This report clarifies what is now known about human capital and how it can be measured.

With the United States' choice for future employment being "high skills or low wages," the challenge to business and industry is to build, in partnership with public agencies, a cohesive management system that would invest in three critical areas of the work force: building a strong foundation of basic skills to help noncollege-bound youth enter the work force; providing continuing education and training for workers; and building a better "second chance" training and education system for working-age youth and adults who face special barriers to employment. To meet this challenge, the National Alliance of Business (NAB) proposes that business and government in each state and local community develop a "work force investment system" that links existing training and education institutions in an effective partnership to build a highly skilled, high performance labor force. If such a system is to be real and permanent, it should be built on guiding principles such as ease of access, broad inclusiveness, public-private partnership, market base, and concerted action at the national, state, and local levels. A proposed work force investment system model for the future couples delivery system reform with a broader role in the labor market for that system. Such a system would be characterized by a common point or points of intake, individualized assessment of clients to determine their service needs, a form of case management to see participants through the system, and a common system of placement that employers could readily access. Present federal and federal-state programs could be integrated into such a program, and local businesses would take the initiative to structure local solutions to problems confronting the mainstream work force. This model is appropriate and could be attainable for the U.S. labor market. (This report describes several state work force investment systems and local programs as well as the Training and Enterprise Councils system in Great Britain.) (KC)

"A landmark in the debate on the future of public policy."—The Washington Post.

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.” —The New York Times Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals. In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve. Here, from a man who has been called both “the Steve Jobs of investing” and “the philosopher king of the financial universe” (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.

This book presents a thought-provoking case for looking at human resource management from an entirely different perspective. In the modern world, organizations have to optimally manage resources to achieve the best results, and the best way to do this is to identify humans as instruments of investment and not as resources. Humans use resources in an activity. Managing people, as a subject, was first studied as part of personnel management, and became known as human resource management (HRM) in the early 80s. However, the basic principles remained largely unchanged. The book argues that it is time that HRM is replaced by human investment management (HIM), where the entire approach of employee management in an organization shifts gears to human investment in activities. In this approach no human is considered bad in relation to an organization, if selected appropriately, and trained well. Everyone is productive, though the returns may differ. Humans can be invested in areas where they are best or can be trained to be the best according to various factors. Unlike any other investment instruments, humans’ value can be continuously upgraded for higher returns. Thus the core of HIM is to maximize the return from each employee as an individual or as a member of the group with minimum expenditure and effort in him or her. HIM can therefore reengineer and replace HRM slowly and steadily at the desired pace where maximum attention is paid to employee investment for improved results. This is unlike HRM, which primarily focuses on employee relations. Turning around HRM to HIM will be the first step in inclusively aligning strategic human resource management with the overall human management. As such, HIM should be seen as a process by which the asset or capital value of individual humans can be increased by turning them into capital humans, an entirely different outlook from the oft-used term human capital.

Investment in human capital is to the fore of debate and analysis in OECD countries about how to promote economic prosperity, fuller employment, and social cohesion. Individuals, organisations and nations increasingly recognise that high levels of know