We had planned to launch our talent report, Tomorrow’s Global Talent, yesterday but the weather defeated us and we have postponed. It is a shame; I was looking forward to some good conversations at the event with people who are thinking deeply about the relationship between labour and capital (a subject upon which there has been much musing historically and upon which great ideologies and counter ideologies have been built). I was especially looking forward to talking about how our understanding of labour markets needs to be updated to reflect our increasingly clear sense that we are living through a time of extraordinary change; perhaps one where the standard script of labour-capital theory no longer is helpful to our thinking or our action.

In many ways the recession has seen some serious reverting to type and replaying old, and very tired, ideas about the role of labour in our economy, one which sees people as disposable and organised labour as militant. Widespread job losses. Wildcat strikes calling for protectionist labour market policies. So far, so familiar.

We at Tomorrow’s Company are thinking about talent. We are not alone. Try putting “talent management” into your search engine and see what I mean. The standard talent story is McKinsey’s ‘War for Talent’ which continues to dominate scarcity thinking everywhere. Add this to the emerging fear of the impact of China and India’s economic ambitions on the global demand for talent (“we need 20 million specialist technologists in the next 2 years…. er but there are only 20 in the whole world right now, omg” etc. etc.) and we have a level of febrility (?) that has put talent management at the top of the corporate agenda.