How good is your succession planning process? How well do you develop talent?

General Motors, that icon (and once bankrupt) icon of American industry just hired (actually they rehired) Bob Lutz as a consultant. He is a former vice chairman of the firm and truly a “car guy”. He is also 79 years old. This has nothing to do with his ability at that age. In fact, there are few who can match his expertise and industry analysts praise the move. But this begs the question for you – are there any retirees or near retirees you can keep around to share knowledge and insights with the brass and with newbies? Probably so..the old model of school, work, retire is..well…old. It doesn’t have to be that way and you can use it to your advantage.

But let’s get back to the original question? This is the best they can do? If so, then it is an indictment of their succession planning process and their talent development process. Again, this is not about Lutz. Nor is it about GM being honest enough to say we can use his help. This is totally about the implication here that they have not created bench strength. Hmm, maybe all those layoffs and downsizing came with an unintended price??

What if this was baseball? The NY Yankees have one of the best relief pitchers, ever, in Mariano Rivera. He is also in his 40s and will not be around much longer. Imagine the year after he retires the Yankees try to bring him back because they dont have anyone near as good as him. I think that would say they didn’t scout nor develop talent well.

How good is your succession planning process? How well do you develop talent? (if you want to talk about it, go ahead and contact me..this is what we do at FireStarter….just sayin’)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 at 1:37 am and is filed under Leadership, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.