Section Fourmanagement for such training. As early as the mid-1980s,
Motorola was providing strategically oriented training on
various countries in its senior-level executive development
program.^91 A related issue is that in order to obtain world-class
labor, human resource managers and executives must acquire
the skills to recruit, hire, and develop managers and
professionals from other countries for global operations.^92
Product Life Cycles and Managerial Fit:
Development vs. Selection
Earlier discussions have noted the importance of aligning
human resource practices with the organization’s overall
strategy. A related issue concerns the importance of matching
types of managers with the organization’s strategies. Some
strategists have proposed that different types of managerial
skills or personalities are required for the different stages of
product life cycles or different corporate strategies. Although
there is no common agreement on the life-cycle stages, a
common typology includes introduction, growth, maturity, and
decline. Broader strategy categories might include steady-state
and evolutionary stages. In the case of product life cycles, it is
argued that in the introduction stage, a manager should be a
risk taker or entrepreneur, while in the decline stage, the
manager should be risk averse and focused on cost
containment. There are problems with product life-cycle models