The intersection between HR strategy and HR technology
So my wife has been on a homemade donut kick lately. That’s right, every weekend I get to sample another dozen donuts. Those of you who read often know that my constant struggle to stay fit must work really well when there is a new batch of donuts sitting around the house every Saturday morning. […]
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On my recent Taiwan trip with my family, one of my uncles tagged along for much of the tour. I really like this uncle as he is often quite interesting to talk to, and is an extremely smart guy. He’s been retired for a while from his last job as the COE of a major […]
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Today I was going through airport security with my wife. I got randomly selected for a screening, which consisted of wiping my hands with a cottonish fabric and sending it through the scanner that detects explosives or something like that. After the screening, I commented to my wife, “so don’t all the terrorists know to […]
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I’ll admit it. I fly United. I also know that everyone hates them, but I actually don’t. In fact, I’d fly United over any other carrier in the US (which does happen quite often). Ok, so sometimes extreme status helps out, but they do treat their upper tiers of status holders rather well. In the […]
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As per my last post,at the end of 2012, I was doing a family vacation in Taiwan. Being with family for 2 weeks is quite an expose into mannerisms that each of us have. I was particularly intrigued by my brother’s questioning of my mother. My brother would constantly ask my mother things like “why […]
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At the end of 2012, I was doing a family vacation in Taiwan. When I say family vacation, I mean not just my wife and me, but my brother’s family along with my parents, visiting all of the senior members of the family (an important thing in Asian cultures). There is an incredible exposure of […]
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There are three people who are pretty commonly in my car. They will go unnamed. One of them is pretty similar to me. She always knows where she is, which way is north, and can get around pretty well. The second has an idea, but has a tendency to say “left” when she really means […]
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Believe it or not, when it comes to personal technology, I’m not in the 1%. Come to think of it, I’m pretty darn sure I’m not in any 1%, but that’s not quite the point. I finally got a new phone after sitting around on my last phone for 2 years – it was ancient. […]
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All too often, I get an industry report to read and end up saying to my colleagues, “wow this is crap.” Case in point, at the end of 2012, I got a widely read industry report that rated a halfway decent HCM provider’s payroll engine to be better than one of the major payroll outsourcers. […]
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Every now and then, I’m parked at a mall, convention center, airport, and I ask myself, “now where did I park my car? OK, so I don’t lose my car that often, but on occasion it happens. OK, I’m not at the mall or convention center that often either. At any rate, the appropriate action […]
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I love San Francisco. It’s a great city to live in, with lots of food, plenty to do, and great places to ride a bike. It also happens to be quite the interesting place for all sorts of reasons. I could point to the Golden Gate Park, numerous museums, beautiful hills and neighborhoods – but […]
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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 […]
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It’s nice being a consultant. People like consultants because we have a specific approach to a problem. We talk to lots of people, look at lots of documents, conduct workshops. Then we synthesize what we have learned and create judgments and opinions, and then we document everything to the nth degree. Some people would argue […]
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On March 2, 2011, Pakistan’s Minister for Minority Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti was assassinated. Like others before him (including Benazir Bhutto), he was killed for standing up for the right of Pakistanian citizens to believe in whatever they wanted to believe. In this case, Bhatti was a Christian, and (to his detriment) was outspoken about it. […]
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A few years ago, i had a custom set of wheels made for my bike. I had the rims specifically weighed and picked out of a set of about 10 rims. I had the spokes weighed and balanced to make sure they were the lightest ones. The spoke nipples (the threaded parts that are basically […]
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OK, I’m Taiwanese, and I recently went back to Taiwan to visit family and see the “home country” that I’ve never been to. As I stayed in the apartment my family had rented, surrounded by rice paddies on all sides, i realized how close I was to having been a rice farmer of some type. […]
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What makes us intelligent, able to make decisions based on our surrounding and pdictions of the future is not that we have an emmense amount of knowledge packed into our brains. Rather, what makes us different as human beings is that we have a great deal of nerves and nerve connections. It is these connections […]
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Imagine this. You’re fixing your house, and you take down a few walls to reconfigure how the place looks – it’s a bit more open, you can see more, put more people in it when you entertain. While you’re at it, you decide to put new walls up – perhaps a new powder room where […]
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Would I be where I am today if I had all the facts every time? I’m actually confident that if it were up to me, I would be digging ditches for a living somewhere (not to demean ditch diggers). Let’s face it, I started off all on the wrong foot. Being an Asian American kid […]
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I came across this quite a few years ago as we started to tinker around with core HR systems needing to integrate with more systems than just payroll and benefits, and as analytics engines started to take off en masse. Back in the first part of the millenium as talent applications started to get a […]
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