Jason Averbook and Mike Brennan of Knowledge Infusion have been posting some interesting thoughts lately on the need to think about industry context when embarking upon new talent management initiatives.
Whether speaking of the technology, the processes, your organization's competencies, or the analytics you choose, etc., the need to move beyond cross-industry best practices and benchmarks is certainly acute. I don't want to get too soap-boxy here - companies need to start somewhere, of course - but bringing talent management to a point where it has a true "strategic" impact on company performance (versus "strategic" meaning "greater impact than previously") requires a link to how the company creates value today and how it intends to create value in the future.
This is much more than adjusting practice to industry context. It's knowing your organization's current business model - its approach to creating and capturing value vis a vis its competitors - and how that business model will be changing in the future, so well that you can mold your entire talent management strategy around it.
Michael Lewis's Moneyball has a quote from former space engineer turned baseball writer, Eric Walker, (pg 58) that illustrates this idea beautifully.
Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away - far, far and away - the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. Anything that increases the offense's chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good. And what is on-base percentage? Simply yet exactly put, it is the probability of that the batter will not make an out.
Kind of mind-boggling. Conventional baseball wisdom put home runs and batting average much higher on the list. But a more thoughtful analysis of how value is created by a baseball team shows that a player's ability to draw a walk is often more meaningful to the team's success than his/her capacity for knocking one out of the park.
John Boudreau and Pete Ramstad's increasingly influential Beyond HR shows the power of thinking in terms of business model and specific, future-oriented strategies in their discussion of Boeing versus Airbus, as well (read it, it's fabulous). Their analysis of how the future of the industry was viewed by each company yields insights around why Boeing went for the 787 Dreamliner and why Airbus invested in the A380, and subsequently, how this reality translated into two very different views of what talent pools and which competencies within those talent pools were critical to success.
This is, ultimately, where HR really needs to go. Not only will thoughtful alignment with strategy trump even the most sophisticated technology and industry-specific practices, but it's what will keep your HR department's ability to add strategic value from ever becoming commoditized.
I want to extend a hat tip to Jon Ingham for picking up on this fabulous article from C.K. Prahalad. 
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