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Reinsurance and financial‐services organization Swiss Re has repositioned its alternative risk resources after a radical reorganization. Strategic imperatives included establishing a new performance culture among its 500 associates, who mostly work in virtual teams as part of the new Swiss Re New Markets (SRNM) division. Compensation through variable bonus and multilevel appraisal has been a critical success factor.

Despite recording more than $1 billion in annual sales world‐wide, LL Bean faces the pressures of all major retailers – competition, fluctuating sales, overcapacity in the sector and potential squeezes on margins. The business is one of the world’s best‐known brands in outdoor sports and mail‐order catalog retailing. Its Freeport flagship store draws more than 3.5 million visitors a year and some 15 million toll‐free catalog calls are received, to place orders from 16,000 stock lines. Online retailing began in 1996.

Getty Images believes that the Internet is the only way to reach a worldwide, disparate and multilingual employee group. Information technology is beginning to enable the company to deliver state‐of‐the‐art HR services. The company is a market leader in providing visual content primarily for the design, media and photographic industries. It is a Web‐enabled e‐commerce business in the world’s top 20, with 2,600 staff and a vision to be “the essential source of imagery and related products and services online”.

If our hospital did not exist, how would we create it? This was the question asked by doctors and managers at Leicester Royal Infirmary, one of two English pilot sites to evaluate the use of business process re‐engineering (BPR) in a healthcare environment.

Dejando huella, the concept of leaving a legacy for all to see, has helped to establish a culture of success at a plant in a border area known for cultural clashes, discrimination, stereotyping, workplace conflict and language difficulties. Established in April 1992 as an automobile airbag and side‐impact‐module manufacturer in TRW’s multinational operations, TRW Occupant Restraints de Chihuahua was set a tough mission by its American parent. It had to set up on a green‐field site, establish advanced manufacturing practices, introduce several new products and deliver as many perfect units as possible to sister plants in the USA – all with 100 percent Mexican employees and management.

Corporations are coming round to the fact that people, like other assets, must be managed for the long term. Any company that can’t prove it’s sustainable beyondthe near‐term is going to have trouble gaining investor confidence. HR professionals need to be thinking in the same way about people by building long‐term talent depth and bench strength within the organization. This issue of Strategic HR Review brings you examples of leading‐edge companies that have faced these challenges and achieved bottom‐line results.

Faced with declining revenues and significant business losses in the early 1990s, IBM reviewed its products, services, infrastructure, operations and functions. As part of this process, HR processes, policies and practices were either reformed or eliminated. Bob Gonzales, vice‐president of HR operations and formerly founding director of IBM’s national human‐resources service center (NHRSC), which emerged as a far‐reaching development in re‐engineering HR, recalls: “We had this bold vision of an ongoing journey which, by transforming HR, could also revitalize the business. It was strategic change of the highest order.”

Over a five‐year period, AT&T Consumer Services experienced radical structural change, in preparation for US deregulation of the telecommunications and information‐services markets in 1996, and afterwards. This had far‐reaching internal impacts, including waves of downsizing, growth and further restructuring. Continuing success in the 23,000‐employee business rests on being able to differentiate itself through high‐performance competitiveness and people effectiveness.

It seems that one of the major buzzwords of the late 1990s is “virtual”we have heard of virtual bookshops, virtual universities, virtual shopping malls, virtual offices and, of course, virtual reality. So is the virtual world simply a passing fad or is it something which is truly changing the way we live our lives and the way we work and communicate? Despite the proliferation of virtuality it is difficult to find a common definition of “virtual” which is applicable in all of its uses. We do believe, however, that the concept has real value when addressing the subject of organizational development; and as a concept it is not so much about managing in the sense of planning, controlling, directing and organizing, but more concerned with the notion of continuous or institutionalized change. This implies not management but a process which is both self‐regulatory and selfperpetuating.

At the World Bank we are learning that economic development is more of a process of knowledge accumulation than of capital accumulation, all the more pertinent because the creation and dissemination of knowledge are accelerating rapidly. The stock of understanding of knowledge itself is growing more rapidly as a result of advances in our understanding of scientific principles. In addition, rapid developments in information and communications technologies (in part the results of these advances) are themselves speeding the rate of generating and diffusing knowledge. This is largely being achieved by reducing the cost of codifying and processing information.