ASSESSING TALENT POTENTIAL - A SUCCESSION PIPELINE
ASSESSING TALENT POTENTIAL - A SUCCESSION PIPELINE - 2026 EDITIONS
Assessing Talent Potential opens with a distinction most organizations still get wrong. Performance appraisals, skills assessments, and competency frameworks all share a common orientation. They look backward at demonstrated behavior against a known standard. This book asks a different question throughout. It asks not what a person has already shown but what a person can become under conditions that have not yet arrived, and it builds a full working system around answering that question with evidence rather than impression.
Every organization eventually confronts the same gap. It can measure what an employee has already done. It struggles to measure what that employee is capable of becoming.
Assessing Talent Potential closes that gap. Dr. Ganesh Shermon builds a complete, working system for identifying, developing, and retaining the people an organization will need in roles that do not yet exist in their current form. The book moves from the Potential Talent Center, where ambiguity rather than clarity becomes the instrument of assessment, through the full discipline of assessing potential itself, into the Potential Pipeline that turns individual judgment into sustained organizational flow. It grounds succession planning in evidence rather than replacement charts, defines the talent competencies that predict success across changing demands, and delivers a full working toolkit of In Basket exercises, case studies, and simulations drawn from real organizational practice. A closing chapter on reward design confronts the failure every talent system eventually risks, the confirmed high potential employee lost simply because compensation never caught up to what the assessment already knew.
Written for practitioners, Assessing Talent Potential gives HR leaders, consultants, and succession planning teams both the reasoning and the working instruments to build a leadership pipeline on the basis of behavioral evidence, algorithms and judgements.
Dr. Ganesh Shermon (XLRI, MIT Sloan, MSU), now an author, consultant, academic, has spent forty years building and running HR Solutions including talent assessment and development practices for organizations across banking, technology, manufacturing and professional services, including senior leadership roles at KPMG and Andersen. He now leads RiverForest Connections and Advisory Channels, working across Dallas, Toronto and Mumbai. He is the author of more than twenty books on competency based human resource management, talent assessment and, the role of agentic HR, algorithms and AI in judging human capability. His latest publications include "Agentic Human Resources, Agentic Recruitment - The Recruiter's Dream, The Candidate's Nightmare, The Verdict Machine - How AI is learning to Judge Us, Measuring Capability - From Assessments to Algorithms, “Unlock Talent Leadership”.
