HR and “The Profit” Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is to provide practice in identifying and applying the basic concepts of human resource management by illustrating how managers use these techniques in their day-to-day jobs. Required Understanding: Be thoroughly familiar with the material in this chapter, and with at least one or two episodes of CNBC’s The Profit with Marcus Lemon is (www.tv.com/shows/the-profit/watch/). (Access a library of past episodes at URLs such as www.cnbc.com/live-tv/the-profit.) How to Set Up the Exercise/Instructions:

• Divide the class into teams of several students.

• Read this: As you may know by watching billionaire Marcus Lemon is as he works with actual small businesses in which he’s taken an ownership share, human resource management often plays an important role in what he and the business owners and managers need to do to be successful. For example, at Grafton Furniture, a lack of clarity about who does what (a lack of up-to-date job descriptions) leads to inadequate supervision of some ongoing orders and to lower profit margins. Questions also arise at Grafton about, for instance, the effectiveness of the training that some managers (including the owner’s son) have received.

• Watch several of these shows (or reruns of the shows), and then meet with your team and answer the following questions:

1. What specific HR functions (recruiting, interviewing, training, and so on) can you identify Mr. Lemon is addressing on this show? Make sure to give specific examples based on the show.

2. What specific HR functions can you identify as being problematical in this company? Again, please give specific answers.

3. In terms of HR functions (such as recruiting, selection, interviewing, compensating, appraising, and so on), what exactly would you recommend doing to improve this company’s performance?

4. Present your team’s conclusions to the class.