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Leadership, Talent & Education

The secrets of Asia's education success

Can one region's recipes be replicated elsewhere?
Denis McCauley | December 7th 2012 | @EG_LeadershipTE

In our recently published global education index – one component of The Learning Curve programme of research – three Asian nations (South Korea, Japan and Singapore) and one territory (Hong Kong) take four of the top five places. (Finland occupies the pole position.) Why, we ask in an accompanying article, are Asian nations such strong education performers? Students in East Asia, including in China – notably Shanghai, whose 15-year-olds topped the most recent PISA tests – and in Singapore frequently outperform Western counterparts in international tests.

Such strong results naturally lead policymakers and experts to ask, What are the secrets of Asia's success? Our research suggests that there are a number of common factors, although not all of them can readily be applied by educational systems in other countries.

Leadership, Talent & Education

Improving education: what really matters

A comparative analysis of countries' education performance
Denis McCauley | November 28th 2012 | @EG_LeadershipTE

Many experts see education as a black box: inputs such as government spending or teacher training go in, with the hope that positive outputs such as improved student test results or higher graduation rates come out at the other end. How the inputs are turned into outputs, however, is nearly impossible to predict. This makes it all the more difficult to compare country performance in education, and to identify universal factors that lead to improved education results – and better socio-economic outcomes – wherever they are applied.

Leadership, Talent & Education

Unlocking human potential

Many firms around the world cannot fulfil their potential because they are failing to harness the skills and experience of their workforce.
Zoe Tabary | November 1st 2012 | @EG_LeadershipTE

Inadequacies in talent management are hurting the competitiveness and financial performance of firms. According to a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in July 2012, 43% of senior executives partially attribute the failure of their firms to achieve key financial targets to ineffective talent management, and two in five say it has also reduced their company's ability to innovate. Clearly, short-sighted HR policies are hitting companies where it hurts. The opportunity cost of not investing enough resources to talent development is also huge. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group, a management consultancy, found that companies that are “highly skilled” in core HR practices achieve up to 3.5 times the revenue growth and as much as twice the profit margins of less capable companies.

Leadership, Talent & Education

Alignment and social involvement in talent management

Speaker and guest blogger John Ingham reviews the Talent Management Summit
Jon Ingham | August 3rd 2012 | @EG_LeadershipTE

As a talent / human capital management blogger I get invited to lots of different conferences. However, given the quality of the agenda, experience of speakers and seniority of attendees, Economist Conferences' Talent Management Summit is definitely one of my favourites.

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Leadership, Talent & Education

From good to great (or very slightly above average)

What impact does the choice of CEO have on a company's future performance?
Veronica Rawlings | May 31st 2012 | @EG_LeadershipTE

Who’d be a CEO?  In this week’s Economist, the Schumpeter column highlighted the increasingly short tenure of today’s chief executives. This got me wondering: what are boards hoping to achieve by replacing CEOs so frequently? And what effect does a CEO have on the success of the business?

Business Strategy

Drucker's black box: how can we measure knowledge worker productivity?

Chris Webber | March 16th 2012 | @MgThinking

Management thinkers and economists pay a lot of attention to productivity, and for good reason. The ability to drive increased value from a fixed level of inputs is one of the key features of effective management and it has underpinned economic growth since the industrial revolution. But as knowledge workers play an ever bigger role in the economy, how can we go about measuring, and then improving, their productivity?

In some industries, such as manufacturing, the task of measuring the productivity of individual workers is reasonably straightforward because managers can simply divide the number of hours a person works by the number of widgets they produce.

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