How important is your career to your life? How important is it to your families health and well being? How does your career affect your future? WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF NOT TAKING YOUR CAREER PROGRESS SERIOUSLY? You should always ask yourself the above questions in order to remind yourself of the importance of your […]

Imagine that you are considering starting your own firm. You\’ve been contacted by a college acquaintance – a brilliant biology student-who tells you that while in graduate school she developed a procedure in the lab that she believes has considerable commercial potential. This classmate makes it clear that she has little interest in or expertise […]

General managers should be involved up to their eyeballs in setting human resources strategy and policies, adapting the strategy and policies on a divisional or regional basis (and then on a plant or facility basis), and implementing the policies by adapting them suitably to particular employees and groups. In fact, general managers should take the […]

Good and objective measures of performance are hard to come by. Giving human resources specialists a role in evaluating general managers may turn recommendations from the same specialists into something closer to \”commands,\” an outcome we would very much like to avoid. On balance, however, this is a role that can often play and a […]

The formulation of the organization\’s human resources strategy begins with basic questions concerning how employment will be structured, what corporate culture will be fostered, how careers will unfold in the organization, what sort of employees will be sought, and so forth. Within this general category of tasks we include both organization-wide human resources strategy and […]

The more that corporate work force strategy dictates unit-level policies – that is, the more that unit-level human resources simply involves implementing policies and practices set down at the corporate level the more sense there is in having a direct reporting relationship from unit-level to corporate human resources. But on balance, people tend to favor […]

Downsizing almost inevitably imposes substantial psychological costs on the workforce. It comes with some social costs for the community, at least in the short-term. And the available evidence on its bottom-line impact isn\’t clear. So the question\” Must you downsize?\” should be pondered carefully. Of course, the costs and benefits of downsizing depend on the […]

The formulation of human resources strategy and policies specialists should act as advisors to and educators of top management. It is important that all of general management, and most especially top management, are human resources literate. But being a general manager usually means being literate about a lot of stuff and an expert on rather […]

Human resource management is not always or solely the presentation of gifts. Sometimes bad news has to be delivered. We aren\’t thinking here of bad news as in, \”You\’re fired,\” in which the relationship is ended. Think instead of \”You didn\’t get the promotion\” or \”We won\’t fund that training in your case.\” It sometimes […]

If we consider the analogy to the distinctions between marketing and customer service or between the corporate finance function on the one hand and the accounting/comptroller function on the other. We generally see fairly clear organizational distinctions drawn between those who are responsible for helping an organization formulate its strategies for reaching markets and creating […]