Hourglass: Making the Most of Your People

Overview

In this issue: Looking forward, global HR, the search for talent, fostering innovation, globalisation, talent and software, eurozone, and letter from India.

CEOs are busy people and while those working directly for them tend to know what's on their minds, it's not very often that the rest of us get a collective view. PwC's Annual Global CEO Survey, as a result, is always eagerly awaited and this year has been no exception.

In this issue we look in more detail at some of the main people-related issues that were raised by the CEOs worldwide who took part in the survey. Inevitably, one of their biggest concerns was talent management, and in particular how they're going to attract and retain the skilled employees that they'll need for future growth. The survey showed that talent shortages were already causing problems for business leaders in many parts of the world, and a quarter of those questioned said they'd recently postponed or abandoned a strategic project because they simply couldn't find the right people to see it through.

Many of the worries that CEOs are grappling with at the moment will - or at least, should - land squarely in the lap of HR. We've been arguing for a while that HR needs to grasp every opportunity to earn its place on the board and this, we feel, is a clear opening. The issues raised by CEOs in the survey touch on some of the fundamental aspects of the HR function, such as how it can find a centralised, post-Ulrich model that works effectively at a local level. It's time for HR to rise to the challenge.

It's clear that the talent management problems raised by the CEOs will test HR functions worldwide, but that's not the only difficulty HR directors will have to address. Life goes on around long-term trends, and in this case business life in Greece is particularly perilous. How many multinational organisations have really thought about what would happen if Greece, or any other country, leaves the eurozone? It's a question that calls for immediate planning, as Mick James explains on page 28 of the report.