Today, Circuit City, a retailer in the US announced that during Q4, they achieved a profit. You might ask, so what is the big deal about this and why are you writing about it in The Infuser. Well, this one paragraph is why we chose this news item today:
The CEO, Philip Schoonover said this to a large group of investors and analysts today waiting to hear that the company was bleeding more than ever. Instead, a PROFIT and TALENT?
While the company is NO WHERE NEAR out of the weeds and has a ton of work to do to turn itself around compared to some of it's competitors in the space, hats off to the CEO today for calling out TALENT as one of the drivers that will turn the company around into the future. Too few CEO's recognize this today and even fewer call it out in public. Look for this to drastically change into the future.
A down economy? Are we in one? If so, look for even more call outs about "right talent, right place, right time." I had the opportunity to talk to a reporter from The Wall Street Journal today and one of the things that we both agreed upon was that talent management and the visibility a CEO needs is higher than ever and organizations that are not focusing on this today might as well be prepared to be in his "Losers" column weekly. This has been a strategy of Knowledge Infusion for the past 18 months when working with our customers and I firmly believe that our customers are in a better place compared to their competitors tied to our efforts.
Circuit City executives did well today to call out talent. Let's hope that they truly do have the TALENT to turnaround the organization and they can prove the talent did it. We all need many more case studies on this top of mind topic.
Another infusion of knowledge....
Great post, Jason. Schoonover's comment on talent speaks to two of the greatest value propositions of talent management systems.
First, they have the ability to demonstrate the value of talent (i.e., people). To your point, more and more CEOs are waking up to the fact that they should treat their peoples as assets in which the right investments need to be made as opposed to expenses to be minimized - even in a down economy. Talent management systems help to do this by managing measurable goals people need to meet or exceed if the company is to succeed in the market place. In other words, whether it wins or loses.
Second, talent management systems have the ability to influence workforce behavior (e.g., through incentives, through development, through competency-based talent acquisition, through tactical training). In other words, how the company plays the game. The greatest differentiator of any organization is its talent. This includes any organization in retail. Perhaps no one called this out more clearly than the authors of the Sears 'Employee-Customer-Profit Chain' article in the Harvard Business Review nearly 10 years ago. The long and the short of the article is that happy employees lead to happy customers lead to better top and bottom lines:
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id =3537