Human Resources

Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital

Beyond HR is the pivot point that illuminates the connection between business and HR strategy in a highly transparent, compelling, and pragmatic way. Boudreau and Ramstad make the case very effectively that talentship is indeed a decision science.

Ian Ziskin, Corporate Vice President, Chief Human Resources and Administrative Officer, Northrop Grumman Corporation

Boudreau and Ramstad present a paradigm shift and a new leadership engine for today s and tomorrow s HR and business leaders. Like Ulrich s HR champions, their sustained research and practical testing has more firmly embedded HR management within top-tier organizational leadership. This major contribution to leadership practice will tangibly improve firms competitive position. Boards should hold chief executives and HR officers accountable to understand and practice the lessons from Beyond HR.

John D. Hofmeister, President and US Country Chair, Shell Oil Company

Put away the organizational tarot cards! In Beyond HR, Boudreau and Ramstad effectively show that it is imperative for the HR profession to move from historically instinctive decision making to the analytical discipline that has existed with our functional colleagues for years. Our organizations futures and our senior leaders expectations urgently require that we all make this shift quickly.

David A. Pace, Executive Vice President, Partner Resources, Starbucks

Business leaders too often have vague or inconsistent ideas about where talent creates competitive advantage, so talent decisions provide situational rather than strategic solutions. Beyond HR creates a much-needed framework to connect strategic imperatives to talent strategy. The framework helps the entire executive committee to clarify both a must-read for all CEOs and chief HR officers.

John S. Bronson, former Executive Vice President HR, Pepsi Cola Worldwide, and Senior Vice President HR, Williams-Sonoma, Inc.

Beyond HR is more than evolutionary it is revolutionary thinking. Boudreau and Ramstad present an entirely new perspective on talent-related decisions in organizations. It is a manifesto with a road map, a decision-science framework for enhancing the quality and rigor of decisions about human capital. Embrace it now, because once your competitors do, you will have to follow if you want to compete and win with talent.

Wayne F. Cascio, PhD, US Bank Term Professor of Management, The Business School, University of Colorado-Denver and Health Sciences Center

The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance

Introduces a new way of measuring and thinking about the contributions of individuals to business success.
Makes the case that the role of Human Resources is increasingly important, as company assets become more intangible and reliant on intellectual capital.
Provides a framework that focuses on identifying where Human Resources issues are performance drivers--or impediments--to strategy implementation.
Develops a measurement system that provides valid, reliable indicators of Human Resources' contribution to the success of strategy implementation, and ultimately to firmperformance.
Includes recommendations supported by clear and persuasive examples, as well as the authors' unique survey of 2,800 firms.

What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management

Every day companies and their leaders fail to capitalize on opportunities because they misunderstand the real sources of business success.

Based on his popular column in Business 2.0, Jeffrey Pfeffer delivers wise and timely business commentary that challenges conventional wisdom while providing data and insights to help companies make smarter decisions. The book contains a series of short chapters filled with examples, data, and insights that challenge questionable assumptions and much conventional management wisdom. Each chapter also provides guidelines about how to think more deeply and intelligently about critical management issues. Covering topics ranging from managing people to leadership to measurement and strategy, it’s good organizational advice, delivered by Dr. Pfeffer himself.

Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace With Today's Nontraditional Workforce

Far-reaching changes in attitudes and family structures have been redefining the workforce for more than two decades—yet the workplace has remained much the same. During this time, many companies have learned that personalizing the customer experience is good for business. In Mass Career Customization, the authors argue convincingly to extend this popular and profitable concept to the workplace.

This book is centered on the powerful insight that career options in today’s economy need to accommodate the rising and falling phases of employee engagement as it changes over time. The remarkable process unveiled in this book offers choices involving four important dimensions of career progression: role; pace; location and schedule; and workload.

As the working population shrinks, maintaining industry advantage will depend largely on keeping employees engaged and connected. Mass Career Customization provides a framework for organizational adaptability that will do just that.

The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value

Loyalty is by no means dead. In fact the principles of loyalty . . . are alive and well at the heart of every company with an enduring record of high productivity, solid profits, and steady expansion.
From The Loyalty Effect

The business world seems to have given up on loyalty: many major corporations now lose-and have to replace-half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. Fred Reichheld's national bestseller The Loyalty Effect shows why companies that ignore these skyrocketing defections face a dismal future of low growth, weak profits, and shortened life expectancy. Reichheld demonstrates the power of loyalty-based management as a highly profitable alternative to the economics of perpetual churn. He makes a powerful economic case for loyalty-and takes you through the numbers to prove it. His startling conclusion: Even a small improvement in customer retention can double profits in your company. The Loyalty Effect will change the way you think about loyalty, profits, and the nature of business.

Fred Reichheld is a Director Emeritus of Bain & Company and a Bain Fellow. He is also the author of Loyalty Rules!.

Reichheld lays out a new "economics of loyalty" that provides a framework where the "soft" elements of business--loyalty and learning--can be effectively linked to the hard science of cash flows and cost/benefit analysis. Because of this connection, Reichheld argues, there is enormous potential for improving a company's performance by increasing customer, investor, and employee loyalty. Reichheld's research demonstrates that loyalty drives profits in direct and quantifiable ways through its impact on growth, learning, and productivity. In addition, loyalty generates a spiritual energy that powers the value creation process that is at the heart of sustained business success. In many industries, loyalty explains the differences in profitability among competitors more effectively than scale, market share, unit costs, or most other factors usually associated with competitive advantage.

Human Resource Champions

Human Resource Champions issues a challenge to HR professionals: define the value you create and institute measures for your performance, or face the inevitable outsourcing of your function. Ulrich identifies four distinct roles that human resources staff must assume-strategic player, administrative expert, employee champion, and change agent. He provides hands-on tools that show HR professionals how they can operate in all four areas simultaneously and offers specific recommendations for partnering with line managers to deliver value and make their organizations more competitive.

The Hr Value Proposition

HR’s leading thinkers provide a blueprint for the future. The international bestseller Human Resource Champions helped set the HR agenda for the 1990s and enabled HR professionals to become strategic partners in their organizations. But earning a seat at the executive table was only the beginning. Today’s HR leaders must also bring substantial value to that table. Drawing on their sixteen-year study of over 29,000 HR professionals and line managers, leading HR experts Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank propose The HR Value Proposition. The authors argue that HR value creation requires a deep understanding of external business realities and how value is defined by key stakeholders both inside and outside the company. They provide practical tools and worksheets for leveraging this knowledge to create HR practices, build organizational capabilities, design HR strategy, and marshal resources that create value for customers, investors, executives, and employees. Written by the field’s premier trailblazers, this book charts the path HR professionals must take to help lead their organizations into the future.

Coaching and Mentoring: How to Develop Top Talent and Achieve Stronger Performance (Harvard Business Essentials)

Effective managers know that timely coaching can dramatically enhance their teams’ performance

Coaching and Mentoring offers managers comprehensive advice on how to help employees grow professionally and achieve their goals.

This volume covers the full spectrum of effective mentoring and the nuts and bolts of coaching.Managers will learn how to master special mentoring challenges, improve listening skills, and provide ongoing support to their employees.

Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills And Talent

Unprecedented shifts in the age distribution and diversity of the global labour pool are underway

Within the decade, as the massive boomer generation begins to retire and fewer skilled workers are available to replace them, companies in industrialized markets will face a labour shortage and brain drain of dramatic proportions.

Ken Dychtwald, Tamara Erickson, and Robert Morison argue that companies ignore these shifts at great peril. Survival will depend on redefining retirement and transforming management and human resource practices to attract, accommodate, and retain workers of all ages and backgrounds.

Based on decades of groundbreaking research and study, the authors present innovative and actionable management techniques for leveraging the knowledge of mature workers, reengaging disillusioned mid-career workers, and attracting and retaining talented younger workers.

This timely book will help organizations sustain their competitive edge in tomorrow’s inevitably tighter labour markets.

Working Knowledge

When new-car developers at Ford Motor Company wanted to learn why the original Taurus design team was so successful, no one could tell them. No one remembered or had recorded what made that effort so special; the knowledge gained in the Taurus project was lost forever. Indeed, the most valuable asset in any company is probably also its most elusive and difficult to manage: knowledge. Authors Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak assert that learning how to identify, manage, and foster knowledge is vital for companies who hope to compete in today's fast-moving global economy.

Working Knowledge examines how knowledge can be nurtured in organizations. Building trust throughout a company is the key to creating a knowledge-oriented corporate culture, a positive environment in which employees are encouraged to make decisions that are efficient, productive, and innovative. The book includes numerous examples of successful knowledge projects at companies such as British Petroleum, 3M, Mobil Oil, and Hewlett-Packard. Concise and clearly written, Working Knowledge is an excellent resource for managers who want to better harness the experience and wisdom within their organizations.

The definitive overview of knowledge management, now available in paperback

This influential book establishes the enduring vocabulary and concepts in the burgeoning field of knowledge management. It serves as the hands-on resource of choice for companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage going forward.

Drawing from their work with more than 30 knowledge-rich firms, Davenport and Prusak--experienced consultants with a track record of success--examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate wisdom into market value. They categorize knowledge work into four sequential activities--accessing, generating, embedding, and transferring--and look at the key skills, techniques, and processes of each. While they present a practical approach to cataloging and storing knowledge so that employees can easily leverage it throughout the firm, the authors caution readers on the limits of communications and information technology in managing intellectual capital.

This influential book establishes the enduring vocabulary and concepts in the burgeoning field of knowledge management. It serves as the hands-on resource of choice for companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage going forward. Drawing from their work with more than thirty knowledge-rich firms, Davenport and Prusak--experienced consultants with a track record of success--examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate wisdom into market value. They categorize knowledge work into four sequential activities--accessing, generating, embedding, and transferring--and look at the key skills, techniques, and processes of each. While they present a practical approach to cataloging and storing knowledge so that employees can easily leverage it throughout the firm, the authors caution readers on the limits of communications and information technology in managing intellectual capital.