It’s hard to think about “talent management” when every day there’s a new announcement about layoffs and unemployment (e.g., Kodak announced this morning that it’s cutting up to 4,500 jobs, or about 18 percent of its workforce).  But from a long-term perspective, I believe that talent management, particularly in supply chain and logistics, will separate tomorrow’s industry leaders from the laggards.

That’s why Marshall Goldsmith’s article this week in BusinessWeek (“Talent on Demand“) caught my attention.  It’s a Q&A piece with Peter Cappelli, a Wharton professor and author of “Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty“.  I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on it, but one of Mr. Cappelli’s answers in the article intrigued me.  Here’s what he said in response to how companies should do talent management today:

“The problem for talent management is to deal with and manage that uncertainty.  We do this by adapting techniques that are already well known from supply-chain management [emphasis mine]. To begin, we ask, what happens when our forecasts for demand turn out to be wrong, as they almost always will? What does it cost us? We can be wrong in two ways: Actual demand is greater than our forecast, and we have a shortage of talent; or actual demand is less than we thought, and we have a surplus of talent.  What will it cost us in each case?”

In supply chain, we talk about having “the right product, in the right quantities, at the right place and time.”   The idea of applying this principle to talent management is very interesting.  And I was reminded of another BusinessWeek article from a couple of years ago that highlighted how IBM developed an algorithm and software tool that lets it identify which employees from across the world have the best qualifications and skills to work on specific consulting project.  “Our customers need us to put the right skills in the right place at the right time,” is the way Robert Moffat Jr., Senior VP at IBM, described the reason they developed this system.

So, which type of supply chain and logistics professionals will be in high demand, but short supply, in the future?  Those with the right mix of analytics, business, and relationship skills.  As I highlighted in “Making Smarter Decisions Faster,” a growing number of companies are leveraging business intelligence and analytics solutions to create a competitive advantage.  But you need to hire and train the right people to realize the value of business intelligence-i.e., people who are not only good at manipulating and analyzing data, but also have a deep understanding of supply chain and logistics processes and have good business acumen. 

These types of employees will be in high demand across all industries, including logistics service providers (3PLs), where talent management will be critical for success.  As I highlighted in a posting last year (“Lessons from the Road“), high employee turnover, which often impacts service levels and work quality, is  one of key reasons some companies are bringing their outsourced operations back in-house.  Turnover at the management level is another issue, along with poor succession planning.

The bottom line: a lot of companies are reducing their workforce in response to the weak economy, but are they looking beyond “dollars and cents” and taking future demand and supply for talent into consideration?  Unfortunately, I think most companies are not.