Human Capital Management

As work and organizations have become more fluid - and business strategy is no longer about planning years ahead but about sensing and seizing new opportunities and adapting to a constantly changing environment - companies must deploy talent in new ways to remain competitive. Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent.

In Humanizing Human Capital, Solange Charas, PhD, and Stela Lupushor reframe traditional HR practices into a future-forward strategy to optimize human capital. Charas and Lupushor shift decision-making about people from a gut sense to an evidence-based approach—a critical and much-needed departure from the cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the-best approach of most traditional HR programs today. 

Traditionally, human resources has focused on recruiting good people, preparing them for assignments, motivating them to perform, and retaining them. These functions remain essential. But to be successful in turbulent times like ours, human capital strategy needs to be broader and much more far reaching.

Real wages have stagnated or declined for most workers, job insecurity has increased, and retirement income is uncertain. Why have jobs gotten so much worse? As Peter Cappelli argues, these issues and others stem from the logic of financial accounting and its fundamental flaws in dealing with human capital. Financial accounting views employee costs as fixed costs that cannot be reduced and fails to account for the costs of bad employees and poor management. The simple goal of today's executives is to drive down employment costs, even if it raises costs elsewhere.