Raising the Sea Level

Four essays of diagnosis earn one of prescription, and the prescription is perhaps unwelcome. At least for those whose thinking cannot transcend quarterly planning.Let me put the claim plainly and admit at the outset what kind of claim it is. Strategic people management is not an input to strategy. It is the precondition of strategy—the thing without which a strategy is a document rather than a course of action undertaken. I am not offering that as an empirical finding, because I know of no study that establishes it and I am not going to pretend otherwise; the literature that comes closest argues correlation between people-centred practice and firm performance, and it argues it with a directional problem of exactly the sort I raised against the psychological-debt survey in the second essay. Profitable firms can afford to treat people well. The claim I am making is definitional and normative, and it stands or falls on whether it clarifies something you already half knew.Here is the…