Human Resources: HR.com's Thought Leaders for the June 21, 2007

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How do you attain greater wealth in your organization? Claudia Joyce, a Principal at McKinsey & Company recently met with Karen Elmhirst to discuss Creating Greater Organizational Wealth by mobilizing the minds of your talent.

Thought Leader Interview with Claudia Joyce: Creating Greater Organization Wealth through Mobilizing Minds

Claudia Joyce is a Principal at McKinsey & Company and a core member of the Financial Services and Strategy Practices groups. She has recently co-authored the book "Mobilizing Minds - Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st Century." In addition, her work has been extensively published on McKinsey's Knowledge Web and in the McKinsey Quarterly. She is a graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and of the University of Chicago.

KE: Why write a book about mobilizing minds?

CJ: We believe that talent has become the true source of
differentiation among institutions but that organizations do not have the appropriate reinforcing mechanisms or the right structures to realize the highest value from their people.

KE: What prompted this conclusion?

CJ: Over the last decade we analyzed the top 150 companies by market capitalization. The profit of the largest 150 companies has grown at a tremendous pace. This is unexpected because economists typically believe that the larger and more complex a company gets, the slower the rate of its profitability growth. We were intrigued and wanted to find out what was driving these results. When we looked at it further, we found that it was being driven by 30 of the very largest companies, which have been able to create a tremendous amount of wealth over time.

To understand what was happening with these companies we used the number of employees as a measure of complexity, and net income per employee as a measure of profitability. We analyzed the results of these two measures from 150 companies in 1984 as compared to 2004.

What we saw was that in 1984, as the number of employees increased, the income decreased per employee. Companies were not able to handle the complexity, and therefore had less profitability per employee. When we looked at these same measures based on 2004 data, the relationship seemed to have changed, at least for some of the companies. There was more dispersion of the results. Some very large companies outperformed smaller companies in terms of net income per employee.

KE: What type of company was able to achieve higher net income per employee?

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Karen Elmhirst, Co-host, Thought Leaders Live

Karen Elmhirst is always on the lookout for research and best practices in the areas of leadership, leadership development and organizational learning. Karen writes articles and interviews thought leaders in order to provide you with the information and resources you need to help you build great organizations. Karen is also an executive coach, working with leaders to help them identify their personal definitions of success and to live lives that support those intentions.

Karen has had experience in a wide range of industries and has held senior level positions in both marketing and sales. Karen has also been active as a writer, trainer, facilitator and communication coach. Her articles have appeared in the IHRIM Journal and Leadership Excellence as well as on HR.com. Karen graduated with Hons. Bachelor of Commerce degree from U.B.C in Vancouver, Canada. She completed her coaching training at The Coaches Training Institute.

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Join us for our next live Thought Leader interview with

Merry Marcus on 9 Steps to Your Successful Onboarding Coaching Program

June 25, 2007 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. ET

In this live webcast you will learn:

What are the business issues driving onboarding coaching?
Why are organizations having such a difficult time retaining and integrating new hires?
...and more.

This upcoming webcast, and its MP3, and PowerPoint downloads are free for ALL Members of HR.com

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Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus is an amazing anthology of higher thinkers including, David Ulrich, Kenny Moore, Marshall Goldsmith and Erin Brockovich. It's 348-pages of exclusive interviews with top experts discussing the proven strategies, the philosophies, and the best methods they have used to strengthen their organizations. Each chapter features a different expert who reveals his/her best practices to help professionals deal with the people side of business.

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