Author Archive

Thanks to Bill Tincup for bringing us the marvelous series of “what’s next by some of HR’s greatest thought leaders.  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I love Sumser and am proud to call him a friend and mentor.  His entry into “What’s Next” actually did make me laugh out loud, on an airplane...
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Julian had a childhood friend named Lucy.  One day, he came home with one of those kindergarten drawings with a little girl and diamonds and presented it to his father.  John asked him what the drawing was, and Julian replies, “It’s Lucy and the sky with diamonds.”  Thus, the song. You can take some core...
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3 Words Follow-up to yesterday’s post written by David Zinger. I am so pleased you took so much away from 3 little words. It makes me feel stronger than the 3 little pigs and I know some wolf can blow my 3 word structure down. The words are all important to me and my work....
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I was checking out David Zinger’s twitter page and noticed his 2009 3-word theme.  They are “Authentic, Connections, Engage.”  A part of me wants a 5 page manifesto on his choice of these words and why they are important to him this year.  (he probably wrote a blog post on this, but I missed...
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I’m sitting on a plane (delayed of course for 4 hours) thinking about the people around me.  I have the fabulous exit row seat on the A319 where there is no seat in front of me.  The guy in the middle next to me is great.  He’s not a talker, he’s slim, does not...
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So you’re thinking about getting married.  You go out and buy a ring with a diamond in it, you figure out a romantic place to ask, and then you get down on one knee and POP the question.  Somehow, she says “yes.”  They key is that there are probably a large number of reasons...
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I must say that Jim Holincheck wrote a quite persuasive piece a couple months ago on why vendor scripted demos will go away.  In today’s environment of SaaS applications, it’s so much easier for organizations to set up sandboxes for potential customers to play around in rather than the old model where client server...
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I’m not sure who first coined the term “shelfware.”  Most of our IT departments have all sorts of stuff we have purchased that we intend to implement but just haven’t done so yet.  Or we have implementations that we have abandoned, or we have technology and strategy roadmaps that are mid way through because...
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We always end up talking about employee adoption whenever we are implementing anything whether it’s technology, process or anything else.  When we talk about adoption, we’re really talking change management, and in that we are talking about changing both behaviors of people as well as attitudes.  We want to convert both their minds as...
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The HR Capitalist had a post the other day about pricing candidate salaries.  But as usual, I have my own opinions. Say it with me – the market rate for any candidate is the $$ amount they will accept.  They’ve got info about what they are worth, you’ve got info about what they are worth. ...
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HRO has seemed dead for at least a couple of years now.  A couple years ago it was almost all I was writing about, and there were mega deals to be had every other month.  All consultants were talking about to their clients was deciding if they should outsource or not.  At the time,...
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If you ever look at a snowflake dangling from the window at your local Macy’s or Bloomingdales, realize that this snowflake is only a piece of marketing, there to draw your eye, but not an accurate representation of reality.  You see, most marketing snowflakes have either five or eight sides to them.  Nobody seems...
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I was chatting to Lexy Martin about a month ago, discussion the blog and how I write about cycling and HR all the time, trying to reach lame analogies.  It was apparent in our conversation that I really have two major activities that dominate my personal time, first the cycling and second eating.  (and...
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Since I figure the great majority of you are reading me on email, Google Reader or some other mechanism that allows you to never visit the site (I do it myself, certainly it’s not a criticism – lucky if I ever read an RSS feed on my PC instead of the blackberry), I thought...
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I was looking at a SuccessFactor’s employee laptop the other day and she had a huge sticker on it with the words “Success = Strategy + Execution.”  I could not help wondering to myself if this was really the equation, or just simplified marketing jargon.  Granted, SuccessFactors is probably pretty darn good at what...
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I must say that sometimes M&A transitions are a pain in the *** for HR and HRIT practitioners.  It’s quite rare in my experience that a merger will be a pure 50/50%, more often than not one of the merger partners is getting a tiny fraction more than 50% and so can govern the...
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Those of you how have been reading this blog for a while are familiar with both Bill Kutik and Karen Beaman as I refer to both of them often.  In fact, It’s probably a bit of conceit for me to say that you know them from reading the blog as they are obviously industry...
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A few days ago, my fellow compatriot Jason Corsello wrote about Gartner’s new magic quadrant.  I’ve actually looked upon the Gartner magic quadrants with some disdain in the last few years, not because of any perceived lack of validity, thoroughness or any other concern with the approach to analysis that Jim Holincheck does, but...
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Those of you how have been reading this blog for a while are familiar with both Bill Kutik and Karen Beaman as I refer to both of them often.  In fact, It’s probably a bit of conceit for me to say that you know them from reading the blog as they are obviously industry...
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I’ve been through a lot of process mapping sessions in my life.  I’ve had the good opportunity to lead many, and also the opportunity to sit in and observe.  It always surprises me how often the current state processes are mapped, and then people go straight into the future state process mapping without real...
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