management including the HR function.
Drucker was keen on decentralization because of its impact on what he called Human Effort, the motivation it provided to people to work and to learn. Decentralization created small pools where people felt that their contribution mattered. Those small pools also meant that there was space for young executives to make mistakes without threatening the future of the company. They were, he said, farms for growing talent. Ironically, General Motors didn’t like the book and banned its use in the company. But the Japanese read it and learnt from it – to their great benefit. ((BBC. “The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management, Programme 2 – Peter Drucker.” BBC World Service.))
While Drucker was really writing about decentralization and the operational structure of a manufacturing organization, it’s interesting that his take on people in the mid 20th century included views on talent management and succession planning. While the U.S. companies may have finally figured out that innovation is a good thing (in the 1980’s), HR is still not the most innovative area in an organization. First of all, we always struggle for funding and budgets. Ours are among the last to be approved and the first to get cut. Second, while employees and managers often appreciate the changes we make when we put content on the corporate intranet, we ourselves are often the bottleneck, asking if our employees will want and adopt the technology.
Drucker was the voice of innovation for decades. Change is not bad, and in today’s world, if we in HR don’t change as well, we will find ourselves behind our competitors and losing the battle for talent.
