Genuine talent is crucial in today’s informed economy as it has become scarce and homogenous. Even though many executives believe that finding and retaining talent is a top priority, businesses are still struggling to fill positions with skilled and multi-talented employees.
Talented people – the vital few – are the main drivers of a company’s success, and businesses will see much higher returns on investment if they devote more resources to the few talented people who are making a big difference, rather than attempting to make the “trivial many” more productive.
This makes talent development critical at all organizational levels and domains because, with a global economy marked by the pressure of increased performance in a variety of domains, we cannot afford to encounter limitations in our discussion of talent development. To maintain operational excellence, the emphasis should be on creating work environments that enable employees to improve their performance on a daily basis and management should consider that creating such an environment can be an effective way to attract and retain employees.
As the world is progressing, only a few are understanding the essentiality of possessing multiple talents. Understanding its importance, Andrew McConnell has thrived to acquire diversified expertise.
Born on June 24, 1981, in Birmingham, Alabama, Andrew McConnell is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Get Out of My Head: Creating Modern Clarity with Stoic Wisdom and the founder of Rented.com, the leading provider of technology, tools, and services to help vacation rental professionals optimize their portfolio of properties.
In 2003, he graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in History. In 2006, he received his LL.M. from the University of Cambridge, and in 2007, he received his Doctor of Law (JD) from Harvard Law School.
Putting his law degrees to more immediate use, McConnell founded and ran Vacation Futures, Inc. and Rented Capital, LLC, and worked with some of the world’s largest public and private entities including at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant and Axiom Global, Inc. as a Director of Solutions Design. His prior experience includes time at Merrill Lynch, Eversheds Sutherland (US) LLP, and Ashe, Rafuse & Hill.
McConnell has been involved in a variety of non-profit and professional organizations, including Sheltering Arms, Georgia’s oldest charity, where he currently sits on the Board and chairs the Financial Sustainability Committee; The Entrepreneurs Organization, where he was an EO Atlanta Board Member, and EO Atlanta Accelerator Board Member, Young Entrepreneur Council, Atlanta Tech Leaders (Founding Advisory Board Member), Leadership Atlanta (50th Anniversary Class, and Leadership Series Co-Chair), and the Serve America Movement.
After gathering an abundance of knowledge of the vacation rental sector, McConnell founded Rented, a company comprised of dedicated vacation rental professionals with over 50 years of combined experience in managing, marketing, and pricing vacation rentals.
The Automated Rate Tool (Art) byRentedis the only dynamic pricing software designed for and by professional short-term rental revenue managers. Art empowers in-house specialists to set the right price for every property, with intelligent rate recommendations and simple custom adjustments. The company’s revenue management service is looked after by a dedicated revenue manager who specializes in handling every detail: setting prices, monitoring performance, and making custom adjustments for companies that require hands-on support. Under McConnell’s leadership, Rented Inc. won the VRTECH Startup Competition in 2021 and was an Inc. 500 winner in 2019 and 2020. Rented Inc. was also ranked fourth in the Financial Times’ list of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies in 2021.
Other than managing various business responsibilities, McConnell also writes and contributes to Forbes, Inc., and the Huffington Post, among other publications. McConnell’s book, Get Out of My Head: Creating Modern Clarity with Stoic Wisdom, was published in 2022 and managed to reach #5 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list in its first week of release. Given his expanded expertise, McConnell has been a member of the US National Team and an international medalist (1999) in open-water swimming. It was his hard work that in 2020, he became a two-time NCAA Division I All-American Honorable Mention.
Acknowledging McConnell’s dedication to his work, he has been credited as an honoree in the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 2020 Class of 40 Under Forty. It is McConnell’s dedication that expanded the horizon of his knowledge and made him shine in the business world.
