Talent: The Market Cap Multiplier

By Ram Charan and Anish Batlaw

How do some Companies Multiply their Market Cap several times over?

Learning to build a high performing talent engine – today’s strategic imperative!

 

In this book, General Atlantic’s Operating Partner Anish Batlaw and veteran business advisor and New York Times bestselling author Ram Charan, show you how to build and incentivize management teams that can multiply enterprise value several times over in 4-5 years.

 

No matter how high your company’s growth goal is, you’ll get from here to there by learning from this book’s riveting narrative of the high-stakes personnel decisions and bold actions taken by CEOs, investors, and boards who grew six real—and world-class—companies, ranging from ecommerce startups to major corporations like Johnson & Johnson. Told from both authors’ firsthand vantage point inside each company, and from Batlaw’s active role in shaping their outcomes, TALENT offers a rare inside look at how shareholder value is created when CEOs move with speed and accuracy to get the right leadership teams in place. 

 

How can you be sure that your company can grow its value as much as these six companies did? By learning from the versatile and replicable methodology presented in this book, which has worked effectively across geographies, cultures, and sectors.  TALENT is the answer. Now is the time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Release date: Jan 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781646870868

Ram Charan

Ram Charan, who learned the art and science of business in his family's shoe shop, has consulted for many well-known companies, including GE, KLM and DuPont and is a bestselling author. He recently bought his first flat in Dallas, Texas, aged 67.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

TALENT: THE ENGINE OF VALUE CREATION

WILLIAM E. FORD, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, GENERAL ATLANTIC

General Atlantic has enjoyed a long history of success as a pioneering growth equity investor by applying a distinctive formula, enabling the firm to create exceptional multiples in value by building up great companies. The firm was founded by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Chuck Feeney, who had previously cofounded the airport retailer Duty Free Shoppers. In 1980, he established General Atlantic as a direct investment entity to support visionary founders, as well as magnify his ability to give back and achieve his mission to give away his accumulated wealth in his lifetime.

In 1982, Chuck formally established Atlantic Philanthropies. The Foundation operated anonymously for its first fifteen years because of Chuck’s desire for flexibility and a low profile. In its thirty-eight years of existence, Atlantic Philanthropies provided close to $10 billion in grants, creating opportunity and promoting greater fairness and equity in communities around the world. Chuck has said before, I see little reason to delay giving when so much good can be achieved through supporting worthwhile causes today. This is the guiding principle of the Giving While Living philosophy that has become an inspiration to so many philanthropists and still permeates the culture at GA today.

The founding team at General Atlantic, including Steve Denning, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus, and Dave Hodgson, Vice Chairman, believed deeply in the power of technology and its ubiquitous potential. Our firm’s strength is partnering with high-performing entrepreneurs and leadership teams and scaling up promising global businesses, investing in innovative products, new markets, and, importantly, people. It is a uniquely optimistic philosophy, a commitment to creating durable business successes that enrich their numerous stakeholders, customers, employees and executives, communities, and investors.

Even with GA’s strong track record, Bill Ford, our CEO since 2007, reflected on that formula a few years ago and felt we could do even better. His objectives focused on what his long experience in the industry told him was one of the most elusive yet consequential—and in many ways underappreciated—elements in the success of GA’s portfolio businesses: talent.

Bill believed that, in many instances, it was taking too long to install the right leadership teams at portfolio companies, or that the companies were having to change leadership multiple times before finding the right fit, costing them valuable time and diminishing returns. The data clearly supported his views. The solution, Bill decided, was to invest in building a comprehensive, data-driven, and disciplined approach to identifying, assessing, and nurturing high-performing talent and building high-performing cultures in a consistent way. His fundamental insight, borne out by an analysis of our performance over the years, was that talent was the key engine of value creation, particularly in today’s challenging, and rapidly changing, knowledge economy. Getting the right leaders in place quickly and more consistently needed to become a core discipline for the firm.

I had a deep conviction, particularly with growth companies, that talent was the single most significant variable in differentiating outstanding performance from just good success, Bill said in an interview. Before, we focused on having the right investment, the right price and deal structure. But we’ve learned talent is as important as all of those things. By his own account, Bill has become something of an evangelist for talent and has taken a series of concrete steps that have been transformative for the firm and its