Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

Fast Company Came Close . . . Tom Stewart Came Closer

In a 1996 article for Fortune, “Taking on the Last Bureaucracy,” Tom Stewart suggested companies should, in a phrase, “blow the sucker up,” referring to HR departments. Given the way HR was conducting its business at that time, Stewart thought the HR function of people management might be better served by non-HR departments in an organization. But in fact, Stewart was slightly off base. It’s not the HR departments that need to be blown up. It’s the wall that HR has erected between itself and the rest of a company’s business that needs to be obliterated.

Glancing through the HR and business press, you’ll find a proliferation of articles extolling the value of human capital and human capital management. In the past several years, both the frequency and fervor of these messages have grown and with good reason. The intuitive sense executives at some of the world’s most successful organizations have had for years—the same sense that has driven them to create the “good place to work” status widely coveted by organizations and widely covered in list upon list in the business press—now is supported by overwhelming quantitative evidence, that is, that the right alignment of human resource practices to business strategy can add shareholder value. There are numerous studies, such as those done by PA Consulting, Watson Wyatt, along with Huselid and Becker, on human capital effectiveness that argue successfully that:

• Business congruent human-capital ...