I actually had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Jac briefly at our exhibit booth and I was really glad to see that he was the closing keynote at the show.  I certainly didn’t see every speech or every session, but I felt the "big thinking" was somehow missing from the show. Dr. Jac fixed that right up (even if it was basically a pitch for his new service).

The presentation was fast moving, and far ranging, but the main idea was that talent is the core of any organization and should be optimized, leveraged and aligned for maximum results. Unalignment is the "common cold of business" – a drain on productivity and results.

He quoted Abe Maslow, who in 1964 said "If everybody concerned is absolutely clear about the goals and directives and far purposes of the organization practically all other questions then become simple technical questions of fitting means to ends."

He belives that other disciplines (sales, marketing, finance) all have metrics they work against. Execs have the Balanced Scorecard, Finance has Accounting, Production has Quality and Sales and Marketing have CRM. But HR doesn’t have anything, at least until now.

And so the talk was really about using his new metric for HR, dubbed TMI, Talent Management Intelligence, as a framework for starting to solve business problems through talent management.

My favorite quote came from Dr. Jac himself: "To think of people as an expense is so stupid it makes me want to throw up. People are hired to add value."