"We spend all our time on people. The day we screw up the people thing, this company is over." - Jack Welch, GE


You've no doubt heard the old real estate adage that the three most important things about a property are Location, Location, and Location. The CSS management philosophy is similar. CSS strongly believes the three most important things about a seller, a sales team, or an entire company, are Talent, Talent, and Talent. Of course, you need a fine product, a focused strategy, broad resources and capabilities, effective training, and hard work... but without talent, your results will never rise above mediocre. Without talented people, all the other elements you have painstakingly put in place to maximize sales will not produce the revenue and profit you expect.

Most organizations and most managers, sort to their people's deficiencies, focus on those weaknesses, send their people off for remedial training, and use compensation plans to bribe those poor folks into doing the very things they're not naturally built to do! CSS takes the opposite approach. We believe the manager's role is not "to put in what God left out, but to bring out what God put in."

We believe there is no limit to what a person can accomplish if we understand and focus on what they can do, place them in jobs that require those specific talents and behaviors, and help them to build and hone those talents every year. When people are well matched to the job requirements, they naturally behave exactly as the manager wants them to, even when the manager isn't looking! Everyone has weaknesses, too. The CSS Talent Focused Management approach is to work around those weaknesses, rather than to improve them.

The CSS paradigm of management is encapsulated in The CSS Management Sphere of Influence. On the Nature Side of the Sphere, we recognize that talents are a given, that each individual has a unique configuration of talents and non-talents, and that we cannot create or change either talents or non-talents. Our sphere of influence gives us the power only to recognize, understand, fit, build, and use the talents that exist. So on the Nature Side, our job is to Fit the Talent to the Task, and we do so via the recruitment, selection, retention, and promotion decisions we make.

On the Nurture Side of the Sphere, our responsibility to both the individual and the company is to Invest in the Talent. Here, too, are four principal management functions within our sphere of influence: relationship, expectation, feedback, and compensation. As with the four management functions on the Nature Side, CSS offers extensive systems and practices to assist managers in making astute investments and producing an outstanding return. When the manager fits the talent correctly to the job, and invests in the talent, employee and customer satisfaction scores rise in tandem, turnover goes down, and productivity and profit soar above the norms.

CSS introduces clients to this method of management in an intensive, hands-on Talent Focused Management (TFM) Workshop, at which participants learn the systems and practices required to make it come alive in their own organization. All TFM workshops also introduce participants to the CSS® Talent Plus®* Candidate Profiling System.

CSS clients typically make frequent use of telephone consulting services from their assigned CSS Consultant or other members of the CSS professional staff; the clock doesn't run and no invoice arrives! We get involved in a broad range of issues, from recruitment and selection, to analyzing performance problems, to designing custom compensation plans.

Robert S. McNamara, the whiz-kid former president of Ford Motor Company and Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, stated that "Management is, in the end, the most creative of all the arts, for its medium is human talent itself."


* A registered trademark of Talent Plus, Inc.