Trend Spotting and CI

Estelle Métayer is an expert in Competitive and Strategic Intelligence. Her research focuses on how managers, CEOs, and board members build and improve their strategic planning and/or competitive intelligence function to avoid strategic blindspots.  An adjunct professor for McGill University, she teaches with Henry Mintzberg in the International and national Advanced Leadership Programs and the International Master for Health Leadership.

Prior to selling the company in 2004, Estelle was the president and founder of Competia (in 1988), the leading training organization for executives and analysts in Strategic Intelligence. Competia.com became the world’s largest community, portal and magazine for strategy professionals. She speaks French, English, German, Dutch, Italian and Arabic. She is also a mother, a commercial pilot and flight instructor. Read more

Nurturing the Golden Few

When you think of Manchester United, you think of high voltage soccer, but do you think of “Man U” as the people who do great Talent Management? When you think of Storm Model Agency, you think haute couture and glamorous fashion models. Do you think of them as an organization that should be benchmarked for studying Talent Management practices? When you think of the BBC, Royal College of Music or Wimbledon, the top of the mind recall is not about their ability to coach high potential talent. That is exactly what the London based specialist consulting and executive search firm Jackson Samuel did. They delved into the Talent Management Practices of eight such firms (referred to as “Enterprise Organizations” here) and tried to glean out some insights on identifying and nurturing talent.  The result was The Golden Few: Lessons in talent management from the worlds of entertainment, sport, arts and academia. Read more

Mass Career Customization

Mass Customization may seem like an oxymoron. When you think of something as individualistic as career choices, it begs the question how far such a thing is possible. Organizations have long defined successful careers to represent a ladder. Ladders were for lads and too bad if the ladies chose to opt out of it. With the changing demographics, all that is changing at a reasonable pace. The Wall Street Journal bestseller Mass Career Customization by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg point out that the demand and supply gap will force corporations to explore new ways of defining careers which will look less and less like the ladder people have used to scale the organizational pyramid. Individuals are using lattices to move to different directions and vary the pace and nature of their assignments while still remaining valuable contributors to the workforce.
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Interesting Intersection Points

I was shooting the breeze with a colleague from my previous life. We both exchanged our business cards and moaned about how global warming was not getting solved in the time frame we had given to the world leaders. The next stop was to catch up with the “people information”. Some call it gossip. We were both delighted at the news of the The Beast having got the sack, except that with both of us having moved on since, the joy of that news was considerably diluted. We talked about the Recession and how it was so much like the dotcom days. If the rising tide could lift all boats, clearly the receding water of the Recession showed who was swimming without adequate beachwear! Read more

Learning Agility

How do companies identify high potential employees? Different organizations use different approaches. There are a host of assessments that can provide data on various competencies that makes leaders successful. There are competencies that leaders need to translate their vision of the future into a strategy. They need to have the competencies to communicate and inspire the stakeholders to buy into that vision. They also need to be able to cobble together a team that will execute that plan. To continue to be successful repeatedly requires leaders to be agile learners. To learn from heir own experience of success and failure. they also need to learn from others success and failure. They are risk takers. Leadership success goes to those who are learning agile. I had attended a workshop by Bob Eichinger where he had outlined the four factors that make up Learning Agility.
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