Peter Cappelli’s new book Talent on Demand asserts that failing to manage your company’s talent pool is “equivalent to failing to manage your supply chain.”

(Cappelli, who needs little introduction here, is a management professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served as senior advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from 2005-2007.)

He says of the “talent on demand” approach: “The idea is that we have to manage talent — the vast majority of U.S. employers, according to surveys, have just given up trying to forecast or plan. But we also have to address the problem that the business environment is highly uncertain. So rather than pretending that long-term plans will work, we have to find ways to be responsive and adapt to that uncertain environment.”

Anyone who has worked in and around supply chain know that there are fundamental questions being asked constantly: Do we have the right part in stock? How long will it take to get the right material? What will it cost?  “Managing supply chains is about managing uncertainty and variability,” notes Cappelli. “ This same uncertainty exists inside companies with regard to talent development. Companies rarely know what they will be building five years out and what skills they will need to make that happen; they also don’t know if the people they have in their pipelines are going to be around.”

Rarely when we think of supply chain do we think of the human side– the “touchy, feely” human resources side of hiring and retaining our employees. Yet if we’re all looking towards our bottom line, isn’t this a common sense– albeit jarring– approach to human capital?

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