According to the US Department of Labor, by 2014, more than one out of every three US workers will be 50 years of age or older. The exodus of baby boomers from the workforce will leave vacancies in critical leadership and other pivotal roles. This raises a crucial question: How does a business make the most of the talent it has to ensure the right skills are in the right place at the right time—no matter how often its needs change? Businesses that build their talent pipeline internally, evaluate alternative work pools, and explore ways to meet their future employee needs will be better positioned than their competitors to face these kinds of challenges.

Today, companies are already beginning to see the profound need for a new approach to maximizing talent—companies like the international technology manufacturer that determines it must address the gap left by the retirement of some 50,000 managers and leaders over the next decade and the successful midsize financial services firm that enters expanding markets and must learn to supplement internal talent with key contractor relationships so that the company does not risk derailing its rapid growth. Or consider that most of the nearly 3,000 new graduates from China (87 percent), the UK (71 percent), and the US (90 percent) surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers indicated they will actively seek out employers whose corporate social responsibility behavior reflects their own.¹

However, as many companies are discovering, reacting and adapting to current talent trends will not be enough. Thinking about talent like a long-term asset and viewing talent as a distinctive competitive attribute are significant shifts away from thinking about talent as a discrete
war that can be won. Anticipating and preparing for future organizational, societal, and marketplace changes—and then weighing their implications on how to secure talent—are aspects of an organizational sustainability mindset. In an effort to gain insight into how businesses
can accomplish this talent objective, a PricewaterhouseCoopers team conducted a scenario planning exercise to envision ways that businesses could evolve to meet future workforce challenges.

The resulting report—Managing tomorrow’s people: The future of work to 2020—presented three business scenarios. In one, big companies reign supreme in attracting top talent and treat social responsibility as optional; in a green model, social responsibility is paramount, and consumers and employees together drive corporate accountability and responsibility; and in the third scenario, localism prevails, and a global network of linked but separate small businesses prospers under entrepreneurial leaders while larger companies flounder.