Monday, September 8, 2008

Collaborative Advantage

Alliance between companies is a fact of business today. Even it becomes a key corporate asset and gives potential benefit called collaborative advantage. A well developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive leg up.

There are five phases into alliances for general. First, courtship-two companies meet, are attracted, and discover their compatibility. The second, engagement-hey draw up plans and close the deal. Phase three, the newly partnered companies discover they different ideas about how business should operate. Phase four, the partners devise mechanisms for bridging those differences and develop techniques for getting along. And finally phase five, each company discovers that it has changed internally as a result of its accommodation to the ongoing collaboration.

Building a successful alliance depends on maintaining a careful balance between personal and the institutional. Like a family, alliance gives way to each partner to live together in day-to-day operation include its uncertainty and unanticipated condition. Thus, each partner should adjust its cultural and operational differences, learn about the differences early and take them into account as events unfold. Active collaborations need for bridging organizational and interpersonal differences and achieving real value from the partnership. Management must be sensitive to political, cultural, organizational and human issues.

Several criteria to meet best relationships are: 1. Strong and something value of each partners. 2. Fit major strategic objectives of the partners. 3. Complementary of assets and skills. 4. Invest each other, means tangible signs of long term commitment. 5. Share information each other. 6. Linkages and shared ways of operating so they can work together smoothly. 7. Formal status, clear responsibilities and decision process. 8. The partners behave toward each other in honorable ways that justify and enhance mutual trust.

Environmental Management: A New Industrial Revolution

The need to protect environment and conserve natural resources has driven industrial to create environmental sustainability. Environmental effects is now become primary concern of many business of how to manage them effectively and efficiently. Companies are now shifting rapidly from a strategy of regulatory compliance to one of proactive environmental management. This kind of thinking has gone through three stages: 1. the widespread business practice in the 1960s and 1970s of coping with environmental crises as they occurred and of attempting to control the resulting damage. 2. The reactive mode of government environmental regulations and minimizing the cost of compliance. 3. The proactive environment strategy through which corporations began to anticipate the environmental effects of their operations.

Proactive environmental management includes combination of five major approaches:

  1. Waste minimization and prevention. It requires the prevention of pollution rather than the control of wastes at the end of the pipeline, through new approaches of production or technology.
  2. Demand side management. It is an approach to pollution prevention that originated in the utility industry.
  3. Design for environment. The objective is reducing reprocessing costs and returns products to market more quickly and economically.
  4. Product stewardship. It is a practice that reduces environmental risks or problems resulting from design, manufacturing, distribution, use, or disposal of products.
  5. Full-cost (environmental) accounting. This method identifies and quantifies environmental performance costs for the product, process, or project.

Corporations that do not adopt proactive approaches to environmental management will simply not be competitive in the global economy of 21st century. Thus, pollution prevention must be adopted for all-small, medium, large corporations, to satisfy customers’ needs, saves money, and profitable business opportunities. Governments, universities, environmental partnerships, and industry association must also work together to seek solutions for the environment problems.

Beyond Greening: Strategies for a sustainable World

The ways companies do their business create great impact on environment. This problems challenge every player on business to develop a sustainable global economy: an economy that the planet is capable of supporting indefinitely. Strict government regulations are issued, and more and more companies are “going green” as they realize that they can reduce pollution and increase profits simultaneously.

There are three stages of environmental strategy that guide companies into sustainability:

a. Pollution prevention. This first step is to make the shift from pollution control to pollution prevention. Pollution control means cleaning up waste after it has been created. Pollution prevention focuses on minimizing or eliminating waste before it is created.

b. Product stewardship. Product stewardship focuses on minimizing not only pollution from manufacturing but also all environmental impacts associated with the full life cycle of a product. In this stage, companies need to examine all the effect that a product could have on the environment, includes full assessment of all inputs to the product and how customers use and dispose of it.

c. Clean technology. The next stage is plan for and invests technology that is environmentally sustainable.

Overall strategies for sustainable environment needs clear framework to give direction to those activities. Thus, companies need to create a vision of a sustainability showing the way products and services must evolve and what new competencies will be needed to get there. Moreover, companies’ clear and fully integrated environmental strategies should also shape the companies’ relationship to customers, suppliers, other companies, policymakers, and all its stakeholders.

Companies must educate customers to prefer products and services that are consistent with sustainability, not just to market its product. The reason is the responsibility for ensuring a sustainable world falls largely on the shoulders of world’s enterprise, public policy, and individual consumption patterns by consumer. Corporations then can and should lead the way to helping to shape public policy maker and driving changes in consumers’ behavior.

Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth

The difference about growth and less successful companies lies in their way approached about strategy. The less successful companies took a conventional approach, dominated by the idea of staying ahead of the competition. The high-growth companies, in contrast, paid a little attention to matching or beating their rivals. They sought to make their competitors irrelevant, through value innovation.

Conventional logic and the logic of value innovation differ in five basic dimensions of strategy:

1. Industry assumption. Conventional logic assumed that conditions are given. But value innovators don’t. They assumed that industry conditions can be shaped.

2. Strategic focus. Conventional logic thought that company should build competitive advantage and beat the competition. Value innovators viewed competition isn’t the benchmark, and company should pursue a quantum leap in value.

3. Customers. Conventional approach view that the customer should be retained, expanded through further segmentation and customization. It focuses on the differences in what customers value. Value innovator targets the mass of buyers and willingly lets some existing customers go. It focuses on the key commonalities.

4. Assets and capabilities. Conventional logic view the business opportunities by leverage its existing assets and capabilities. Value innovators not be constrained by what companies already have.

5. Product and service offerings. An industry’s traditional boundaries determine the products and services a company offers. A value innovators often cross the boundaries.

In creating a value innovation, managers should focus on three platforms: product, service, and delivery. Product platform is the physical products; service platform is support such as maintenance and customer service; and delivery platform includes logistics and the channel used to deliver the product to customers.

Value innovation is the simultaneous pursuit of radically superior value of buyers and lower costs for companies. To become a value innovators, companies should become pioneers, the business that offer unprecedented value. Thus, managers must stop and think about the industry assumptions, the company’s strategic focus, and the approaches-to customers, assets and capabilities, and product and service offerings-that are taken as given.

Strategy, Value Innovation, and the Knowledge Economy

Competition has occupied the center of strategic thinking for the past twenty years. This approach results an unintended effects, that are: imitative approach to the market, the companies act reactively, and understanding of emerging mass markets and changing customer demands becomes bazy. But high growth and successful companies view this approach was irrelevant. They pursue value innovation which is not about striving to out perform the competition. These companies offer fundamentally new and superior buyer value in existing markets and by enabling quantum leap in buyer value to create new markets. They went beyond competing in existing markets to expanding the demand side of the economy.

Value innovation links innovation to what the mass of buyers value. High growth companies offer customers with radically superior value at accessible price level to the mass buyers.

Successful value innovators using two different approaches. First, strategic pricing for demand creation, leads to high volume and rapidly establishes a powerful brand reputation. Second, target costing for profit creation, leads to attractive profit margins and a cost structure that is hard for potential followers to match.

To make value innovation happen, top management must clearly communicate the company’s commitment to value innovation as the key strategic component by articulating its underlying logic. Then, when putting value innovation strategies into action, companies must cultivate a corporate culture conducive to willing collaboration. Companies must pursue its individuals to share their best ideas and knowledge, because these are the primary inputs for value innovation. Fairness in the process of making and executing decisions must also be engaged, because fair process and value innovation create a positively reinforcing cycle.

Value innovation is the essence of strategy in the knowledge economy. By implementing value innovation, strategies of cost leadership and differentiation are likely to succeed. But, it is also important to note that value innovators must shifting their strategy focus, from conventional to value innovation focus.

Blue Ocean Strategy

The business universe consists two distinct kinds of space, which are blue and red oceans. Red oceans represent all the industry in existence today. The market space was known, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are well understood. On the contrary, blue ocean strategy denote all the industries not in existence today. Blue ocean strategy is about doing business where there is no competitor, focus on creating new land, not dividing up existing land. In designing blue ocean strategy, these concept must be considered:

1. Blue oceans are not about technology innovation. It is the product of strategy and managerial action.

2. Incumbents often create blue oceans and usually within their core business. Most blue oceans are created from within, not beyond, red oceans of existing industries.

3. Company and industry are the wrong units of analysis. The most appropriate unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans is the strategic move.

4. Creating blue oceans can build brand equity.

The creators of blue oceans never use he competition as a benchmark. They make it irrelevant by creating a leap in value for both buyers and the company itself. Blue oceans rejects the fundamental tenet of conventional strategy: that a trade-off exists between value and cost. When companies create blue ocean, they can pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously. Blue ocean strategy also creates considerable economics and cognitive barriers to imitation.

Maximizing Regional Opportunities

Going global is now popular strategies among companies. For many national companies’ executives, they should include global strategies among their strategic choice. But it is not easy to set up global strategies especially for our national companies. Companies need smart strategy which has considered deep understanding of their own product categories and the geographic arenas they operate in.

Indonesian manufacturers were already facing the prospect of a more difficult environment due to globalization of manufacturing production and liberalization. In addition, low competitiveness applies to Indonesian condition since the slow-down of the manufacturing sector in 1993-1997. This challenge creates difficulties for national manufacturers to compete in the global arena.

How successful a company is depends crucially on how intelligent it is at observing and interpreting the dynamic world in which it operates (Gupta and Govindarajan, 2002). It makes companies need to take rigorous look at where they stand relative in the industry. It has several purposes, first, take a different view of companies in the industry and rigorous understanding about interdependencies with other sector. Second, it would provide potential opportunities and weaknesses which could be the evident later. Companies can used their understanding to creates strategic choice for the companies.

Economic experts have predicted that the 21st century will be the Asia-Pacific century: forecasts say that in 2020, the year the total free trade begins, almost 70 percent of the world’s GNP will be circulating in the Asia-Pacific region (Ciptono, 2005). For local champion, it is the time to expand their market, creating early competitive advantage in regional first. In other word, global strategy may start at a regional level.

But the definition of "region" often changes in response to market conditions and, indeed, to a company's own strategic decisions (Ghemawat, 2003). Thus, companies need to consider what they mean by region. According to Indonesia, common understanding of region is based on geographic view, that is ASEAN-south east continent and Asia Pacific region in which Indonesia take an important roles inside.

Maximizing regional opportunities has several benefits for Indonesian companies. First, it has many similarities with national condition in cultural, economic, political, and administrative. Thus, expanding into regional market become achievable and easier than going global directly. Companies would not confuse to decide whether standardize or localize product because regional market is much more similar. Regional expansion creates business model easier—how much to standardize from country to country versus how much to localize to respond to local differences.

Second, starting regional market as the early step for global strategy is supported with the free trade arrangement. As we know, by the time AFTA is implemented, South East Asian market will be integrated. The opportunities create here if the companies start to expand the markets now.

In many if not most cases, companies see globalization as a matter of taking a superior (by assumption) business model and extending it geographically, with necessary modifications, to maximize the firm's economies of scale (Ghemawat, 2003). There are several national companies that create success in expanding into regional market. They are even have new motto in facing globalization challenge, that is “go regional, act local”. This success story is expected to inspire other local champion to start enter the global market through regional strategy.

Global market is a very big opportunities. Maximizing its potential need smart approach in choosing what’s the first move. Regional strategy is one of the right choices for national companies which possess some benefits.

Gupta and Govindarajan, 2002. Converting Global Presence into Global Competitive Advantage. Academy of Management Executive. Vol. 15 No. 2

Ciptono, 2005. Towards A New Indonesia: Total Quality of Indonesian Management-The Red and White Management. Paper on International Seminar, 50 Anniversary Faculty of Economics, Gadjah Mada University.

Ghemawat, Pankaj. 2003. "The Forgotten Strategy," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 81, No. 11, November

Ghemawat, Pankaj. 2005. "Regional Strategies for Global Leadership," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 83, No. 12, December 2005

National Cultural Strategy

Globalization brings Indonesia the need to set up national strategy which leads us toward competitive advantage rather than comparative advantage. The strategy includes cultural aspect. Culture becomes important attention in national strategy because it is the glue of Indonesia effort toward competitiveness. It can link many dimensions of Indonesian’s lives. In addition, Cultural strategy is important because it is about how Indonesia is perceived abroad. Cultural development contributes to the image of Indonesia, thus supports the overall development program. It both reflects and shapes our society. Cultural strategy is also needed because we should build capability to our culture to adopt, adapt, and innovate the international influences.

Competitive strategy is about being different (Porter, 1996). Developing cultural strategy needs framework of action, which will underpin the expected cultural life in the future. Thus, to strategize our culture, we need to explore our unique value and heritage to set up national cultural strategy which fosters national innovation and creativity. The blue print of national cultural strategy should embrace all people, inclusive, and belongs to everyone.

There are several elements to be considered as core objectives in arranging Indonesian cultural strategy. First, we should consider innovation and creativity. We could develop the conditions in which creativity and innovation can flourish in all sectors of our life, including business, schools, and daily lives.

Innovation is the creativity in action. Creativity could become our national resource, vital to the individual's quality of life and to society's well being. Fostering creativity among people would give potential growth into creative industry. Creative industry is industrial sector which contains creativity as the concept.

Second, we should maximize the role of educational institution as the key for cultural enhancement. Schools are the center of creativity. Having educated people, we would realize culture’s potential contribution to Indonesian economy. Reflecting Indonesia’s present condition, education doesn’t become priority of government budget. Government even neglects the law which regulates 20% minimum allocation of the budget.

Culture is still needed to be included in the educational curriculum. Arts and other cultural expressions could enrich everybody’s lives, thus should be embedded in the daily teaching process.

The next attention is partnership among parties in national lives to strategizing cultural aspect. The parties are government, culture practitioner, and public. Blue print for national cultural strategy should declare clearly what is the role of each party.

The essence of government’s role is creating conducive environment to support and encourage the development of desired culture. National cultural treasures and traditions must be conserved and promoted both locally and globally. Government commitment

Local authorities held important roles here. Indonesia has 33 provinces that possess its own culture. Local authorities, means “Gubernur” and “Bupati/Wali Kota” must be engaged in the national cultural development. They are also hold strategic roles in initiating any cooperation with private sector.

Cultural practitioners must also view culture as one of national potential to be enhanced in the global era. They must also realize that international influences could become big threats to the existence of national culture.

Finally, public engagement is the edge for cultural strategy. Indonesian efforts to conserve, enhance, and promote national culture is depend also in the public hand. Lack of participation from public would not makes the objectives couldn’t be reached. The expected role of public is also controlling the implementation of the blue print for national cultural strategy.

Read also: Porter, Michael E.1996. What is Strategy?. Harvard Business Review

Friday, September 5, 2008

How Internet Support Traditional Ways of Competing?

Many have argued that the Internet renders strategy obsolete. In reality, the opposite is true. Beeause the Internet tends to weaken industry profitability without providing proprietary operational advantages, it is more important than ever for companies to distinguish themselves through strategy. The winners will be those that view the internet as a complement to, not a cannibal of, traditional ways of competing.”

The internet is an extremely important new technology that has received so much attention from entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and business observers. Internet gives the opportunity for the company to create economic value and establish distinctive strategic positioning than before. Its greatest impact is changing the way human communicate.

This kind of technology provides a potentially powerful tool for enhancing operational effectiveness and creates strategic positioning through easing and speeding the exchange of real-time information. But the next question is does internet change how the business operates?

But internet has creates a paradox. Its benefits-making information widely available, reducing the difficulty of purchasing, marketing, and distribution, allowing buyers and sellers to find and transact business with one another more easily-also make it more difficult for companies to capture those benefits as profits.

It is difficult to provide a sustainable competitive advantage through simply improving operational effectiveness, because many rival doing the same. Companies need to create more difficulty for those rivals to imitate, by deploying strategic positioning through internet that is highly integrated value chain.

Deploying the internet methods need critical consideration: The integration with traditional methods. Virtual activities co not simply eliminates the need for physical activities, but often amplifies their importance.

The reasons are: First, introducing internet applications in one activity often places greater demands on physical activities elsewhere in the value chain. Second, it can have systemic consequences, requiring new or enhanced physical activities that are often unanticipated. Third, most internet applications have some short comings I comparison methods.

Frequently. In fact, an internet application and a traditional method benefit each other. Thus, finding a new configuration of internet and traditional approaches is the right strategy for present economy.

Ref:

Porter, Michael. (2001). “Strategy and the Internet”. Harvard Business Review, March.

Global Strategy: Conceptual Framework

Global strategy is the way a business competes in the global market. The strategy plays vital role in determining the performance of a business in the global market. There are numerous prescriptions for business facing global competition. These prescription describe what is global strategy, why, and how the global strategy be implemented.


The general framework for global strategy concepts are: first, a global strategy is required whenever there are important interdependencies among a business’s competitive position in different countries. Second, the sources of these interdependencies can be identified.

Third, the critical issues that a global strategy must address include the configuration and coordination of the business’s world activities. Fourth, the organization structure should be aligned with and derived from the global strategy.

There are two theoretical approaches to global strategy. Industrial organization-based theory describe that competitive advantage is viewed as a position of superior performance that a business attains through offering undifferentiated products at low prices or differentiated products for customers are willing to pay a price premium.

Second is resource-based theory, which said that competitive advantage is residing in the inherent heterogeneity of the immobile strategic resources which business control. The two theoretical perspectives must be linked together to provide a solid theoretical foundation to study global strategy and performance.

Global strategy is not a simple choice of product standardization, standardized marketing or concentrated manufacturing. Rather, it is multifaceted course of action involving six major dimensions; include global market participation, product standardization, uniform marketing, integrated competitive moves, co-ordination of value adding activities, and concentration of value adding activities.

To implement global strategy, as managerial implications, managers must formulate the multidimensional and coherent set of actions. Specifically, managers must develop an organization-wide market orientation, be committed to global markets, nurture a kind of organization culture that is conducive to global strategy conception and implementation, create organizational capabilities, and accumulate international experience.

full paper

Global Mindset

The economic landscape of the world is changing rapidly. It is becoming increasingly global.

In the world which is going flat, companies need to adjust its mindset into what we call global mindset. Global mindset means high differentiation and high integration in knowledge structure. Global mindset is one that combines an openness to and awareness of diversity across cultures and markets with a propensity and ability to synthesize across this diversity.

The value of a global mindset lies in enabling the company to combine speed with accurate response, and the benefit of global mindset derives from the fact that, while the company has a grasp of and insight into the needs of the local market, it is also able to build cognitive bridges across these needs between these needs and the company’s own global experience and capabilities. The key word of global mindset is cultivation, and the shape of mindset is our interpretations of the world around us.

Then, how an individual or team of managers cultivates self-consciousness regarding their current market? The first approach is to ask managers or teams to articulate their beliefs about the subject domain. Second approach is to conduct a comparative analysis of how different people or companies appear to interpret the same reality.

In other side, companies can cultivate exposure to and increase knowledge of diverse cultures and markets in two ways. First, facilitate such knowledge building at the level of individuals. Second, companies should build diversity in the composition of the people making up the company.

Both approaches are essential for every company, and complement each other. The first focuses on building cognitive diversity inside the mindsets of individuals, and the next focuses on assembling a diverse knowledge base across the organization’s members.

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Converting Global Presence into Global Competitive Advantage

Global presence doesn’t ensure companies into global competitive advantage. Thus, companies need to transform global presence into global competitive advantage. It requires systematic analysis, purposeful thinking, and careful orchestration, and is never ending process. Companies must exploit five value creation opportunities, which are:

  1. Adapting to local market differences. By responding to country-level heterogeneity, companies can reap benefits in three fundamental areas: Increased market share, improved price realization, and neutralizing local competitors.
  1. Exploiting economies of global scale. The potential benefits of economies of scale can appear in various ways: spreading fixed costs, pooling purchasing power, and creating critical mass.
  1. Exploiting economies of global scope. Global scope refers to the multiplicity of regions and countries in which company markets its products or services. In fulfilling the needs of multilocation global customers, companies have two potential avenues through which to turn global scope into global competitive advantage: providing coordinated services and leveraging their market power.

Tapping he optimal locations for activities and resources. By optimizing the location for every activity in the value chain, companies can yield one or more of three strategic benefits: performance enhancement, cost reduction, and risk reduction.

Maximizing knowledge transfer across locations. Locally created knowledge can yield strategic benefits to the global enterprise, ranging from faster product and process innovation, lower cost of innovation, and reduced risk of competitive preemption.

Creating global competitive advantage requires several actions as implication. They must evaluate the optimality of the global network for each activity in the value chain along three dimensions: activity architecture, world-class competencies for each facility, and frictionless coordination between similar activities; between complimentary activities. Based on this evaluation, firms should then design and execute actions to eliminate or at least reduce the suboptimalities.


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Thursday, September 4, 2008

10 Questions to Diagnose Strategic Competence

Through his article entitled “Are you a Strategist or Just Manager?” , Hans H. Hinterhuber and Wolfgang Popp discussed about the importance for executives to go beyond managerial competence toward strategic management competence. He argue that strategic management competence is linked with the personality of successful entrepreneurs and managers.

Strategist can be identified by measuring the vision, the way to suit changing conditions, and generalize the ideas into action and led others to do so. Although there is no test that can precisely evaluate an individual’s strategic management competence, he presented ten-question profiles based on Prussian general’s strategic thinking that are helpful to diagnose/measure strategic competence. Here are the questions:

1. “Do I Have an Entrepreneurial Vision?” This is an important skill to provide an orientation point that guides a company’s movement in specific direction.


2. “Do I Have a Corporate Philosophy?” This question is measurement of ideological creed of both entrepreneurs and managers.


3. “Do I Have Competitive Advantage?” By understanding where does competitive advantage exist, company could get the unique position in the market.


4. “Do My Employees Use Their Ability to Act Freely in The Interest of the Company?” Effective directives combine the strategic intention of top management with the initiative and creativity of all employees.


5. “Have I Built an Organization That Implements My Vision?” Managers must ensure that company’s vision remain in their position.


6. “Are The Line Managers Involved In Strategic Planning?” The key to successful execution of strategy is early involvement of line managers.


7. “Is the Corporate Culture in Harmony with the Strategies?” It is a must that corporate culture, company philosophy, and strategies can be implemented by employees.


8. “Do I Point out Directions and Take New Approaches?” Managers must have performance and entrepreneurial capability in spontaneity, originality, intuition, and personal greatness to become a strategist.


9. “Have I been Lucky in My Life So Far?” The good strategist also needs good luck. They must have an ability to put oneself in position that favors being lucky.


10. “Do I Make Contribution to the Development of Society and Myself?” Managers must make good relationships both inside and outside the company.

So, are you a strategist or just manager?

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Balanced Scorecards & KPI for HR

The Balanced Scorecards (BSC) is a conceptual model for managing organization’s performance. In early development, BSC aimed to solve organization’s measurement problems, which is put heavy priority on tangible aspects rather than intangible aspects. This model then complements financial measures of past performance with measures of drivers of future performance.

Balanced Scorecard incorporates valuation of organizations’ intangible and intellectual assets since intangible assets recently increase its portion of organization’s source of competitive advantages. To design BSC system, first we choice relevant KPI to HR function as both traditional personnel management to business partner level.

To implement BSC framework for HR function, first we should define goals statement that describe organization strategic objectives. Objectives then translated into specific measurement reflects by key performance indicator (KPI) which is followed by challenging but achievable quantitative target. List of initiatives are generated to support objectives achievement.

Typical objectives and KPI for HR function are presented below.

Understanding Human Resource Strategy

HR Practitioners are now being exposed to another new concept: “human resources strategy” due to the urgent needs to develop strategic approach rather than old-fashioned administration/personnel management. The article tries to provide general framework to enhance HR role towards business’ strategic partner.


Refer to Thomas (1996). HR strategy should be defined as “A co-coordinated set of actions aimed at integrating an organization’s culture, organization, people and systems”. It consists of HR mission statement, HR internal and external analysis, HR planning, Objectives/performance measurement, action plan, implementation, and review. Visual framework about HR strategy is presented below.


Thomas (1996)


The figure consists of several components:

  1. HR mission statement

The human resources function has to be clear as to where the organization is trying to go and then consider the implications for its own activities. It provides a basis for future measurement.

  1. HR analysis

HR analysis could be done through SWOT analysis to clarify the current status of the function, the organization and its external operating environment. Line managers should be co-opted into this process as it helps to generate new issues, understanding, ownership and commitment to any subsequent human resource activities.

  1. HR planning.

Planning HR is about developing framework to those dimensions: organization, systems, people, and culture. Four dimensions are translated into HR policies which is contains organization strategic choices. How those four dimensions affect HR policies is figured below.