Section Three
Quinn Mills has reported a similar response from an
executive:
“I’ve told my staff to quit talking to me about
human resource planning,” said one executive.
“We can’t plan for people because we do a
miserable job of business planning. And I don’t
want another nest of strategic planners in the
company.”^22Although the literature had advocated that companies
should place increased emphasis on human resource planning,
there was still a lack of enthusiasm for the process by
practitioners for many years. Nonetheless, by the late 1970s,
human resource planning activity appeared to have increased.
Some observers of the turning point cited a reactive response
to the need to comply with equal employment opportunity
legislation and greater recognition of the contribution of human
resources to the performance and profitability of companies.^23
In order to comply with affirmative action goals and timetables,
some planning is a practical necessity. The experiences with
the jail project just described can be contrasted with the
experiences of the U.S. Navy’s shipyards operations in which a
total workforce of 80,000 was reduced to 72,000. Because of
forecasting, alternative actions enabled the Navy to achieve
these reductions while having to release only 58 employ-ees.^24