Talent on Demand

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book came relatively soon after finishing my earlier book, The New Deal at Work, which described the breakdown of lifetime employment and the move toward more market-driven employment relationships. I thought that there must be some new model emerging that would describe how employers were managing careers and the development of talent in the context of the more open labor markets—lateral hiring and layoffs—that had already been under way for more than a decade.

I was wrong, but it took me several years to discover that. After attending lots of talent management conferences and workshops, reading through the business press, talking to employers, consultants, and other experts, I realized that most U.S. employers ...