The High Potential’s Advantage: Get Noticed, Impress Your Bosses, and Become a Top Leader

The High Potential’s Advantage has a set of innovative, even fascinating approaches to finding and classifying characteristics of high-potential employees. The authors’ proposed five factors are 1 – Situation sensing (adapting to your boss); 2 – Talent accelerating (finding the best team, and quickly); 3 – Career piloting (navigating complex paths); 4 – Complexity translating (creating compelling narratives from untidy information); and 5 – Catalytic learning (foundational to all factors: proactive and persistent). The insights around complexity translating are worth the price of the book.

The book has been highly praised for its new insights into performance assessment. The material includes detailed explanations of the existing managerial world. Thoughts about performance assessments, talent reviews, and corporate culture sometimes overwhelm, and points about specific factors, the subject of the book, are like a burst of fresh air. Summary sections could have tied factors much more to current practice, maybe via tables. Nevertheless, when people are trying to communicate bold and consequential new ideas, not everything can be done at once. I look forward to a more narrowly scoped, systematized presentation of specific recommendations about how the five factors can advance the nurturing of employees in high-performance organizations.