A Guide to the Human Resource Body of Knowledge (HRBoK)

ForewordHR Rising to the Opportunity

Dave Ulrich

Rensis Likert Professor of Business at the University of Michigan and Partner, the RBL Group

The professionals who commit to helping organizations and people succeed through human resource (HR) practices have impact because they recognize and respond to the unprecedented opportunities available in today's business world. This exceptional volume holds the Human Resource Body of Knowledge (HRBoK™), offering both conceptual frameworks and practical tools to enable HR professionals. Let me set the context for the opportunities implicit in this work with three simple tenets.

First, it is a great time to be in HR. HR is not about HR, but about helping organizations and individuals in organizations be more successful. Organizational success includes investor confidence (evidenced by market value), customer commitment (evidenced by customer share), and community reputation (evidenced in social responsibility). Individual success includes measures of productivity (evidenced by output/input indicators), as well as personal well-being (evidenced by sentiment indicators).

Four forces make HR more central to organization and individual success: the context of business: social, technological, economic, political, environmental, and demographic changes (STEPED); the increased pace of change: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity (VUCA); the demise of employee well-being (individuation, isolation, indifference, intensity); and the requirement ...