Peter Cappelli (born September 7, 1956) is a human resources and management specialist. He is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ^[1] in Philadelphia and is the Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources.^[2]

Cappelli became a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources^[3] (NAHR) USA in 2003 and has been a Research Associate of National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) since.^[4]
Beyond academics, he has consulted with businesses, international organizations^[5] and inspired federal policy-making in workforce and education for the US and other governments.^[6][7] A world-renowned expert in human resources^[8], he led the discussions on Unemployment and Workforce Skills at the 2012 Davos Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum^[7]and was a member of its Global Agenda Council on Employment.^[9]

In 2009, he was rewarded with PRO Award by the International Association of Corporate and Professional Recruiters (IACPR) for his exceptional contributions to the field of Human Resources.^[10] Cappelli was ranked fifth in HR Magazine’s 2012 list of most important management thinkers^[11] and named among the top 25 most influential thinkers in human capital by Vault Rankings.^[5]

Peter Cappelli received his Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Relations from Cornell University in 1978.^[10] He received the Irving Ives Award as the outstanding member of freshman and sophomore classes and was recognized as the Academic Leader of the class of 1978 with Daniel Alpern Award.^[12]

Soon after his undergrad, Cappelli joined Oxford University’s Nuffield College as a Fulbright Scholar and earned his Doctorate in Labor Economics in 1983.^[13] He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a post-doctoral fellow.^[10] He became a German Marshall Fund Fellow in 1986 and has been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution since 1980.

Cappelli has taught at Wharton from 1985, before that at the University of California (Berkeley), University of Illinois. He was a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Bocconi University in Milan.^[10] He chaired Wharton’s Management Department in 1993 and has a courtesy appointment in Penn’s Graduate School of Education. He teaches collective bargaining, organizational behavior, negotiations and conflict resolutions, compensation and labor economics.^[12]

He also hosts “In the Workplace” show on Sirius XM 111 Business Radio powered by The Wharton School weekly aired on Thursdays at 5:00 PM EST.^[14] He is also a regular columnist for HR Executive Online Magazine.^[11]

Paul Feyerabend’s book, Against Method, had a profound effect on Cappelli’s career.^[15] He believes the only way of telling if an argument is worth its salt is to go out and test it. He directed Wharton’s Advanced Management program for 15 years and currently leads the TMI-Wharton Programs on Talent Management as its Academic Director.^[16]

Cappelli’s early research examined the effects of declining union power in the US on collective bargaining and its outcomes. Among prominent studies here were those documenting how the end of airline regulation changed union-management relationships^[17], how business strategies were being used to reduce union power, and explaining the logic behind the process of ratifying after the fact union contracts and, indeed any negotiated agreement.^[18]

His research shifted in the 1990s to topics concerning the workforce as a whole. During this period, he also co-directed the National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce with Robert Zemsky for the US Department of Education, which continued from the Bush administration through the Clinton Administration.^[19] Among Cappelli’s important studies were Change at Work (1997), a book describing how corporate restructuring efforts shifted business risk onto employees^[20], and The New Deal at Work (1999), which documented the end of lifetime employment. It first described what are now seen as common consequences of the new employment relationships, such as concerns about employee retention and the decline of commitment to employers.^[21]

The interest in the state of the workforce and policy concerning it continued with a series of publications such as Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (2012), which described how employer hiring practices during the Great Recession were actually making it more difficult to hire good candidates. This book was reviewed in major business publications and was referenced by the NY Times Editorial Board in a statement about workforce policy.^[22] Will College Pay Off—A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You’ll Ever Make (2015) challenged the common advice that it always made sense to go to college. It was reviewed by Financial Times^[23] and excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and other major business publications.^[10]

Cappelli’s third and more recent area of interest is in the practice of human resources. His contemporary work on that topic began with Talent Management: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, named a Best Business Book of 2008 by Booz Allen Hamilton.^[12] It outlined how employers should recognize the fact that businesses, and the human resource functions in them, face a fundamental challenge in the form of uncertainty. Older practices that assumed stability in business needs, such as workforce planning and succession planning, no longer worked as a result.^[24]He described how adopting tools associated with supply chain management, where uncertainty is assumed, is the more sensible approach.

A book that spanned the policy and human resources topics was Managing the Older Worker (2010), which documented both the advantages of engaging older employees and the discrimination against them in employment. These issues have come to a head because younger supervisors increasingly find themselves managing older subordinates.^[25]He has a set of recent papers published in The Harvard Business Review outlining the contemporary challenges in human resources, such as reforming our practices for managing employee performance, what is required to support agile project management systems, and the dysfunction of contemporary hiring practices.^[26].

With his Wharton colleagues, he has published two studies about international management practices: The India Way (2010), based on interviews with the CEO’s of the 150 largest companies in India^[27], identified the unique practices, created in part by borrowing from Silicon Valley and Japan but also capturing aspects of Indian culture, that represent a distinctive way of managing companies. Fortune Makers (2017) is the counterpart study based on interviews with the founders and leaders of the largest private companies in China.^[28]

Cappelli has been on several advisory panels. He spent about 10 years around Washington, consulting and advising first for Reagan Administration in the US Department of Labor, followed by co-directing the National Center on the Educational Quality of Workforce under Clinton and Bush Administrations.^[6][19] He also spent a lot of time in India and other developing countries investigating their talent management challenges.^[27]

In 1996, Cappelli became an Executive Committee member of the US Department of Labor to establish the National Center on Post-Secondary Improvement at the Stanford University.^[12] Other than the US government, he was appointed as a Senior Advisor for employment policy to the Kingdom of Bahrain between 2003 and 2005, and has been a Distinguished Scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore from 2007.^[19]

• In 2001, Vault Rankings named him among the 25 most important people working in the area of human capital.
• In 2003, he was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.
• In 2009, he received the PRO award from the International Association of Corporate and Professional Recruiters for his contributions to the field of human resources.
• In 2011, he won the Core Teaching Award WEMBA East.
• In 2011, HR Magazine listed him among top international thinkers.
• In 2012, Cappelli was ranked fifth by HR Magazine in the list of world’s most influential management thinkers.

• Will College Pay Off?: A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You'll Ever Make (2015). It was reviewed by Financial Times^[23] and has been excerpted in several international media outlets.^[12]
• Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can do About It (2012), has received several mentions in The TIME Magazine, The Wallstreet Journal, The Washington Post and Harvard Business Review, among others.
• Managing the Older Worker (2010), co-authored with Bill Novelli.
• Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty (2008).

• Peter Cappelli, “Succession Planning,” in Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2010).
• “How Organizations Obtain the Human Capital They Need,” in Oxford Handbook of Human Capital (2009).
• Peter Cappelli, "Examining the Incidence of Downsizing and Its Effects on Establishment Performance,” in On the Job: Is Long-term Employment a Thing of the Past? (2000) published by Russell Sage.

• Peter Cappelli, Prasanna Tambe and Valery Yakubovich (2019), Can Data Science change Human Resources?, published in The Future of Management in an AI World.
• Peter Cappelli (2018), Talent Management for the 21st Century, Harvard Business Review.
• Peter Cappelli (2015), Why we love to hate HR, Harvard Business Review.
• Peter Cappelli and Monica Hamori (2013), Who Says Yes When the Headhunter Calls? Understanding Executive Job Search, Organization Science.
• Peter Cappelli and JR Keller (2013), Classifying work in the new economy, Academy of Management Review, 28 (4), p. 1-22.

• The Biggest Mistakes Companies Make with Hiring, The Wall Street Journal, 21 February 2019.
• Why Bosses Should Stop Thinking of ‘A Players,’ ‘B Players’ and ‘C Players’, The Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2017.
• Why focusing too narrowly in college could backfire?, The Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2013.
• Why Tomorrow’s Wall Street Leaders Don’t Like Bonuses, Washington Post, 19 December 2010, with Michael Useem, John Paul MacDuffie, and Matthew Bidwell.
• What Does ‘Qualified’ Truly Mean? Newsday, 11 January 2009.
• Workers Clip the Wings of United. Financial Times, 4 December 2002.
• Do Pepsi and Oatmeal Mix? Wall Street Journal, 5 December 2000, p. A26.