This text is an important addition to the ongoing discourse on strategic management, particularly, strategic human resource management. It is a result of research carried out in the agricultural sector, in general, and on multinational tea firms, in particular. The author’s hands-on and conceptual insights gained through nineteen years of experience across African countries make the text a useful tool for company boards of directors and strategic level managers charged with the formulation and implementation of business and human resource strategies. In addition, it provides justification to HR managers of the need to shift focus from primarily being concerned with routine transactional HR activities to dealing with transformational ones, which are contingent on the circumstances of the organization. Scholars, management consultants and management students will also find the contents of this book to be of great interest and benefit.It is now sufficiently recognised that management has to be concerned with deliverables, rather than abstractions. Therefore, many firms formulate and implement one form of business strategy or the other. However, strategies cannot be conceived, let alone realised, without human resource input. The question that HR continues to grapple with, therefore, is how it can demonstrate the contribution of each employee to the bottom line and business sustainability. How this question is to be answered has not always been explained and is even more crucial for the agricultural firms which are characterized by great instability in terms of weather patterns, commodity prices, currency exchange rates and wage levels. HR planning, in these circumstances, cannot be a simple exercise, but getting it right is more important than for organizations in more predictable environments.This book moves away from the romanticization of the role of HRM in such organizations, and instead provides empirical evidence of the types of business and human resource strategies employed, strategic integration between these strategies and the strategic human resource management processes and practices used. Finally, it considers the concomitant synergies achieved by strategic fit between business and human resource strategies and their role in achieving sustainable competitive advantage.
