The concept of a job, as we know it, is starting to go away. Over the last year I've been speaking with many corporate business and HR leaders and have heard a common theme: we need our organizations to be more agile. We need to redesign the organization so we can learn faster, communicate better, and respond more rapidly to change. This quest for the agile organization has changed the nature of what we call a job. Pfizer, for example, has set "increase business agility" as one of its four goals for the coming year.
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SAP, the world's largest application software company, just announced the best revenue and earnings growth the company has made in many years. The company's quarterly revenues grew by 12% to over $3. 4 billion Euros and profits rose by 23% to $1. 6 billion. And now that the company has announced its plans to acquire SuccessFactors for $3.
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Talent management makes money. If you are trying to build a business case for a corporate talent management program, here is some astounding data: Of the 700+ organizations we studied in 2010 and 2011, only 7% told us that they have a "strategic talent management" program. We defined talent management in four levels of maturity: Silo'd (all HR practices operate seperately, with little standardization) Standardized (HR practices standardizes, but not highly integrated with each other) Integrated (A talent management leader in place, but integration still in process) Strategic (A high degree of integration with business leaders taking charge for most talent practices). Our research found that around the world, 28% of organizations are "silo'd", 45% are "standardized," 20% are "integrated," and 7% are "strategic. " This data was collected through a variety of surveys and interviews.
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Wow.  After more than three years of decline in spending, corporate training budgets just jumped up 9. 5% last year.  (Just released, 2012 Bersin & Associates Corporate Learning Factbook®).  Good news for corporate HR teams and business leaders in general.
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Late last year I attended two major talent and leadership conferences in Stockholm. At these events I had the opportunity to meet with various HR leaders at Electrolux, Ericsson, Logica, BT, Maersk, Grundfos, Unicredit, Bertelsman, and others. What I learned is something important that we are building into a broad research framework we will launch at our IMPACT 2012 research conference this year.   Let me present a preview here. Building an Agile Organization Over time, if you look at all the businesses that thrive and compare them against those that fail, you find one thing in common:  it is the "agile" companies that succeed.
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Bullish news for the US economy:  this week the ADP employment report and the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and the US unemployment rate dropped to 8. 5% (down . 6% since August). Many of these jobs are in non-cyclical businesses (healthcare, food service, and manufacturing), which shows that companies are starting to invest for growth. It's clear to me (and our research confirms this) that businesses are now investing again.
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We just completed a year-long research study on the customer experience with talent management software. Despite the sky-high market valuations for these companies and the growth rate of the market, these products are not fully meeting customer needs. In fact, among the 1,146 companies we surveyed, their average overall satisfaction is 3. 65 on a scale of 5. 0, giving the vendors as a whole a grade of C+.
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