HR professionals need to take a proactive role in promoting and carrying out strategies to uplift organizational performance. Brumback discusses five strategies to be followed by HR professionals to build that high-performance organization. This article rests on two axioms: 1. Any organization without right people in it can't literally perform. 2. The ideal standard for any organization is that of `tall' performance (Brumback, 2002). The standard has two demanding criteria. One requires `tall behavior.' That is, all efforts must be carried out in a consistently ethical, efficient, and motivated manner. The other criterion requires that the efforts consistently lead to `tall results.' They are the best possible ones that benefit one or more groups of stakeholders (including the environment) and that do not intentionally harm any of them, at least not without their consent.

Any strategies for uplifting organizational performance must meet both criteria. It will be argued in this paper that HR professionals need to take a proactive role in promoting and carrying out such strategies. The premise of the argument is that HR professionals have untapped potential for helping organizations to boost their performance. This potential goes well beyond fulfilling the more traditional administrative roles that are being increasingly outsourced in large corporations to reduce costs. Ironically, any organization in which senior management views the workforce as a cost factor already has a head start toward `short' performance, the mirror image of the ideal standard.