The art and science of talent search: how to spot, assess, woo, and retain highly talented people. How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears? Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better. Cowen and Gross guide the reader through the major scientific research areas relevant for talent search, including how to conduct an interview, how much to weight intelligence, how to judge personality and match personality traits to jobs, how to evaluate talent in online interactions such as Zoom calls, why talented women are still undervalued and how to spot them, how to understand the special talents in people who have disabilities or supposed disabilities, and how to use delegated scouts to find talent. Talent appreciation is an art, but it is an art you can improve through study and experience. Identifying underrated, brilliant individuals is one of the simplest ways to give yourself an organizational edge, and this is the book that will show you how to do that. Talent is both for people searching for talent and for those who wish to be searched for, found, and discovered.

A manual for building a faster brain and a better you! The Little Book of Talent is an easy-to-use handbook of scientifically proven, field-tested methods to improve skills—your skills, your kids’ skills, your organization’s skills—in sports, music, art, math, and business. The product of five years of reporting from the world’s greatest talent hotbeds and interviews with successful master coaches, it distills the daunting complexity of skill development into 52 clear, concise directives. Whether you’re age 10 or 100, whether you’re on the sports field or the stage, in the classroom or the corner office, this is an essential guide for anyone who ever asked, “How do I get better?” Praise for The Little Book of Talent “The Little Book of Talent should be given to every graduate at commencement, every new parent in a delivery room, every executive on the first day of work. It is a guidebook—beautiful in its simplicity and backed by hard science—for nurturing excellence.”—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit “It’s so juvenile to throw around hyperbolic terms such as ‘life-changing,’ but there’s no other way to describe The Little Book of Talent. I was avidly trying new things within the first half hour of reading it and haven’t stopped since. Brilliant. And yes: life-changing.”—Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence

On the first day of school, as the children in Miss Lucinda's class introduce themselves and name their special talent, Jack wonders if he is good at anything.

Want to draw but don't think you have the talent? This book is for you--no experience or formal training required! Danny Gregory, co-founder of the popular online Sketchbook Skool, shows you how to get started making art for pleasure with fun, easy lessons. Get started fast with just a pen and paper, learn to see your subject with new eyes, and enjoy the creative process.

Tens of millions of people in the U.S. with criminal records are highly talented, reliable, and eager to work. Implement these second chance hiring practices to give your company a significant competitive advantage over those that do not. Researched, tested, and written by the chief investment strategist of one of the country’s leading business banks, Jeffrey Korzenik includes dozens of examples of businesses that have successfully implemented the second chance hiring practices outlined in this book. Korzenik shows those companies that have learned to go beyond the label and to evaluate the qualities of the individual applicant have tapped into an often-overlooked source of loyal and productive talent. In Untapped Talent, you will: Understand what goes into a successful second chance hire, from the support that will be needed internally to the resources that are available from outside agencies. Learn how businesses from a variety of industries have instituted successful second chance hiring programs and how this has positively impacted their culture and bottom line. Gain practical onboarding and coaching strategies that will help ensure a smooth transition and a productive, happy new employee. Acquire relevant knowledge of the criminal justice system to provide context in identifying the potential of second chance hiring. Your path to a loyal, engaged, and productive workforce starts with the clear competitive advantage you’ll gain by implementing the second-chance hiring practices within Untapped Talent.

What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism. Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything. • Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice. • Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development. • Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students. These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

Radical Advice for Reinventing Talent--and HR Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of human capital, and yet the talent practices their organizations use are stuck in the twentieth century. Typical talent-planning and HR processes are designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where "lines and boxes" still define how people are managed. As work and organizations have become more fluid--and business strategy is no longer about planning years ahead but about sensing and seizing new opportunities and adapting to a constantly changing environment--companies must deploy talent in new ways to remain competitive. Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent--for today's agile, digital, analytical, technologically driven strategic environment--and for creating the HR function that business needs. Filled with examples of forward-thinking companies that have adopted radical new approaches to talent (such as ADP, Amgen, BlackRock, Blackstone, Haier, ING, Marsh, Tata Communications, Telenor, and Volvo), as well as the juggernauts and the startups of Silicon Valley, this book shows leaders how to bring the rigor that they apply to financial capital to their human capital--elevating HR to the same level as finance in their organizations. Providing deep, expert insight and advice for what needs to change and how to change it, this is the definitive book for reimagining and creating a talent-driven organization that wins.

Powerful ideas to transform hiring into a massive competitive advantage for your business Talent Makers: How the Best Organizations Win through Structured and Inclusive Hiring is essential reading for every leader who knows that hiring is crucial to their organization and wants to compete for top talent, diversify their organization, and build winning teams. Daniel Chait and Jon Stross, co-founders of Greenhouse Software, Inc, provide readers with a comprehensive and proven framework to improve hiring quickly, substantially, and measurably. Talent Makers will provide a step-by-step plan and actionable advice to help leaders assess their talent practice (or lack thereof) and transform hiring into a measurable competitive advantage. Readers will understand and employ: A proven system and principles for hiring used by the world's best companies Hiring practices that remove bias and result in more diverse teams An assessment of their hiring practice using the Hiring Maturity model Measurement of employee lifetime value in quantifiable terms, and how to increase that value through hiring The Talent Makers methodology is the result of the authors’ experience and the ideas and stories from their community of more than 4,000 organizations. This is the book that CEOs, hiring managers, talent practitioners, and human resources leaders must read to transform their hiring and propel their organization to new heights.

"The vast majority of the workforce in any organization possesses far more talent, intelligence, capability, and creativity than their present jobs require or even allow." - Dr. Stephen R. Covey That's what Talent Unleashed is about—unleashing that unlimited store of potential in people. That's a leader's job. And how does a leader do that job? Through 3 leadership conversations—not just individual events, but ongoing discussions designed to help people give the best they can. In these conversations, leaders trade fear for trust, confusion for clarity, and micromanaging for empowerment. The three vital conversations are: The performance Conversation The Voice Conversation The Clearing the Path Conversation Performance Conversations define roles and set clear goals. Leaders hold people accountable for these roles and goals, thus transforming team members from "managed hirelings" to "trusted partners and teammates." Voice Conversations affirm the worth and potential of each person on a team. Leaders help individuals discover their unique gifts, talents, and abilities and align these gifts, talents, and abilities to the great mission of the organization. It is the process that ignites the inner fire. Clear the Path Conversations turn supervisors into leaders who become sources of help and empower people to succeed in their jobs. Leaders help clear away the obstacles from the success pathway.

Fortune magazine editor Geoff Colvin offers new evidence that top performers in any field are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness, he argues, does not come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades. The key to this is how successful people practice, how the results of practice are analysed and how they learn from their mistakes. This new mindset will change the way reader's think about their jobs and careers, and will inspire them to achieve more in all they do.