HR Strategy
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Lack of Use
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It’s been a while since I was on a bike. All for good reasons, I haven’t actually been home in about 3 weeks. I mean, you do need to have a bike available to you and decent roads to go for a ride. I’m not sure that 3 weeks in NYC qualify. First, I’m afraid…
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What’s Next?
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Just a few short years ago, it really seemed like the vendor space was leading the market with all sorts of great new functionality and new ways to think about the world. After all, what would we have done if SoftScape had not coined the term “Talent Management”? (I’m pretty sure it was them, but…
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Everything in its Place
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I write this in the usual place – the airplane. I’m in a window seat, so I’m only surrounded on three sides. The guy in front of me has decided that all the stuff he does not want should not go in front of him, but that “out of sight, out of mind” is a…
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Going Too Far: Social Media Notifications
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I don’t know about the rest of you, but pretty much every time I receive a notification about farmville or gangster wars on Facebook, I pretty want to shoot the senders. If they are nieces or nephews, they get some allowances for being kids. But when I get literally 5 or 6 notifications in a…
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Up In The Air – Boarding Theory
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Many of the people I know have watched a film called “Up in the Air.” Indeed, I suppose it was a popular file garnering several Oscar nominations. (I have no idea if it won anything as I don’t watch the Oscars.) Several people have told me how personal the film was, and other than the…
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Lessons Learned From Gaming
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Ok, I’ll admit that I’ve been playing this on-line game. It’s a MMORPG (I can’t believe I remembered that whole thing) and I play a priest in a guild of mages, fighters, archers, etc. What I find entertaining about it is not the game-play, but the collaboration that is necessary to make the game work. …
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Style and Strategy: Nadal versus Federer
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I love tennis. I prefer to watch it than to play as I’m not really very good, and I seem to have a bum shoulder. Each year, my wife and I record the coverage of every grand slam, and to be honest, we have missed the once omni-presence of Rafael Nadal in all the finals. …
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Employee Portal Experience Fundamentals
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Portal redesign is fun these days. Creating widgets from our talent management systems and plugging in cool looking, drillable analytics from the business intelligence engine (also widgetized) is pretty cool. The technology advances in the last few years that allow you to take a standard portal and natively configure and insert your widgets (portlets, pagelets,…
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The “Other”
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Why can’t we get along with payroll? What makes them so different? It really does not matter when Payroll reports up to HR and when they report up to Finance. There always seems to be some friction. Often we like to think that they are just “different” people. HR people are strategic and nurturing and…
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Business Intelligence and Data Dispersion
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Data Encryption with business intelligence and reports has always been a problem. Users are constantly requesting reports, and once data is in someone’s hands, it’s almost impossible to control data dissemination and what I’ll call data diaspora. One must admit, especially in large organizations, that trying to put controls from a procedural perspective is not…
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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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Real Life is Analog
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Not Digital. We all love digital. It makes our lives easier and faster. But I’m not sure we all have an appropriate understanding of what digital and analog really mean. The fact of the matter is that we don’t live in a digital world. Our world is purely analog. We just have digital processes that…
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Gaming: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste
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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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Inspiration or Engagement?
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I’ve been away for a little while. No, I have not been on vacation, or away from the country. I’ve just not been writing. I don’t know if other bloggers have this problem, but I don’t bother writing if I’m not “inspired.” To be honest, I’ve faced this a few times in my career, and…
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Burnt to a Crisp
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I have a friend who happens to have a particular way of ordering steaks. This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, I’m not sure how many Indian guys order steaks. Perhaps Gautam can shed some light on this for me. (I think my friend lives in Goa if that makes a difference). Second…
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Maintaining Cadence
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In cycling, one of the core concepts when you are trying to maintain good “form” is the maintenance of cadence. Basically, a cyclist is most efficient when the legs are spinning at around 90 to 110 cycles per minute. The idea is that for each pedal stroke, a certain number of watts must be generated…
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Measuring the Temperature of your Workforce
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For those of you who have read Dan Brown’s new book “The Lost Symbol” there is an interesting concept of measuring the temperature of a population. I’ll provide a quick couple of paragraphs, noting that it’s really not critical in any way to the plot of the story: Trish laughed. “Yeah, sounds crazy, I know.…
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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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HR Leadership Selection
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I’ve been talking lately about how individual contributors are not always the best leaders. Here, Jeff Hunter talks about why sometimes the individual contributor can become a great executive, and some of the problems they must overcome to get there. A Vice President of HR may be expected to have a great eye for talent,…