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 -- though not by its Japanese competitors. 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.

Drawing on the extraordinary new program developed at the Harvard Business School, this book presents an innovative strategic model of human resource management, or HRM. And it demonstrates how this new way of thinking is being implemented at several major American and Japanese corporations, with relatively low financial investment and high productivity pay-off.