The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else

December 8, 2011
George Anders

How can we sort out the mysteries of talent? How do venture capitalists pick winners, the FBI hostage rescue team find agents, or Hollywood casting agents size up actors. Anyone trying to build a great organization faces the same basic challenges. We all struggle to tell really outstanding prospects from ones who look great on paper but then fail on the job. And how to spot the candidates who don’t look as good on paper but might still deliver extraordinary performance. The good news is that anyone can hone the ability to recognize greatness.

Speaker Details

George Anders is one of the founding writers at Bloomberg View, specializing in opinion pieces about the U.S. economy, financial markets and innovation. He spent two decades as a top feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for national reporting. He also has written for Fast Company, The New York Times, Parade, forbes.com, Smart Money, and Harvard Business Review. In addition to writing The Rare Find, George is the author of Merchants of Debt: KKR and the Mortgaging of American Business; Health Against Wealth: HMOs and the Breakdown of Medical Trust, and Perfect Enough: Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard.