Talent management is a preoccupation of many senior human resources practitioners and certain boardrooms. The importance of people has long been recognised in the speeches of CEOs and alluded to in corporate annual reports. A new report suggests that, for many organisations, the challenges which talent management seeks to address are real and pressing, but the approaches they adopt ensure their efforts are doomed to disappoint. Many approaches to talent management are unaffordable. Companies engage in bidding wars to recruit people considered especially talented or high flyers. As the supply of identifiable and deployable talent dries up, organisations move on to compete for those thought to have 'potential' in an uncertain future. Having talented individuals on the payroll is one thing, leveraging their capabilities to secure competitive advantage is another. Applications examined demonstrate more practical and cost-effective approaches can boost performance, cut costs, speed up responses, reduce stress and ensure compliance.