
The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent
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– Unabridged
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Foreword written by New York Times best-selling author and retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink.
A must-listen for any business leader looking to build elite teams and win on talent.
Talent is the foundation of every success story from Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Main Street, and even on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the hidden asset that never shows up on the balance sheet, despite being the driver for a company's true value. And now, in this hypercompetitive business environment, the war for talent has never been more important or more complex. Of 800 CEOs and 600 C-suite executives polled in 2019, the overwhelming majority cited the ability to attract and retain top talent as their number one concern.
For your organization to win, you need to attract and retain the best talent. But without the right strategy or mindset, you won't be able to do so - and you won't be able to compete. After all, your people, not your product or service, are your strongest competitive advantage.
When it comes to winning on talent, no one does it better or more consistently than the US Special Operations community. Their success comes down to their people and a widely held foundational belief: Talent + Leadership = Victory.
The Talent War explores how US Special Operations Forces assess, select, and develop their world-class talent. You'll learn how to adopt a talent mindset, the single greatest weapon you can possess in the war for talent. When your organization reflects this mindset, you will hire, train, and develop the right people and put them in the best positions to make decisions that allow you to retake the advantage and win the war.
- Listening Length6 hours and 24 minutes
- Audible release date10 November 2020
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB08LQRDZHM
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 6 hours and 24 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Mike Sarraille, George Randle, Josh Cotton |
Narrator | Mike Sarraille, George Randle, Jocko Willink - foreword |
Audible.com.au Release Date | 10 November 2020 |
Publisher | Lioncrest Publishing |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B08LQRDZHM |
Best Sellers Rank | 40,078 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 114 in Workplace Culture (Audible Books & Originals) 275 in Human Resources & Personnel Management (Books) 348 in Workplace Culture (Books) |
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I read it through in one day.
Yes, it’s that good.
BLUF: I have a long standing interest in specialized selection programs. I’ve been very fortunate over my polymathic career to work with the designers of many high level selection programs. This book is a milestone as it details for the non-military audience the specific processes that produce elite military special operators. The authors do a fantastic job in making that information accessible to the lay audience, business leaders, and human resource professionals.
I was recently asked to consider ways that selection and assessment might be improved, and how a “creativity and out of the box thinking” mindset culture could be fostered within an existing body of highly experienced and combat-hardened special operators.
So finding this book at this time was a stroke of great good luck. This book is an extraordinary resource for anyone examining the issues involved in attracting talent, or looking to export these hard-won, battle-tested concepts of military selection into their world whether it’s business, the arts, or any endeavor that requires high order talent.
Some random takeaways:
Manage your expectations and open your mind. Talent doesn’t always look like what we expect or have been taught to expect. This is a huge insight for managers/leaders — the toughest guy in an organization may be a sweet faced kindly old man with gray in his hair and lines in his face, not the uber-athlete straining at the bit to prove he’s better than everybody else.
Look for character, train for skills. Start with the human and what they are like at their core, rather than what skills they bring to the table. They make an excellent point about the SOF model — no one comes into SOF selection as a SOF operator with the skill set. They learn that in training and with their unit AFTER they’ve demonstrated what KIND of human they are.
A GREAT list of attributes that make up desired character:
Drive
Resiliency
Adaptability
Humility
Integrity
Effective Intelligence
Team-ability
Curiosity
Emotional Strength
One challenge I see upon completing the book is that of educating leadership and key management anywhere, from existing units to business structure, on the long term cost benefit of maintaining a comprehensive selection, assessment, training and feedback structure. It’s expensive in dollars and skilled manpower hours, and is a challenge to this day even in the units that fostered and brought up the leaders who wrote this. Even more of a challenge translating it to a business structure focused on dollars and revenue.
Selection is an expensive program and there’s always the challenge of what to do with the potentially valuable people who don’t make the cut. One friend described himself as a member of the “second most elite unit — DELTA selection wash-outs” — he’d been invited, got to selection, failed, went on to be a superstar elsewhere because he didn’t let the failure break him down.
There really isn’t any good answer to the expense issue other than education, through seminars, books, and lots and lots of case studies tied to the metrics that matter for business: revenue and return on investment. That education should focus on reaching existing leadership to open their minds to the paradigm of finding, motivating and retaining the top talent in their field whatever that might be.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the science of enhanced human performance, as FINDING the right people is just as critical a piece as improving the performance of the people you have.