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This paper aims to examine the future contribution of human resources (HR) in three areas: first, the evolution of four waves of HR value creation leading to an outside-in focus. Second, HR insights about individual competence (talent), leadership and organization capabilities (culture). Third, creating more effective HR departments and upgrading HR professionals.

The author, Dave Ulrich, has worked extensively on HR theory, research and practice. This paper synthesizes and extends his (and others’) thinking about HR’s evolving contributions.

HR is not about HR, but about helping an organization succeed in the marketplace through talent, leadership and organization. HR departments can be assessed and improved based on nine dimensions and HR professionals can recognize and master competencies that help them deliver value.

Reading should come away recognize where HR can continue to contribute to individual and organizational success through thinking outside in, delivering HR agenda (talent, leadership and organization), and improving the HR department and upgrading HR professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact that HR departments have on alternative stakeholders when they focus on improving the organization’s information capability instead of focusing their information agenda on human resource (HR) departmental activities.

The findings are based on the 2016 offering of the HR Competency study that is sponsored by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the RBL Group. The data set consists of over 36,000 respondents from around the world. Data were gathered through a 360 methodology that includes self-ratings and HR and non-HR associate ratings.

The findings show that HR’s involvement in leveraging business information has more impact than any other HR department activity on creating value for key external stakeholders. When controlling for other HR activities, the analysis shows that 77.4 per cent of HR total impact on customer value and 55.6 per cent of shareholder value occurs through HR’s involvement in information management. This impact occurs as HR departments contribute to identifying important external information (including customer and competitive information), importing important external information into the firm, analyzing information through both quantitative and qualitative algorithms, disseminating key facts and findings throughout the firm and ensuring the full utilization of information in decision making. The authors provide examples of how HR departments in leading companies are contributing to each of these phases of organization information management.

These findings have potentially important implications for how HR professionals add value to their key stakeholders. It suggests that HR departments will add greater value to their firms as they shift the focus of their information agenda from application to internal HR processes and practices to creating competitive advantage through organization-wide information management capability.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an integrated framework for understanding agility. Agility has become an increasingly important capability in today’s changing business world. In this paper, the authors suggest “3, 4’s” to better define agility. Agility can be defined through four dimensions (create the future, anticipate opportunity, adapt quickly and learn always); agility occurs with four stakeholders (strategy, organization, leader and individual); and agility is sustained through four Human Resource (HR) tools (people, performance, information and work).

Using this integrated framework, executives can better define, assess and invest in creating agility as a capability.

The authors studied leading Chinese and US high-tech organizations to discover how they respond to changing market conditions.

The research for this agility framework is described in their book, Reinventing the Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Radically Greater Value in Fast-Changing Markets.

The purpose of this paper is to provide answers to four questions on building a better human resources (HR) department: why?, who?, what? and how?

The paper is based on the accumulated experience of the co-authors.

The paper finds that better HR departments create better organizations and will often do this by enabling better relationships between the people working in them. Developing the right relationships is also an increasingly important part of creating an effective HR organization.

Much attention has been spent on developing HR professionals. The authors also want to make HR departments better. This paper steers future research on HR effectiveness in this direction.

Senior HR leaders charged with improving their HR department may do so with the roadmap offered by the authors.

For businesses to receive full value from HR, it is very important to upgrade the quality of HR professionals. It is even more important to upgrade HR departments. This paper suggests how this can be done.

This paper aims to answer the why, what and how of culture as an emerging human resource agenda. Understanding culture is a trending topic for organization executives and thought leaders. Few deny the importance of culture for shaping and sustaining employee engagement and productivity, sustained strategy and business results. But while culture matters, it is often ambiguous and hard to define.

Based on our research on over 1,000 organizations, the authors have found that organization (culture) impacts business performance two to four times as much as individual talent.

The authors suggest that culture is not just a random set of values, beliefs or emotions, but a winning culture turns customer promises (firm brands) into internal organization actions. This paper proposes a disciplined process for creating a winning culture that engages employees in the right issues and invite human resource professionals to step up to this opportunity.

In this paper, the authors posit that the war for talent may be supplemented by understanding victory through organization culture.

In this paper, the authors share answers to the following questions based on data collected from 183 global companies in the most recent round of Aon Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders^®: Does diversity and inclusion matter? What is diversity? What practices build more diverse workforces and more inclusive cultures?

Much of the research cited in this paper comes from the Aon-Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders^® data set. In the latest round of data collection, completed in late 2014, 183 companies participated from around the world. Each completed a detailed online questionnaire of leadership practices. From those submissions, finalists were identified and hundreds of interviews were conducted with senior line and executives of human resources. A panel of expert judges determined the global and regional winners based on their responses to the survey questionnaire and interviews, as well as financial and other publicly available information.

Whether it is a causal relationship or merely a correlated finding, companies that have diverse, inclusive talent strategies appear to out-perform their peers on both talent and financial outcomes.

This paper highlights the differences between top companies in managing diversity compared to other companies in the research data. It also highlights some best practice methods to build diversity.

This paper documents the evolution of the definitions of diversity and considers diversity as a means to business ends rather than an end in itself.

This paper aims to define and clarify the nine criteria of an effective HR department, and it illustrates how these nine criteria deliver value across four distinct stages of an HR department.

This research is based on over 100,000 respondents from the HR competency study along with interviews and discussions with senior HR professionals in over 100 global 500 organizations across all industry sectors.

Many HR transformation efforts exclusively focus on how to organize the HR department. This paper argues that organizing and designing the right HR department is an important part of HR transformation, but focusing only on the HR department is a narrow focus of the overall effectiveness of HR. The overall effectiveness of the HR department consists of nine criteria that deliver value across four stages.

This paper provides HR professionals with a simple and practical framework to audit the overall effectiveness of the HR department by clarifying the nine criteria of an effective HR department that deliver value across four stages.

Against the backdrop of IBM Personal Computer Business's acquisition by Lenovo Group, this case introduces the remodeling process of Lenovo's HR organization and development team, during which the company's 5P principle, namely “Plan (think clearly before making promise), Perform (promise is to be fulfilled), Prioritize (company's interest is top priority), Practice (make progress every day in every year), Pioneering (venture any experiment to be a trailblazer), takes shape. After learning about Lenovo's recruitment of internationalized talents, cross-cultural coaches for senior leaders, cultural development in internationalization and risk aversion in international operations, we can understand what Lenovo's HR team does to avoid conflicts in corporate culture and ethnic culture in cross-border mergers and acquisitions and integration, and how to adjust and change the HR management system.

Business leaders can add to their bottom line by being more attentive to “soft” organization factors, such as the commitment level of employees, the quality of leaders, and the linkage of both to obtaining results. Such “intangible” factors account for 50 percent of a company’s market value. Results‐based leadership is the key source of increasing this intangible value. The selection and development of leaders in the organization should begin with the question, “What is it we need to deliver for the company?” Next determine the behaviors the leaders need to deliver those results. Too many companies do the reverse. For example, a firm wants leaders who have a vision “so that” the company will be able to innovate products faster than competitors. Or, the business wants leaders who can build teams quickly “so that” the time from concept to commercialization of a product is 20 percent faster in two years. Four attributes of leadership are suggested: setting direction for where the organization is headed; demonstrating personal character; mobilizing individual employee commitment; engendering the organization’s capability (building systems). Linking these attributes to results, there are four steps offered that will help build results‐based leaders: believe that leadership matters; develop a leadership brand; assess leaders and find their gaps; invest in leadership. A four by four matrix tool is offered as an aid to promote the linkage between capabilities and results. Empowerment becomes easy when the four levers (information, competence, authority, and rewards) are taken across the four boundaries of every company (vertical, horizontal, external and global). A succinct example: most firms move authority vertically from top to bottom but fail when they keep information, competence and rewards at the top.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a new leadership style – “soft leadership” – which is needed in a interconnected, global, and technocratic world.

This paper is a combination of research into a new leadership style with a question and answer session during an International Leadership Association (ILA) webinar.

The paper discovers how the soft leaders adopt tools such as influence, persuasion, negotiation, appreciation, motivation, and collaboration for the collective good. It explains how soft leadership is different from other leadership styles. It describes the significance of soft leadership and differentiates between soft and hard leadership through examples. It substantiates with Dave Ulrich's Leadership Code. It provides the questions posed by participants during the webinar organized by International Leadership Association (ILA) with answers. It calls upon readers to consider how leadership insights acquired from this manuscript may be applied individually and organizationally to make a difference in the lives of others.

The 11 C's that collectively constitute soft leadership is a unique concept. Globally renowned management guru, Dave Ulrich mapped 11 C's into a leadership code on the author's request which added value to this new concept. Participation of international leadership experts and their questions during the ILA webinar with the author's spontaneous answers further enriched this concept.