Here are 100 books that Talent on Demand fans have personally recommended if you like
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The future of talent management is now. I’m a teacher, consultant, and board member who is deeply interested in the social and economic impact of the freelance revolution. Millions of people around the world are now working for themselves as independent professionals or “solopreneurs”. Millions more are taking on freelance assignments to augment their income or increase their expertise and experience. Technology makes it possible for professionals in many fields to work remotely and free themselves from the limitations of their local economy. These benefits organizations by offering greater access to talent and gives professionals greater access to opportunity.
This book brought global survey data, case examples, and thought leadership together in recommending a new approach to HR that has since become a standard: driving the organizational capabilities the business needs to flourish competitively, and deliver superior value to customers. Six critical HR competencies based on research are described and best practices shared. The new model of HR proposed in this book has been broadly adopted.
"This definitive work on HR competencies provides ideas and tools that help HR professionals develop their career and make their organization effective." -Edward E. Lawler III, Professor, University of Southern California
"This book is a crucial blueprint of what it takes to succeed. A must have for every HR professional." -Lynda Gratton, Professor, London Business School
"One single concept changed the HR world forever: 'HR business partner'. Through consistent cycles of research and practical application, Dave and his team have produced and update the most comprehensive set of HR competencies ever." -Horacio Quiros, President, World Federation of People Management Associations…
The future of talent management is now. I’m a teacher, consultant, and board member who is deeply interested in the social and economic impact of the freelance revolution. Millions of people around the world are now working for themselves as independent professionals or “solopreneurs”. Millions more are taking on freelance assignments to augment their income or increase their expertise and experience. Technology makes it possible for professionals in many fields to work remotely and free themselves from the limitations of their local economy. These benefits organizations by offering greater access to talent and gives professionals greater access to opportunity.
Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson changed the way we think about career development through their research and what they called the four stages of development. It has influenced career development and talent management practices in companies around the world. Deeply accessible and practical, the four stages are fully described and the book is rich in application tools, methods and best practices.
The future of talent management is now. I’m a teacher, consultant, and board member who is deeply interested in the social and economic impact of the freelance revolution. Millions of people around the world are now working for themselves as independent professionals or “solopreneurs”. Millions more are taking on freelance assignments to augment their income or increase their expertise and experience. Technology makes it possible for professionals in many fields to work remotely and free themselves from the limitations of their local economy. These benefits organizations by offering greater access to talent and gives professionals greater access to opportunity.
Quinn’s book should be read by every organization and talent specialist. He reminds us through both data and case study that radical change requires a transformational mindset combined with what he calls strategic incrementalism. His book provides a rich mix of examples, tools, and methods for continuously improving the organization and workforce to meet current and likely future challenges.
The future of talent management is now. I’m a teacher, consultant, and board member who is deeply interested in the social and economic impact of the freelance revolution. Millions of people around the world are now working for themselves as independent professionals or “solopreneurs”. Millions more are taking on freelance assignments to augment their income or increase their expertise and experience. Technology makes it possible for professionals in many fields to work remotely and free themselves from the limitations of their local economy. These benefits organizations by offering greater access to talent and gives professionals greater access to opportunity.
In a recent survey of HR leaders, 80% mentioned that they were continuing to organize their HR department based on the “Ulrich” model. Is there a more impressive recommendation for the impact of this book, and Dave’s research and writing? In HR Champions, Ulrich points out the importance of three types of HR work: business partners, specialists, and shared services. In a recent HR Management article, that model was expanded to include a fourth category: project management. Technology is obviously a much bigger factor in HR work since 1996 when the book was first published. But, this oldie but goodie has aged extraordinarily well and continues to be relevant and insightful. If you are in HR or interested in talent management at scale, this book has to be on your list.
The author argues that the roles of human resource professionals must be redefined to meet the competitive challenges organizations face today and into the future. He provides a framework that identifies four distinct roles of human resource professionals: strategic player, administrative expert, employee champion, and change agent. He includes many examples to demonstrate that human resource professionals must operate in all four areas simultaneously in order to contribute fully. He urges a shift of these professionals' mentality from "what I do" to "what I deliver" and makes specific recommendations for how individuals in human resources can partner with line managers…
Inequality and fairness are basic issues in human conflict and cooperation that have long fascinated me. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, I was confronted with the extreme racial segregation of schools and neighborhoods. My Catholic upbringing taught me to cherish the cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance, and my education in political economy taught me that markets can fairly and efficiently allocate resources, when legal power is evenly shared. My formal education culminated in a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, which led me to my current roles: Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Principal Economist at Gallup. I care deeply about the social conditions that create cooperation and conflict.
To understand why some workers are paid more than others, you have to understand how skills are valued and rewarded in the labor market, and how that has changed, as the economy has evolved.
Focused on the United States, Katz and Goldin provide a sweeping overview of how education leads to skills and income, drawing on the most well-established theories in economics. It misses some important causes of inequality, but is essential for understanding the one of the deepest economic forces governing wages: the supply and demand of human capital.
This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the…
I have always asked why too many times I am told. From my early days studying psychology to working for Myspace out in LA and now with clients in London, my fondness for understanding what drives change, inertia, and pain has always been a focus. I knew from an early age that understanding people and how they are affected by, use and fear change and technology would be a useful skill to focus on. Doing so has enabled me to work with big brands, and smart cookies and interview some of the best minds of our generation. I recently brought everything under one roof, TBD Group, to help people see around corners.
I am a huge fan of making complex things simple and understandable, Kevin does this superbly well with Futureproof. From putting the nine rules on the cover to explaining each in a way that makes you shun the Hollywood stereotypes that are burned into our brains, the book explores how AI and automation will change the way we do business and beyond. It’s a must-read.
'Kevin Roose provides a clear, compelling strategy for surviving the next wave of technology with our jobs - and souls - intact... Futureproof is the survival guide you need' Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
In this timely, counterintuitive, and highly practical guide to the age of A.I. and automation, a New York Times technology columnist argues that the key to success is making yourself more human, not less.
The machines are here. After decades of sci-fi doomsaying and marketing hype, advanced A.I. and automation technologies have leapt out of research labs and Silicon Valley engineering departments and into the…
I've always been interested in trying to make the world a better place, increasing the well-being of families and nations, and not just in making private profit for myself or for some employer. In working as a consultant on education and development in 22 different countries, many of them poor and developing such as Nepal, Malawi, and Indonesia, I've seen a lot of poverty and inequality, and have also come to see how education, including its effects on fertility rates, health, longevity, the survival of democratic institutions and so forth and especially its financing is at the heart of making lives better, especially for children who are the future of each family and each nation.
This book is a classic. Gary Becker received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992 for his work on Human Capital, (as had TW Schultz).
This book was near the beginning of Gary Becker’s very productive life and launched a well-known wave of research and innovation that has by now had major impacts on many branches of economics such labor economics, international trade, economic growth, home economics, and now economic development.
He received the Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush at the White House in 2007 where President Bush said “Professor Becker has shown that economic principles do not just exist in theory.” Gary Becker died in 2014. He was 83.
This is a ‘must read’ for any person seriously interested in Human Capital, Labor Economics, the Economics of Education, or other fields that have been or are being revolutionized by human capital theory and empirical research. For others…
"Human Capital" is Becker's study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Becker looks at the effects of investment in education on earnings and employment, and shows how his theory measures the incentive for such investment, as well as the costs and returns from college and high school education. Another part of the study explores the relation between age and earnings. This edition includes four new chapters, covering recent ideas about human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labour, economic considerations within the family, and inequality in earnings.
I grew up outside of Flint, Michigan, which during my lifetime went from being a pretty nice place to live to being a perpetual basket case that still doesn’t have clean water. I’ve always been very concerned with the question of what went wrong, and very early in my graduate education, it became clear to me that the neoliberal agenda that started under Reagan has been at the root of the economic rot and destruction that has afflicted Flint and so many other places. That personal connection, combined with my background in theology, makes me well-suited to talk about how political belief systems “hook” us, even when they hurt us.
More than most authors on neoliberalism, Brown takes it seriously as a philosophy and worldview that aims to reshape human society and our individual sense of self. Drawing on classic philosophers like Aristotle, Marx, and Arendt, she argues that neoliberalism is hollowing our sense of what it means to be human by turning us all into hyper-competitive, self-marketing, self-branding drones. I wind up arguing with her a lot in my book, but whether you wind up agreeing or disagreeing with her, she’s an essential point of reference.
Neoliberal rationality ― ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture ― remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled.
The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive…
I've always been interested in trying to make the world a better place, increasing the well-being of families and nations, and not just in making private profit for myself or for some employer. In working as a consultant on education and development in 22 different countries, many of them poor and developing such as Nepal, Malawi, and Indonesia, I've seen a lot of poverty and inequality, and have also come to see how education, including its effects on fertility rates, health, longevity, the survival of democratic institutions and so forth and especially its financing is at the heart of making lives better, especially for children who are the future of each family and each nation.
Theodore Schultz, a personal friend, was President of the American Economics Association, and Head of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago.
He is generally regarded as the father of Human Capital theory and analysis, is the one who hired Gary Becker from Columbia University, and his Presidential Address to the American Economics Association in 1960 is widely cited as the beginning of the human capital revolution in economics.
It transformed the fields of economic growth where modern endogenous growth models are currently the mainstream, the fields of labor economics, home economics, the economics of education, and is in the process of revolutionizing the field of economic development (with ‘endogenous development’).
This highly readable and interesting book will give the reader a basic understanding of human capital analysis. Its roots are in Becker’s Economic Journal article on “the economics of the allocation of human time”.
I’m a serial entrepreneur who’s built and sold several startups. I’ve been helping non-venture-backed startup founders since 2005 and now I run the first startup accelerator for bootstrappers, called TinySeed. I’ve invested in 57 startups, but I don’t believe the only way to start a SaaS company is to raise money. I host the most popular podcast for bootstrappers, called Startups for the Rest of Us. I also run the most well-known conference and online community for non-venture-track SaaS founders, called MicroConf.
There are many traction channels that we can try to leverage as founders and oftentimes it’s difficult to know which channel will work best. This book provides you with the framework to methodically discover and test different traction channels effectively and systematically grow your startup. If nothing else, this book is a great list of marketing approaches that you can use as a starting point for your growth efforts.
In Traction, serial entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares give startups the tools for generating explosive customer growth
'Anyone trying to break through to new customers can use this smart, ambitious book' Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction.
Building a successful company is hard. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn't the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It's how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers.