Hasn't HR suffered enough? At a time when major organizational initiatives in performance management and talent management should be giving human resources managers a big boost in respect and organizational influence, most executives continue to view HR as utterly nonstrategic and the last place they want to end up. Fast Company’s cover story “Why We Hate HR” was bad enough, but today comes another indignity.

At Christie’s auction house in New York a painting by Lucien Freud will go up for auction. It is of a rather Rubenesque nude woman asleep on a coach. It is expected to fetch the highest price ever for any living artist. Its title: “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping." That is not the image the HR function needs!

So what's the solution? How can HR practitioners elevate the strategic importance of the function and attract the best talent to this incredibly important field? HR isn’t about paperwork and summer outings. It’s about the acquisition, development, and measurement of talent. It’s a deeply strategic field with the power to make tangible and lasting effects on the organization.

In the hands of the right people, HR would not be a career dead-end; it could be the new road to the top. It's a sad state of affairs that crunching data and managing outsourcers are considered better career tracks for aspiring leaders than creating and executing people strategies -- but that appears to be the case.

Even though I’m not in the field, I’m fed up for my HR brethren. HR is a critical player in executing a company’s larger talent management strategies - something lost, it seems, on too many companies. After all, what moves the organization? Its people. Recruiting the best and the brightest talent, implementing strategies to get the most out of them, guiding the development of top performers, addressing weak links, measuring the value people deliver to the organization. What could possibly be more important?

Apparently everything else -- at least if you judge by the career tracks and opinions of most executives. So where does HR stand in your organization? Is it a disrespected function or can it be rehabilitated? Is it even possible to move HR out of the wings and onto center stage? If so, how?

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An item in today's Financial Times about the challenges faced by Renault and Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn caught my attention. Ghosn is something of a celebrity in management circles for his ability to run two separate auto companies at the same time. Indeed, he even tried to take on a third, but his attempts to forge an alliance with GM a couple of years ago never panned out.

But time and the economy are finally catching up to Ghosn, and some are wondering whether he's been wearing one crown too many. He himself has hinted that he's burning out. Has Ghosn stretched himself too thin? Should he have delegated some of his leadership responsibilities to others? Would both of his now sputtering organizations be better served by more focused management?

Questions like these shouldn't be reserved for high profile CEOs. We are all at risk of overstretching and burning out, especially when the profits aren't rolling in quite as smoothly as they were. We all need to take a cold hard look at our spheres of responsibility and make sure we're dedicating the right resources and attention to the right things. Have you taken on too many responsibilities? Could burnout affect your performance and your ability get the most from your part of the organization? It serves no one best interests to let that happen. More so, when your performance suffers, you lose control of your agenda.

Drawing on two columns I wrote for Harvard Management Update, here are some pointers to help you keep your focus in the right places, resist the urge to overreach, and remain firmly in control of defining your priorities.

Begin asking these four questions:

• Which of my responsibilities will have the biggest impact on my team and my organization?

• Which are most important to my boss?

• Which might make a big difference in my personal success?

• Which will have the biggest negative consequences if I don't pay attention to them?

Ideally, you'll want to tackle a mix of projects that, in total, will produce value for your company by helping it to advance toward its strategic goals, and that will benefit your boss, your team, and yourself. Put at the top of your list the projects that serve the broadest cross-section of these constituencies.

Delegate the things that don't require your immediate supervision. But don't simply offload responsibilities. When making assignments, think carefully about the match between employees' skills and the tasks you're giving them. Also be sure you direct them to the right resources. This may seem obvious, but for a harried executive they are easy to overlook.

Finally, display the courage of your convictions. Even after you've delegated some core work, you are still going to have to say no pretty often if you're going to keep your focus sharp, deliver maximum value, and retain your sanity. And the truth is that while some things simply aren't important to you, they probably are to someone else. When you decide it's best not to take on a new project, make absolutely certain you can articulate why to any interested parties. The best answer is often found when you consider the consequences of saying yes -- namely, destroying your ability to get higher-priority jobs done well and on time.

Any advice you'd like to share on setting strong priorities and hedging against burnout?

The thrill is gone.

As the French president Nicolas Sarkozy enters the second year of his term, his popularity ratings are half what they were when he took office. The hyperkinetic center-right reformist whose campaign message boiled down to “Work more!” and “Hidebound France must change!” got off to a promising start. He appointed an impressively diverse cabinet that included a prominent leftist and a number of women, one a Muslim. He instituted important reforms of the university system. He eliminated “special regimes” for some public-sector employees. And he weakened the 35-hour work week’s stranglehold on productivity.

Then when his marriage imploded, he seemed to shrug off the role of earnest workaholic and shove work aside in favor of wooing and wedding former supermodel Carla Bruni in very public fashion. Yes, the French love romance but they also deeply value propriety and raffinement in their leaders. “President Bling-Bling”--who graced numerous magazine covers with Bruni at his side and sent a text message during an audience with the Pope--has fallen far short in this department.

Now that his honeymoon is over (with the French public and his party, I mean; can't say about with Bruni), Sarkozy will find delivering on his promises of change to be doubly difficult. He must re-inspire jaded and skeptical constituencies to believe in him and buy into his vision, and discipline them--and himself--to execute it.

Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler finds himself in much the same situation. When he moved into the top spot, he promised to "transform virtually every aspect of how [Pfizer does] business.” Nearly two years later, he has little to show for his efforts, and the clock is ticking. The blockbuster Lipitor, which brings in close to $13 billion of revenue annually, could face generic competition in just two years, and it appears that nothing with its sales potential is in the pipeline. The stock recently dropped to a 10-year low after disappointing first-quarter earnings.

There’s lots of advice out there for getting off to a strong start--our own Michael Watkins writes frequently on this topic--but where should leaders focus their efforts when they're one or two years into the job and much difficult work still lies ahead?

To keep the flame alive while slogging away at the difficult and sometimes dull work of execution:

What about you? As you've entered your second or third or sixth year in a leadership role, what practices have you found effective at keeping your vision alive and moving your organization toward realizing it?

Microsoft’s decision on Saturday to drop its bid for Yahoo created disappointment all around, particularly for Yahoo shareholders, who saw the stock tumble about 15% by midday Monday.

But as Heidi N. Moore suggests in the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft’s “no” might mean “maybe,” and the two companies could find themselves in talks again. If so, those talks will happen under very different circumstances.

Yahoo’s devaluation would put added pressure on Jerry Yang to reach a deal. Steve Ballmer would be on a hotter seat, too, due to Bill Gates’s departure from an active role at Microsoft. And the various actions and reactions of partners, competitors, suppliers, consumers, and markets will all have changed the negotiation context in a thousand unpredictable ways.

Negotiating in a complex and constantly shifting landscape isn’t a challenge faced only by big companies making big deals; it’s universal. The following free resources can help you surmount this challenge:

Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay is the editor of Harvard Management Update.

One of our clients, just back from Haiti, reported people rioting for food and eating dirt to fill their stomachs. The ever-worsening world food crisis is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it is finally one issue that cannot be blamed on global corporations – or is it? Where are the boundaries of corporate social responsibility today?

We all understand that companies need to take responsibility for the social or environmental harms they may cause. We’ve also learned that companies can be held accountable for the labor practices of their suppliers and even for the predictably imprudent behavior of their customers. Any linkage to the world food crisis seems much more attenuated.

Yet there is a linkage. We hear that hedge funds playing the commodity markets are contributing to the run up in prices. The new emphasis on biofuels, subsidized heavily by government incentives, has creating a competing market for crops. Climate change, attributable in large part to power plants and transportation, has led to droughts and floods that reduce crop yields. Even more broadly, the continued consumption of fossil fuels and the accompanying rise in the price of oil has put pressure on petroleum-based fertilizers. It may not be possible to single out any one company as a culprit, but the connection between corporate behavior and the food crisis is genuine: must companies respond by changing their practices?

Even more troubling is the question of any affirmative obligation to help solve the problem. After all, the developed markets where most goods are sold are the least affected, so any impact on company sales is insignificant. Americans, for example, may grumble about higher prices at the grocery store, but food represents a much smaller share of their total spending, and raw ingredients represent a much smaller part of the ultimate purchase price of our highly processed foods. In the developing world, there is no margin: higher prices mean that people eat less, or not at all.

Yet the fact that most companies are neither harmed by nor blamed for this crisis doesn’t mean that we should overlook what they could do to ameliorate it. Seed companies have the technologies to improve crop yields through genetic modification. Monsanto, for example, recently joined a public-private partnership with the Gates Foundation and the Africa Agricultural Technology Foundation to develop drought resistant corn. Transportation companies have the logistics to get food where it is most needed. TNT, for example, has long provided logistics support to the World Food Programme of the United Nations. Food companies and financial institutions have the financing that could enable small farmers to dramatically improve their productivity. Wal-Mart has joined with Mercy Corp and USAID to guarantee purchases of market-driven agricultural products from Guatemalan farmers, thereby greatly increasing the prices and predictability of crop sales. And the lobbying arm of most global corporations could do a great deal to alter agricultural tariffs and increase international aid.

Pharmaceutical companies offer a fascinating parallel. The leading global companies collectively distribute billions of dollars of free drugs to the developing world, prompted by a combination of public relations and humanitarian motivations. Like the food crisis, they didn’t cause the diseases nor do the populations they help represent lucrative potential markets. But they have stepped up to an affirmative obligation based on their unique capacity to help.

If every global corporation took action to address the world food crisis based on its own unique capabilities, that would be a welcome redefinition of corporate social responsibility, and more important, the problem would soon be solved.

Mark Kramer is Managing Director of FSG Social Impact Advisors. He is also the co-author, with Michael Porter, of the McKinsey Award-winning Harvard Business Review article, "Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility."