Tanglewood Case

. The overall purpose of each company is to keep customers happy with their services, and keeping employees happy.

b. I would say they develop talent. The IBM of today, of course, is no longer reliant on great hardware; it now depends on great talent and on exceptional systems for managing that talent. So with that, they are training employees to be the best they can be. EDS is another company developing talent. "In another key area, we learned that we have an extreme deficiency in our project program management," he says. After all the gaps and surpluses were analyzed, Sivinski says, the company sent out an e-mail to its employees discussing each employee's current portfolio of skills--and the skills the company was going to be in short supply of now and down the road.

C. When it comes to Lands End they have a lead system. In their busy Christmas time, they kept ahead of the schedule. They plan for the season. They start in January looking at the projections as far as the amount of orders there were planning on having, and then based on those numbers were able to determined how many people it will take to get the orders out of the door.

D. I would say they emphasize on external hiring. Cisco, like many other big companies, is changing, experimenting, and rethinking the way it recruits, hires, and trains its employees, and how it will maintain its winning culture. Cisco's hiring and retention practices were viewed as keys to its success. To keep ahead of the competition, the company drew in top talent at an enviable rate.

E. Most of the organizations core workforce is made up of individuals who are viewed as regular full time or part time employees of the organization. They are central to the core goods and services delivered by the organization.

F. I think it depends on the company. For example, Cisco's hiring and retention practices were viewed as keys to its success. The company has had to adopt new practices, approaches some experts think may hurt the company in the long run by hindering the flow of talent and ideas that make the company great. Whereas, Land Ends they have temporaries all year long. During the holiday season, about half of the employees are regular employees, and the other half are temporary employees. Temporaries are kept year round because business fluctuates within the year, and the temporary employees help with the peaks.

G. Most of the businesses seem to hire nationally. At Lands End they have always had the philosophy that every hire is a potential regular employee. So when doing the interviewing they are looking at people with the same interest in that person as they would in someone who's going to be a regular hire because their intention is that they'll work for the company for more than just the holiday season. They look for people with good customer service attitude no matter what job it is. For they have more than 466,000 employees throughout the world. The problem is that historically, the resources have been in a variety of supply pools and difficult to aggregate, leading to sub-optimized response to client needs.

H. For P&G they relocated/swapped. The idea of the employee swap between the two companies gained momentum about a year ago, when P&G's then global marketing officer, Jim Stengel, expressed concern that one of the biggest initiatives in the company's laundry-soap history was a switch to smaller bottles with a more concentrated formula which didn't include enough of an online search-term marketing campaign, according to two people familiar with the matter. So with the relocation of employees it has helped the companies out.

I. In September, EDS announced that it would cut as many as 15,000 to 20,000 employees as part of an effort to trim $3 billion in costs over the