Talent Management

Talent serves as the foundation and force field for all organizational initiative and accomplishment.  Peter Drucker made that clear, long ago.

  • “Business is a process which converts a resource, distinct knowledge, into a contribution of economic value in the market place [sic].”
  • “We know now that the source of wealth is something specifically human, knowledge.”
  • “Business is a human organization, made or broken by the quality of its people.”
  • ”One does not “manage” people. The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.”

Any/every business organization can choose to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.  The well codified prescriptions for effectiveness at that foundational business management task have been around for decades.  Indeed, those prescriptions not only present significant opportunities for improved organizational performance but also constitute legal and regulatory authority for avoiding any jeopardy of negligence or impropriety in all business employment decisions.

Strategic Talent Management (STM) embeds those prescriptive practices as necessary conditions for Integrated Talent Management (ITM), a prerequisite for STM—to align Talent Strategy and Workforce Plan with Business Strategy and thereby turbocharge organizational performance.

Unfortunately, many self-anointed ‘experts’ operating in the talent management space have no idea what ITM or STM competence requires.  At one level it’s really pretty simple: (i) identify the jobs (roles) that drive organizational performance, (ii) analyze those jobs to determine what it takes to perform well, and (iii) use demonstrably valid, multi-measure job-matching assessments to determine the extent to which individuals have what it takes for job performance and job learning.  Those three steps will generate a searchable database with a common language and shared data set across all jobs and job holders (job by job and person by person) that fully enables ITM—aka HR silo elimination and all the associated benefits.

Vision21 President and CEO has served as an Authorized Partner and Certified Professional, with the foremost multi-measure job-matching personnel assessment, PXT Select®, A Wiley Brand, since early 2004.  Vision21 gives clients the roadmap for STM, including ITM, as the starting point for successful, very high value business transformation, as affirmed by the Gen AI-assisted (perplexity.ai) search result, below (dated 10/01/2025):

“Integrated Talent Management (ITM) is a prerequisite for Strategic Talent Management because ITM ensures all core talent processes—like recruiting, onboarding, learning, performance management, and succession planning—are interlinked, data-driven, and directly aligned with the organization’s business objectives. This integration creates a seamless, end-to-end talent lifecycle where each HR function supports and builds on the others, enabling a strategic perspective that moves beyond isolated actions to coordinated, organization-wide talent decisions.”