BOOK REVIEWS

‘Talent Management’ (TM) has attracted attention from academics and practitioners. Many books, articles and surveys have been published and consulting firms attracted by its market potential (Iles 2007, 2008). Talent Management has often been placed as top of the list of critical human resource (HR) issues for organisations and predicted to be the next core competency in HR expertise. Does TM require a new paradigm for HR, in which HR should learn more about strategic decision science in order to play a powerful and decision-supporting function? Is a key integration role for the corporate HR function in the international firm the strategic management of global talent? Has TM brought real business meaning for HR professionals as the steward of the organisation’s talent management process? Or is TM just a re-packaging of old ideas with a fresh name? The literature reveals a lack of clarity regarding the definition and scope of TM; different companies and researchers seem to have their own conceptions and understandings of TM, ranging from ‘inclusive’ to ‘exclusive’ (CIPD 2007). This book by Cappelli, a leading American researcher on employment relations, is very timely in addressing many issues in talent management. It follows his earlier work on careers, the breakdown of lifetime employment and the move towards more market-driven employment relationships and borrows concepts from economics, focusing on human capital management, and operational researchers, focusing on managing supply chains. An interesting feature of the book is that, unlike many American books, it takes a more global perspective; in particular it benefits from a study of TM approaches in Singapore (both companies and government) and in Indian companies, especially IT companies. Indeed, Cappelli feels that no new model of TM has emerged in the USA describing how employers are managing careers and developing talent in the context of the more open labour markets, lateral hiring and lay-offs that have been underway for over a decade. He believes that most US companies are not managing talent at all, whereas those that do – older, large ‘academy’ companies with a long legacy of HR and succession planning – are still acting as if they had lifetime employment models, but in practice are losing most of their employees to competitors. Singapore and India seem to be thinking about talent issues differently. However, the book also relies on candid observations from American organisations, supporters of the Center for Human Resources at Wharton, as well as insights from the Operations Research (OR) research group at Wharton. These helped give Cappelli the insight that the basic challenge in TM is to identify demand and then manage supply to just meet demand, a challenge shared with other business disciplines (it is not clear here what distinguishes TM from HR planning). Talent Management is defined as ‘the process through which employees anticipate and meet their needs for human capital’ (p. 1) and is seen as similar to supply chain management. Failures in TM include mismatches between supply and demand, such as having too many employees (‘inventory’) leading to lay-offs, restructuring or turnover due to perceptions of lack of career opportunities on the one hand or, on the other hand, too few, leading to shortages. Cappelli points out that both undershooting or overshooting carry costs and that failures in managing this balance have led employers to lurch from surpluses to shortages, as in IT. He sees US employers as either doing nothing, making no attempt to