Introduction: Challenges for the field of strategic talent management

Introduction: why this book?The origins of this book can be traced back to a symposium held in Chicago at the 2009 US Academy of Management on the topic of Global Talent Management: Understanding the Contours of the Field and the Challenges for HRM. A group of academics from the UK, the United States, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Australia got together to explore what they felt were the emerging challenges in this field, which was in the infancy stage of development. Under the umbrella term of global human resource management (GHRM), they identified the need to understand an increasingly wide range of challenges, including a changing set of academic contours that were being placed around their field, and a range of innovations in practice. Their historical interest in how organizations exported talented expatriates around the world had been taken over by the need to look at multiple resourcing options – organizations were now combining the use of assignments with efforts to localize management across new global operations. They were capitalizing on international commuters and business travel, short-term assignments, international projects, knowledge management exchanges, building centers of expertise, moving people from countries or regions into these centers and then exporting them back out again, using passive recruitment to pick up potential talent in globalized labor markets or global cities, and attracting skilled migrants. In short, they were trying to build skills and capabilities around the world. They might not be managing these multiple ways of moving talent and their insight around the world very strategically, but by default this was what they were doing. Who knows how to solve these sorts of problems? Were the new contours of talent management making it a branch of knowledge management, global leadership, and international human resource management (IHRM) strategy, we asked?.