Editorial: Globalisation and Talent Management

Editorial by Alberto Gabbai
Chairman of the Board of Cezanne Software

We are used to thinking of globalisation as the outsourcing of manufacturing to lower-wage countries, most of all China. True; but there are other phenomena involved. In 2003, some 25,000 US tax returns were made in India; the number rose to 100,000 the following year, and it reached 400,000 in 2005. This means services, not just manufacturing jobs are being outsourced.

I was recently reading The World is Flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century, by Thomas Friedman, a business book dealing with globalisation and how it was made possible, in entirely new ways, by technology. What really struck me, though, is not so much what is happening, but its pace: it is fast and it is accelerating.

This, in turn, reminded me of a schema, brilliantly expressed by Dr. Ichack Adizes, which basically says: change - problems/opportunities - solutions - change - more problems/opportunities. In other words, changes cause events, which are at the same time problems and opportunities, which require a solution, which will cause, in turn, more change. So, the faster we are at finding solutions the faster situations will change among us, forcing us to increase the pace.

And what does this all mean to our (that is, Western) jobs, our employees, and our recruiters?
Our jobs are shifting towards activities that are directly in contact with the client, towards roles that will be characterised as “consultants”, while others, probably in some faraway Indian or Chinese city, will perform the background work. Our jobs are changing dramatically, and our employees, more often than not, will end their career with a different kind of job to which they started it. And this will happen not just because they will move up the ladder of corporate responsibility, but mainly because the jobs they held initially will either disappear or because the tools used to achieve results will be so different as to change the entire focus of the job, even if the job title remains the same.

In other words, we will need people who are flexible, ready to learn, willing to study new subjects and to change and adapt. This is a message to the recruiters: stop hiring people for what they know, as their knowledge will become obsolete in a short time; hire them for what they are, for their attitudes and their basic values, and then nurture their ability to learn with training and the right environment.