Feb 13, 2013

Note of warning:  Stereotypes follow in plenty. Last year I wrote a post titled “I could have been a rice farmer.”  It’s completely true that had my parents not moved from Taiwan to the United States before I was born, the possible alternatives to my life are infinite.  However, I probably would not actually have been a rice farmer even...

Oct 11, 2012

The talent management panel at The HR Technology Conference was all about diversity.  Not diversity in terms of workforce, but the diversity in terms of approaches in deploying talent processes and technologies that different companies take in pursuit of their goals. With Jason Averbook hosting, we had Walmart (2+ million employees), Motorola Solutions (called...

Sep 12, 2012

I’ve been watching with fascination over the last couple years as countires have rebelled against their governments (Arab Spring in 2011), and American citizens have condemned corruption, and congratulated the populous for rising up and forcing change.  It’s fascinating to me because we are so unaware of what has been going on around us for so long.  After...

Mar 21, 2011

It seems to me that there has been a renewed focus on core HR.  Now I need to tell the truth, I really thought core HR was dead.  I mean, it will always be around, but with the whole industry moving on to cooler things like analytics and talent management, who cares about core HR anyway?  Seriously, core HR is core HR, how many ways can you present an...

Oct 13, 2010

There was a time when if you wanted to collaborate, the only way to do it was either walking over to someone and having a conversation, or perhaps you could call someone’s “secretary” and leave a message.  Then we got voice mail.  Then we got email.  We’ve been trapped in an email world for over a decade now, but it seems that the next shift is...

Oct 6, 2010

I can’t quite remember when it was, but on a recent Bill Kutik Radio Show, Bill mentioned, “One of the things that drives me crazy, is every survey that comes out, everyone says that Succession Planning is their top priority, and then the following year, the same survey states that nobody implemented it.”  Bill’s absolutely right, and I’ve started...

Sep 29, 2010

Until tonight, I’ve never seen a lightning storm from above the clouds.  I’m not sure what percentage of lightning strikes actually are visible below the clouds, but this storm over Texas that I’m watching has a few lightning bolts per second all localized in a small area over the course of the last 5 minutes that we’ve been flying by it. ...

Sep 22, 2010

In most businesses, if the supply chain stops, everything stops.  Ford can’t make cars if they don’t have wheels, hospitals get pretty jammed up if all the CT machines are down, and most organizations wither away if the sales pipeline goes away.  You can view almost any portion of any business from a supply chain point of view.  In HR, we...

Aug 25, 2010

We’ve been doing a pretty good job with Talent Management in my opinion.  We have pretty much deployed our systems or are in the midst of doing so.  We have reengineered our core talent processes from talent acquisition to performance to succession to learning and compensation.  We have started to grow our talent thinking past these core processes to...

Aug 23, 2010

A long (very long) time ago, I used to captain a cycling team.  I had a crew of about 6 people that raced every week, and we all had our objectives and our roles.  As part of our weekly training for races, we would drill the sprinter on sprinting exercises, have the guys who would chase down breakaways doing crazy intervals, the climbers climbing, etc.  At...