I had the pleasure last week of moderating a panel of senior talent development officers representing three very different

industries and diverse geographies: Deb Wheelock of Mercer (a high-end professional services firm, recruiting highly educated knowledge workers), Pamela Stroko of The Gap (a retailer faced with the classic industry challenges of creating a differentiating employee proposition and enhancing retention of its large workforce), and Sujaya Banerjee of the Essar Group (a diversified India-based enterprise participating in a variety of industrial sectors, including steel, energy, and communications).

Interestingly, even with this diversity of perspectives, we found our views on today's top talent challenges to be surprisingly aligned. I thought you might like to see our listand would love to hear your thoughts on things you're wrestling with that we missed.

Here goes:

1. Attracting and retaining enough employees at all levels to meet the needs of organic and inorganic growth. All three companies are facing a talent crunch. Essar, for example, has grown from 20 thousand employees to a staggering 60 thousand in the past 3 years. Fifty-five percent of their employees have less than two years of tenure. 2. Creating a value proposition that appeals to multiple generations. With four generations in today's workplace, most companies are struggling to create an employee experience that appeals to individuals with diverse needs, preferences and assumptions. The Gap, for example, has 153,000 people in its workforce. The stores have a high percentage of Gen Y employees, while corporate roles and leadership ranks are primarily made up of Gen X'ers and Boomers. How does one create a compelling employee value proposition for the organization? 3. Developing a robust leadership pipeline. I believe one of the biggest potential threats to many corporations is a lack of a robust talent pool from which to select future leaders. This is in part a numbers issuethe Gen X cohort is small and therefore, as I like to say, precious. But it's also an interest issuemany members of Gen X are simply not particularly excited about being considered for these roles. There was wide agreement among the panelists that a lack of individuals ready to move into senior client manager and leadership roles is a critical challenge. 4. Rounding out the capabilities of hires who lack the breadth of necessary for global leadership. It's relatively straightforward to identify and assess experts in specific functional or technical arenas, but much more difficult to determine whether those individuals have the people skills, leadership capabilities, business breadth, and global diversity sensibilities required for the nature of leadership today. Increasingly, the challenge of developing these broader skill sets falls to the corporations. Essar has formed an academy specifically to develop and groom its own leaders. 5. Transferring key knowledge and relationships. The looming retirement of a significant portion of the workforce challenges all companies, but particularly those who are dependant on the strength of tacit knowledge, such as that embedded in customer relationships, a key to Mercer's business success. 6. Stemming the exodus of Gen X'ers from corporate life. A big threat in many firms today is the exodus of mid-career talentpeople in whom the organization has invested heavily and in whom it has pinned it hopes for future leadership. For example, developing talent management practices and programs calibrated to leverage technology and create greater work/life balance has been a priority for Mercer over recent years.

7. Redesigning talent management practices to attract and retain Gen Y's. The challenge of calibrating talent management practices and programs to attract and engage our young entrants is critically important to all firms and particularly so for firms that depend on a strong flow of top talent, such professional service firms like Mercer. All three panelists agreed that making the business infrastructure more attractive to Gen Y is a high priority. 8. Creating a workplace that is open to Boomers in their "second careers." Age prejudice still exists, but smart companies are looking for ways to incorporate the talents of Boomers and even older workers in the workforce. In many cases, this requires rethinking roles and work relationships. 9. Overcoming a "norm" of short tenure and frequent movement. Some industries, such as specialty retail, are known for having a very disposable view of talent. Companies intent on changing that norm, such as The Gap, must address both external influences in the marketplace and an internal mindset. The Gap believes retaining employees in roles for 3+ years will be a key to their future earnings growth. 10. Enlisting executives who don't appreciate the challenge. Many talent executives complain that business leaders still believe that people are lined up outside the door because of the power of the company's brand. The challenge of enlisting the support of all executives for the transition from a talent culture that has traditionally operated with a "buy" strategy to one that places more emphasis on "build" is widely shared. What did we miss? What are your biggest talent challenges?

INTRODUCTION We are all aware of organizational change but managing it requires different abilities from those associated with operational leadership. The key to managing organizational change is: What attitudes will the organization want to prevail after the organizational change has been implemented? What level of performance is the organizational change design striving to achieve? Will people confidently offer creative thought and accept empowerment, particularly in areas of risk, during the organizational change process? Organization face increasing market pressures characterized by shortening delivery time spans, tightening of product quality, and performance specifications, and diversification of customer requirements. With increasing competition many organizational change initiatives have been to cut costs and reduce human resources. Consequently organizations find it difficult to harness systems, processes and people to provide a quality customer service. This has severely strained communication channels, human relations and the ability to manage essential organizational change and development initiatives effectively. Once organizations have reacted to commercial threat by taking whatever short term organizational change measures they can, they are often left with stressed, demoralized, and low performing people. Reaction to this malaise has been to exalt people to raise their productivity with management preoccupation on how best performance improvement could be achieved. With organizational change being preoccupied with internal malaise management simply fail to secure the organizational change needed to take advantage of market opportunities, or counter new market threats, and consequently the organization continues to decline. If an organizational change approach to managing it is taken that does not consider peoples natural feelings and needs then the organizational change initiative itself, no matter how important, will not produce the beneficial results required. At its worse the organizational change process will produce poor moral and consequently poor performance. Managing change is probably the single most important issue today for all those who have undertaken the difficult task of managing organizations. Technological changes and increased global competition caused by liberalization and deregulation has placed greater demands on organizations to be flexible, responsive and efficient. Around the world, organizations big and small face the inevitable prospect of change. Organizational change comes in many forms, like some organizations may grow bigger, they may become better without becoming bigger, or they may shrink and become smaller or they may even die. Given these kinds of manifestations of change, it is not surprising that it evokes a myriad of emotions. Some find the prospect and experience of change exciting, challenging and fulfilling. Others find it daunting, stressful and unpleasant. It can cause both hope and despair. Managing change also involves simultaneously managing resources, processes and emotions. This is what makes 'change' a complicated and challenging task. Today, India is poised on the threshold of a major transformation, because India is the only country in the world with the thriving democracy of approximately 937 million people, and the size of its middle class exceeds the population of the European Union. According to the World Bank forecast, by 2025 Indian will be the world's fifth largest economy. Following the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, Indian businesses were exposed to the realities of both domestic and global competition. Many business analytical pundits expected indigenous businesses to struggle for survival in the throes of

deregulation and increases competition. Surprisingly, the response from the Indian organizations to these changes has been positive. Organizational change refers to processes of growth, decline and transformation within the organization. For many people, including managers and academics, organizations are 'things' which provide order and stability. We tend to think of organizations as enduring structures in a changing society. Also there is a widespread view of organizations as being associated with constancy and permanence. The truth, however, is that organizations are changing all the time. Organizational change takes different forms. It may change their strategy or purpose, introduce new products or services, change the way they produce and sell, change their technology, enter new markets, close down departments or plants, hire new employees, acquire other organizations, or become acquired by other organizations and so on. In doing so it may become larger, smaller or stay in the same size. Sometimes organizations change quite radically but retain the same name and image. CHANGES IN INDIA The changes that swept the organizational winds across the world reached the Indian continent in 1991. For more than 40 years, the government policies sheltered Indian businesses from competition and never expected that the Indian companies would transform and adopt the global mindset. Subsequently, the Indian Government liberalized a series of policy measures aimed at removing restrictions and barriers to economic activities. Such liberalization made Indian business houses to increased local as well as global competition. By and large, the Indian organizations responded vigorously and positively to the changes in the economic environment. Number of the Indian companies saw these changes as opportunities rather than as threats. For example, Ranbaxy, a Pharmaceutical company manufacturing in eight countries and exports its products to 45 countries. To cite another Indian Company is Arvind Mills, which is rated as the world's fifth largest denim producer. Prior to 1991, the idea of Indian organizations becoming world - class producers would certainly evoked cynicism and derision. Yet, this is what precisely many Indian organizations hope to become in the coming decade. After all the myriad of theories presented by the theorists, there is only one question that emerges: What are the processes by which organizations change? Planned change certainly is one process, but there are other processes by which organizations change like for example; some described the predictable stages in the life of an organization - stages over which managers had little influence. Others described failures and bankruptcies and witnessed the murderous hand of the environment in organizational decay. While some were interested in how organizations innovate; they focused on processes of innovation. As the field of organizational change began to flourish, it became abundantly clear that planned change was only one mechanism of change, and that there were several processes of change in organizations.