For some years now, Howard Thomas has enjoyed making fun of the silk handkerchief that always resides in the top pocket of my blazer. So I considered it a step up in our relationship when he approached me with the serious request that I write the foreword to this book. I quickly said yes.

It also helped that Howard and his coauthors Rick Smith and Fermin Diez are taking on an issue that I deal with every day in my job – the issue of human capital as a strategic imperative. When you’re growing your revenues year-over-year by orders of magnitude … When you’re methodically expanding your geographic footprint … When you’re constantly adding to the categories in which you compete … When you’re regularly entering new trade agreements and encountering new competitors – and new kinds of competitors … When you’re managing ever-greater scale and complexity … When your employee profi le is becoming more multicultural and multigenerational … When your multinational corporation increasingly depends on your financial contribution to meet investor expectations … And when all those things are happening at once … you don’t need anyone to tell you that human capital is a strategic imperative. You need someone to help you put the right people in the right jobs on a large scale and with the greatest urgency. Who better to provide that help than the three authors of this book? In Fermin, you get the leader of Mercer’s Human Capital consulting business throughout Asia Pacific and Africa and a former Head of HR at Freescale Semiconductor and VP at Pepsi.