He views the importance of having both as entrepreneurs who can continue to dream, but without any manager or executive, those dreams will remain dreams because there will no one to work and turn these dreams into reality. In short, the company needs the vision of entrepreneurs and the sound management of executives and managers.

Today the Aditya Birla Group also faces the same talent shortage problems as everyone else. In its hiring efforts, which transcend various locations and sectors, it faces a variety of local market realities such as compliance with local labor laws and understanding of the local business practices, cultures, customs, and social norms. It has not been easy to find the right talent in today's marketplace. The company plans to end this perpetual total dependence on the outside marketplace for finding the right talent of high potential employees.

In Asia there is lack of people with good experience in sectors such as retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, and so on. A lot of these "sectional" skills have dissipated because there are other job opportunities available for people with these kinds of skills. Either they lose interest along the way, or they were not given the right training and job exposures. Instead of improving their skill sets to become specialists, they eventually settle for job opportunities that require general skills. This is where the skill shortage in these sectors has become more and more acute in recent times with the economic boom that started in Asia some years back.

The Aditya Birla Group embarked on a long-term strategy to grow its own talent. What that means is that the company invests the time and money to coach, mentor, and prepare these special selected cream of the crop from its management cadre, or even from the high potential employees, based on recruitment schemes and a well-planned succession plan.

The Aditya Birla Group then decided to test this specially designed model in the internal audit division. The company proceeded to select the best students from a few reputable institutions of higher learning and universities in the commerce, accounting, and Masters programs. These selected individuals are then trained in the accounting firm and in the internal audit division based on a specially designed curriculum that is customised to the business requirements and corporate culture.

To ensure that the selected individuals are fully exposed to the practical side of the business, a shadow program exists for these individuals to be coached and mentored by selected superiors. At the end of this 12-month concentrated and customised skills development and training program, the company believes about 80 per cent of these individuals would be a good fit into the company for the specific areas of skills that they learned from the intensive training.

Coupled with the structured talent management framework with career paths and behavioural leadership models, including the personal involvement of the Chairman and senior management teams in its talent incubation efforts, it is easy for the company to be recognised as an employer of choice. In fact, in our local campuses, we are ranked number seven in the top ten attractive employers.

Ninety per cent of the skills and talent are developed from homegrown ideas, whereas the actual delivery and design to improve and to fine-tune these ideas are made successful in joint partnership with our partners who have the unique capabilities and value-add. Without such complementary working partnerships, we would never have attained the success in our own talent nurturing efforts.

Addressing the main root causes of the acute talent shortage problem in Asia, the Aditya Birla Group's view is that the relatively poor command of the English language by employable graduates is far from what is expected of the multinational companies operating in Asia. This is especially acute in most countries in Asia where the English language is not the mother tongue, or is not the first language, or is not a widely spoken language in people's daily lives, for example, in Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea.

The second root cause is that Asians seem to find the Western countries more attractive. So the Aditya Birla Group needs to make Asia more attractive to the Asians. Perhaps it is the tradition-bound thinking that what is from the West is always the best and that Asia is somehow inferior to the West. Asians who have gone abroad to the Western countries are reluctant to return to their home countries, for example, China or India, to serve their own countries when the Asian economic boom happened.

That being said, the standards of living, infrastructure, housing, sanitation, education, and so on need to improve to international standards and quality. When these standards and quality improve to international benchmarks, the backflow of good Asian talent will rake place from the Western countries. This is a good time as the United States and European economic slowdown will slowly drive good talent to return to Asia. At the same time, with the push from the economic turmoil in the West, we need to ensure that there is the pull from Asia. For example, the quality of education in countries like Japan and India can be strengthened and modernised in an effort to adapt it to international standards.

Finally, the concept of branding also has an important part to play in the whole scheme of things. The Aditya Birla Group's perspective of branding is interesting. It is what the company is — all the intangibles — and it is the experience every employee gets to go through while in employment, so it is difficult to describe it succinctly. People want to work for companies with great reputation and experience.

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