Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues and my students at Rutgers. Over the years, they have taught me far more than I ever learned in graduate school. Particularly valuable were the insights I gained from the experienced and very bright professionals who participated in the Rutgers Executive Masters in HR Leadership program and in the executive education programs offered by the Rutgers Center for Management Development. Among many other things, these individuals taught me the importance of communicating core concepts with a minimum of academic jargon and mathematical notation. To the extent that I failed to do that in this book, the fault is my own. My students also often asked me to recommend a book on corporate finance that would be appropriate for HR managers. The difficulty I had in identifying books that would provide what they were looking for prompted me to begin thinking about doing this volume. It was my colleague and friend Dr. Paula Caligiuri who encouraged me to move beyond just thinking about it and actually submit a book proposal to FT Press. I am therefore particularly grateful to Paula for making this book happen.

The ideas expressed in this volume are largely a synthesis of the writings and contributions others have made to the finance and human resource strategy literatures. My dependence on their work cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, the list is far too large to acknowledge them all. I have, however, tried to cite many of these individuals in the following chapters. Finally, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my parents. Though neither had a degree in finance, or anything else, their exceptional level of business acumen (and hard work) provided our family with the resources that enabled my siblings and me to attend college and graduate school.