The inspiration for this page comes from an article published in the Winter 2002 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

While they are a for profit enterprise they have given Michael K. Peacock the OK to "Fair Use" of this information. This means that we can only use limited excerpts from the original article and these quotes are designated by italic text.

You can find the original article here;

"Building Competitive Advantage Through People" by Christopher A Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal

Michael K. Peacock wants to express his gratitude for being allowed to share this with our Veterans.

The Most Important Puzzle Piece

 Human, not financial, capital must be the starting point and ongoing foundation of a successful strategy.

Without People organizations would not even exsist so with that we can agree with this statement ..,

In short, People are the key strategic resource, and strategy must be built on a human-resource foundation.

With this in mind a organizations real battle is for quality people who have a passion for the products and services that are offered by the company.

And if recruitment and retention are based primarily on the compensation package, the person lured by a big offer will almost certainly leave for a bigger one.

So this creates a new question that must be answered, How do we expand our staff without expending all of our resources?

We must first acknowledge that..,

There is a scarcity of talented people and the knowledge they possess.

In other words we are limited as to who we can get to help us with our business. So,

In today's economy, this is the constraining - and therefore strategic - resource.

 We need develope a path to get people into our companies who are not only commited to the long term goals of the company but also have the passion or internal fire that translates into the drive or desire to continue even when the market goes flat.

This Human Capital or People First approach is close to my heart because I do alot of volunteer work as a part of my recovery from the years of negitive life choices and so as I reenter the world of work I have found that most leaders overlook the best talant because they are already working for free as volunteers.

Very few top executives have been able to transform themselves from being analytically driven strategy directors to people-oriented strategy framers.

And it is because of this our best people can be overlooked as we search for people who have not shown that they are committed to the company.

Yet for a traditional company to make the transition into the New Economy, that transformation is vital.

 As we go forward we should ask ourselves as leaders are we overlooking our best people?