The Good Jobs Strategy

Explains how today's workers are a company's greatest asset and should be treated as such and discusses the flaws in the trend that sent service, manufacturing and retail sector jobs overseas in an effort to stay competitive through reduced wages and benefits. 25,000 first printing.

Experts discuss improving job quality in low-wage industries including retail, residential construction, hospitals and long-term healthcare, restaurants, manufacturing, and long-haul trucking. Americans work harder and longer than our counterparts in other industrialized nations. Yet prosperity remains elusive to many. Workers in such low-wage industries as retail, restaurants, and home construction live from paycheck to paycheck, juggling multiple jobs with variable schedules, few benefits, and limited prospects for advancement. These bad outcomes are produced by a range of industry-specific factors, including intense competition, outsourcing and subcontracting, failure to enforce employment standards, overt discrimination, outmoded production and management systems, and inadequate worker voice. In this volume, experts look for ways to improve job quality in the low-wage sector. They offer in-depth examinations of specific industries—long-term healthcare, hospitals and outpatient care, retail, residential construction, restaurants, manufacturing, and long-haul trucking—that together account for more than half of all low-wage jobs. The book's sector view allows the contributors to address industry-specific variations that shape operational choices about work. Drawing on deep industry knowledge, they consider important distinctions within and between these industries; the financial, institutional, and structural incentives that shape the choices employers make; and what it would take to make more jobs better jobs. Contributors Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt, Dale Belman, Julie Brockman, Françoise Carré, Susan Helper, Matt Hinkel, Tashlin Lakhani, JaeEun Lee, Raphael Martins, Russell Ormiston, Paul Osterman, Can Ouyang, Chris Tilly, Steve Viscelli

The labour markets of OECD and emerging economies are undergoing major transformations. The widespread slow-down in productivity and wage growth and high levels of income inequality in many countries are coupled with structural changes linked to the digital revolution, globalisation and ...

Two research analysts describe how companies can truly understand the real needs of their customers by seeing a business through their eyes and enforcing the concept of “customer service” through every facet of the company, from finance to legal to marketing.

"Contemporary ways of working are not working, even for professionals and managers in what used to be considered "good" jobs. Companies are responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets by adopting management practices and staffing strategies that push workers to do more and more with less and less. New technologies facilitate always-on availability, normalizing 24/7 job expectations. This new intensity spawns chronic stress in the form of overload - feelings of too much to do and too little time to do it. Kelly and Moen argue this way of working is both unhealthy and unsustainable. Employees burn out, quit, or lack the time or energy to bring their best contributions to their jobs. Organizations lose out along with individuals, families, and communities. This book moves beyond familiar tropes about 'work-life balance' to argue that the problem lies not in the effort to 'balance' but in the very nature of contemporary work. Overload harms workers of all genders, ages, and life stages as well as the bottom lines of corporations. What can be done? Kelly and Moen draw on five years of research, including a major field experiment, in a Fortune 500 firm to describe a new approach to making work more sane and sustainable. The initiative, called STAR, prompts imaginative yet feasible changes (or work redesigns) that improve employees' health, wellbeing, and ability to manage both their personal and their work lives. They find the firm also benefits through increased job satisfaction and reduced turnover"

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

Why do some innovation projects succeed where others fail? The book reveals the business implications of Jobs Theory and explains how to put Jobs Theory into practice using Outcome-Driven Innovation.

Retailers today are drowning in data but lacking in insight. They have so much information at their disposal that they struggle with both how to sort through it, and how to add science to their decision-making process without blunting the art that they correctly believe is a key ingredient of their success. This book reveals how retailers can use data to manage everything from strategic assortment planning, inventory management, and markdowns to improve store-level execution. This data-driven approach to the retail supply chain leads to far greater and faster inventory turns, far fewer and lower discounted goods and services, and better profit margins. The authors also tease out the personnel issues and the organizational implications of this approach.