Life science companies have been facing unprecedented pressures requiring them to become more in tune with the realities of their marketplaces and to take a more thoughtful approach to understanding and managing business risks.  We know many of the issues driving risk  – patent expiry, pricing competition from generics, increased regulatory scrutiny, rising costs, poor efficiency of internal business processes.  The question becomes what to do about them.
Many companies have mounted significant efforts to better manage their R&D organizations, trying to make them more disciplined and efficient.  Others have rolled out significant operational excellence efforts aimed at improving operational and production related efficiencies.  Still others have worked to strengthen their systems of internal controls, improve quality management, and/or beef up their investment/divestiture strategies.  All these efforts and many others are likely to have positive impact on mitigating business risk.

However, in a 2008 survey of global life science executives, 31% indicated that better “Talent Management” is the area that is most critical in mitigating exposure to business risk, and I think they’re right.  The issue goes far beyond simply finding and retaining R&D technical talent, an age old life sciences issue.  It includes talent in other areas with skills that are becoming more and more critical to success, such as managing change efforts and managing partnership relationships.

I find that many companies have yet to clearly recognize many of these emerging, non-traditional skill requirements, much less have plans to attract and retain people that have them.  The steps to success include:

•  Identifying the diverse skills required to lead in your industry,
•  Objectively assessing how the existing workforce matches these skill requirements,
•  Developing well defined plans to attract talent to fill the gaps, and
•  Ensuring systems are in place throughout the organization (not just in HR) to retain the talent

How is your does your organization handle Talent Management?

Fred Greulich

Tags: Human Resources, Risk Management

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18, 2010 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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, or  Forward