Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital - Hardcover

Boudreau, Professor John W; Ramstad, Peter M

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 142210415X ISBN 13: 9781422104156

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 2007

Synopsis

Is your talent strategy a unique competitive advantage? As competition for top talent increases, companies must recognize that decisions about talent and its organization can have a significant strategic impact.

Beyond HR shows how organizations can uncover distinctive talent contributions, strategically differentiate their HR practices and metrics, and more optimally allocate talent to create value. Illustrations from companies such as Disney, Boeing, and Corning describe a new decision science called Talentship, that reveals opportunities by identifying strategy pivot points and the optimal talent and organization decisions that address them.

A unique framework helps readers identify their own distinctive strategic pivot points and connect them to talent decisions, showing how today’s “HR” can evolve to fulfill its potential as a source of strategic advantage.

About this title

About the Authors

John W. Boudreau is professor of management and organization at USC's Marshall School of Business and the research director at USC's Center for Effective Organizations. He has published more than 50 books and academic articles, including the best-selling textbook Human Resource Management in multiple languages worldwide (and now in its 8th edition). His research on the bridge between talent and competitive advantage is recognized worldwide and received the Academy of Management's New Concept and Human Resource Scholarly Contribution awards. He consults extensively with clients such as Citigroup, Corning, GE, JP Morgan Chase, Sun Microsystems and others. Prior to joining USC, he was Professor and Director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University.

Peter M. Ramstad is Executive Vice President for Strategy and Finance at Personnel Decisions International (PDI), a global human resources consulting firm known for building leadership talent. He has worked extensively with both HR and line leaders at all levels of several US and multinational organizations.

From the Back Cover

Does your talent strategy give your organization a unique advantage? It had better-because the competition is heating up. How to leave rival companies scrambling? Think more strategically about your company’s number-one resource: its people. Do so, and you improve the quality of every decision that hinges on human capital-no matter where in your organization such decisions are made.

In Beyond HR: The New Science of Human capital, John Boudreau and Peter Ramstad show you how to do this through a new decisions science-talentship. Through talentship, you move far beyond merely reactive mind-set of planning and budgeting for headcount and hiring and retaining talent. You take a strategic approach to talent by asking savvier questions, including:

Do we know where our pivotal talent is in the organization?

Do we invest differentially in our most pivotal-or do we use the “peanut butter” approach, spreading investments evenly across the entire company?

Where does our business strategy require that our talent pools would have to change the most?

If we changed our strategic goals, which of our talent pools would have to change the most?

Using examples from companies as wide-ranging as Disney, Boeing, SAS, Starbucks, and Corning, the authors reveal how HR professionals can extend their influence by making talent decisions strategically. And they draw on leading research in strategy, economics, and organizational theory to provide a compelling new vision for HR’s role in the future.

The payoff for smarter choices about human capital? You extend your focus from the quality of your talent decisions. You accelerate the maturing of the human resource profession from a practice to a decisions science. And you enable your HR function to realize its true potential as a key source of strategic advantage for your firm.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 142210415X
• ISBN 13: 9781422104156
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258