In May 2009, consultants in the human capital practice at Deloitte LLP, along with researchers at The Manufacturing Institute and at Oracle, set out to tackle this quandary -- in the manufacturing sector, anyway -- by correlating strong Ebitda performance to certain human-capital-management strategies. Deloitte's Richard Kleinert and TMI's Emily Stover DeRocco, along with their colleagues, share their findings in "" in the current edition of the semiannual Deloitte Review.

The team focused its analysis on the 142 largest manufacturers represented in a web-based national survey, probing participants about both their companies' talent-management practices and their financial performance. After sorting respondents by self-reported Ebitda -- identifying the top and bottom quartiles -- researchers found three distinct people-management characteristics among the manufacturers with the best cash flow:

They perform formal succession planning across the workforce (not just in the executive ranks.)

They link employee pay directly to company performance, or to results at a specific manufacturing plant.

They link an explicitly defined talent-development strategy to their business strategy.