What's the best way to grow talent?  Invest heavily in training?  Go out and acquire the best when you need it?  Cool succession planning software?

Not corporate talent - Olympic Talent....

With the Chinese doing well in the Olympics and our memory of the USSR and East German machines still fresh, many are pointing to the presence of a nationalized sports program as a key to establishing Olympic superiority.  Bela Karolyi came out at the Olympics and pointed to missing teeth among the Chinese gymnasts as proof of a "win at all costs" attitude, as well as the potential superiority of a nationalized sports system, where kids get plucked at a young age and turned into specialists.

As it turns out, medal count almost always comes down to population and GDP, although GDP could be partially replaced by a hat tip to Lenin or Marx.  From the Financial Times in the UK:

"Every country is at it. China has spent a fortune on its quest to win the most gold medals at Beijing. The UK is likely to spend more than $1bn on elite sports in the run-up to the London games in 2012. Just like military planners, Australia’s Olympic Committee, a sporting power, is demanding more money to keep up with emerging threats.

It might be worth it to sustain Aussie sporting pride – if there were any evidence that it is possible to buy Olympic gold medals. In fact, almost all Olympic success can be explained using only five factors: population, gross domestic product per capita, home advantage, the use of an elite sport system to identify talent, and a country’s system of government. Tired of Olympic failure? Install a communist regime.

The first two factors are by far the most important: more people means more exceptional sporting talent; higher national income means leisure time to spend on fencing or handball; and at the Olympics, home advantage allows the hosts to field a larger team.

What nations can do is target sports that no one else plays. South Korea wins a lot of medals for archery, Germany always wins the team dressage, and while US and Russian athletes both win a lot of medals, it is surprisingly rare for them to share an Olympic podium.

Interesting analysis, and it makes sense for the business world as well.  Looking to develop a new piece of software?  Take this lesson and do it with a technology/geographic center combination that will allow you to get talent.  Nothing worse than chasing a total of five developers, working in a retired technology, in a metro area with 3 million people. 

For the record, I'm saying that the US has three of the five factors in place.  Population, GDP, and an elite sporting system that ID's talent in the USOC.  For the communist players that have been the yin to our yang (USSR, East Germany and now China), they replace the GDP with the system of government, effectively nationalizing the whole operation.

People lose sight of the fact that we have the elite system in place in the USOC, just like the Chinese do with the nationalized system.

The primary difference?  Our government doesn't force the kids into specialized schools away from their families, like the Chinese do.

In the USA - we let the parents do that...  It's all about choice here... :)

Go USA!!