Welcome to Managing Human and Social Capital, part of the course Management Leadership. I'm Mike Useem. I'm on the faculty Professor of Management here at the Wharton School. I'm going to be working with my friend and colleague Peter Capelli also a Professor of Management here at the Wharton school. >> I also direct our Center for Human Resources and Mike directs the Center for Leadership and Change here at the Wharton School. So we've both been here forever, I think, pretty much. >> Yeah, pretty much. >> For a very long time. And we've been teaching this course, I've been teaching it for about 30 years or so. And I think it's maybe important to hear a little bit about the kind of work that we have done. Mike and I together have written a couple of books. We're finishing one now about China and how the private companies in China manage, particularly the CEO's there. We wrote at one a little earlier about India the same thing. And based on interviews with the leaders of those companies in both countries. >> And Peter just maybe to add to that, we've also spent a lot of time inside companies trying to appreciate how they get people to come to work in the morning and do a great job. And that I think is going to describe, all these pieces are going to describe how we're going to take this on. We're going to bring in research, some of which we've done, we're going to bring in examples, some of which we've seen. All this designed to pull people's thinking forward on if they've got more than a couple people working for them, how to ensure that those people show up a 9 o'clock in the morning, do a great job, leave at the end of the day? >> We weren't here at the beginning of the Wharton School. It's been around for a very long time. This is the world's oldest business school. But the topic of managing people has been central to the history of the school. World War I, so about a hundred years ago, one of the most important developments in the 20th century was the rise of scientific management, Taylorism as some people call it. Frederick Taylor was teaching here at the Wharton School and his great patron was Joseph Wharton, who was the CEO of Bethlehem Steel at the time. And after that, Elton Mayo began his career here. He was the guy who founded the Human Relations School, which basically discovered the idea that people are not rational completely Incentive-driven machines. And that the dynamics within groups matter an awful lot as well. And in 1980s, the Tavistock Institute was here, moved here from London. It's a famous place that figured out that if you thought carefully about how groups interacted, people interacted with groups and technology, you could get much more effective management and organization performance. There's a long history of this here. A lot of it begins before we got here. >> And Peter, maybe to take, pick up on that and get us into the course itself, we gotta know where we're going, and that's having a strategy, and a way to execute around that, and that's part of this course. But, having referenced Frederick Taylor and others along the way, we've come to appreciate over quite a number of years now that because people are sometimes unpredictable, their personalities that we carry around will a little bit complex. That we cannot take it for granted the people once hired, we'll get the job done and a way their that we want them to or that will give their all to it. And with that, a lot of thinking has followed into your sense of Patrick Taylor did his great work. We have the for example the work of Stanley McChrystal, the US commanding officer in Afghanistan has written a great book called Team of Teams. And his focus there is once we got people in groups, then how do we actually knit those teams together? Or think Cheryl Sandberg who wrote this book as the number two person at Facebook, called Lean In, which is about how you exercise influence in the workplace, individually and more than that. And so we're going to draw on the work of Stanley McChrystal, Cheryl Sandberg, Frederick Taylor and others, on this critical area which is how Human and social capital can be put to great advantage.
