In his new book, Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli attempts to address an issue that I would hope all companies are thinking about today: how to manage the unpredictable demand for talent.

Unlike other books on talent management, this book uses terms and examples that CEOs and CFOs can understand. Instead of just talking about turnover, productivity and other HR metrics, Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talks in terms of making money: “And making money requires that you understand the costs as well as the benefits associated with your talent management choices,” he says.

The gist of Cappelli’s book is that most companies are relying on outdated and ineffective strategies to develop their internal talent, while being way too dependent on outside hiring.

For example, many companies still use a development model for employees that assumes they will be with them for their entire careers. Under what Cappelli calls the “Organization Man” model, companies train employees to learn the skills that are specific to their business needs, with the understanding that those employees will grow with the company.

But the reality today is that companies can’t predict what their talent needs are going to be 10 years from now, and even if they could, it’s not likely that their employees will stay with them for that long.

Most employers have realized that and thus have become overly dependent on outside hiring, which has its own set of challenges.

Cappelli argues that employers should instead adopt “on-demand talent management,” which means developing employees according to competencies that could be valuable no matter where the business is in 10 years.

He advocates on-the-job training, but cautions companies against rotational assignments, because too often good talent ends up waiting on the sidelines for their rotation to come up, and nothing is more frustrating to an employee than waiting. Other ways that companies can get the most bang from their buck in on-demand training are:

• Peer training, where employees can volunteer to mentor others.
• Outside training, where organizations lend employees to outside charities or even to clients (as consulting company Mercer does) to learn from those experiences.
• Cost-shared training, where employees are asked to foot some of the bill for their outside training. One way to do this is through training wages, where employers pay employees less while they are in a training program. Another way is through tuition assistance programs, or having them go through training before they take on a job.

All of Cappelli’s points are pretty interesting, and companies should take many of them seriously.

But the real problem today with companies is that they too often give lip service to employee development, but fail to follow through. I can’t count how many times a week I hear companies say how much they value their people, that they’re the No. 1 asset, etc. But when the going gets tough, those same people are the first to get the boot.

Since we seem to be heading into a recession, I wonder whether companies will embrace Cappelli’s ideas on developing talent, or will just resort to the old ways of mass layoffs, with the hope that they will be able to find the talent again when the market picks up. What do you think?

A young man is unhappy and in turmoil over his life. He encounters a wise but mysterious old man who seems to command knowledge that could make all his dreams come true, but for the youth to achieve his goals, the old man demands that he pass the tests and challenges he will put before him.

Does it sound familiar? It’s Star Wars. It’s The Hobbit. It’s The Sword in the Stone, and a thousand and one other hero quests.

And it’s also The Go-Giver, a new book that modestly (and accurately) describes itself as “A little story about a powerful business idea.”

It’s pretty high in Amazon’s rankings for business and motivational books, and I would guess that its positive message and its mytho-heroic story are the reasons why.

So, just as Joseph Campbell set forth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that George Lucas used as a thematic blueprint for Star Wars, The Go-Giver begins with a youth who stumbles into a secret world. In this case, it’s it’s Joe, a 25-year-old company go-getter who is struggling to succeed in his sales business. He’s lost the big contract he was after, and so goes in search of the mysterious “Chairman,” who, he thinks, he can use as leverage to win back the big account.

The Chairman lives regally in a “beautiful stone mansion.” (Campbell notes that the first stage of the mythological journey is the “call to adventure,” signifying the destiny that has summoned the hero “and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of the society to a zone unknown.” Campbell says the zone can be represented as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, but it’s always a “place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings.” So too in The Go-Giver.)

The Chairman leads Joe through his journey of initiation, introducing him to transformative characters—the chef, the real estate genius, the teacher-turned-CEO, the coffee goddess, and the ultra-mysterious “Connector.” He imparts to Joe the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success,” and while that doesn’t have the same ring as the Sword in the Stone, the Force or the Nine Rings of Power, I guess stratospheric success will have to do in here in the world of the business quest. By the end of the book, Joe has learned and lived the laws, become the benevolent and successful “go-giver,” and secured the love and freedom of the fair maiden. At then the Ewoks dance with joy. Sorry—I got my quests mixed up. No Ewoks here.

As I said, a lot of people are buying this 132-page book, at $20 a pop, even though its message can be stated, verbatim, in less than 100 words. The writing is pedestrian, and all in all, I’d rather watch Star Wars. But clearly, thousands of Amazon readers are getting something that I’m missing. What is it? Let me know.