If your three most significant long-term investors asked your executive leadership team the following question “We realize that in the current business environment you are pressured with handling numerous immediate short-term challenges, but do you have any concerns about your organization’s ability to differentiate itself on how you manage your top talent … we are referring to the employees that are critical to strategic success and to medium-to-long-term business viability?” How would you respond?

Then after listening to your answer to the question above they asked, “if you formed a team comprised of external process innovation experts and a cross-functional sub-set of some of your top talent … and they were challenged with formally analyzing the current state of each of the eight core processes listed below … would they identify anything in the processes that: (a) provides unique access to a wide variety of top-notch talent markets; (b) is rare in nature and would be very difficult to understand how to replicate it; (c) would be costly to imitate it; and (d) is non-substitutable – nothing like it? What would be your response to their question?

What if they asked you, “when was the last time that you conducted such an analysis … what were the conclusions of the analysis … and what follow-up actions did you take?”

Core Processes – Mission-Critical and High-Potential Talent Management (examples):