Douglas Ready and Jay Conger, visiting professors in organizational behavior at the London Business School, recently published an article titled How to Fill the Talent Gap in The Wall Street Journal. Based on research with dozens of companies, they identified the main talent problems and solutions.
Here is a quick summary:

THE PROBLEMS

1. EMERGING MARKETS
2. NARROW THINKING
3. DEMOGRAPHICS AND ECONOMICS
4. THE EXPECTATIONS GAP
5. BLIND SPOTS

THE SOLUTIONS

1. MAKE YOUR TALENT PLAN MATCH YOUR BUSINESS PLAN
2. TALENT MANAGEMENT IS EVERYONE'S JOB
3. GLOBAL EXCELLENCE NEEDS LOCAL EFFECTIVENESS
4. SUPPORT MATTERS
5. MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

Our key learning from this article is summarized in this quote:

Companies are racing to find solutions, but most of them are making a crucial error: They're treating these problems as separate issues… companies must rethink how they hire, train and reward their employees, placing those tasks at the heart of their business plans. In doing so, they have an opportunity to address all these separate problems with a unified plan, rather than waste time and resources attacking each of the issues individually.

If you need justification to establish or extend your talent management strategies, attach this article and The Hackett Group’s report to your business case. They provide a nice one-two punch to get you started on building your own world class talent factory.

They also align well with many of the themes and presentations at Taleo WORLD: Performance 2.0 last week. Hundreds of conference attendees had the opportunity to view our new Taleo Performance products that run natively integrated on our Taleo Enterprise Edition platform for an end-to-end talent solution. Now large global organizations that are already using Taleo—such as P&G cited in the article—have the opportunity to directly address these issues and build their world class talent factories using a holistic talent process for a higher level of business performance.

Bloggers Jason Corsello, Phil Wainewright, Zach Thomas, Josh Bersin, and Mike Potter have all weighed in on Taleo Performance. Their observations support how a next generation of talent management that’s focused on usability can be the engine that truly powers the talent factory and business performance.