Fighting "Brain Drain" at Your Company

How does a successful business prevent its top people from leaving, so-called "brain drain"? Is it critical to keep individual stars or is it more important to have a system that nurtures, develops, and retains talent? Here is a good article from Harvard Business Review:
"On: Innovation, Creativity, Leadership Getting Smarter about Google's 'Brain Drain'" by Bill Taylor
http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2010/11/getting_smarter_about_googles.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+harvardbusiness+(HBR.org)

I have worked at a number of different companies, for a number of different managers. I can say that Lesson 2, "If you want to keep great contributors, develop better managers," is critical. Working for a great manager keeps you energized, you don't even think about leaving. That is the most important thing for me.

I also think that Lesson 3, "Just because people leave doesn't mean they're gone for good," is very important--and almost nobody realizes it! I have found that when I leave a job my newly former employer doesn't want anything to do with me. I always found this strange, because it is inevitable in my experience that they end up calling back a couple years later wondering if I'd like to come back. It has happened to me multiple times, with multiple companies. One of my former employers tried every two years like clockwork to hire me back. They were always a day late and a dollar short--if they had just been serious about it (make the better offer a few years earlier) they would have gotten me.

My former employers never thought they would want me back or laid the groundwork for this. Put it another way: I think that I've always made every effort to leave a company on very good terms (I've never worked for a bad company, so that helps), specifically so I would be return if the right situation arose. But the companies didn't seem to care if they left me on bad terms. As I've grown older I've never understood this. People move around a lot nowadays; they don't stay in one job for their whole career. What better situation than to go back to an organization you already know, with new skills that you could never get within that organization? In my present situation I could come back into my old job and do it a LOT better. I have a much clearer perspective on the way customers (relative to my former job) think, because I am one now!