People Power

Developing the talent to perform

Kim Warren and Jeremy Kourdi

ISBN 0-9545328-2-1

People are an expensive, critical resource in any organization, and can represent a powerful source of sustained advantage. They profoundly affect other resources, such as customers, brand reputation, intellectual property, and cash.  They drive the growth or decline of these resources and possess attributes of their own, such as skills and knowledge that must be carefully developed and nurtured.

Despite this, leaders tend to focus on the softer aspects of people management - those that are the least easy to identify and influence, such as motivating, mentoring, and team working - while neglecting the fundamentals of how many people they need, where, when, and to do what. This book redresses the balance, providing a practical, rigorous, and fact-based approach to managing this most sensitive of resources.

People Power:

• Shows leaders how to understand and manage the changes in their staff base over time in the light of often complex interactions between hiring, promotion, development and attrition.
• Explains where people connect to the tangible resources of the business to help managers deploy them more effectively, get the right number of the best people in the right places, and make the necessary adjustments as the business changes through time.
• Describes the mechanisms by which people and teams develop skills and shared capabilities so that they can boost the performance of the organization as a whole.
• Provides a common language in diagrams, words, and numbers to help leaders, HR professionals, and others in the management team understand and communicate how their staff resources are developing through time, thus enabling costly and arduous organizational initiatives to be undertaken with confidence and support.

Improving performance by making better decisions about your people is not just a matter for top management; given the right tools, anyone with influence over the way their enterprise works can make a difference.  This book provides an original approach to developing organizational effectiveness that is long overdue.

Contents

Introduction
People, resources, and performance
Understanding staff dynamics
Resource interdependence
Understanding resource attributes
Rivalry for resources
Developing your employer brand
Intangible resources
Building capabilities
Going forward

Kim Warren

is a Teaching Fellow in Strategic Management at London Business School. In addition to teaching strategy dynamics on MBA and executive programs, he consults and coaches leadership teams in this approach. His work spans a wide range of sectors including governmental and voluntary bodies and professional organizations as well as corporate settings such as oil and petrochemicals, banking, pharmaceuticals, and global IT services. He is also the author of Competitive Strategy Dynamics (John Wiley & Sons, 2002) and The Critical Path (Vola Press, 2003).

Jeremy Kourdi

is a writer and business consultant. He has worked with major corporations, publishers, business schools, and professional associations, including HSBC, The Economist Group, IMD, and the Chartered Management Institute. He is a MA in international relations and is the author of ten business books and many articles.

VOLA Press

Vola Press was established by experts in business dynamics and strategy to publish books that help managers at every level make substantial - and sustainable - improvements in their business performance.