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This is a multi-issue one-on-one internal negotiation between a recently promoted boss, Joanna, and an older-than-her employee, Rupert, who is disgruntled at having been passed over for promotion. Joanna needs his advice to design the new strategy for the Indonesia operations, which she must present to the board soon.

To tame its soaring health care costs, Intel tried many popular approaches: "consumer-driven health care" offerings such as high-deductible/low-premium plans, on-site clinics, and employee wellness programs. But by 2009 Intel realized that those programs alone would not enable the company to solve the problem, because they didn't affect its root cause: the steadily rising cost of the care employees and their families were receiving. Intel projected that its health care expenditures would hit a whopping $1 billion by 2012. So the company decided to try a novel approach. As a large purchaser of health services and with expertise in quality improvement and supplier management, Intel was uniquely positioned to drive transformation in its local health care market. The company decided that it would manage the quality and cost of its health care suppliers with the same rigor it applied to its equipment suppliers, by monitoring quality and cost. It spearheaded a collaborative effort in Portland, Oregon, that included two health systems, a plan administrator, and a major government employer. So far the Portland collaborative has reduced treatment costs for certain medical conditions by 24% to 49%, improved patient satisfaction, and eliminated over 10,000 hours' worth of waste in the two health systems' business processes.

Complaints against HR, which are nothing new, have a cyclical quality. They're driven largely by the business context. When companies are struggling with labor issues, HR is seen as a valued leadership partner. When things are smoother all around, managers wonder what the function is doing for them. This is a moment of enormous opportunity for HR leaders to separate the valuable from the worthless and secure huge payoffs for their organizations. The author outlines some basic but powerful steps they can take: (1) Set the agenda. CEOs are rarely experts on workplace issues, so the HR team can show them what they should care about and why, such as layoffs, recruiting, flexible work arrangements, and performance management. (2) Focus on the here and now. This means continually identifying new challenges and designing tools to meet them. (3) Acquire business knowledge. HR needs first-rate analytic minds to help companies make sense of all their employee data. (4) Highlight financial benefits. HR departments don't usually calculate ROI for their programs, but quantifying costs and benefits turns talent decisions into business decisions. (5) Walk away from time wasters. Often programs lack impact unless top executives lead them, transforming the culture. Otherwise HR is just a booster for initiatives it can neither enforce nor measure.

Although people drive every organization's success, research shows that most CEOs undervalue their HR function and their chief human resources officer (CHRO). No wonder, then, that managing human capital is a top challenge for companies. To address it, say the authors, CEOs must redefine and elevate the CHRO role. They should spell out their expectations in a new written contract, focusing on three contributions that the CHRO, as an expert on talent (both in-house and at the competition), should be making: predicting the outcomes of strategically deploying human resources, diagnosing people-related problems that are hurting the company's performance, and prescribing actions on the people side that will create value. Administrative tasks, such as managing benefits, might be delegated to others. And the CHRO should be assessed by actions that deliver revenue, margin, brand recognition, or market share. With a new mandate from the CEO, and with appropriate business training, the CHRO can contribute to the organization just as powerfully as the CFO can. Indeed, the CEO should partner with the CHRO and the CFO in what the authors call a G3--a triumvirate to steer the company. Although reshaping the HR function could take three years or more, the authors' experience with companies such as GE and BlackRock suggests that it's well worth the effort.

This article relates how the HR team at Juniper Networks answered top management's call for a renewed focus on values and culture as a differentiator. Early on it launched a program of "trio tours" in which senior executives met with local talent at various company locations to discuss Juniper's culture. One young engineer in Bangalore pointed out that the company's forced performance rankings were demoralizing and clashed with Juniper's espoused values of authenticity and trust. Neuroscience research soon echoed that view, and in 2011 Juniper became one of the first global companies to abolish forced rankings. Developing a reputation as an innovative HR organization requires walking a fine line, the authors write. Big new ideas often arise from popular talks and articles; if you embrace too many of those, or apply them too superficially, you'll develop a reputation for fad surfing. Dig beneath the surface to the fundamental scientific research and insights, and you can set the stage for profound effect. Juniper's approach--getting the big picture, seizing on insights, applying them wisely, and ensuring their impact--has enabled this company to move from one-off programs and unconnected experiments to a system that is always evolving in exciting and consistently business-aligned ways.

The 2015 case "Royal Bank of Canada: Transforming Managers (A)" discusses programs that the bank put in place between 2011 and 2013 to improve managerial effectiveness. The case looks at the traits that make good managers, how to use data to create visibility into managerial effectiveness, the features of a successful intervention action plan, and the challenges with finding ways to reward good managers. Specifically, the case focuses on a pilot intervention program within the Canadian Banking operations division that was designed by Human Resources thought leaders in collaboration with Canadian Banking operations' top leaders. The program had multiple parts: 1) Using an analytics model based on the employee opinion survey to rank all managers in the division based on effectiveness; 2) Dividing all managers into four effectiveness cohorts (roughly in quartiles); 3) Identifying the managers most in need of, and most likely to benefit from, manager effectiveness training; and 4) creating and carrying out action plans. The action plans included formal coaching by each of the targeted managers' managers (the most effective intervention), feedback, and formal training. The case concludes as the bank waits for the results of the next employee opinion survey to gauge how effective its management improvement programs were. The companion case, "Royal Bank of Canada: Transforming Managers (B)," discusses the results of the programs.

The 2015 case "Royal Bank of Canada: Transforming Managers (B)" details the success of the manager improvement pilot intervention program discussed in the companion case, "Royal Bank of Canada: Transforming Managers (A)." Within one year, the division that ran the program, the Canadian Banking operations division, saw marked improvement in nearly all of the managers who participated in the program. Based on these results, the division continued to hone the intervention program details, and RBC expanded the program across the bank.

In 2015, LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, was experiencing explosive growth, and it needed to hire the very best people quickly to support and fuel that growth. This case discusses LinkedIn's hiring approach and details how the company used its own online recruiting products, such as LinkedIn Talent Solutions, to attract and retain talent. At the same time, the company was creating new recruiting models that put it at the forefront of modern recruiting. LinkedIn had done well so far in bringing in top talent. Nevertheless, as it rapidly scaled, the challenge was making sure the company could compete with other tech firms to attract enough highly skilled engineers. The case explains specific techniques that LinkedIn's recruiting team of over 100 people used to attract talented candidates for positions in engineering, sales, and other departments. Those techniques included: 1) replacing cold calling potential candidates with finding "warm connections" to them through their LinkedIn networks; 2) using a data-driven approach to identify the best candidates to pursue; and 3) developing personalized online relationships with top candidates. LinkedIn made internal hiring a priority. For external hires, the company focused heavily on recruiting passive candidates-people were who already gainfully employed and not necessarily looking for a new job. The case also discusses LinkedIn's employee value proposition, focusing on the extraordinary opportunities employees were given for "transformation" once they joined the LinkedIn team. These opportunities included personal advancement through a smooth path to change jobs within LinkedIn if they wished, as well as formal and informal programs designed for employees to pursue their passions-and share their experiences. "LinkedIn and Modern Recruiting (B)" goes into more detail about LinkedIn's data-driven approach, new recruitment innovations, and diversity scorecard.

This case picks up where "LinkedIn and Modern Recruiting (A)" left off, detailing the company's innovations in hiring practices, which included its highly effective use of LinkedIn profile and resume data. As part of these innovations, LinkedIn's talent acquisition team built a new recruiting model, called the Total Addressable Market (TAM) model. TAM took a page out of sales and marketing models by using data that users provided on LinkedIn, enabling the company to narrow, segment, and prioritize which potential candidates to commit recruiting resources toward. In addition, the case presents LinkedIn's diversity scorecard and efforts to date.

This 2015 case focuses on the evolution of Box's management practices as the company grew from a small start-up to an organization with over 1,000 employees in five major locations. The online file sharing and cloud content collaboration service company was founded in 2005, and a decade later it was valued at $2.4 billion. During that time, Box was evolving its approaches to and processes for hiring, compensation, promotions, and performance evaluations. A driving factor in its management practices was the need to attract and retain top-quality entrepreneurial employees. However, as the company pivoted strategy to focus more on the lucrative enterprise market, its management practices had to evolve to be able to attract and retain more experienced employees with specific expertise in that segment. Box found it need to address tensions that arose as the company grew, including the slower speed of promotions, the changing compensation mix (cash versus equity), and the changing company culture as more seasoned employees joined the Box team.

This case, an update on "Henkel: Building a Winning Culture (A)," describes Henkel's strong performance against its tough 2012 objectives, as well as the new objectives CEO Kasper Rorsted set for 2016.

Supplement to case IN1256. This case looks at how Lincoln Electric, the US-based company renowned for its compensation scheme, tried to implement its human resource policies globally and particularly in China.

The Vice President and General Manager of Northeast BMW, a family-owned car dealership, must determine what disciplinary actions to take against an employee who posted defamatory comments and photos to his Facebook page referencing two instances at the dealership. The first involved a launch event of the redesigned BMW 5 Series model for which the sales staff was dissatisfied with the quality of refreshments offered to potential customers. The employee also posted pictures and disparaging captions about an accident that occurred at the company's adjacent LandRover dealership later that week. The Vice President learned of the Facebook postings through phone calls from neighboring dealers.

Southwest Airlines has defied gravity as a leading domestic airliner with consistent profitability, extreme customer loyalty, and a happy labor force. Organizational excellence and a positive corporate culture has propelled Southwest to its leadership position in the US aviation industry. But what is the secret that keeps this airliner flying miles above its competitors? While success can be attributed to several competing factors, students will hone in on leadership, employees, and community impact to assess Southwest's organizational excellence.

The case study discusses the human resource strategy of a fast-growing company in the highly competitive beauty spa industry in Malaysia. It examines how the founders' personal values and philosophies are expressed in the human resource policies and practices and the influence of these on the company's customer service delivery and service culture. HerbaLine's focus on excellent customer service enabled the founders, Mr. Low Chee-Kwong and Ms. Liu Kim-Hwa, to position the beauty spa operator as a viable alternative to expensive, high-end international beauty chains and low-cost, no frills individually-operated beauty salons. The success of their service strategy is reflected in the growth of the beauty spa operator from one outlet in 2000 to 55 outlets in 2014. With a vision to expand HerbaLine beauty spa to every major town in Malaysia, the founders embarked on a new a profit sharing scheme for high performing employees to reward performance and to sustain and grow the high levels of employee commitment and excellent service delivery that underpinned the company's growth. Could this be the motor that would enable the company to double its number of outlets to 100 by 2024?

Like many other companies, Deloitte realized that its system for evaluating the work of employees--and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly--was increasingly out of step with its objectives. It searched for something nimbler, real-time, and more individualized--something squarely focused on fueling performance in the future rather than assessing it in the past. The new system will have no cascading objectives, no once-a-year reviews, and no 360-degree-feedback tools. Its hallmarks are speed, agility, one-size-fits-one, and constant learning, all underpinned by a new way of collecting reliable performance data. To arrive at this design, Deloitte drew on three pieces of evidence: a simple counting of hours, a review of research in the science of ratings, and a carefully controlled study of its own organization. It discovered that the organization was spending close to 2 million hours a year on performance management, and that "idiosyncratic rater effects" led to ratings that revealed more about team leaders than about the people they were rating. From an empirical study of its own high-performing teams, the company learned that three items correlated best with high performance for a team: "My coworkers are committed to doing quality work," "The mission of our company inspires me," and "I have the chance to use my strengths every day." Of these, the third was the most powerful across the organization. With all this evidence in hand, the company set about designing a radical new performance management system, which the authors describe in this article.

It is August 2014, and the Citibank conference on leadership and development has just concluded. Immediately after, Sara Roberts, Talent Head of Citigroup Asia Pacific, and Anuranjita Kumar, Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) of Citigroup South Asia, discuss a pressing issue: how talent and development programmes at Citibank India could evolve to cultivate the bank's future leaders.

HCL Technologies Ltd., India's fastest growing IT services company, had radically improved its performance since the announcement of its famous "Employee First, Customer Second" strategy. Although sales, customer and employee satisfaction had significantly increased, HCL still lagged its competitors on overall profitability. With manpower costs accounting for a significant part of the operating cost, HCL responded to the changing competitive environment and redesigned its talent management strategy. The case is set in the dynamic context of the growing competitive environment of talent shortages and increasing wage costs in India where the Talent Acquisition Group (TAG) of HCL is looking to become a true business partner by evolving its service capability to help increase overall profitability. As part of its new strategy, HCL realigns the TAG, implements major change initiatives to align its members and signs up aggressive SLAs with the business stakeholders. With the implementation of a new HRIS system to aid quick decision making, innovative methods of talent acquisition and focused metrics for the function, the HCL TAG pushes the boundaries of what can and should be strategic recruitment.

This case explores how a hiring manager at LinkedIn uses a selection interview to ensure a new employee fits the organization's values and culture. This selection interview provides a glimpse into how this manager puts the organization's values and culture into practice while recruiting a new employee. The case provides students with background information about LinkedIn's growth and success, its culture, and the value CEO Jeff Weiner's places on compassion. It also introduces Ryan Giles, a hiring manager at LinkedIn who poses an interview question to Lindsay Reed, a student pursuing an internship with LinkedIn. The case puts the student in the role of Lindsay as she debates the best way to answer the interview question. The epilogue to the teaching note describes Lindsay's answer as well as Ryan's explanation as to why he used this approach.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School's MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies. What their comprehensive survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women's careers doesn't always square with reality. The survey showed, for instance, that: (1) The highly educated, ambitious women and men of HBS don't differ much in terms of what they value and hope for in their lives and careers. (2) It simply isn't true that a large proportion of HBS alumnae have "opted out" to care for children. (3) Going part-time or taking a career break to care for children doesn't explain the gender gap in senior management. (4) The vast majority of women anticipated that their careers would rank equally with those of their partners. Many of them were disappointed. It is now time, the authors write, for companies to consider how they can institutionalize a level playing field for all employees, including caregivers of both genders. The misguided assumption that high-potential women are "riskier" hires than their male peers because they are apt to discard their careers after parenthood has become yet another bias for women to contend with.