Strategic Assessments (5)
Master Sun: “The terrain is to be assessed in terms of distance, difficulty or ease of travel, dimension and safety.”
Zhang Yu: “In any military operation, it is important first to know the lay of the land. When you know the distance to be traveled, then you can plan whether to proceed directly of by a circuitous route. When you know the difficulty or ease of travel, then you can determine the advantages of infantry or mounted troops. When you know the dimension of the area, then you can assess how many troops you need, many or few. When you know the relative safety of the terrain, then you can discern whether to do battle or disperse.”
Adaptation: One way of understanding terrain is that it is the context within which your campaign will unfold. Talent Strategists apply their understanding of the markets they compete in by taking circumstance (organizational posture) and situation (marketplace realities) into consideration. Over time they learn to visualize statistical abstractions as physical space (terrain).
Through this practice they discover gaps between their organization’s objectives and its current market position (distance). Difficulty or ease of travel can be understood as the logistical component of bridging these gaps.
Dimension relates to demographic considerations. In other words dimension is a function of measuring the scope of the market and contrasting this measurement against your requirements and your existing resources. Therefore, familiarity with the demographic realities helps one to know if the objectives can be achieved by mundane means (infantry) or whether extraordinary measures (mounted troops) will be required to produce the desired outcomes.
Safety is an assessment of the business risks that are associated with the recruiting campaign combined with appreciation of the consequences of failure. In other words, analysis of the risk versus reward for the various means you might choose to use to achieve your ends.
If your firm is planning on entering a new market surreptitiously you won’t want to advertise under your own brand. You may want a third party to screen the responses to your confidential advertising without disclosing your company’s name. You may wish to employ search-research consultants and contract recruiters to jump-start the effort so you can quickly come up to strength without telegraphing your management’s intentions.
In order to gain insight into the challenges that may be presented by terrain it will be valuable to ask and answer the following ten questions:
- How do your adversaries currently recruit?
- How deep is your opponent’s network?
- How deep is your network?
- What can your learn about the market from your employees?
- What can you learn about the market from candidates?
- What sources of demographic information are available?
- Does your opponent enjoy a geographic advantage in securing a particular kind of talent?
- Can you offset an opponent’s geographic advantage by creating a satellite office and near sourcing?
- Can you offset the geographic advantage by outsourcing to another country?
- Can you offset this advantage by offering telecommuting opportunities?
Application: If you are required to recruit a telecommunications engineering team of 300 persons and the company’s headquarters is located in Duluth, Minnesota it will be far more challenging (and expensive) for you to attain your goals than it would be if the headquarters were in Raleigh, North Carolina or Richardson, Texas. Far more difficult if the company is based in Johannesburg, South Africa than it would be if the headquarters were in Istanbul, Turkey.
The regional demographic factors either work for you or against you. If you don’t know the terrain of the regional and discipline specific marketplaces you compete in how can you hope to achieve your objectives?
This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under The Art of War for Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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