Talk about ‘strategy’ we can trace back to a general Greek word ‘strategos’. It means ‘army’ and ‘lead’. (Bracker, 1980 cited in whittington,1993).
The same as the case of HRM, traditional HRM not taken serious until it undergo the test of time. Intangible assets include trademark, copyright, business secret and so on. Human Resource is the significant intangible assets of enterprise competition ability today. Sometimes intangible assets are valuable than physical assets.
For example…
The John Lewis Partnership has been developing an unusual HRM strategy. This enterprise divides to two subsidiaries of the John Lewis Department Stores and the Waitrose supermarket chain. There are about 66,000 staffs which named ‘partners’ not ‘employees’ working for JLP. Further, this organization is owned by all partners not employer. There is a complicate organization structure for a democratic enterprise. Each democratic bodies has right to decide their representatives by voting. Their HRM strategy focuses on ‘employer of distinction’ and emphasis on a fair competition model. The centre of the strategy is ‘powered by our principles’ (PbOP) which comprises faithful, honesty, esteem, commission, achieving common target. First of all, they have a set of method for each stage of the partners’ career. For instance: evaluating, recruitment, training, promotion and so on. Each partners’ behaviors were reported. Following, other feature is setting appropriate work-life balance to ensure the balance between home, leisure and work. There is a career vacation plan for every partner with five years’ work. There are a large number of benefits which partners can choice by themselves. Such as travel to a desirable country, check in luxury hotel and boating. Thirdly, HRM strategies of JLP maintain competitive salary and attractive benefit based on annual financial reports. Such as 2005, the organization take out 15% profits as bonus