090601 Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom

(June 01, 2009) If you’ve been following along, there’s a gentle undercurrent about Disruption in my writing these days. The ravages of Moore’s Law ultimately find their way into every pocket of our culture.

Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper] It has continued for almost half a century and in 2005 was not expected to stop for another decade at least

Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is strongly linked to Moore’s law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[8] Moore’s law describes this driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The consequences of Moore’s Law are everywhere. Major industries, from electronics design to banking have been reshaped by the combination of Moore’s Law and the expansion of digital communications. Advertising, news and the rest of the old industrial media are reeling from the impact. There is virtually nothing left.

Disruption is what happens when Moore’s Law meets your world.

You’ve seen it and you now the symptoms. First, the seasoned folks all swear that their business simply can’t be digitized. Then the digitization starts in earnest. New players emerge, like Apple in music or Google in news and advertising. Whole new approaches to doing the same old thing arrive.

Take a moment and think about the news industry. For nearly a century, owning a newspaper was a license to print money. When the disruption came, the incumbents simply couldn’t figure out what to do. Those country club memberships and six figure salaries were absolutely necessary (to everyone but the disruptors). Imagine what it’s like to watch your world crumble while you’re unable to save it.

That’s what’s coming to HR and Recruiting.

How do you think it will get here?

One thing is for sure. Anything that resembles conventional wisdom is out the window.

Disruption

(May 29, 2009) Disruption is what happens when prices fall and profits rise. Google is a good example of a company that has grown by exploiting disruption. The have the ability to accept far lower revenue per advertising transaction than any of the incumbents. When Google enters a market, the incumbents are in trouble.

It looks like black magic, particularly when your lunch is getting eaten. Disruptive moments are not really the result of a competitor’s behavior. Craigslist and Google are eating old media lunch, in part, because they were in the caferteria line when it was first served. Disruptive moments are a matter of timing. Capitalizing on them begins with simply being there.

The opportunity for disruption comes when incumbent organizations develop a clear picture of what they are doing. As soon as reality becomes fixed, the chance to undercut emerges. In a uniquely human paradox, success is usually at the root of the problem. “Getting it right” almost always produces a myopia that prevents further exploration. Success prevents learning.

“Winning Generals Always Fight the Last War”

That’s one way of encapsulating the disruptive moment. Being well prepared and planned for more of what happened yesterday makes any person or organization susceptible to an assault by entities that simply see things differently.

I was on the phone with a leader of one of the great HR-Recruiting professional associations. We talked about disruption, the need to rethink the entire profession and the importance of leadership in times of rapid change. He was extremely proud of the energy being poured into the ’strategic transformation’.

So I asked him, “Who is in charge of asking the hard questions? Whose job is it to ask if HR is relevant to anything anymore? Or, who is asking ‘What if HR is not strategic nd never should have been?’ Or, ‘What if everything we know about organiziations is an anachronism, an artifact of 20th Century Industrial thinking?”

“Oh,” he said, “Our transformation isn’t that big.”

I found myself remembering the (now deposed) big time editors and owners of newspapers and media I’ve worked with over the years. Certain of their role and value, they simply could not step up to the realities that being an anachronism is fatal.

Earlier this week, the Daily links section included a series of Disruption links. They’re really worth reading.

Retention Doesn’t Work

Why do we have layoffs? One counter-intuitive answer is “because retention programs work.” Layoffs happen because the efforts to keep the workforce trimmed didn’t work. Attrition wasn’t high enough. The right people did not leave of their own accord.

Hiring and Keeping the Best People is a standard goal in most organizations. Identifying key talent and promoting them is such a core part of conventional wisdom that we take it for granted. Most leaders aspire to be surrounded by trusted colleagues who are well seasoned and deeply experienced.

When this idea spreads through an organization, it is called “Retention”. In a harsher light, it is the essence of cronyism and featherbedding.

Is it really a sound business practice?

Good, strategic workforce planning is virtually nonexistent. Instead of accurately knowing and describing the specifics of our workforces, we rely on tired generalizations. We want to manage attrition down and become the “employer of choice”. In other words, our HR Departments lead us down the primrose path and make our organizations home to people who retire in place.

It should be no surprise that we have downturns. Preparing for them, hiring wisely and continually pruning the organization is the right way to approach the problem. Too few hands always leads to greater productivity.

Time and again, our organizations act surprised when the downturn comes. RIFs mean that we “hired too many people”. Said another way, “We didn’t let enough people go when times were good.” Retention and retention programs, therefore, are the primary cause of RIFs.

“Why do we have layoffs?” Because the retention programs work too well. The idea that great people should be retained in their jobs for a long time is the exact opposite of growth and innovation. Retention breeds seniority and bureaucracy. Innovation requires youth and inexperience.

Influence Happens In A Context

By John Sumser

As the Top 100 Influencers project unfolds, we’re going to provide a guided tour of the industry. After all, it’s a little illy to say “these people drive the thematic rivers of our industry without being really clear about the industry itself. For starters, we’ll just get the lay of the land.

The HR-Recruiting Industry is a vast assemblage of 80,000 companies and over 1,000,000 working professionals (1.5 Million by some estimates). Generally, one percent of the workforce earns a living in the HR-Recruiting Industry. Depending on who you ask, Recruiters make up as much as a third of the total number.

Tallies of size and complexity are complicated by the fact that the role is performed informally in smaller companies even though vendors deliver HR products and services to the tiniest of companies.

There are two coexisting components of the industry. An ecosystem of experts, recruiters, accountants, payroll processors and benefits managers serve the needs of the professional HR community, their management and stakeholders. The two sides, buyers and sellers, serve the needs (in the domestic American MArket alone) of 50 Million discrete job transactions per year as well as the payroll and benefits of the 150 Million in the American workforce.

The elements of the industry are

• Benefits
• Payroll
• Compensation Analysis / Management
• Training
• Organizational Development
• Talent Acquisition
• Succession Management
• Talent Management
• Workforce Planning
• Staffing
• Recruiting
• Vendor Management
• Labor Relations

Typically, each of these segments has a range of vendors providing a range of services. HR is rarely practiced as a standardized discipline. It’s more common to see each company develop and execute its own cultural approach to the HR question.

Over the last decade or so, larger companies experimented with Outsourcing

• HR in its entirety (HROs)
• Ownership of employees (PEOs)
• All or Part of the Recruiting Process

Recruiting and staffing are unique. According to Elaine Orler, VP of the Talent MAnagement practice at KnowledgeInfusion, “Recruiting must move at market speed. The rest of HR can readily move at enterprise speed.” What she means is that Recruiting focuses on meeting critical needs on the open market while the rest of HR is a purer overhead function.

This bifurcation of HR leads to conflict “in the house”. The administrative component wants careful movement and is a fundamentally conservative function. The Talent Acquisition team, on the other hand, has to be extremely resourceful and competitive. There is real and sustained difference between the mindsets.

There are about 7 Million companies in the American economy. Each of them delivers some form of HR to its employees. It’s a vast market with huge differences based on geography and industry.

Additionally, the industry behaves differently based on company size. The Fortune 2,500 are typically referred to as “enterprise companies”. They use industrial strength solutions like Oracle, SAP or Microsoft. Workday, a newcomer founded by the fellow who started Peoplesoft is a promising up and comer.

The remainder of the industry, the other 6,997,500 (or so) companies use a patchwork quilt of products and services,

Over the coming weeks, we’ll look deeper into the details of the industry on a niche by niche basis.

This is the environment n which influence is earned, delivered, purchased and deployed. While most marketing discussions treat the HR-Recruiting MArketplace as if it were monolithic, it is tremendously fragmented with most companies developing unique solutions.

Influence is therefore really important. Each company tries to navigate its way through the hurdles of regulatory requirements, talent needs and employee perks. The greatest HR-Recruiting Managers think for themselves. The issues are complex enough that the hint of truth is good enough to make decisions, sometimes.

Key Influencer

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Key Influencer

By John Sumser

These days, I am trying to figure out who the influencers are in our industry, I’m trying to come up with a list of 100. Then, I’m interviewing the people on the list.

The whole question of who is influential is pretty interesting.

Some people go to a lot of conferences and exert their influence through pure networking. For these folks, influence and connection are inextricably linked. They are the prime movers of the status quo. Their influence depends on stability and a modest degree of change. They are well liked and see the world as a place where being liked is an important goal.

Another group of people spend a lot of time giving talks at conferences and publishing their work online. Many of these self-promoters exert an interesting influence on the industry. Often, they are a mile wide and an inch deep as the saying goes. The object of their involvement is, pure and simple, to build their consulting business or to increase sales for their company.

There’s a third group of people who, for some reason, have the industry at heart. They don’t really work for the money (though many of them do pretty well). They find real challenge in improving the way things get done, thought about and perceived.

The last group of influencers are a little harder to notice. They are customers and practitioners who make the whole thing go around. The other three groups depend on validation, in one form or another from users and customers.

I’m looking to figure out who the 100 most influential people are across all four groups.

When I say “industry”, I mean all of Recruiting, Staffing, HR, HCM and HRTech.

I’d be happy to get your suggestions if I haven’t already asked. If you have a moment, I’d love to see your list of the top 5 most influential people in the industry.

It’s amazing how different people’s perceptions are. As I have evaluated the terrain, I have had a number of conversations with people who wouldn’t recognize the names on your list. You wouldn’t recognize theirs. Our industry is vast.

So far, I’ve done about 15 of the interviews. Each of the people is at least somewhat charismatic, well informed and really fun to spend an hour with. I’m getting the hang of interviewing and enjoying the process.

The other day, I made a decision.

I’ve started to focus heavily on the women in the group. I really want to understand why the leadership of our industry is predominantly male while the trench level workers are predominantly female. Of all the places in the world, our business is the last place you’d expect to see that sort of inequity.

So, I’m ‘diggin into it.

Who do you think are the industry leaders?

If you enjoyed this conversation, consider joining our community. It’s even better inside.

Mincing Words

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Mincing Words

By John Sumser

(April 24, 2009) What you say and how you say it matters. The other side of the political correctness debate is a simple idea. Your language says a lot about how you see things. While I agree with Heather’s frustration, the proper alternative is not a free for all..

What you call people and how you say it can be offensive. You may be astonished (as I have been from time to time) at the way people react to the simplest cultural references. On the one side of the argument is being clear about what you mean. On the other side is being clear about what you don’t mean.

We’re all acutely aware of the damage that’s been done to inter-gender communication. As Heather noted, it’s now impossible to slide a compliment across the gender gap. Defeatists and agitators say this means we should end brute force language surveillance.

I think we have a good ways to go.

A huge part of the problem in our industry is that we are really imprecise with our language. The people of HR and Recruiting are willing to use unexamined language in a way that none of the other professions do. Ill conceived metaphors about human beings litter the HR landscape. Like most metaphorical conversation, the end result is bad communication when people start believing the literal meaning and missing the idea.

Here is a very simple idea. In the 21st Century, it is against the law almost everywhere, to own another person. Any language that hints at the idea of that kind of ownership is both offensive and misguided. It’s easy to slip and there are not readily available replacement words.

Human beings are not capital. They are not assets. They are not resources. They are not talent. Each of these ideas compares people to forms of wealth and raw material. Each of these notions objectifies people. It is demeaning. It is a bad way to communicate the underlying idea.

It makes for bad decision making.

People are not a list of skills and accomplishments. A job is not a buzzword search string. Work is not a formulaic application of capital to a task.

No, people are dynamic and complex. The way that they fit into jobs (or don’t) is surprising and mysterious. The very work that they do changes because they are doing it. The way that they interact with the team to produce results is only vaguely predictable. They seem to perform better in circumstances where trust and transparency are the norm.

In Heather’s assault on the Cult of Nice, she says:

The Cult of Nice demands that everyone conform to one set of rules that is politically correct, conflict-free and most of all, their way. It?s an insidious form of codependency where Nice is the highest good. The focus is entirely on the behavior of others and how it makes the cult member feel. It makes substantive discussion impossible.

Wah, wah, wah. Substantive discussion can’t take place when the fundamental language is demeaning. Ms Bussing’s answer is to kick away the constraints. But, in some cases, the rules are not harsh enough. Ironically, Heather’s position boils down to the same thing she argues against i.e., not making you feel bad makes me feel bad.

Meanwhile, we are letting our business leaders make gross judgment error by allowing them to think of the people who work for them as material objects.

So, the next time you hear someone use the phrase “Human Capital”, please tell them that “Humans are not Capital, owning people is against the law.” If they backpedal and say, “I mean they are assets”, tell them that “people are not property of any kind”. Force the dialog.

In this instance, the question is better than all of the answers you could get.

• I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.
• I’m doing a Free Webinar: Regional HR Marketing and PR – Tailoring Sales to Market Realities
  - Thursday, May 7, 2009,
  - 10-11 am PT (1-2 pm ET)
• I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.


If you enjoyed this conversation, consider joining our community. It’s even better inside.

Collaboration

The original content you are reading in RSS format was written by RecruitingBlogs.com and published originally at http://www.recruitingblogs.com/. Stop by and subscribe to our RSS feed today! Thanks!

Collaboration

By John Sumser

(April 17, 2009) Doesn’t it make you sick. “We’re going to transparently leverage the technologies for collaboration authenticity in our intimate community so we can harness the synergy for transformation.” Always, always, always, the people who talk about this stuff have no idea what it means. I get a headache when I have to listen while the lips move and nothing comes out. There’s a buzzword parade in our industry.

Vapid is this week’s vocabulary word. It means “lacking liveliness”. If I tell you that I’m talking about vapid enthusiasm, will that make sense? Glassy eyed cheerleaders of either gender who use words that they don’t understand as if they did…with big smiles and that stare that tells you that you better not question them. Vapid enthusiasm.

Some useful synonyms are insipid, banal, jejune and inane. Since I’m on the hunt for fresh words, I’d love to start with jejune. But, it turns out that insipid is closer. Jejune means “devoid of interest” and that’s not quite it. Insipid means “lacking challenge” and that’s closer. I’m trying to do better than plain old “stupid”.

I’ve had the pleasure of sitting through enough of this stuff that many of my favorite words have gotten worn out. Community, integrity, authenticity, dialog are all in the junk heap, their meanings held hostage for a careerist’s pleasure, rotting in a compost pile of good words gone bad.

Grump, grump, grump, grump. I find that I’m a participant in the process of eroding meaning. Got to catch the buzzword train before it leaves the station.

So, I bring this all up because I was reminded today of what work can be.

I’m beginning a new working relationship, testing the waters to discover what’s possible. We’re both seasoned players from slightly different worlds. We agreed to experiment to see if we could build something small. No big bet, just a little excursion to see what happens.

So, we sat down at a table on the deck of a beach restaurant and started talking.

The most amazing thing happened. My IQ shot up by 20 or 30 points. My ability to produce intelligent content multiplied. The conversation produced things that neither of us could produce alone.

I think this is what they mean by collaboration. It’s an explosive and productive experience that seems like magic. It’s hard to tell whose idea is whose when it gets going. When you reach this collaborative state, you can create amazing things in short amounts of time.

I was reminded that collaboration doesn’t mean group edit. It’s more exciting, mysterious and original than that. It’s a great place from which to solve problems.

I have been fortunate enough to have great collaborative relationships throughout my career. I’m coming off a dry spell that seems to have something to do with the downturn. It’s really great to rediscover the meaning of one of those words.

Work can and should be exciting and challenging. It’s easy to get lost in the fog of dreariness. For me, collaborating generates sunlight and fresh air.

I’m curious about the things that make a job great. What does it for you? How do you find it when the meaning has gone out of your favorite words?

If you enjoyed this conversation, consider joining our community. It’s even better inside.

• I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.
• I’m doing a Free Webinar: Regional HR Marketing and PR – Tailoring Sales to Market Realities
  - Thursday, May 7, 2009,
  - 10-11 am PT (1-2 pm ET)
• I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

Talent is the Problem

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Talent is the Problem

By John Sumser

(April 03, 2009) I spent the first part of this week at the San Diego ERE Expo. It was an amazing get together with lots of interesting people. Everyone from the north and the east was celebrating the climate. It’s not such a big thing for those of us who already live in paradise.

As I watched and listened, I started to realize that we’re witnessing a sea change. Our little universe is transforming along with the rest of the economy. The blood is running in the streets so deeply that it sometimes obscures our view. Change is upon us.

Everywhere I went, people were talking about talent. No one had a definition of talent, they just talked about it. That’s how it is in HR and Recruiting, people have long theoretical conversations without ever defining terms. Talent this, talent that, talent the other thing. No shared definition, lots and lots of generalizations.

It became clear to me that talent is code. It means “the best and the brightest” until you ask someone. I spent all day Monday asking people what talent was. The best I could get is the “it’s something everyone has.” “Bulls**t,” I thought to myself.

It doesn’t pass the Emma Sumser (she’s my mom) test. If I tell her that everyone is talented, she’s liable to say something like “That’s why they’re all on the Knicks” or “Hmmm, you handle that shovel like a ballerina” or “I guess I was dealing with the only untalented person in customer service yesterday.”

Talent does not mean “everyone”, it means “the best and the brightest.” The War for Talent is not a war for everyone, it is a war for a specific class of people. The term, talent, demeans most people. They don’t want to be lumped in with the class of people who enjoy being called “the best and the brightest”.

Talent Management System is a misnomer. Those things manage people. Most people are not particularly talented.

The “Talented” ones have been allowed to operate unsupervised. The adults are coming. We’ve been celebrating innovation and creativity at the expense of good old fashioned hard work. Hard work is making a comeback; it’s the new black. Just Work.

Here’s the problem. You just don’t want everyone in your organization to be talented. It’s very likely the case that we are suffering from the fact that there were too many talented executives at AIG. The term “Talent” and all of the philosophy about managing this “scarce” commodity, is at the root of the misbehavior of the first part of this Century. People who are hired and coddled because they are “talent” do the stupid sorts of things that we’ve just witnessed.

The degree to which you need “talented” people is a function of your organization. R&D Centers need lots of innovation. McDonald’s franchises need relatively little. In fact, most companies need very little talent. What they do need is persistent, hard-working, determined, honest people who bring all of their resources to bear on the job at hand.

I expect to see the term talent used less and less frequently. When you make it a question of “talent”, you insult people who create value for a living; you demean the vast majority of people with jobs. Calling people “talent” is short sighted and demonstrates a failure to understand the problem. They are not “talent”, they are “people”.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.13

Talent Is The Problem

(April 03, 2009) I spent the first part of this week at the San Diego ERE Expo. It was an amazing get together with lots of interesting people. Everyone from the north and the east was celebrating the climate. It’s not such a big thing for those of us who already live in paradise.

As I watched and listened, I started to realize that we’re witnessing a sea change. Our little universe is transforming along with the rest of the economy. The blood is running in the streets so deeply that it sometimes obscures our view. Change is upon us.

Everywhere I went, people were talking about talent. No one had a definition of talent, they just talked about it. That’s how it is in HR and Recruiting, people have long theoretical conversations without ever defining terms. Talent this, talent that, talent the other thing. No shared definition, lots and lots of generalizations.

It became clear to me that talent is code. It means “the best and the brightest” until you ask someone. I spent all day Monday asking people what talent was. The best I could get is the “it’s something everyone has.” “Bulls**t,” I thought to myself.

It doesn’t pass the Emma Sumser (she’s my mom) test. If I tell her that everyone is talented, she’s liable to say something like “That’s why they’re all on the Knicks” or “Hmmm, you handle that shovel like a ballerina” or “I guess I was dealing with the only untalented person in customer service yesterday.”

Talent does not mean “everyone”, it means “the best and the brightest.” The War for Talent is not a war for everyone, it is a war for a specific class of people. The term, talent, demeans most people. They don’t want to be lumped in with the class of people who enjoy being called “the best and the brightest”.

Talent Management System is a misnomer. Those things manage people. Most people are not particularly talented.

The “Talented” ones have been allowed to operate unsupervised. The adults are coming. We’ve been celebrating innovation and creativity at the expense of good old fashioned hard work. Hard work is making a comeback; it’s the new black. Just Work.

Here’s the problem. You just don’t want everyone in your organization to be talented. It’s very likely the case that we are suffering from the fact that there were too many talented executives at AIG. The term “Talent” and all of the philosophy about managing this “scarce” commodity, is at the root of the misbehavior of the first part of this Century. People who are hired and coddled because they are “talent” do the stupid sorts of things that we’ve just witnessed.

The degree to which you need “talented” people is a function of your organization. R&D Centers need lots of innovation. McDonald’s franchises need relatively little. In fact, most companies need very little talent. What they do need is persistent, hard-working, determined, honest people who bring all of their resources to bear on the job at hand.

I expect to see the term talent used less and less frequently. When you make it a question of “talent”, you insult people who create value for a living; you demean the vast majority of people with jobs. Calling people “talent” is short sighted and demonstrates a failure to understand the problem. They are not “talent”, they are “people”.

RBC Changes, Stays the Same

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RBC Changes, Stays the Same

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.12
By John Sumser

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.12 RBC Changes, Stays the Same

(March 27, 2009) Early this week, Jason unveiled the new face of RBC. Driven by growth in the community and pending changes at Ning HQ, the design was a clear path through some opposing forces. We’re ending the week revitalized and refocused.

Communities evolve through seasons of change. Because this is a work related experience, our relationship evolve in ways that are work like. People come and people go. One of the really cool things about the online environment is that there is an infinite supply of real estate. All you need to start something new is enough desire to leave and start something new.

Most great companies are started by people who are certain that they can do it better than the idiots they are currently doing it with. That’s the very essence of how companies form in Silicon Valley. A couple of key professionals determine that they can do it faster, smarter or better than the current gig. They quit their jobs, move into a garage and start to create enormous value.

In other words, dissatisfaction is often the source of great creative energy.

Did you notice the article by Lance Haun this week, Building a Community of Competitors. Jason is inviting the founding members of related (I’ll say competitive but not everyone agrees with me) communities. Lance runs HRMToday, a community more clearly focused on general HR. He said “What you get out of your time with recruiting all-stars is up to you. I am looking forward to continuing to grow and develop my knowledge of recruiting while I share how I think HR and recruiting can work together to create stronger organizations.”

In other words, working with your competition makes you a stronger player.

From where I sit, it looks like Jason is working an interesting problem. The signs of health in our community are two surprising things

1. We are big enough to have real conflict. This conflict is a source of energy that needs to be harnessed. Most communities don’t get big enough to have conflict. Often, the ones that do would rather not see the conflict.
2. RBC has enough momentum that people are able to grow here and move onto other things.

What do you think of the new RBC?

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