Play To Your Strengths:Managing Your Internal Labor Markets for Lasting Competitive Advantage

All leaders know that people are critical to the success of their companies. But executives don‘t always act that way. Why? Because they lack the facts. Too often, they don‘t really know which workplace practices create the greatest value. And they don‘t know which attributes of their workforce are critical to winning with their business strategy.

Now, this is all changing. Companies can measure the links between their specific workplace practices and business results, learning what is creating value and what is not. This can lead to better decisions about where to cut costs, where to reallocate spending, and where to make bigger investments for greater returns.

In Play To Your Strengths: Managing Your Internal Labor Markets for Lasting Competitive Advantage, Haig R. Nalbantian, Richard A. Guzzo, Dave Kieffer, and Jay Doherty explain how you can exploit the last available asset to be mobilized as a competitive advantage: the people in your company.

The authors are principals of Mercer Human Resource Consulting, co-founders of the Strategy and Metrics Group, and are the chief architects of the theory, tools, and processes described in this summary.

The ideas we will discuss are the result of their 10-year study, involving more than 100 companies and data from 2 million employees. Their findings reveal for the first time how people management practices affect the workforce, and how they make an impact on business performance.