Savvy companies understand the competitive value of talented people and spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals wherever they can be found. The trouble is that too many companies pay too little attention to allocating their internal talent resources effectively. Few companies use talented people in a competitively advantageous way—by maximizing their visibility and mobility and creating work experiences that help them feed and develop their expertise. Many a frustrated manager has searched in vain for the right person for a particular job, knowing that he or she works somewhere in the company. And many talented people have had the experience of getting stuck in a dead-end corner of a company, never finding the right experiences and challenges to grow, and, finally, bailing out.1
In a modern, networked, and knowledge-based business environment, intangible assets (such as skills, reputations, and relationships) generate the highest value. Effective resource allocation means unleashing the value of talent by mobilizing talented people for the best opportunities—including, in particular, opportunities to become even more developed by finding work that creates distinctive new skills and knowledge.
As global markets become more dynamic and competitive, companies will need to deploy talent even more flexibly across broader...