Creating business value through people

Abstract

The essence of business strategy is value creation for all stakeholders. Strategy provides the firm with a compelling case to achieve long-term competitive advantage. Employee value is a critical input in creating customer value. There is a disturbing disconnect in organisational management. While research strongly supports a direct co-relationship between organisational effectiveness and people management skills, trends in management practices are inconsistent with research findings. Ideally, HR strategy ought to be dovetailed into Business strategy, since human capital is one of the key drivers in creating and sustaining value in business. People in the organisation are the intangible assets and create the knowledge repository that exists in the firm. In the context of the business strategy, such knowledge power creates a differential advantage in favour of the firm. The paper proposes to look holistically at the linkage between business strategy and people strategy for creating sustainable business value.