Leadership and Talent in Asia: How the Best Employers Deliver Extraordinary Performance

"Leadership and Talent in Asia" by Mick Bennett and Andrew Bell deals with how leaders in Asia are able to make the most out of their employees in order to become Best Employers. The authors used empirical findings from Hewitt Associates' Best Employers studies to support their arguments. The book is basically divided into three main sections; Leadership and Talent, Engagement and Execution and A Framework for Sustainability. The first section dealt mainly with the importance of leadership in an organization, how it is crucial to have a clarity of purpose for their employees and the importance of getting the right talent and making sure the talent stays with the organization. The second section dealt mostly with having the right culture and engaged employees will create great business results. In the last section, the authors provided some trends that they foresee (such as diversity in the workforce, blurring of work and personal life, etc) and some implications for the organization and HR. Basically, they concluded that being a Best Employer is not an easy or an overnight thing. Leaders need to align business strategies with people strategies and also to make sure employees' needs are taken care of. It also takes a lot of commitment from leaders to ensure employees are engaged with the organization. This is an easy to read book as the writing is very conversational. There are some HR jargons but I think the authors did a great job explaining them. The content itself is not earth-shaking because what they talked about is nothing new in this field but it is still nevertheless a useful book to have as they are able to support their arguments with Best Employer Studies' results and finding. In addition, I like the fact that the authors were able to illustrate their points with case studies of the Best Employers in Asia.