Strategic human resource development

The subject of Strategic Human Resource Development has emerged as the logical development of the Organizational Development (OD) tradition. Strategic Human Resource Development combines three things: (a) an awareness of the complexities of change management; (b) a desire to rescue the concept of Human Resource Development from a mundane existence in the depths of training programmes; and, finally, (c) a new perspective which provides direction for the twenty-first century. Strategic Human Resource Development promotes a more enlightened, ethical and skills-focused change management that puts human resources back where they belong - at the forefront of the change agenda.

This book represents the fusion of three disciplines - Human Resource Development (HRD), Organizational Development (OD), and Strategic Management. Two things might be said about this. First, the demarcation between disciplines is often arbitrary and constructed for convenience. In reality, however, the management of organizations requires a more eclectic approach driven by the pragmatic needs of managers and the organization's members.

Second, there has been fusion of these three areas in recent years as middle managers have become increasingly involved in managing change. This, in fact, represents the more recent thinking about pro-active change in contrast to the older planned change approaches.

One major problem with the various debates on Human Resource Development, Organizational Development and Strategic Management is the reactive nature of these disciplines to change. This book seeks to draw the boundaries for a new discipline that views change management as a strategic process-driven approach that emerges from within the organization rather than due to the pressures of external forces. It is in this sense that it should be regarded as pro-active since the purpose is continual transformation of the organization's products and services.

The book is informed by the transformation of Organizational Develop ment, with its origins in twentieth-century management, to a new terrain in which learning is placed at the forefront. This is, in part, a challenge to the reactive formulations of change management we have seen in the past 2 years. However, it also represents a determined effort to challenge the complacency of managers in the twenty-first century who may think that manipulative programmes were a product of the past. Change often seems like a reshuffled pack of cards in which the contents of each hand change b the form of the game remains the same. Not wishing to be too cynical, its nevertheless clear that people still become alienated, stressed and exploited, by new organizational forms: by employers who use Information Comm ications Technologies as mechanisms to control and manipulate or by companies, such as Marconi or Enron, who fail their own workforce as well as other stakeholders - shareholders, local communities and even the nation