Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

While not only an invaluable tool for the HR leader, it is also a must read for the Sales & Operations Leaders as well.

In a prior career, I worked for Brad Hall as his Training Director and we put this model to the test and saw excellent results within six months.

Hall's book provides a blue print for success in measuring and managing human capital with the same rigor as measuring and managing financial capital.

All leaders of the business that map and execute a similar plan will absolutely increase results as well as maintaining a stellar workforce!

Hall's book is the best written on human capital development. Hall
provides a practical and compelling methodology for measuring year over year improvement in human capital. The book is well-researched and includes numerous charts and graphs that make a complex topic accessible to managers outside of human resources. I recommend this book to any manager looking to improve the performance of his/her people.

Brad Hall's book, The new Human Capital Strategy, brings a much needed level of structure and discipline to managing Human Resources and People. While most companies claim that people are their most important asset, Hall correctly points out, that most companies don't have HR management programs that are consistent with that claim.

The brilliance of Hall's book is the way he distills this broad subject down to the few specific dimensions that truly need attention.

- Separating HR as a strategic function, and thus a source of competitive advantage, from HR as an administrative function.

- A focus on business results - Not activities or HR programs

- The importance of defining and measuring business results to gauge the true effectiveness of HR programs.

- Year over year improvement in the real return companies get from their investment in people.

From here, Hall goes on to address some of the barriers and keys to success in the practical implementation of the principles he discusses - executive engagement, organizational structure issues, team structure, measurement techniques, and many real life examples.

This book is a great read for any business leader (not just HR professionals) who seriously believes that people are an important asset for their success.

I worked with Brad together in Asia and found his book to be something that the HR community, as well as, clients of HR have been waiting for for a long time. His book brings together his wealth of experience and knowledge into practical tips and guides that everyone can use. While a lot of other HR practitioner books are based on theories, I know from reading this book that the case studies and guides provided in this brilliant book are based on real business problems.

Basically, I highly recommend this book for those looking for implement-able and practical guides for building up your organization.

Bradley Hall once started a meeting with the famous sentence "Basically, I hate HR" - and I guess he shares this view with more than 70% of all CEOs world wide. This book gives you an excellent strategy how to upgrade HR to Human Capital Management. Your CEO will change his mind!