INTRODUCTION
Merging strategic and human resource (HR) planning activities has become a critical source of competitiveness for all organizations. Executives must be able to integrate strategic initiatives and HR practices to gain competitive advantage in the face of increasingly volatile technological innovation, customer expectations, and global competition. HR professionals must learn to integrate strategic and HR planning as well. While others (Walker, 1992; Schuler, 1990; and Ulrich, 1987) have detailed the models for changing HR roles, less work has been done to identify the specific steps of linking strategic and HR practices. This article (1) demonstrates the need for collaboration between strategic and HR planning, (2) expands traditional HR planning models that focus on the strategy-HR linkage to include a customer-employee linkage, (3) offers a specific process for building this linkage, and (4) proposes key questions which executives may ask to ensure that the integration occurs.