Talking Point: There is plenty of executive talent out there for search firms

It works like this. Two or three of the bigger headhunting firms between them work for most of the top FTSE companies on the appointments of their most senior executives. Whitehead Mann, for example, claims that it handles the searches for more than half the top 100 companies.

One of the rules of conduct of business between client and headhunter is that once a search for the company has been completed, that corporate becomes "off-limits" for reciprocal poaching for at least a year, sometimes up to two.

So you can see immediately that at any one time most of the UK's finest corporates are off-side for the searchers scouting for their next heads. The best hunting grounds for chairmen and chief executives are either those running other FTSE companies, deputies, divisional heads or managing directors lower down the money tree, within the 100 and also among the top 250 companies.

Corporates, too, are to blame for this vicious circle by agreeing to the off-limits rule. The big companies, by their nature, like to follow the IBM rule of business and are attracted to the larger headhunters because it gives them a sense of security. Indirectly, this means the big search firms and companies are colluding to create a self-serving and monopolistic environment.

There are at least a dozen searches going on now for chief executive positions. Many of them appear to be taking an extraordinarily long time, such as those for Boots and Cable & Wireless.

Others, such as the hunts for new chairmen of the London Stock Exchange and the Financial Services Authority, appear to be more difficult this time round. But this is probably more to do with a lack of imagination than any shortage of talented candidates. All this has added fuel to the perception that there is a crisis of talent in industry.

Ask anyone outside the bigger search firms and they say talk of a crisis of calibre is complete tosh, more a crisis of headhunting dynamism.

Pertinently, they say, it is deeply insulting to the next generation of UK management which is alive and flourishing down the rungs . It just needs more leg-work and dynamism from the search industry to go out and dig deeper and to be more lateral: there are a lot of investment bankers out there.

Carol Leonard of Leonard Hull (with just two consultants), who learned the business with Norman Broadbent, says there is a huge talent pool waiting to be tapped. Leonard was deeply impressed by the young talent she saw recently while placing three interesting chief executive positions - Sly Bailey at Trinity Mirror, Miles Templeman at Bulmers and Ian Coull at Slough Estates.

There is an easy solution to broadening the search net. And it is one which the two forefathers of headhunting, David Norman and Miles Broadbent, spent their careers espousing.

Norman always said that four consultants was the optimum size for a good search firm while Broadbent advised headhunters to disband or re-invent themselves every five years, thus dealing with the off-limits rule and the potential conflicts of interest problems.