If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/ authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Many contemporary approaches to talent management are unaffordable. This paper seeks to summarise some key findings of a five-year investigation into quicker and more affordable routes to creating high performance organisations. It aims to suggest a practical and much more cost-effective way of quickly achieving multiple corporate objectives and measurable benefits for both people and organisations is often being overlooked.Design/methodology/approach -A programme of critical success factor, ''issue'' and other surveys was complemented with a five-year evaluation of more recent case studies to understand early adoptions of performance support and to assess their results and implications. The applications examined were discussed with the relevant technical architect and the results obtained corroborated with commissioner/user performance data and/or documented assessments/reactions.Findings -Recruiting exceptional people -even if affordable -can create a host of problems if they are not properly managed, which is often the case. Paying for talented people may make little sense for organisations that cannot harness or capture and share what they do differently. Talent needs to be relevant to what an organisation is seeking to do and critical success factors for excelling in key roles, and what top performers do differently in these areas captured and shared.Research limitations/implications -Evaluations of performance management need to consider all the objectives that are beneficially impacted.Practical implications -One can avoid certain general, expensive, time consuming and disruptive corporate programmes in an area such as talent management and adopt quick, focused, cost effective alternatives that generate large returns on investment, and quickly deliver multiple benefits for people and organisations. Performance support can enable average performers wherever they may be to excel at difficult jobs.Social implications -A wider range of people can be helped to do difficult jobs.Originality/value -The paper summarises the main findings of an investigation that has identified deficiencies of contemporary approaches to talent management, identifies an approach which if...

The essence of the challenge facing directors and boards is to define some form of distinctive and compelling vision which both differentiates and motivates; and assemble the capability in terms of people, organization, process, technology and finance to turn aspiration into achievement [1].In competitive markets, organizations have been seeking to outperform each other by raising productivity, often by squeezing more out of their people, i.e., working them harder. More recently, as many people and organizations have begun to reveal some signs of strain, attention has shifted to other means of harnessing more of the potential of people and applying it to those activities which create value for customers.Faced both with formidable external challenges from strong competitors and with exciting opportunities, many organizations are concluding that more than incremental change is required. Only "step change" improvements offer a confident prospect of stealing a march on incremental improvers. In the search for greater flexibility and performance breakthroughs, relationships between people, processes and technology are being reassessed critically and fundamentally. Alternative approachesThe available approaches to fundamental change include various emerging models of organization, different forms of relationship with suppliers, customers and business partners, and a wide choice of patterns of work and alternative approaches to learning. All of these have been shown to offer viable routes to radical performance improvements when used appropriately and properly. There are also management, business, support and learning processes to re-engineer.Although there exists a diversity of options for radical change, many organizations appear to be relying almost exclusively on the "re-engineering" of their business processes. The focus on business processes, the sequences and combinations of activities which cut across functional boundaries and deliver value to customers, has resulted in intense levels of interest in business process re-engineering (BPR). In part this is because BPR has been "packaged" and hyped with almost evangelical fervour, while scattered adopters of alternative approaches have tended to keep their successes to themselves in order to discourage emulation by competitors. Role of processesManagement and business processes together represent one, and a relatively obvious, means by which the various areas of corporate capability can be harnessed and applied to value creating activity (Figure 1).

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Teamwork is one of the most widely recommended tools for organizational transformation. Initiatives such as business process redesign, total quality management or new product development almost always depend on effective and high-energy group efforts. Presents a new study of team management practice, and the corporate objectives served, in a broad crosssection of organizations in the UK. Shows, by interviews and a survey of 100 firms, that teamwork and teambased organizations are likely to increase significantly in the future as a result of many strategic change programmes currently under way. Especially important will be the growth of teams linking firms to customers, suppliers and international partners. Examines critical success factors and makes recommendations for future practice. The growth of teamwork will be accompanied by new organizational forms and ways of working -the "new organization". This will be based on networks and clusters of skills, crossing boundaries with suppliers, customers and even competitors. New forms of training and team development will be required for flexible operation in fluid and ever-changing environments.