With compliance now its main goal, human resource management has become a hodgepodge of unconnected functions and tasks. Williams argues persuasively that lost in the day-to-day effort is another, equally important goal: employee and organizational development. One result is that human resource management has lost credibility as a profession and in its own way, much like many of the organizations it serves, has become dysfuntional. To correct this imbalance—compliance over development—and in fact to salvage the HR profession itself Williams challenges HR people to abandon their search for power and money in organizational life, and instead to redirect their efforts to helping, truly helping, employees realize their potential in organizational settings. With surveys, checklists, advice, and revealing anecdotes drawn from his own extensive academic and consulting experiences, Williams provides a provocative, controversial analysis of the new crisis in human resource management, and a workable set of strategies to help HR professionals emerge from it.

Williams begins by calling the human resource function a bogged-down process. He identifies the problems this causes, and articulates a need for a new set of synergistic processes that will pull HR people out of the past and into the future he envisions for them. In Part II he digs into specific strategies to accomplish the HR makeover. He identifies a new role for HR, traces a process of change, and illustrates the effects of technological advances on the entire HR restrategizing effort. Part III tells HR professionals how to do it. In what he calls a series of workshop chapters, Williams helps HR people reassess their position in their own organizations, determine whether they are on the wrong paths and if so how to get off them, and then provides ways to reinstate the development function to its rightful place as equal in importance to compliance.