systematicHR

The intersection between HR strategy and HR technology

Learning Mgmt

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    I Could Have Been A Ditch Digger

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    systematicHR

    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…

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    Talent Particles in Action

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    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…

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    The Future of Learning

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    Those of you who read this blog often know that I’m a cyclist and generally a fitness kind of guy.  I’m actually fairly obsessive, and on a recent day entering my daily food and caloric intake into my smart phone, I thought how wonderful it would be if I could record my daily learning experiences…

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    Immediacy without Details

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    I’ll have to be honest – I’m having a really hard time with some of the new technology.  I’m supposed to be a technologist and be up on all the latest stuff.  But I find myself at odds with some of the theory and philosophy.  There seems to be an emerging sense of immediacy and…

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    Gaming: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

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    systematicHR

    I’ve been writing a lot about gaming and being an advocate for the learning activities that it promotes.  In many cases and for many games, there is active online collaboration, leadership, decision-making, team building, and project management going on.  The participants don’t necessarily know it’s happening, but it is.  However, while the players may be…

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    What does Irony Taste Like?

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    My wife and I were recently at dinner with her sister’s family. One of the boys is about 14 years old, and as we were waiting for our table, he was looking through the bottles of wines displayed nearby. (No, he’s not drinking yet, we don’t live in France) He observed one bottle keenly, and…

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    Training Innovation

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    I’ve been thinking a lot about whether you can teach people how to be innovators.  As North America and EMEA slowly loses production and manufacturing work to countries like India and China, what is left behind is the design and innovation work that is the starting point before production can shift to those other countries. …

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    The Singularity

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    What is “the singularity?” It’s basically the Terminator movie in practice.  The singularity predicts that there is a point where computers become so intelligent that they are able to self replicate, they are able to generate knowledge at a supremely faster rate than humans can, and that eventually humans become unnecessary.  There are a couple…

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    Enterprise 2.0 Diagram

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    I ran across this quite interesting and comprehensive e2.0 diagram and thought I’d share.  I like how it’s organized with Actors, Technologies and Methods as part of the engine behind e2.0, but as usual I have a few comments. I probably would have phrased the Business Drivers differently – perhaps removing it as one of…

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    Your Best Employees

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    systematicHR

    So who are your best employees?  Are they simply the top performance scores?  Are they the ones who hold the most patents?  Have the best win ratio when in court?  I’m a firm believer that while there are some natural top performers, it is also a skill that can be learned.  HBR outlines some key…

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    Gaming and Collaboration

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    Gen Y.  They sit at their PC’s, play their games, and avoid all real social contact.  As they enter the workforce, their lack of social skills will be a mismatch to that of the broader workforce who value direct, one to one communications.  Their poor verbal and presentation skills will make them less persuasive.  So…

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    An Update with Sum Total

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    systematicHR

    I’ll admit.  It caught me completely off guard to find out that the major learning vendors (Saba and Sum Total) have been offering talent management systems for the better part of a year (or longer).  I’ve been advocating this for some time as I’ll explain below, but they have been flying under the radar for…

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    Video iPods in Training

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    systematicHR

    “Training is now going to employees rather than the other way around.”  ((Gronstedt, Anders.  June 2007.  “Employees Get and Earful.”  HBR June 2007, Pg 26)) A few months ago I posted some podcast ideas that you could use in HR.  Harvard Business Review recently listed a few excellent reasons to continue expansion of this format…

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    Choosing the Right Talent Strategy to Drive Profits

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    So how much does it cost to drive up revenues by 1%?  There are many possibilities including: Cost of acquiring new talent versis: Cost of developing new talent Cost of rewards versus: Cost of 1% increase in engagement So which of these has the largest actual impact to the bottom line?  It’s not as if…

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    HR Strategy – What Really Matters?

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    Harvard Business Review recently published that “Most traditional HR performance metrics – such as employee turnover rates, average time to fill open positions, and total hours of training provided – don’t predict organizational performance.”  ((Bassi, Laurie and McMurrer, Daniel, March 2007. “Maximizing Your Return on People.”  Harvard Business Review.  Retrived from http://www.hbr.com.))  Instead, they correlated…

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    We Don’t Have the Infrastructure to Develop Talent

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    systematicHR

    A recent New York Times article ran a story about the increasingly large volumes of college applicants and the decreasing rates of admittance rates for college bound high school students.  While this trend has been going on in the U.S. for several years, many of us in HR have been having a concurrent discussion about…

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    Educating for a Lifetime

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    systematicHR

    With rapid changes in technology, the business environment, and the dynamic nature of knowledge usability in the modern world, managing one’s career becomes increasingly difficult. Necessity dictates that employees not only change careers more often as their interests change and their knowledge becomes obsolete, but they need to retrain and re-educate more often as well.…

  • Training Salespeople

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    systematicHR

    Miller Heiman has the ever popular “blue sheet” sales training, and there are many others like it. Teaching sales people how to sell isn’t necessarily the type of training that’s going to bring you higher revenues though. Years about Nabisco did a study on their non-sales skills sales training. They found that for ever $1000…

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    Web 2.0 Networks and HR

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    systematicHR

    This is an increasingly featured topic on this site.  Innovation networks and collaboration networks are of great interest to the business community because it ties together how work and product actually gets done.  Sure we have our formal organizational hierarchies, and we have process flow charts that rout our activities to each other, but the…

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    HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 2

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    systematicHR

    Lowell Bryan wrote in the McKinsey Quarterly that there is a new metric around: Times have changed and ROIC is no longer important – the new metric is profit per employee. ((Bryan, Lowell, 2007. “The New Metrics of Corporate Performance: Profit per Employee.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 56)) Again, we look at the…