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In the United States, HR management is perceived as a narrow specialty. In Japan, it's a place to go to get ahead.

Decisions about talent should be made with the same rigor and logic as decisions about money, customers, and technology.

Job Offer Negotiation is a role play between a job applicant and a recruiter. This role play is illustrates the importance of preparation and planning, integrative negotiation in the context of job offers and specific behaviors that contribute to effective negotiation.

Job Offer Negotiation is a role play between a job applicant and a recruiter. It is intended to illustrate the importance of preparation and planning; integrative negotiation in the context of job offers, and specific behaviors that contribute to effective negotiation. To be used with Job Offer Negotiation - Applicant, product 905C12.

What happens when strained relationships develop between two people you value in your organization and they come to you for advice? David Walker was a senior attorney in a bustling white shoe law practice. During an especially busy time, Walker became party to an in-office dispute between his trusted administrative assistant, Susan Emson, and a respected colleague, Ramya Kumar. He had spent numerous hours listening to both sides tell their stories and was left with an impending sense that he had no answers. How was he ever going to help two people he valued greatly work out a compromise between their extremely polar positions? How did the dispute get to such a point? The case provides opportunities to explore the sources of interpersonal conflict, causes of escalation, and ways of diffusing and resolving it.

Most professional women step off the career fast track at some point. With children to raise, elderly parents to care for, and other pulls on their time, these women are confronted with one off-ramp after another. When they feel pushed at the same time by long hours and unsatisfying work, the decision to leave becomes even easier. But woe to the woman who intends for that exit to be temporary. The on-ramps for professional women to get back on track are few and far between, the authors confirm. Their new survey research reveals for the first time the extent of the problem--what percentage of highly qualified women leave work and for how long, what obstacles they face coming back, and what price they pay for their time-outs. And what are the implications for corporate America? One thing at least seems clear: As market and economic factors align in ways guaranteed to make talent constraints and skill shortages huge issues again, employers must learn to reverse this brain drain. Like it or not, large numbers of highly qualified, committed women need to take time out of the workplace. The trick is to help them maintain connections that will allow them to reenter the workforce without being marginalized for the rest of their lives. Strategies for building such connections include creating reduced-hour jobs, providing flexibility in the workday and in the arc of a career, removing the stigma of taking time off, refusing to burn bridges, offering outlets for altruism, and nurturing women's ambition. An HBR Special Report, available online at www.womenscareersreport.hbr.org, presents detailed findings of the survey.

Baby busters won't get the jobs the boomers leave behind, warns demographer Phillip Longman.

For six years, Cynthia Cunningham and Shelley Murray shared an executive job at Fleet Bank: one desk, one chair, one computer, one telephone, and one voice-mail account. To their clients and colleagues, they were effectively one person, though one person with the strengths and ideas of two, seamlessly handing projects back and forth. Although their department was dissolved after the bank merged with Bank of America, the two continue to consider themselves a package--they have one resume, and they are seeking their next opportunity together. Their choice to share a job was not only a quality-of-life decision but one intended to keep their careers on course: "Taking two separate part-time jobs would have thrown us completely off track," they write in this first-person account. "We're both ambitious people, and neither of us wanted just a job. We wanted careers." In this article, the two highly motivated women reveal their determination to manage the demands of both family and career. Flextime, telecommuting, and compressed workweeks are just some of the options open to executives seeking greater work/life balance; the job share, as described by Cunningham and Murray, could well be the next solution for those wishing to avoid major trade-offs between their personal and professional lives. Cunningham and Murray describe in vivid detail how they structured their unusual arrangement, how they sold themselves to management, and the hurdles they faced along the way. Theirs is a win-win story, for the company and for them.

Presents the dilemma facing George Jones with respect to the high selling cost at Parisian Department Stores. The challenges to be considered reflect issues at different levels of the organization, including individual salespeople, the store itself, and the merchandise policy for a set of rather diverse stores.

Most feedback accentuates the negative. During formal employee evaluations, discussions invariably focus on "opportunities for improvement," even if the overall evaluation is laudatory. No wonder most executives--and their direct reports--dread them. Traditional, corrective feedback has its place, of course; every organization must filter out failing employees and ensure that everyone performs at an expected level of competence. But too much emphasis on problem areas prevents companies from reaping the best from their people. After all, it's a rare baseball player who is equally good at every position. Why should a natural third baseman labor to develop his skills as a right fielder? This article presents a tool to help you understand and leverage your strengths. Called the Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise, it offers a unique feedback experience that counterbalances negative input. It allows you to tap into talents you may or may not be aware of and, so, increase your career potential. To begin the RBS exercise, you first need to solicit comments from family, friends, colleagues, and teachers, asking them to give specific examples of times in which those strengths were particularly beneficial. Next, you need to search for common themes in the feedback, organizing them in a table to develop a clear picture of your strong suits. Third, you must write a self-portrait--a description of yourself that summarizes and distills the accumulated information. And, finally, you need to redesign your personal job description to build on what you're good at. The RBS exercise helps you discover who you are at the top of your game. Once you're aware of your best self, you can shape the positions you choose to play--both now and in the next phase of your career.

How many of us keep pace day to day, upholding our obligations to our bosses, families, and the community, even as our overall satisfaction with work and quality of life decline? And, yet, our common response to the situation is: "I'm too busy to do anything about it now." Unfortunately, unless a personal or professional crisis strikes, very few of us step back, take stock of our day-to-day actions, and make a change. In this article, London Business School strategy professors Donald Sull and Dominic Houlder examine the reasons why a gap often exists between the things we value most and the ways we actually spend our time, money, and attention. They also suggest a practical approach to managing the gap. The framework they propose is based on their study of organizational commitments--the investments, promises, and contracts made today that bind companies to a future course of action. Such commitments can prevent organizations from responding effectively to change. A similar logic applies to personal commitments--the day-to-day decisions we make about how we allocate our precious resources. These decisions are individually small and, therefore, easy to lose sight of. When we do, a gap can develop between our commitments and our convictions. Sull and Houlder make no value judgments about the content of personal commitments; they've devised a somewhat dispassionate tool to help you take a thorough inventory of what matters to you most. It involves listing your most important values and assigning to each a percentage of your annual salary, the hours out of your week, and the amount of energy you devote. Using this exercise, you should be able to identify big gaps--stated values that receive little or none of your scarce resources or a single value that sucks a disproportionate share of resources--and change your allocations accordingly.

By comparing the top executives of 1980's Fortune 100 companies with the top brass of firms in the 2001 list, the authors have quantified a transformation that until now has been largely anecdotal. A dramatic shift in executive careers, and in executives themselves, has occurred over the past two decades. Today's Fortune 100 executives are younger, more of them are female, and fewer were educated at elite institutions. They're also making their way to the top more quickly. They're taking fewer jobs along the way, and they increasingly move from one company to the next as their careers unfold. In their wide-ranging analysis, the authors offer a number of insights. For one thing, it has become clear that there are huge advantages to working in a growing firm. For another, the firms that have been big for a long time still provide the most extensive training and development. They also offer relatively long promotion ladders--hence the common wisdom that these "academy companies" are great to have been from. While women were disproportionately scarce among the most senior ranks of executives in 2001, those who arrived got there faster and at a younger age than their male colleagues. Perhaps the career hurdles that women face had blocked all but the most highly qualified female managers, who then proceeded to rise quickly. In the future, a record of good P&L performance may become even more critical to getting hired and advancing in the largest companies. As a result, we may see a reversal of the usual flow of talent, which has been from the academy companies to smaller firms. It may be increasingly common for executives to develop records of performance in small companies, or even as entrepreneurs, and then seek positions in large corporations.

Sara Horowitz, founder of the nonprofit Working Today, explains why insurance programs for independent workers are good for business.

Young employees are ambitious--yet hoping to stay at one company for as long as possible.

Economics professor Paul Oyer and management policy professor Scott Schaefer explain how the Civil Rights Act of 1991 hurts those it's meant to help.

In the context of Japan's struggling economy of the 1990s, ORIX, a leading Japanese financial services company, implemented a new performance evaluation and compensation system. At the time, many higher-paying western firms were entering the Japanese market and threatened to take ORIX's talent. ORIX's system had always included performance-based pay and now sought to make it a bigger part. The CEO sought to create a system combining the best elements of Japanese Western corporate culture. In 2001, ORIX further refined and expanded its evaluation and compensation system. Several managers comment on the system's strengths and weaknesses. Examines these issues in the light of Japan's economy and unique corporate culture.

Describes the steps the vice-president of human resources takes in revamping an HR function that was noncooperative and, at times, competitive and introducing the company to the notion of HR as a strategic business partner. Explores changes made to the company's compensation, performance management, and succession planning processes. Teaching Purpose: To allow students to think strategically about reorganizing the human resources department to support business strategy and serve as a business partner.

Supplements the (A) case.

This case discusses the problem of balancing demand and supply of professionals over time using a fictional scenario.