You might have been forgiven for thinking that a time-machine had plunked you in front of a black-and-white TV to watch "To Tell the Truth." But I heard these comments at a conference of HR executives in Chicago just over a week ago. The three chief executives, each the leader of a company that ranks high on one or another best-places-to-worklist, spoke before several hundred people who like people businesses.

Here's what I heard: There's no such thing as a generic "people business." A company is a great place to work, or a lousy one, not because of its HR package. The key is whether the total deal it offers employees is consistent with the strategy the company takes to market.

Maybe I was thinking this because we at Booz & Company just completed our internal, annual people survey, or because of the intense reactions to my post a couple of weeks ago about how CEO Vineet Nayar puts employees ahead of customers.

Whatever the reason, it became clear to me that in people policies, as in just about everything else, the rule is "horses for courses."

Take Baird: A great little company but not a big brand name, Baird aggressively pursued its "best companies" prize as a way to sell itself to recruits. (Consulting firms sell hard, too, all of us thinking that the cream of the crop is barely good enough.)  A signature demonstration of Baird's muscular people strategy: When the financial crisis hit, Purcell first moved to keep his top team intact by getting them all to take a pay cut so no jobs would be lost; a few weeks later, he got employees' consent to dilute their ownership, then ventured into the teeth of the storm to hire a couple hundred top-notch people who'd been released by struggling rivals. (That was a big move: The firm's headcount is just 1,300.) This boldness is combined with high expectations and what seems like a no-excuses insistence on accountability: as the company website puts it, "a world-class environment that challenges you to achieve your potential and rewards you for your efforts." Buckle up.

Allstate worries that it's too nice. People either leave quickly or become lifers. One good hand washes the other: Teamwork increases (not a bad thing) but accountability and ambition become dampened (not a good thing). But Wilson can't just crack the whip, because Allstate, like State Farm, targets customers who value service over price - it advertises that it seeks "compassionate individuals involved in the business of helping people." In other words, both the pluses and the minuses of its culture are outgrowths of its value proposition. To challenge complacency and introduce more accountability, Wilson and his HR team now are offering all employees a day-long workshop to help them discover what they want out of work and life - and then gradually changing incentives and rewards.

To Waddell,  Northern Trust's biggest people issue is creating a global culture. That figures, since the bank comes from Illinois, which outlawed any branch banking at all until 1967 and restricted their number till 1993. The Northern needs to guard the conservative, high-integrity culture that is the heart of its brand. Strategically the bank's story has been to resist temptations to diversify too much in financial services - "We know what we do well, and focus sharply on those things" - and successfully transplant that expertise to the 18 states and 16 countries where it now operates. That has provoked intensive discussions of the "what-one-word-best-describes-this-company?" sort that can seem like the epitome of soft-side fluff. But in this case, they are foundation stones for maintaining coherence as the bank pursues a global strategy based on carefully defined expertise.

I can't imagine three more different places to work, which is the point. When you build your strategy on your capabilities - which is the right way to build it - then your people policies should be as differentiated as your way to going to market.

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