How and When to Leverage an Interim Executive - Talent Management magazine
Talent Management magazine, The Business of Talent Management "How and When to Leverage an Interim Executive
By Cindy Lubitz -  4/15/14
Interim executives can prove effective in a business era of rapid change and needed agility. Still, there are plenty of factors organizations should consider.
6 Steps to Leverage an Interim Executive
Are you hiring an executive to provide interim leadership while seeking a permanent executive for the long term? Follow these steps.
Fast Company’s 1997 article by Daniel Pink, “Free Agent Nation,” reads like an Orwellian novel with its prediction of the morphing workplace. The self-employed, the independent contractors and the temps who make up Pink’s working definition of the free agent have now progressed to the very top of the career ladder. Interim — or temporary executives — are highly specialized professionals employed to quickly turn businesses around or provide a shot in the arm while a long-term executive is being sought.
But what is the business case for interim executives? At the macro level, the answer is business agility. Interims allow organizations to quickly add needed expertise to respond to market changes or capitalize on specific opportunities. For medium to large corporations, it also gives them the chance to act like their startup competitors, moving quickly to take advantage of innovation and sidestep prolonged, permanent staffing protocols.
The follow on book to Daniel Pink's "Free Agent Nation according to critics and analysts --- the journey of baby boomers to free agency.
 Michael Hammer (aka Hib) Hits The Nail on the Head With Boomerville,March 6, 2014
This review is from:Â BOOMERVILLE: Getting Off the Corporate Merry-Go-Round: Baby Boomers Leaving Permanent Employment by the Millions (Kindle Edition)
Boomerville: Getting Off the Corporate Merry Ground is a very accessible account and personal testimonial of the extraordinary shifts that are now occurring in the way businesses and people will be working together in future years.
In my work as a researcher and analyst associated with Staffing Industry Analysts and other organizations dealing with the subject, I am very familiar with these trends and developments. Perhaps the average person has some idea about them, but probably does not find the professional industry literature about these complex developments very accessible. And I think that's where Boomerville comes in.
Baby boomers today may remember almost 15 years ago Daniel Pink's book, Free Agent Nation. At that time, it was probably noted, perhaps read, but filed away in some mental archive. But now, with time having passed, people having aged, and a major recession and financial crisis not long over, babyboomers may find the subject more salient and directly relevant to their own lives and would like to understand it further. It is in this way that I see Boomerville being a Free Agent Nation for the early 21st Century (and since Free Agent Nation was first published, there hasn't been another book that has taken on this particular subject "head on," as Boomerville does).
I would also say that Boomerville not only points to and discusses the general trend toward a more "independent, freelance" workforce, it brings together all of the complex parts of these workforce developments (including the shifts in corporate contingent workforce practices since the time of Daniel Pink's book, the current economic and political realities, and the current and emerging challenges that we are now starting witness in labor markets, et al).
Boomerville offers a sobering picture about the state of the labor market, but also holds out great optimism for what it can be and how a transformed labor market can strengthen the national economy (if the vision and the reality are not shunned, but rather embraced by people, business leaders, and perhaps most of policy makers.
The title Boomerville may suggest an unattractive destination for today's baby boomers, but the book actually points to a prosperous future for everyone, including older workers, if we can manage to get it right.
The first step in getting it right is understanding the situation. For this reason, I think Boomerville can be an extremely interesting and informative read--not so much for workforce management professionals who live and breath this complicated evolving subject-- but rather (thankfully) for the countless people, baby boomers, business people, et al who really do have a major need to understand and that thinking about the shifts and opportunities that Boomerville describes.
