Section Threeresource planning requires that someone pay consistent
attention to the process, year in and year out, not just when
there is a crisis.”^16
Failure to Plan for Human Resources
There are a number of examples in which the failure to plan for
human resources has had a major adverse effect on
organizations. For example, General Electric once encountered
difficulties because of a mismatch between the skills of its
engineering staff and the work that needed to be done. At the
time, General Electric had 30,000 electromechanical engineers
whose skills were becoming largely irrelevant because the
company’s needs were shifting toward the skills possessed by
electronics engineers. Eventually, the company recognized that
its difficulties were caused by a failure to plan in earlier years.
Problems such as these prompted General Electric’s chairman
to urge his managers to conduct human resource planning. A
multinational corporation that planned a technologically
advanced smelter for construction in Brazil provides a similar
example. Because the company did not assess the availability
of the computer technicians and service workers in the
geographic area, it had to make expensive changes in its plans
in order to match the plant with the available labor supply.^17
Public accounting firms provide another example. Some of the
difficulties in public accounting firms have been attributed to