As a management consultant and former human resources executive the issue of staff development and “succession” has always fascinated me. I see it as an absolutely critical factor in the long term success of a business or organization of any kind. The interesting thing is that it has been a consideration for hundreds of years and I am not convinced we do much better than we did four hundred years ago. There are exceptions, but not many.

I work primarily in the fields of employee engagement and change management so for the last 10 years or more I have been watching a couple of things that we only seem to be recently recognizing as threats to our economy.

The first is the exponentially increasing costs of delivering health care. In 2010 it is estimated that 12% of GDP (gross domestic product) will be spent on delivering health care. At current rates that is expected to climb to over 16% by 2020. There are a couple of things about that that should be concerning you:

I am pretty big into branding. I don’t mean “branding” in the traditional sense of logos, and trademarks and the way we traditionally think about it. When I talk about branding I mean it in the sense that people inside and outside the organization are very clear about what we do, who we are, and what is important to us.

I think we have a bit of a sustainability crisis that is “hiding” in plain sight. I remember when I started working in and around the area of employee engagement (we didn’t call it that then) over ten years ago. I felt in my gut and could show anecdotally that there was a relationship between how people felt about their work and the organization they worked for and how they performed.