Research Assignment, Strategy Obtain from your library a copy of following article: Laurie Bassie and Daniel McMurrer, "Maximizing Your Return on People," Harvard Business Review (March 2007), pp. 115-123. The authors of this article state (p. 123): "Globalization has left only one true path to profitability for firms operating in high-wage, developed nations: to base their com- petitive strategy on exceptional human capital management (HCM) . . . managing human capital by instinct and intuition becomes not only inadequate, but reckless. The most competitive companies will be those that manage their employees like the assets they are."

Required After reading the above-referenced article, answer the following questions:

1. What is the general issue addressed by the authors of this article? That is, what managerial problem are they discussing?

2. The authors develop a framework that, they assert, can be useful for increasing the long-term value of investments in human capital. What are the two major factors in the authors' framework? How can the framework be used by managers as part of a comprehensive management accounting and control system?

3. The authors provide three examples of how their evaluation/assessment framework was used in practice to assess the quality of an organization's HCM. For each example, indicate how organizational perform- ance was defined, and how the evaluation framework proposed by the authors was used to improve that performance. (That is, what principal results were achieved?)