"The Irish economy and businesses within it are successful because of the way we manage people." Could we claim this? The question is sharply posed for Irish readers in The Human Equation - Building Profits by Putting People First (Harvard Business School Press), the latest book from Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Mr Pfeffer writes primarily for an US audience, with case studies and contrasts taken from overseas as needed. But his argument will be keenly felt by managers of businesses everywhere, whether large or small, and even by public-sector management.

The argument is that a condition for sustainable competitive advantage is the use of "high-performance management practices". "Success comes from being able to effectively implement a competitive strategy, not merely from having one," he writes in his introduction, filling in the detail with zeal throughout the book. A committed workforce which derives intrinsic reward from working to be the best in their business is essential for long-term success.

High-performance management practices are distilled to seven points:

employment security;

selective hiring of new personnel;

self-managed teams and decentralisation of decision-making;

comparatively high compensation based on organisational, not individual, performance;

extensive training in firm-specific competences;

reduced status distinctions and barriers;

extensive sharing of financial and performance information throughout the organisation.

This may seem like well-rehearsed points of management gurus, and Mr Pfeffer has written and lectured extensively about these types of practices in specific industries. If it were so well known they give competitive advantage, how come so many firms do not adopt them?

Some of the above practices are counter-cultural, at least in the US and in Anglo-Saxon business generally. Job security has been diminished in the US,

to a much greater extent than in Europe. But only if, or when, our economy faces a recession shall we discover how much security there is.

Just as challenging to Irish management would be the introduction of self-managed teams and effective decentralisation of decision making. Would our companies share information, to the point where, for example, all 6,500 employees of Whole Foods Markets are designated as "insiders" for stock-trading purposes, something which only the directors and senior managers would normally be accustomed to?

The chapter "How Common Approaches to Pay Cause Problems" is biting in its criticism of cutting wages and labour costs as a route to productivity. Mr Pfeffer torpedoes myths such as "effective compensation practices reward individual efforts" and "pay systems and the associated measurement practices [performance reviews] - are critically important for organisational effectiveness".

He berates individualistic reward for chief executives who downsize corporations to the point where they destroy the business's independent existence.

He is strongly in favour of what we call partnership between management and unions at company level and even makes an argument that some businesses should seek unionisation. He includes a chapter on public policy responses to facilitate high performance work practices. This is music to the ears of ICTU and EU Social Affairs Commissioner Padraig Flynn.

Many of Mr Pfeffer's examples come from manufacturing businesses on a scale and in industries - autos, mining, private power generation - where few Irish firms compete. There has been criticism that his examples are selective and unrepresentative. One can quibble. The real question is, why should his arguments be accepted?

He would claim evidence. Mr Pfeffer competes in an academic world as well as the management consultancy market. When he states that "hundreds of studies and scores of systematic reviews of incentive studies consistently document the ineffectiveness of external rewards", one does not feel that he is bluffing.

Behind the evidence, there is a view of human nature which places intrinsic motivation, trust and mutual obligations at the centre of the organisation of work rather than external to the working environment. Work is not a mere economic transaction, in this view, it is the engagement of people towards a shared goal.

In Ireland, the advocates of partnership and some companies can take heart from this book. But quite a few of those high-performance management practices would be novel in most workplaces.

Oliver O'Connor is an investment-funds specialist