Exactly, what are you doing?

Now that I have answered my most popular question (how ARE you?), I thought I should spend some time answering the second most popular question: “Exactly what are you doing?” I am doing my best to make this entry concise!

Fact 1 Johnson & Johnson’s operating model: The Company is decentralized. Each sector, Medical Devices, Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Products, and within each sector, each operating company, operates on its own. J&J is an umbrella organization that owns over 200 companies around the world. The decentralized model allows for each business to learn their market and operate accordingly. And, as we have seen for over 100 years, this has worked. Yet a drawback to this model is the duplications of costs, best practices, and efforts. Therefore, recently, there has been a push to transform the enabling functions (HR, IT, Finance – those similar across all companies) into global functions where best practices, contacts, costs, systems, talent, etc is shared and leveraged.

Fact 2 China Talent: China is an emerging market and the economy is growing fast. When the economy grows, companies grow; and when companies grow, they need more people. Thus, there is strong competition for talent, both in recruiting new and retaining current employees. It is normal for employees to receive many calls from headhunters offering new opportunities, more money, and a better job.

Fact 1+2: Combining together Fact 1 and 2, creates a problem for J&J to strategically tackle the China War for Talent. Each operating company, each sector, is trying to individually recruit and retain employees, rather than leveraging the broader J&J name, and resources. Solution: Create a China Talent Center

China Talent Center: I (along with 2 others) was brought here to help design, plan, and build a China Talent Center (CTC). The CTC will be a centralized specialist group that will provide overall Talent Management strategy and standard practices for all operating companies in China. We will develop a unified approach to attract, develop, retain and deploy top talent so that the organization has a continuous pipeline of capable and ready leaders to achieve our growth and innovation goals in China.

Our work is focused on 3 main areas:
1) Local University recruiting in China for Undergraduate, Graduate, and PhD level candidates. This work will develop a J&J employment brand, build relationships with target schools, and standardize the on-boarding experience for all new hires.
2) Transforming the employee learning and development process, by providing consistent, cross-sector, One J&J training curriculum. The work will provide every employee with critical leadership and functional competency trainings.
3) Building a culture that ensures a pipeline of capable and ready leaders through talent development and organizational development. This work will focus on developing programs for high-potentials as well as creating structured processes for the organization to discuss, understand, and share talent across sectors.

We are still in the planning phase, conducting interviews across J&J China (from the presidents all the way down to employee focus groups) to understand their current state and their desired future state. From here, we will do a gap analysis and prepare recommendations. Once our recommendations are approved (early June), we will begin to execute on our early quick wins (what we can deliver in 2008) as well as create plan for 2009 and 2010.

Does that make sense?