Cultivating Your Minor League Talent For A Major League Call Up

A quick look at sports as a business. Teams are only successful if the right players are in the right positions. The NFL and NBA gets fresh players mostly from the college ranks through a yearly draft, throw a lot of money at a prospect, and hope they get a return before there rookie contract is up and they test the free agent market. But Major League Baseball drafts player to play in the minor league to hone skills and see if what are essentially kids are really ready for the pressure of prime time coverage and the grind of a 162 game season. The minor leagues are the basis of the baseball farm system that allows teams to pull from its own resources of players already in tune with the systems and cultures at a moments notice to fill a void at any position. Now lets go back to the world of you average corporation. What would seem like a simple concept of recruiting good talent and growing your own successors from within this pool of talent isn't. At least not in the execution. This comes from an article by Ann Marsh in this month's Business 2.0 Magazine titled, "Why Companies Overlook Their Own Talent," documenting how companies aren't making cultivating talent a top priority. The result in many cases is serious problems when its time to begin the executive succession process, a serious neglect of potential leaders at lower and middle levels of management, and the tendency to lose out on prospects who see greater potentials for opportunity at competing companies. The article lists various companies who got the secession plans outlying home grown talent wrong (like NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE), Gateway, Inc. (NYSE:GTW)) and right...eventually (like Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE:TSN), Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX)). - Why Companies Overlook Their Own Talent (Business 2.0) Baseball Express