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How To Ask All The Wrong Questions
Read more: How To Ask All The Wrong QuestionsAt 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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CedarCrestone 2008-2009 HR Systems Survey
It’s not often that you get to see the results of a survey before the submission deadline is up, but Lexy Martin shared a few preliminary numbers with me. While these are very preliminary numbers, it’s interesting to see the directionality of the numbers. She was thinking that with the down-economy, that some of the…
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Growth and Sustainability – Where Does HR Fit In?
Global warming on the minds of executives. They may not actually care, but they realize that the growth of their business will partly depend on the sustainability of their products and the consciousness around environmental issues that the company can portray. So the question is this: where does HR technology fit in? Transactional: This one…
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US Businesses for Sale?
Back in I guess what was the 80’s, there was all the rage over Japanese money buying US property and business. Well times have changed and there is an interesting dichotomy going on. Now, the U.S. economy is outsourcing to China and India (and others). Low skilled labor is going outside of the U.S. and…
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HR Budgets & the Economy
The economy is in the tank, and while predictions are that things will get better in 2009, many HR leaders are doing budgets right now. The problem with recessions and HR is that HR budgets often take longer to come back than other budgets. Take 2001 as an example. The “bubble” burst with such ferocity…
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Offboarding
There is a single offboarding experience that sticks out in my mind as one of the most positive work experiences I’ve ever had. While these days we have technology and alumni networks to help us out, successful offboarding is more about the people than about the technology or process. As usual, I had not been…
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Your Best Employees
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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Where People Fit in the Toyota Way
A while back I wrote a series on the Toyota Way. Toyota is unquestionably one of the top manufacturing companies in the world producing high quality products at a very low cost. At the center of this is the Toyota Production System (TPS) which formalizes production structures throughout the manufacturing process. However, behind the scenes…
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HBR on Service Oriented Architecture
Far be it for feeble minded me to critique HBR’s SOA article entitled “Then Next Revolution in Productivity,” ((HBR June 2008, pg 73)) but that’s what I’ll do anyway. While I’m a firm believer that SOA and that we’ll see high levels of SOA adoption in the upcoming years, I’m skeptical that this is the…
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Management Gurus: Peter Principle and HR
While I’m sure everyone thinks I’m going to write about Tom Peters, instead, there is another, more famous Peter Principle out there: The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” While formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in a humorous…
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Management Gurus: Drucker and HR
Interestingly enough, Peter Drucker was writing about talent management as early as 1945. He was clearly decades ahead of his time, and his earliest writings still contain lessons for all of management including the HR function. Drucker was keen on decentralization because of its impact on what he called Human Effort, the motivation it provided…