ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been very fortunate to have worked with many great management thinkers who have impacted my thinking about talent management and organizations. I would like to single out the major ones here. During my graduate school years, I was fortunate to have Lyman Porter as my mentor, supervisor, and friend. This relationship continued for over fifty years, and it greatly influenced my work and thinking about motivation and satisfaction.

My first “job” was at Yale University, where I met Chris Argyris, who had a great influence on my thinking about organizational effectiveness and what makes organizational research useful.

My first senior faculty job was at the University of Michigan. I spent my time there at the Institute for Social Research, where I headed one of its research programs. It was a great learning experience, as I had the chance to work with Robert Kahn and Stanley Seashore and learned about field research and organizational change.

At the University of Southern California, I have had the chance to work with an icon in the field of leadership development and organization, Warren Bennis. I also have had the good fortune to work with some of the best talent management thinkers in the corporate and academic worlds as a result of my role in the Center for Effective Organizations; my relationships with all of them helped me develop many of the ideas that are in this book. While at USC, I have done hundreds of studies on talent management. The results of these studies led to the key principles and practices that are the foundation of the reinvented approach to talent management that I advocate in this book.