The New Human Capital Strategy: Improving the Value of Your Most Important Investment- Year After Year [Hardcover]

Bradley W. Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2008

It is often said that the only true source of sustained competitive advantage is people. But what does that mean and how can this be measured and managed? How many organizations know whether their human capital outperforms their competitors', or even whether it improves year-over-year? And what is the strategy for continually improving that performance?The "New Human Capital Strategy" is a roadmap for delivering measurable business results by systematically improving the performance of those in roles most important to customers and shareholders. Proposing a radical shift in the way organizations measure and manage their people, the book asserts that competitive advantage is a function of four areas of strength: effective executive teams; leaders who deliver results; outperforming competitors in key positions; and workforce performance. Using examples, research, and metrics, this essential guide provides readers with a system for ensuring that their people are more valuable this year than the last.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The statement 'People are our greatest source of competitive advantage' is hackneyed at best, but still it is true. Author Bradley Hall thinks the main problem is that the leadership in companies doesn’t know if their employees are 'better'

than their competitor peers and whether they continue to improve annually. He proposes a radical new way of identifying and measuring precisely which activities are most and least responsible for sustained growth, and determining, much the way financial analysis does, which human capital investments will pay dividends over and over. The book maps out a way for HR departments to deliver true business results, and tie human capital initiatives directly and consistently to bottom-line results...The book enables both general managers and HR professionals to create a blueprint of human capital success and a strategy and system for achieving it. In so doing, it calls for 'blowing up' today’s HR paradigm and questions many of its assumptions."

IHRIM JOURNAL MAGAZINE

“… provides a well-researched, pragmatic approach to developing human talent with a business setting...Recommended.” -- Choice magazine

Book Description

It is often said that the only true source of sustained competitive advantage is people. But what does that mean and how can this be measured and managed? How many organizations know whether their human capital outperforms their competitors’, or even whether it improves year-over-year? And what is the strategy for continually improving that performance?

The New Human Capital Strategy is a roadmap for delivering measurable business results by systematically improving the performance of those in roles most important to customers and shareholders. Proposing a radical shift in the way organizations measure and manage their people, the book asserts that competitive advantage is a function of four areas of strength:

• effective executive teams

• leaders who deliver results

• outperforming competitors in key positions

• workforce performance

Using examples, research, and metrics, this essential guide provides readers with a system for ensuring that their people are more valuable this year than the last.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM (January 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081440927X
• ISBN-13: 978-0814409275
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #760,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a Great Book, March 23, 2008

By 

Gerald Randall (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Human Capital Strategy: Improving the Value of Your Most Important Investment- Year After Year (Hardcover)

As an HR practitioner, this book has become my symbol of hope for the profession. I've always known there was "something wrong" with how HR is being practiced in organizations today, but never clearly identified the root of the problem, much less offered a method for addressing it. Brad Hall's book provides that insight.

Through current research and his industry experience, Hall provides ample evidence that despite decades of seeking and gaining "a seat at the table," HR overall has not progressed beyond the traditional administrative "personnel" function. Accordingly, Hall argues it's time to "blow up today's model and replace it with a fundamentally new Human Capital Strategy."

Hall begins with thought-provoking questions such as "has your human capital improved year over year?" which demonstrate that HR has not delivered on its responsibility to ensure human capital is managed as a business asset. He builds towards his human capital approach which centers around four key elements; building effective executive teams, building leaders who deliver sustained business results, ensuring employees in key positions outperform their peers in competitor organizations, and a fourth, designing a disciplined approach for improving workforce performance, which serves as the structure and environment within which the first three can flourish.

The model challenges fundamental elements of current HR practice, such as the focus on supporting "internal customers" (management and employees), arguing instead for a focus on meeting the expectations of external clients and stakeholders. At a more granular level, it challenges the merit of current practices (e.g., forced ranking of employees, aggressive "performance management", and annual performance reviews) and offers a method to meet the objectives of these practices through a roadmap for building high performance organizations.

This is a fresh read and I highly recommend it to all professionals who have a stake in improving their organization's performance.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wise and Practical Guide to Managing People in a Hypercompetitive Age, January 11, 2008

By 

Michael Griffitts (Dunellen, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Human Capital Strategy: Improving the Value of Your Most Important Investment- Year After Year (Hardcover)

After twenty years of experience in the trenches of HR and organizational consulting, Bradley Hall distills his business insights into a wide-ranging, comprehensive book that can help business leaders bring badly needed rigor and method to managing their organizations. Using language reminiscent of Gary Hamel's strident calls to action, Hall advocates a revolutionary transformation in today's Human Resources model that will allow organizations to build "a blueprint of human capital success and a strategy and system for achieving it.¨ (p. 12)

Building on work done by Jim Collins, The New Human Capital Strategy argues compellingly both for the growing importance of "excellence in people and organizational capabilities¨ and for the stubborn inability of our current management models to promote this excellence. Current talent management practices tend to be internally-focused, egalitarian, program-centric, and reactive.

But as technologies proliferate and competitive pressures accelerate in a flat, globalized world, human capital is the one area that organizations can target to ensure that they have a sustainable competitive advantage. Hall's ambitious agenda is to define those capabilities that will allow business leaders to build a human capital vision, and then to execute on that vision with the same rigor and systematic management that they use in managing their financial assets.

Hall spends the bulk of his book on how to define a human capital vision, and then how to build a human capital system (HCS). The primary elements of a HCS include:
' Effective Executive Teams
' Leaders Who Deliver Results
' Key Position Excellence
' Improving Workforce Performance
By putting together thoughtful, integrated systems for managing these elements, organizations will be significantly better at managing their human capital in ways that will drive performance and consistent deliver great business results.

The practical insights and tools peppered generously throughout the book both illustrate and inspire. As I read the book, I not only saw how sensible these ideas were in the contexts that Hall described, but I also began to envision the application of these concepts in my own organization.

What makes the book so powerful is that the author combines big-picture thinking with proven, practical advice for how to implement big ideas. There are so many useful checklists, templates, tables, and other graphics in this book that bring to life his ideas, and will trigger your own.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book breaks new ground in HR thinking., March 2, 2008

By 

Don M. Field (Coto de Caza, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Human Capital Strategy: Improving the Value of Your Most Important Investment- Year After Year (Hardcover)

Bradley Hall's book takes a different approach than other HR books. He focuses on developing an HR strategy that creates a competitive advantage through your people. He understands that HR departments are normally measured on the programs they administer but not on whether those programs actually lead to improving the organization's skills and ability to win against their competitors. Hall is more focused on the results and not the programs. That's a departure from many other business books and breaks new ground.

Hall understands that striving to have each employee equal or exceed the competitor's employee in a similar job will yield huge success and this book lays out a program to measure and develop your people.

Hall's business anecdotes are not only fun but appropriate and emphasize his points perfectly. This is an interesting and worthwhile read for anyone wanting to improve their HR strategy and make their companies more competitive.