Talent management is increasingly viewed as a legitimate industry, yet very little effort has been made to define it exactly.

What is talent management? First "management" (as per Merriam Webster) is defined as: "judicious use of means to accomplish an end."

Or in the context of  talent management, a first definition would be "judicious use of talent to accomplish an end."

Therefore, the key elements to clarify are: what are "judicious" and an "end"?

For a sports team, the end is clear: to win the game, to win the championship. For a public company, the end is also very clear: to maximize shareholder return. For a public service organization or a government, it is to improve the quality of the service to their constituents with a limited amount of resources.

In other terms: "A judicious use of talent to win the championship" or "a judicious use of talent to optimize shareholder return."

So it seems that the core of the definition for talent management lies under the term: judicious.

What is a judicious use of talent for a sports team? It is to carefully select your team members, to put them in a position in which they are the best, at the right time, to improve their strength and monitor their progress, to motivate them to stay with the team or not, depending on the fit and performance and finally to stimulate a full commitment and a culture of performance. This job is left to the coach.  Often coaches also divide the target, or "end" into smaller sub-targets, i.e. you have to be the best at scoring, at defending, or at running, so each team member has his or her own specialty. But one of the key advantages that for a coach is to have a very limited number of people to overview. 

So how can this be scaled for a 100,000 employee organization?

I suggest that this is the key of what we mean by talent management in an organizational environment: "A scalable judicious use of talent to optimize shareholder return"

Activities similar to the sports coach take place, but often with different names:

1. Recruitment and selection of new employees
2. Assessment, deployment and redeployment of resources
3. Offboarding and onboarding of new team member
4. Performance management & alignment
5. Workforce & succession planning
6. Workforce engagement and motivation
7. Training and development

As a consequence, all those processes are in need of systematic scalability for large organizations, so we find more and more use of software solutions. That is what has created this new industry with a potential of formidable impact.