Reviewed By: Before Numbers. (London: Random House Business Books), Pp. 320, Rs. 699, (P/B), ISBN

BOOK REVIEW
Bill Conaty and Ram Charan (2011). The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People
Before Numbers. (London: Random House Business Books), pp. 320, Rs. 699, (p/b), ISBN
978-1-8479-4072-8
Reviewed by
Shiva Kumar Srinivasan, Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), Chennai
Who are the talent masters? Why do they matter? What is the relationship between
leading people effectively and business performance? How do these masters get a competitive
edge out of talent? These then are some of the important questions that are addressed by Bill
Conaty and Ram Charan in this engaging book. Conaty has worked in GE for forty years and
was instrumental in setting up a number of important HRM and talent management practices
there. Charan is a leading management consultant and an authority on corporate governance;
he was educated at the Harvard Business School and has served as a faculty there. The work
experience and wisdom that these writers bring to this summary of the most effective talent
management practices in existence in corporate America will ensure that this is going to be
the book on talent management against which those who move into this field will be measured
in the years to come. As companies in this part of the world begin to understand the
competitive edge that talent management practices will make possible in a hypercompetitive
world, they will turn to books like this in order to ‘institutionalize’ the best practices in talent
management. What they will find here is not only the theory behind talent management, but
also a toolkit that will take them through the various steps necessary to do so.
This toolkit comprises the basic principles, the cultural requirements, the modalities
involved in managing talent, and the most effective approaches to leadership training and
development. It also includes a section which answers the most frequently asked questions on
talent management along with a set of guidelines to conduct ‘talent reviews’. The ideas
presented here draw upon Conaty’s experience of working at GE’s Croton Ville to determine
whether it is possible for a firm to replicate the learning experience fostered here in their own
premises; and, if so, at what cost. It also discusses the ways and means for making ‘business
partners’ out of HR professionals so that the ethic of taking people and talent seriously
becomes a habit in firms rather than a problem that appears to be important only when there is
an urgent staffing issue to be dealt with. Another important advantage of the talent masters
approach to HR issues is that it makes succession planning at all levels much more effective.
What is being contemplated here is nothing less than a same day succession when senior
leaders leave the firm. Conaty is also uniquely equipped to discuss this issue because he
helped GE’s Jack Welch in finding a successor in Jeffrey Immelt. Charan has also spent the
better part of his career working as a consultant to GE; he has taught several programs at
Croton Ville and is the recipient of the Bell Ringer award for excellence in teaching. So a
unique feature of this book is that the framework that they have put together is based on an
intimate understanding of what really happens at Croton Ville rather than an attempt to see if
they can come up with a framework that will be applicable in the context of management and
leadership development programs in the corporate sector. In addition to discussing the
training programs on offer at Croton Ville, they also discuss a number of instances where
talent issues such as unexpected resignations had to be dealt with in GE. The approach that
they feel works best in such situations is to build several layers of leadership so that there is a
seamless succession to the senior levels of the hierarchy in which such problems emerge.
They argue that GE is able to retain up to 95 percent of its top leadership talent as a result of
the extraordinary efforts that have been made to spot, develop, and deploy talent. Nonetheless,
being an ‘academy company’, GE continues to be attractive to those in corporate America and
elsewhere who are on the lookout for leaders.
Great Lakes Herald Vol 6, No 2, September 2012 - Page 76 -

The tool kit also includes an interesting item which discusses what sort of attributes
an ‘ideal CEO’ should have though the argument is not that only those who have all these
attributes should be made a CEO. They also explain what feedback is along with a
prescription on how the Welch model of feedback in the form of candid handwritten letters
can be an effective tool for increasing motivational levels (along with the provision of timely
recognition) for GE’s executives. This is a common theme in the biographical literature on
Jack Welch since these executives hold on to these letters for years even after they have
served the functional purpose for which they were written. They serve, needless to say, as an
existential link to Welch and thereby provide these executives with not only a sense of
inclusion, but proof that they exist(ed) as important contributors to GE. There are also two
examples of letters that Welch actually wrote to Conaty with annotations by the authors on the
‘clarity, specificity, tone, and the underlying message’ to make it possible for CEOs to
attempt such forms of feedback in their own turn. They also include a list of the ‘pitfalls’ that
leaders should be wary of along with a summary of the lessons that have been learnt so far in
matters pertaining to ‘talent and leadership development’. The thoroughness with which the
ideas of talent mastery are discussed here - along with the conciseness with which they have
been expressed and the life-time of experience that they are able to draw from - provides good
reason to believe that readers who wish to try out these ideas when they find themselves in
leadership positions have no excuse for not doing so.
The authorial wager is that ‘putting people before the numbers is fundamental to
becoming a talent master since operational and financial results begin with having the right
people in the right jobs to create and execute the business strategy’. In addition to an in-depth
examination of the GE experience, they also include original case studies of Hindustan
Unilever, P&G, Agilent Technologies, Novartis, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, LGE, UniCredit,
and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. This collection of cases, which are drawn from a number of
different domains, makes it easy to generalize the practices of the talent masters. It is the
examination of cases across different domains, again, that makes it possible to give readers
not only a sense of what these talent masters are up to, but to actually provide a feel for these
practices. What these cases also demonstrate is the fact that leaders who wish to lead talent
effectively must acquire a ‘rigorous intimacy’ with their employees since talent is not an
abstraction, but a set of lived experiences. It constitutes, as Freudian psychoanalysts might put
it, the very jouissance of value addition. It is therefore important to understand the
transferential dynamics that is implicated in leadership practices, and the ways in which the
assessment and evaluation of talent is implicated in these dynamics. Though Conaty and
Charan do not use the term ‘transference’, their use of the term ‘intimacy’ can only be
understood in this context. As they put it, ‘only intimacy among leaders will engender the
candor, mutual trust, and confidence that are essential to building organizational capability’.
The most important form of strategic capability for talent masters then is, quite simply, talent
management.
Great Lakes Herald Vol 6, No 2, September 2012 - Page 77 -

Reviewed By: Before Numbers. (London: Random House Business Books), Pp. 320, Rs. 699, (P/B), ISBN

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BOOK REVIEW

Great Lakes Herald Vol 6, No 2, September 2012 - Page 76 -

Great Lakes Herald Vol 6, No 2, September 2012 - Page 77 -

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