Rethinking Human Capital

By Stefania Dinklage

The paradigm introduced in this book will unsettle many, frighten a few, and create hope for many if not all. Understanding the full range of individual talent and knowing which areas require development will result in a more effective commitment of resources and better utilization of talent in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Commercial Insights LLC
• Release date: Aug 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578300375

Stefania Dinklage

A diverse career extending over more than two decades that includes significant expertise ranging across seven languages combined with success in both academic and business environments. Early concentration in the hospitality industry provided insight into leadership, management, and human resource development, and led to an advanced degree in Business and Behavioral Psychology. Consulting and Training in the Shared Service Industry presented a unique consulting opportunity; to delve into the functionality of the complete business cycle, and even more specifically, the critical order-to-cash cycle. That experience introduced targeted and deeper insight into the selection and development of the key resources necessary to the success of both public and private enterprises throughout Europe. The aggregate of these experiences resulted in a kernel that became the topic of a number of published articles promoting the rethinking of methodologies used to assess talent and talent management. The essence is captured in this book and provides guidance towards a common competency framework and the more practical and economically efficient utilization of human resources.

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Copyrighted Material

Rethinking Human Capital: From Job to GIG

Copyright © 2021 by Commercial Insights LLC.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

For information about this title or to order other books and/or electronic media, contact the publisher:

Stefania Dinklage

[e-mail]

Patrick O. Connelly

Brad Mueller

www.commercialinsights.ch

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Cover design: Laura Dinklage

Interior design: 1106 Design

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

AUTHORS IN BRIEF

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I

INNOVATIVE CONCEPT—COMPETENCY

Chapter II

THE HISTORICAL PATTERN THAT LED TO THE CURRENT DILEMMA

Chapter III

CURRENT MODEL FOR SECURING HUMAN RESOURCES

Chapter IV

RETHINKING A PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR

Chapter V

GIVEN THE STATUS QUO—A QUANTUM LEAP

Chapter VI

A CONTEXT FOR OPTIMIZING A SCALABLE HUMAN RESOURCE POOL

Epilogue

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

Appendix I

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE UNEMPLOYED

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Appendix V

GLOSSARY

REFERENCES

INDEX

PREFACE

This book represents the work product and result of several years of research and experience into the methodology and effectiveness of human resource management—how resources are attracted, selected, retained, and developed in order to optimize value both to the individuals and to markets. The authors contribute an interesting amalgam of education and experience as well as a unique understanding of the factors that now lead to the presentation of the Competency Paradigm.

Together, the authors bring nearly a century of experience in education, psychology, and business among diverse global markets and cultures to bear on an increasingly more difficult challenge . . . the optimization of resources both internal and external with a goal of establishing a twitch-agile¹ entity within an economically efficient framework.

Having directly experienced the results of an inefficient system of resource selection over the last few decades in many different industries and markets, the team has concentrated expertise in aspects of business performance that addresses the move toward a more responsive, agile, and efficient model. This book represents a move toward taking full advantage of the value of the method to be presented in this book. Talent and human resource managers must advance from a job-descriptive, resume-intensive search-and-secure structure to a competency-based search that optimizes the true value of both individual and pooled resources.

Further, the search can be executed both within and beyond the enterprise to enable current needs-analysis response and medium- and even long-term strategic planning.

Alternatively, failure to adapt organizations to this 21st-century strategy—which promotes more rapid adaptation, functional agility, and challenge response—lowers an enterprise’s competitive advantage and sustains typical silo thinking that restricts growth. In the end, the process is self-defeating.

The leadership team consists of three seasoned executives, each with specific knowledge and experience, forming an integral pool of competencies that has proven successful in the implementation of various projects around the world.

A dialogue among these experts assessed and then analyzed the potential of such a major shift from job-descriptive hiring practices to competency-assessment and -fulfillment practices. They provide a unique perspective on the diverse challenges faced by modern organizations. This book was co-authored by a team with a history of successful insolvency and business turnaround, talent management, and, in general, helping organizations in need of an alternate strategy to improve and indeed optimize the resources of the enterprise.

An observation that prevails from past initiatives is that many organizational structures focus on narrow fixed and semi-fixed silo functionality, position-centered and skill-level targeted. The results lead toward an inherently less-agile response to market conditions, impairing effective team execution and retarding a more holistic and professional development of resident skills and an awareness of the real potential of enterprise talent.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity presented by the concepts in this book resides in a better understanding of the actual bounds of internal/external competency across diverse areas of expertise and the availability to the enterprise. This book articulates the alternative view and suggests a methodology to restructure business processes into competencies and, further, to standardize them into a common vocabulary and framework.

Amidst an economic and medical crisis unparalleled in recent history, this book introduces a process that represents a major paradigm shift. Human resource management is deconstructed into a skill, knowledge, and experience construct to identify key elements that lead to the identification and selection of talent that fulfills the needs of a competitive enterprise. The myriad of dimensions through which the authors approach human resource management represents a departure from the traditional applicant-assessment techniques, replacing these with an approach that identifies both resident competencies and required additional competencies to create an optimal solution to fulfill an enterprise’s current and future needs.

Further, the paradigm stimulates interest in understanding that the recognition of gaps in desirable competencies is as important as competency affirmation in the creation of a strategic-development plan—the former important to the strategic solution of the current business plan, and the latter critical to the forward-looking strategy of the enterprise. This represents a major shift in traditional human resource management and one that the authors believe will represent a quantum leap forward in the overall economic efficiency of the enterprise.

Implementation will also require a change in methodology and the traditional thinking used to define a successful candidate or associate. The authors instead focus on the incremental talents, the competencies, and the sub-competencies that combine to present the suitable candidate—internal resident or external, perhaps GIG²—associate required to satisfy enterprise needs.

Internally, HR organizations must demonstrate an ability to select, train, and more fully, if not completely, utilize all competencies in the talent pool effectively within a context of rapid change. The challenge will force organizations to rapidly configure and reconfigure solutions using all available internal and external talent resources in order to meet challenges. The process essentially establishes both an internal and external GIG marketplace, thus integrating competencies from an extended resource pool.

The book presents a value proposition further promoting continuous improvement, learning, and bridging gaps in desirable and necessary competencies, integrating and combining the best features among trade/vocational, academic training, and professional business experience. This formidable model integrates a much broader spectrum of knowledge and makes many more resources available, in a much more efficient manner and with a more interesting cost structure, to interested parties.

In order to establish this value, it is necessary to abandon the narrow focus of the past on job titles and descriptions and realign focus upon the identification and development of a wider array of competencies, the aggregate that may be brought to bear upon challenges faster and more efficiently in response to modern market demands.

Given current global market challenges that may not resolve themselves in the near future, the competency framework this work presents provides an economically efficient solution. The standardized and scalable nature of the model enables a flexibility that supports continuous improvement of the base and as a consequence a growing capability to respond to challenges in a timely manner. The nature of the model is almost heuristic, adjusting content to introduce improvement, identify opportunities, and promote enterprise growth accordingly.

The idea for the book evolved from discussions both internal and external, among executives bemoaning the fact that extremely talented resources were being lost as organizations responded to fiscal pressures in standard ways. Decisions were being made according to position; those viewed as dispensable were the first to be severed, regardless of the body of knowledge represented by the individual position-holder.

Our team debated for several months over the creation of a rationale that supported a continuity of the archaic process . . . and failed to establish a reasonable argument to continue this process. The work product in this book presents an alternative solution to the status quo and delivers a methodology to characterize, classify, recognize, utilize, and optimize enterprise resources previously unknown or, at the least, underutilized. This solution is at once impactful to both top and bottom lines of enterprises and worthy of consideration. That is why you find yourself here.

AUTHORS IN BRIEF

Stefanie Dinklage: A diverse career extending over more than two decades that includes significant expertise ranging across seven languages combined with success in both academic and business environments. Early concentration in the hospitality industry provided insight into leadership, management, and human resource development, and led to an advanced degree in Business and Behavioral Psychology. Consulting and training in the shared-service industry presented a unique consulting opportunity to delve into the functionality of the complete business cycle, more specifically, the critical order-to-cash cycle. That experience introduced targeted and deeper insight into the selection and development of the key resources necessary to the success of both public and private enterprises throughout Europe. The aggregate of these experiences resulted in a kernel that became the topic of a number of published articles promoting the rethinking of methodologies used to assess talent and talent management. The essence is captured in this book and provides guidance toward a common competency framework and the more practically and economically efficient utilization of human resources.

Brad Mueller: Global leader experienced in turnarounds, business startups, mergers, acquisitions, divestments, and selling businesses for profit. He has diverse, international experience in marketing, sales, operations, engineering, finance, and information systems in the consumer-products, nuclear, office-supply, lamination and plastics, capital-equipment, packaging, software, security, scientific-instrumentation, and X-ray industries. Sixteen years proven P & L results. Designed, built, staffed, and started up three businesses in the US and Korea. Negotiated joint ventures, customer contracts and large-supplier agreements. Entrepreneurial executive with a proven track record in recruiting, training, and developing self-directed work teams.

Prof. Patrick O. Connelly: Career global trade and risk management manufacturing-and-distribution executive and university undergraduate and graduate professor for the last forty years. Expertise extends to developing successful business processes in challenging markets such as the People’s Republic of China, South East Asia, as well as European and Latin American market sectors. Publications include dozens of professional articles and authorship of three editions of Trade Credit Risk Management: Fundamentals of the Craft in Theory and Practice, supporting global professional certification in credit risk management.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

As with all book projects, it is important to highlight key support extended to us by others that, in the end, contributed to the completed work and resulted in an event of publication and, hopefully, success. As lead author, I acknowledge the influence of both co-authors Patrick O. Connelly and Brad Mueller for sharing countless hours of discussion and debate that enabled the formulation of the idea that became this book.

To colleagues and friends at Alexion, my thanks for expanding the experience brought to bear with their unique and important insights that individually and collectively enabled a broader base upon which to apply their perspective and test the reality of competency-based management.

Personally, I owe special thanks to my soul mates Carl Silva and Ann-May Baur Barat for enabling the conversion of my thoughts into functioning technological results, no small task, indeed. To my daughters Laura and Katharina, whose support and patience were instrumental to my success, my love, my thanks, and my hopes that the paradigm introduced in the book may return their investment in me in a more tangible way for their careers.

Finally, as a team, we would like to acknowledge the efforts of myriad acquaintances, editors, and the publisher for supporting the production of this book.

INTRODUCTION

As the reader moves through this book, he is reminded that a common vocabulary is the foundation of today’s business world. We are accustomed to definitions of basic concepts, as well as business, employee, job, position, title, job description, organizational chart, competency, level of performance, and, of course, hierarchical structure found primarily in more structured organizations. All of which served to facilitate the challenge of understanding the aspects of the business that enable productive and profitable growth.

EVOLVING THE BUSINESS

How did the business life begin? How did mankind arrive at these terms? What actual meaning was given to these terms? More importantly, what has mankind assigned to these terms over the millennia? How were these terms used on a daily basis, and how were they introduced into our lives? This book covers the history of business with its terms from three dimensions—The Past, The Present and The Future.

We will give examples from the Middle Ages, such as the shoemaker, who started out making a pair of shoes, and then grew his one-man shop into a family business, creating his own business model and talent pool. This often resulted later in specializations of talent to introduce a higher level of expertise that allowed the store to attract a more desirable clientele.

We will also see that one of the most important and critical production factors for a company is its employee pool. Proper and diligent implementation and promotion of an onboarding process that ensures effective selection, regulation, development, and optimization of resources is an essential component of business success.

In this modern age, it is no longer acceptable or economically efficient to employ factors that do not perform up to the level of their potential. New equipment is introduced that is more efficient, requires less energy and maintenance, and produces output at multiples of predecessor machines. Similarly, in an Information Age, human resources now represent opportunities to improve the actual economic value of each hire both initially and as they demonstrate a contribution to the growth of the business.