The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers

The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers

 

The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers written by Bill Conaty is a collection of experiences about leadership skills and engagement with industrial players during the writer’s tenure as Senior Vice President of General Electric. Bill has vast experience in Human Resource management for 40 years at General Electric and during the period, he masters how to achieve strong companies’ financial performance decade after decade by finding and nurturing leadership talent. Bill has deep human resources expertise while servicing as a leader for entire General Electric’s employees worldwide. Inside his book, he writes an architectural structure of how to create human resources practices in the areas of workforce specialization and succession planning. He stresses human capital is the foremost factor that realizes company performance and profitability. That is why he put the head of the book Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers.

Developing talent is definite products of any company at the end of the day. Products of such company are all time-perishable and becoming obsolete over time. The only thing that remains is the institutional learning and the development of skills and capabilities. A company that lingers a while longer onto certain product will become irrelevant in short coming future. The companies that focusing on human capital and developing talent would be able to sustain as the new products keep on being introduced as a result of talent development and retention. This is a whole general idea what Bill Conaty tries to explain in his book.

In order to retain and nurture talents, there is no specific way to measure the best method of doing it. Developing human talent is not like developing machine in which engineers able to follow specific rule. Developing human talent is all about soft skills, what the people like and what people does not. The methods of developing human talent cannot be written into becoming specific tools. However at the end of the book, Bill Conaty wrote few generic ideas which everybody can follow about how to develop talent as an individual or as an institution. People can read and practice the ideas, but without engagement from top management, the execution is unfeasible. No organization ever got to be a talent master without the wholehearted commitment and participation of enlightened top managers. The top managers often have common characteristic in viewing leadership fundamentals such as they understand the key to the future is the talent. Strategies come and go, market share and profits expand and vanish, but an organization that can build self renewing team of leaders is prepared to bring anything that tomorrow brings.

These are brief introduction and key points from overall content written in this book. Even though this book is principally guidance to any rank of readers in industries, but the contents are practical to be applied onto public sector since institutional structure between private and public are almost similar. Nevertheless, the main focus in this book is human talent development and not really onto marketable products.

Bill Conaty successfully wrote whole of his experiences in his book. The quotes and success stories vary from top 500 Fortune companies to leadership stories in suburban areas in India. That reflects the variety of leadership styles he garnered based on the nature of business and its locality. Hence, it makes this book suitable for any background of readers who like to learn from others experience. Bill has strong interpretation on natural behaviors of leaders. His capability makes him able to inspire people working under him to be enthusiasts in his/ her job. Several scenarios were written in this book such as inspirational story about Niels Fache who was an engineer with academic interest but had entrepreneurial determination inside him. Fache worked as Production Line Manager in Agilent Technologies, a technology company which specializes in producing radio waves instruments. He liked the job at the first place, but when the product enters into maintenance mode, he lost his satisfaction. He started to think about getting out of the job and talked to the one of company’s Vice President, Ron Nersesian. Ron quickly discovered that Fache was a person who was entrepreneurial, action oriented and had a drive for speed and results. So, Ron took Fache to report to himself, tested him, grew him and understood clearly where his strengths were. Ron even went as far as accompanied Fache on trip to Korea where he looked for the strength Fache had in business negotiating. After going under coaching for several years, Fache able to make business judgment and make decision on his own analysis. Now Fache has reached Vice President level as same as his coach and able to run major business and really doing a great job. This real life example touches the readers where the boss personally engaging with the subordinates when the apprentice’s potential is noticeable and encourages them to grow higher.

I had the golden opportunity working under Ron Nersesian leadership during my time working in Electronic Measurement Group, Agilent Technologies in Penang. He is such a charismatic leader which is able to inspire peoples working with him. When I crossed his name in this book alongside Agilent’s CEO Bill Sullivan, Bill Conaty put forward the qualities a good leaders must possess which are rare in public sector as I reminiscence my time in Agilent.

Then this story brings the reader to this point. Bill Conaty suggests a leader should demonstrated leadership skills to other in some area of their life. Even high academic qualification is deemed required, the hiring manager has to look for those who have the desire and potential to lead others and help them grow as Agilent does. Once a potential leader is appointed, he/ she have to be trained and drilled to the specifics of each leader talent. For that purpose, this book suggests several methods from Bill Conaty’s experience in corporate world of developing leaders which few are permissible in practice in public sector. However, this book falls short of methods to become good leaders in managing public accounts.

Managing corporate accounts and public account need two different approaches. Corporate account is all about generating numbers while public account is all about fiscal expenditure. These two accounts must have different sets of leadership skills although they share some common values. For example, stakeholders of a company consist of boards of directors and shareholders. Meanwhile stakeholders in public sector are the people itself. Leaders from public sector cannot act and interact based on loss and profit statement, they need to take care of the sentiment of the people and needs. Failure to deal with the people is certainly a failure as a leader. I would like to link this to one of politician in Malaysia who was once a dominant corporate figure, then become high ranking executive official in one of the states in Malaysia. His corporate approaches invited critics from his colleagues. He adopted the corporate style of management, yet he failed to convince his colleagues and the masses about the benefits of his approach.

After reading Bill Conaty’s book, I would like to suggest others to read another book entitled Managing Complex Network: Strategies for Public Sector by Walter Julius Michael Kickert. Even though this book does not elaborate on leadership skills, Walter gives practical approaches on ways to transfer business oriented administration to suit public management.

Unlike other management gurus, Bill Conaty easily grasps his readers’ attention through his style and language he use in this book. The scenarios given serve as a guideline which we can emulate the lessons and methodologies to develop ourselves into becoming a good leader. I would like to quote our former Chief Director of Public Service Department, Tan Sri Ismail Adam, “Business is no longer as usual. If you cannot do the job, someone else will do it for you”. It is extremely important as young Administrative and Diplomatic officer to take every single opportunity to develop ourselves through emulating business leadership as described in this book as it is proven to be successful. Those grand names stipulated in Bill Conaty’s book worked in 500 Fortune companies around the globe.

At the end of this book, Conaty highlighted that searching for a right leader is just like a quest to find Holy Grail which is a never ending task. A leader that feels comfortable in his current zone will become irrelevant as the world keep reinvent itself. A leader must have foresight and able to lead others toward his/her vision. As a prerequisite to be a good leader, one must be a good follower.

A good follower does not follow its leader blindly but at the same time need to learn the strength and weakness along the way. There is no short cut in becoming a good and ideal leader. It is lifelong processes which need a perfect blend of searching and nurturing leadership talent by emulating experiences of the others.