Human Capital

According to conventional wisdom, big business wields enormous influence over America's political agenda and is responsible for the relatively limited scale of the country's social policies. In Stuck in Neutral, however, Cathie Jo Martin challenges that view, arguing that big business has limited involvement in social policy and in many instances desires broader social interventions.Combining hundreds of in-depth interviews with careful quantitative analysis, Martin shows that there is strong support among managers for government-sponsored training, health, work, and family initiatives to enhance workers' skills and productivity. This support does not translate into political action, surprisingly, because big firms are not organized to intervene effectively. Every large company has its own staff to deal with government affairs, but overarching organizations for the most part lobby ineffectively for the collective interests of big business in the social realm. By contrast, small firms, which cannot afford to lobby the government directly, rely on representative associations to speak for them. The unified voice of small business comes through much more clearly in policy circles than the diverse messages presented by individual corporations, ensuring that the small-business agenda of limited social policy prevails.A vivid portrayal of the interplay between business and politics, Stuck in Neutral offers a fresh take on some of the most controversial issues of our day. It is a must read for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of the American welfare state and political economy.

This book argues that in the age of globalization and rapid technological change, an understanding of business behavior and government policy towards business requires an appreciation of the firm's human dimension.

Corporations are the productive engine of market economies. Yet the rules by which the wealth generated by corporations gets divided between the providers of financial capital and the providers of human capital are poorly understood. In this colloquium, a group of economists, social scientists, lawyers, labor relations specialists, business executives, and executives of financial institutions debate questions about the allocation of risks, returns, and rights in corporations that were raised in Margaret Blair's prior book, Ownership and Control: Rethinking Corporate Governance for the Twenty-First Century (Brookings, 1995). In addition to Margaret Blair, participants include Bernard Aidinoff, Amatai Etzioni, Ronald Gilson, Martin Ginsburg, Mark Goyder, Oliver Hart, Bruce Householder, Tony Jackson, Bevis Longstreth, Jonathan Low, Bruce MacLaury, Ira Millstein, Nell Minow, Charles Rossotti, Charles Schultze, Kenneth West, and Sidney Winter. Roswell Perkins, of the New York law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, served as moderator.

There are thousands of mergers every year and, by some estimates, two-thirds of them either fail or fall far short of expectations. How can leaders keep their merger from becoming a head-on collision? In The Human Side of M&A, Dennis Carey and Dayton Ogden argue that most failed mergers looked good on paper--they made financial and strategic sense--but the crucial human element was neglected or overlooked. Consequently, corporate cultures often clash and wreck any chance that the companies will work harmoniously together. The authors, who have worked with many companies in the process of merging, draw on their unique experience to demonstrate how to address the human side of a merger, revealing pitfalls to avoid as well as best practices to pursue. They describe how to assess the quality of the people on both sides, aligned with the strategy, to determine whom to retain. They argue that the CEOs need to create a new vision for the combined company (one that differs from the visions of the two individual entities). And they stress that it is vitally important to move quickly once the merger is approved so that the new enterprise can hit the ground running on the first official day of operating as a combined company. The book concludes with a rigorous statistical appendix that analyzes some of the most successful mergers of the past ten years, validating the book's underlying theme and conclusions. While the volume of mergers may wax and wane depending on a host of economic factors, mergers will endure as a logical, efficient, and profitable strategy for many companies in a global economy. This book will help ensure the success of those who choose this path.

Focusing on the development agenda of selected developed and developing countries, the contributors in this volume show that the varying degrees of success or failure in the programs of different countries are due to the way they deal with human factor development. Each essay clearly shows that a nation cannot achieve development if it continuously fails to develop its own national human factor. The contributors maintain that what different parts of the world, particularly Southeast Asia, call a "development miracle" is not a miracle, but the result of integrated programs that focus on the development of the human factor.

The authors of this text review the most current thinking on HR initiatives associated with current organisational performance and investigate how the field will need to mobilise in new ways to meet the demands of the future.