I attended the Taleo customer conference last week in Chicago where CEO Michael Gregoire in his opening session speech boasted about Taleo’s recent acquisition of Learn.com, a $26 million private learning company that Taleo had just bought for $125 million. (Wow!) He admitted he had never been pro learning management systems but that Taleo’s customers’ expressed learning needs had made him a convert to the importance of having an LMS.

Throughout the first day of the conference, many Taleo executives talked about how the acquisition made Taleo a complete talent management company with strong recruiting, which is their heritage along with performance, compensation, and now learning to round out their offerings. This is exactly what I recommend in my research, "The Four Pillars Of Talent Management".

If we are going to have organizations that put a premium on skilled, knowledgeable, and happy employees, there must be a seamless integration among these essential components. Recruiting and onboarding become a process of hiring the right people, ramping them up quickly to full productivity while integrating them into the company culture and putting new hires into an employee performance management plan linked to appropriate learning activities. By linking performance to compensation and non-monetary rewards, employees are more likely to feel that they are valued members of the company team.

Just when you were getting your mind around Social Computing, Forrester has concluded that Social Computing is a steppingstone along the path to the empowered era. At least that’s one of the findings you’ll discover in the new book Empowered, co-authored by Groundswell author Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, published today by Harvard Business Review Press.

My research team’s charter here at Forrester is to “Predict and quantify growth and disruption in the tech industry.” That means we’re always on the lookout for the next big thing(s), whether that’s technology, economic, or business trends that will change the direction of the industry’s fortunes. So we spend a lot of time on primary research, understanding the requirements and priorities of key business technology constituencies like IT organizations, business leaders, and employees within businesses large and small.

And many of our clients in the tech industry do the same. I recently spent some time with Saul Berman and Ragna Bell from IBM’s Global Business Services team, which just completed its bi-annual Global CEO Study. It’s an impressive piece of research, with interviews of more than 1,500 CEOs from around the world about their challenges, goals, and values. One prominent takeaway for readers of this blog: sustainability and environmental concerns are NOT gaining ground on the priority list of global CEOs. Take a look at Figure 1: “environmental issues” are stuck in 7^th place on the list of the most important external factors impacting the CEOs’ organizations over the next 3 years. So while we in the sustainability community think we’re making headway in corporate boardrooms, this data doesn't show much progress over the last six years.

[Update: 3:15pm, 9-7-2010. Sigh. This is a US-only offer. My apologies to colleagues and friends in other countries. I'm told you can buy it on Amazon.com in other countries, at least in hard copy.]

Our new book, Empowered, is free on Kindle through September 10th. That means anybody with a Kindle or Kindle reader (iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, PC, or Mac) can download and read it for free forever.

My coauthor Josh Bernoff explains why we're not crazy to do this. It boils down to: We hope you read it and share your thoughts and your own HERO experiences with friends and colleagues. For my part, I'd be thrilled to hear directly back from you or read about your own HERO experiences in comments or posts or tweets or video narratives. Here's Josh's post: 

Starting today and continuing until this Friday September 10, you can download Empowered to your Kindle at no charge.

You want to know how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers, don't you? If you've got a Kindle, what's stopping you?

Now to the other question. Are we crazy?

Some people have told me that giving away Empowered on Kindle makes it seem worthless. Or that I'm giving up revenue.