Blog (56)
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Talentpunks: How to spot them and why they matter to your business
2009 was the year of Edupunk. In case you missed it, on the psychology grad network, PsychFutures, in chronological order you can read all the major articles. We're talking thinkers like Tapscott and Godin, think tanks like Demos, the Sunday Times, Fast Company, Mashable, New York Times. It was a big media friendly deal.
If your business could make a New Year’s Resolution...
I will help you shed the Christmas pounds by putting more healthy free food on the menu
I will ban all unnecessary meetings and barriers to productivity
I will let you choose when to work from home
I will encourage you to use more not less social media
I will give you more time to think
I will let you bring your pug into work
I will tell you now if your job is unsafe
I will finally start treating you like an adult
Talking of adults, maybe in 2012 this should be a collaborative resolution?
Human Capital Handbook: Christmas Issue Out Now
4 quarterly issues (roughly spaced from February, June, September and December). 27 heavyweight articles (if you need to know, that’s roughly 6.75 articles per issue). Big name authors – Ulrich, Flamholtz, Marks, Bassi, Spender - as well as soon to be lorded emerging stars – Wilson, Anderson, Thamotheram, Royal and O’Donnell. UK, Sweden, France, US, Denmark, Australia, Canada, France: a global POV, and a rich one too, from busy body regulators to myth debunking academics, coal facing practitioners to outside looking in investors, OBE’s to CBE’s. All intermingled with an uncountable number of fleeter footed poems, cartoons, quotes - ‘clickbait’ - as our inaugural and esteemed editor, Ann Graham christened them.
The email HR should have waiting in your inbox on January 1st 2012
Christmas is coming fast and with it that annual angel/demon where you are already forgiving yourself for indulging two sizes in the wrong direction with the promise that starting Jan 1st you really honestly will do something about your health.
Of course, businesses do this too. They get to the end of the year, worked and at the moment increasingly partied out, and in the back of their minds they take stock and make very real commitments to making 2012 different, to focusing on improving the health and wellbeing of the bottom line.
I don’t know yet: it’s still early, but I count a dozen overnight, newsletters like the one from HR Magazine that pointed me to this research, Google Alerts, network notifications, emails from the boss rescheduling today’s meeting (I have the flu). But I have 4 work email accounts (yes, 4) and each of these will have a similar amount of mail waiting for me, so it’s safe to say an hour into my day and I will have exceeded the daily average.
Harold Jarche always has interesting things to say or pass on. One is a review of Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come from: The natural history of innovation. The smart idea here is how smart ideas happen. And that is by bumping into each other. Clashing. Colliding. Challenging. Converging. Tapping one another on the shoulder and saying, hi. Finishing each other’s sentences. Making pauses pregnant.
An exclusive Human Resource Director’s Network in a time of Austerity
Our Sponsor, Human Potential Accounting, is launching a UK based peer-to-peer network for Human Resource Directors. With a twist. Actually several.
For a start, for most networks these days it’s about volume. This network is the opposite. You have to be a bona fide top table HR Director to join, and only one person can represent your industry or sector. This ensures the highest quality of participants feel free to talk openly about what’s happening to them.
What if E.O. Wilson had become a business biologist?
Über ecologist E.O. Wilson reminds me of my boss, Dr Michael Reddy of Human Potential Accounting and HubCap. Not in terms of age (Wilson is 82, my boss, well, he would prefer to steer people South of anything like that figure). Or appearance (though they both seem wedded to a similar choice of shirts). Or achievement: there are few who stack up to Wilson in terms of global impact, though Michael did develop the world’s first truly global EAP service. Perhaps you could say it is that they are both still unable to ‘quit the field’ (though Wilson’s field – the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique - is far removed from human capital management).
Hat tip to the always excellent HR Capitalist blog for sharing something really valuable, a really deep long, really insightful, really real rant by a Google employee against Google. A rant that was sent to ALL Google employees (including the board). And was then ‘leaked’. (If you don’t want to waste time hearing my thoughts on this, read the full and as yet still public rant here.)
They lie, steal, cheat, squabble, fall out, back bite, switch sides, take bribes, take short cuts, take their ball home, take duvet days, take nothing on board and nothing into account, can’t empathise, can’t think straight, can’t do as they’re told, can’t help it, can’t think without a box, think a clean inbox is a box well ticked...