Abstract
When I picked up a copy of this book I immediately felt that the title sounds like a fresh narrative on succession planning that should be welcomed in these times in the UK when ‘talented’ people in education are made redundant. To my surprise, when I started reading on the topic, I realized I was not aware of the fairly long debate raging for more than a decade on this topic in the human resource field.
Already in 2006 a critical review of ‘talent management’ publications appeared (Lewis and Heckman, 2006: 139) and they made the startling discovery that in 2004 ‘talent management’ yielded 2,700,000 hits using a popular search engine and in 2005 the same key words yielded 8 million hits.
Educational institutions face similar challenges to typical commercial enterprises and public sector organizations, including economic and budgetary pressures, increased competition for top-notch talent, compliance and a rapidly changing diverse workforce that must be effectively managed. Talent management directly impacts on pupil achievement as a study in five large urban school districts in the USA revealed. ‘For most of these districts, implementing the components of strategic management of human capital is still very much a work in progress’ is however the caveat of caution in this report that makes this book timely and relevant (Anon., 2011a: 1).
Questioning the reason for the popularity of the ‘new’ term, ‘talent management’ over the ‘older’, ‘succession management’ or ‘human resource planning’, Lewis and Heckman do mention the fact that the ‘new’ term does indicate a mindset change. This brings me to the seminal work of Michel Foucault (2003) who argues that the truth and justice (fairness) regime of a particular society is not a given; it is always the results of what he calls a particular discursive practice. What is very pertinent to the times we live in is that the way we talk about ‘school leaders’ determines and reflects in a way our sense of fairness in the world of work in an educational setting. Austerity is not about cutting cost it is about people and people with talent losing their jobs!
Right at the start of the book under review the authors make it clear that talent management ‘is different from simple succession planning and filling typical hierarchical leadership roles that exist today, as it is a process of providing able and talented people who will create new and different leadership roles in the future’ (p. 3).
They discuss the key dimensions of leadership on page 9 with an emphasis on where do you want to go (strategic acumen), with whom (working with others) based on the leader’s personal qualities, but all three firmly rooted in the leader’s values as the central element of the model. In a recent newspaper article this was again emphasised with reference to failing schools in South Africa. ‘Values maketh a good school’ (Anon., 2011b: 1). The authors come up with a template that determines the structure of the book, namely:
Defining organisational strategy and values
Talent identification
Talent development
Talent culture
The way forward
Although Lewis and Heckman (2006) agree that the drivers of the new term ‘talent management’ is to be found in the popular and practitioner press one should be careful not to lean too heavily on what I would call quasi-scientific publications by training practitioners, see Cross (2007) and Peters (2005).
This book is an ideal addition to the libraries of human resource practitioners because it will enable them to reflect on their own practice. The book contains a wide range of practical strategies on how to get the job done but very little theorising of the topic takes place. So the benefit for students and beginner researchers might not be that much.