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A comprehensive and insightful look at the modern workplace and how employees are managed, where the new approach is driven by the quirks of financial accounting to the detriment of employees and the long-term success of the organization. Real wages have stagnated or declined for most workers, job insecurity has increased, and retirement income is uncertain. Hours of work for white collar employees have increased steadily, opportunities for advancement have withered, and evidence of the negative effects of workplace stress on health continues to accumulate. Why have jobs gotten so much worse? As Peter Cappelli argues, these issues are not a result of companies trying to be cost effective. They stem from the logic of financial accounting--the arbiter for determining whether a company is maximizing shareholder value--and its fundamental flaws in dealing with human capital. Financial accounting views employee costs as fixed costs that cannot be reduced and fails to account for the costs of bad employees and poor management. The simple goal of today's executives is to drive down employment costs, even if it raises costs elsewhere. In Our Least Important Asset, Cappelli argues that the financial accounting problem explains many puzzling practices in contemporary management--employers' emphasis on costs per hire over the quality of hires, the replacement of regular employees with "leased" workers, the shift to unlimited vacations, and the transition of hiring responsibilities from professional recruiters to more expensive line managers. In the process, employers undercut all the evidence about what works to improve the quality, productivity, and creativity of workers. Drawing on decades of experience and research, Cappelli provides a comprehensive and insightful critique of the modern workplace where the gaps in financial accounting make things worse for everyone, from employees to investors.
Peter Cappelli confronts the myth of the skills gap and provides an actionable path forward to put people back to work. Even in a time of perilously high unemployment, companies contend that they cannot find the employees they need. Pointing to a skills gap, employers argue applicants are simply not qualified; schools aren't preparing students for jobs; the government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants; and even when the match is right, prospective employees won't accept jobs at the wages offered. In this powerful and fast-reading book, Peter Cappelli, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, debunks the arguments and exposes the real reasons good people can't get hired. Drawing on jobs data, anecdotes from all sides of the employer-employee divide, and interviews with jobs professionals, he explores the paradoxical forces bearing down on the American workplace and lays out solutions that can help us break through what has become a crippling employer-employee stand-off. Among the questions he confronts: Is there really a skills gap? To what extent is the hiring process being held hostage by automated software that can crunch thousands of applications an hour? What kind of training could best bridge the gap between employer expectations and applicant realities, and who should foot the bill for it? Are schools really at fault? Named one of HR Magazine's Top 20 Most Influential Thinkers of 2011, Cappelli not only changes the way we think about hiring but points the way forward to rev America's job engine again.
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An innovative new valuation framework with truly useful economic indicators The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers shows how the ubiquitous financial reports have become useless in capital market decisions and lays out an actionable alternative. Based on a comprehensive, large-sample empirical analysis, this book reports financial documents' continuous deterioration in relevance to investors' decisions. An enlightening discussion details the reasons why accounting is losing relevance in today's market, backed by numerous examples with real-world impact. Beyond simply identifying the problem, this report offers a solution—the Value Creation Report—and demonstrates its utility in key industries. New indicators focus on strategy and execution to identify and evaluate a company's true value-creating resources for a more up-to-date approach to critical investment decision-making. While entire industries have come to rely on financial reports for vital information, these documents are flawed and insufficient when it comes to the way investors and lenders work in the current economic climate. This book demonstrates an alternative, giving you a new framework for more informed decision making. Discover a new, comprehensive system of economic indicators Focus on strategic, value-creating resources in company valuation Learn how traditional financial documents are quickly losing their utility Find a path forward with actionable, up-to-date information Major corporate decisions, such as restructuring and M&A, are predicated on financial indicators of profitability and asset/liabilities values. These documents move mountains, so what happens if they're based on faulty indicators that fail to show the true value of the company? The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers shows you the reality and offers a new blueprint for more accurate valuation.
Your company's data has the potential to add enormous value to every facet of the organization -- from marketing and new product development to strategy to financial management. Yet if your company is like most, it's not using its data to create strategic advantage. Data sits around unused -- or incorrect data fouls up operations and decision making. In Data Driven, Thomas Redman, the "Data Doc," shows how to leverage and deploy data to sharpen your company's competitive edge and enhance its profitability. The author reveals: · The special properties that make data such a powerful asset · The hidden costs of flawed, outdated, or otherwise poor-quality data · How to improve data quality for competitive advantage · Strategies for exploiting your data to make better business decisions · The many ways to bring data to market · Ideas for dealing with political struggles over data and concerns about privacy rights Your company's data is a key business asset, and you need to manage it aggressively and professionally. Whether you're a top executive, an aspiring leader, or a product-line manager, this eye-opening book provides the tools and thinking you need to do that.
Introducing “return on relationship” with your most valued customers The traditional model of growing your business—by relying on employees in sales, marketing, and product development—is dying. Today’s most successful companies are taking a different approach: getting customers to market, sell, and create products for them. In assessing client value, most companies look at the money paid for their goods and services. But in this book, Customer Strategy Group CEO Bill Lee offers a compelling new vision for growth by maximizing your “return on relationship” with select customers—those that offer rich sources of hidden wealth. A different type of ROI, this strategy of making the most of your firm’s existing relationships is a modern approach to customer relations—one that yields a distinct business advantage. Illustrated by numerous case studies—Salesforce.com, SAS Institute, 3M, Microsoft, and others—The Hidden Wealth of Customers shows the value some customers can have by helping to market your offerings, penetrate foreign markets, leverage the demand-generating power of social media, build customer communities, improve innovation, and more. Lee explains how to effectively engage this crucial audience, which has the power to keep your strategy focused on important customer issues and increase profitability. When done right, your best customers will prospect for you while also speeding product adoption and improving customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty. Consider this book a blueprint for finally making the most out of your most valuable customer relationships.
The principles of sound human resource management are generally understood, but too often practitioners believe the same policies and programs will work in all contexts. The effectiveness of any system is highly dependent on the context within which it must function. And due to globalization and increased workforce diversity, the contexts across and even within organizations have become more varied. The Most Important Asset is a story about new graduates entering the human resources field, encountering and dealing with workforce management challenges and issues and developing their own professional competence through experience. Principles are presented and alternative solutions to problems are explored, providing the reader with a roadmap for analyzing situations and making decisions as to how to act. Placing the characters in different types of organizations provides insights into how different contexts call for different strategies. Alternative strategies for staffing an organization, developing its people, defining, measuring and rewarding performance are used to illustrate how what is done should be compatible with the mission, culture, organizational strategy, and internal and external realities.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is under fire, but attracting and retaining talent is more important than ever. This book introduces an entirely new approach to DEI, showing how and why measuring inclusion is the key for organizations to enjoy higher performance and greater employee satisfaction, without causing any backlash. Measuring Inclusion offers step-by-step directions, sample data, and real-world case studies to help you make meaningful and sustainable improvements in employee recruitment, engagement, productivity, and retention. You will learn to quantify, track, and estimate the financial ROI of your organization’s DEI efforts just as you do with every other business activity—and in the process make your organization more successful and increasingly welcoming for everyone. “A more strategic, data-informed approach to DEI.” – Tiffany Wollbrinck, Global Talent Management and Development, Levi Strauss & Co “Practical, measurable strategies that tie directly to business performance.” – Kirsty Devine, Head of US HR and Global Projects, The Financial Times “The analytical framework practitioners have been looking for in the area of DEI.” – Silke Muenster, Former Chief Diversity Officer, Philip Morris International “A crucial counterpoint to the current backlash against DEI, providing a data-driven justification for why these efforts are essential for business success.” – Jennifer Brown, Keynote Speaker and WSJ best-selling author, How to be an Inclusive Leader A former professor with degrees in mathematics, aerospace engineering, and neuroscience, Paolo Gaudiano is an entrepreneur, a teacher, a prolific writer, and a sought-after speaker. His work transforms how people think about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and what they do about it, with the ultimate goal of making our society more inclusive and equitable while driving greater economic benefits for everyone.
Rising inequality is the defining feature of our age. With the lion’s share of wealth growth going to the top, for a growing percentage of society a middle-class existence is out of reach. What exactly are the economic shifts that have driven the social transformations taking place in Anglo-capitalist societies? In this timely book, Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings argue that the rise of the asset economy has produced a new logic of inequality. Several decades of property inflation have seen asset ownership overshadow employment as a determinant of class position. Exploring the impact of generational dynamics in this new class landscape, the book advances an original perspective on a range of phenomena that are widely debated but poorly understood – including the growth of wealth inequalities and precarity, the dynamics of urban property inflation, changes in fiscal and monetary policy and the predicament of the “millennial” generation. Despite widespread awareness of the harmful effects of Quantitative Easing and similar asset-supporting measures, we appear to have entered an era of policy “lock-in” that is responsible for a growing disconnect between popular expectations and institutional priorities. The resulting polarization underlies many of the volatile dynamics and rapidly shifting alliances that dominate today’s headlines.
Two veteran merger and acquisition mavens take readers behind the scenes to examine successful and poorly managed corporate mergers to show what's required to achieve the best strategic, organizational, and cultural fit between any two companies. They outline steps to take before, during, and after.