By Mal Warwick and Paul Polak
Success in business today requires a whole new set of management skills that were either entirely ignored or under-appreciated in times past. Naturally, technical competence with telecommunications comes quickly to mind. More to the point, however, those areas of responsibility that have traditionally been encompassed in a company’s “HR” function demand greater attention in the 21st century than ever before.
The stakeholder-centered management about which we wrote in The Business Solution to Poverty rests, above all, on deep appreciation of the values, needs, and ambitions of new generations of employees and consultants now rising to dominance in the business world. Anyone who hires, manages, or supervises millennials understands instantly that they are more concerned about diversity, environmental issues, and meaningful work than those who have gone before them. Ignoring these and other generational differences can spell high job turnover, added recruitment and training costs, and, most of all, low productivity. In short, happy employees are an essential ingredient in a company’s ability to stay profitable.
To thrive over the long term, a business must optimize its most valuable assets — its people and the intellectual property they produce — by ensuring that they are well paid, treated with respect, engaged in building their own careers, and given ample opportunities to find meaning and balance in their jobs.
Paul Polak and Mal Warwick’s award-winning book, The Business Solution to Poverty, highlights 20 “takeaways” that encapsulate much of the book’s essence. Today we have featured the twentieth and last of those takeaways. The other nineteen appear in previous posts. To access them, search the site with the keyword “takeaways.”
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