Michael Beer

How to create the high-performance, high-commitment organization.

Integrating knowledge from strategic management, performance management, and organization design, strategic human resource expert and Harvard Business School Professor Michael Beer outlines what the high-commitment, high-performance organization looks like and provides practitioners with the transformation process to help them get there. Starting with leaders who have the right values, Beer shows how to weave together a complete system that includes top-to-bottom communication, organization design, HR policies, and leadership transformation process, and outlines what practitioners must do in HR, structure, systems, goals, culture, and strategy to create high-performance organizations.

The time has come for American managers to rethink the traditional relationship between management and workers. The personnel practices of the past are an obstacle today, blocking the higher productivity and quality levels your firm will need to succeed in the competitive environment of the 1980s and beyond.

While U.S. corporations have become increasingly sophisticated at managing their financial and capital resources, one critical resource has been seriously underutilized in the American firm. This book introduces a new way of thinking about, and managing, your firm's greatest untapped potential: the human resources that can make or break any firm's best-laid plans.

Managing Human Assets is not a book about "personnel management"; traditional personnel practice has involved a disjointed set of functions and techniques that have not optimized motivation, commitment, competence, and receptivity to change, the social capital of the firm.

Instead, here is a pioneering guide for all general managers, operations managers, and personnel executives that treats the management of human resources as a key part of the firm's long-term competitive strategy. It demonstrates how this new way of thinking is being implemented at several major corporations, with relatively low financial investment and high productivity pay-off. With Managing Human Assets, you can realize the vast potential for productivity that lies in one of the American firm's last underutilized resources -- the motivated American worker.

Michael Beer’s current research focuses on the question of what makes an Effective Organization. Based on his extensive research and practice about this question Beer has identified six highly interrelated core capabilities:

1. Capacity of the organization’s management to develop a clear and compelling strategic and values direction.
2. An effective senior team capable of honest conversations about ever changing strategic and organizational problems and opportunities.
3. A leader who advocates a direction for the organization and humbly inquiries into organizational barriers to achieving the organization’s direction.
4. Coordination and collaboration between functions, businesses, and geographic boundaries essential to executing the organizations strategic direction.
5. Developing leadership and general management capabilities in high potential individuals.
6. Truth is able to speak to power about the organizations key strengths to be preserved and barriers to executing the business’ strategy.

The research method employed:

To enable truth to speak to power about barriers to organizational effectiveness Beer and his colleagues employed a research and intervention methodology they developed called the Strategic Fitness Process.  The method enabled a task force of eight key high performance leaders commissioned by the senior team to conduct confidential interviews of one hundred key people across all parts of the organization. They asked interviewees to tell them what in their experience stood in the way of executing the organization’s business’ strategy and values.

The six capabilities are a syndrome of interdependent barriers that exist in most organizations because they are difficult to develop and maintain. At key inflection points in the organization’s life, they become the major reason for the inability of the organization to respond effectively. A vicious negative cycle develops that is difficult to stop unless leaders enable an honest conversation about them and change how the enterprise is organized, managed and led.