Shrewd Investments in Networking

Everyone is told they need to network. We all know the benefits; or at least we know them intellectually. Yet it still takes time and effort to get out there and do what you need to do. And, of course, we do not have very much time to spare. Getting a little more focus helps to make it easier to do.

Instead of thinking of networking as a cost (time, energy and cash),think about it in terms of an investment. Convert the time and energy into a monetary equivalent. Now...

• What are your investment objectives? What significant goals in your life do you think could be aided by new people? Therefore, what do you want to get out of your networking?
• Linked to the above, what is your investment strategy going to be? Short, medium or long term? Gordon Gekko asset stripping or Warren Buffet in it for the long haul?
• Are you going to spread your investment? Rather than put all your eggs in one basket, using a variety of different channels spreads risk but also dilutes your time. What is the right balance for you based on what you want to achieve?

I could go on, but I am sure you can take it from here. Using the investment metaphor is just one way of filling your networking with new ideas and action. And, if you are not too keen on investing, how about gardening?

Posted by Colin Gautrey on the Influence Blog @ http://www.gautreygroup.com

10 Leadership Lessons from the IBM Executive School

But failure was not an option for Mobley, and after many a dark night of the soul he hit upon the answer that turned IBM into the fastest growing and most admired corporation in the world…

In 1955 IBM’s legendary CEO, Tom Watson Jr., gave my mentor, Louis R. Mobley, a blank check and carte blanche to create The IBM Executive School. Fresh from successfully implementing IBM’s first supervisor and middle management training programs, Mobley confidently set about churning out executives as well.

The first thing he did, in conjunction with GE and DuPont, was hire the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the same company that still does the SATs, to identify the skills that make great leaders great. Once these intellectual skills were identified, Mobley and his colleagues at GE and DuPont assumed that spitting out executives would simply mean “training to the test.”

ETS dutifully rounded up a bunch of proven leaders and tested them every which way from Sunday looking for their common skills. The results were astounding and more than a little disturbing. As Mobley put it, “No matter what bell shaped curve we drew, successful leaders fell on the extreme edges. The only thing they seemed to have in common was having nothing in common. ETS was so frustrated that they offered us our money back.”

But failure wasn’t an option for Mobley, and after many a dark night of the soul he finally hit upon the answer. Unlike supervisors and middle managers, what successful executives shared were not skills and knowledge but values and attitudes. And over time Mobley identified the values and attitudes that great leaders share.

1) Great Leaders Thrive on Ambiguity. While most of us like black and white decisions, successful leaders are comfortable with what Mobley called, “shades of gray.” Great leaders are able to hold apparent contradictions in tension. They use the tension these paradoxes produce to come up with innovative ideas.

2)   Great Leaders Love Blank Sheets of Paper. Supervisors and middle managers use a framework of policies and procedures to guide them to the proper decision. They want a plan that reduces their job to filling in the blanks or what Mobley called “following the bouncing ball.” By contrast, leaders create the blanks that managers fill in. Like some business Einstein intent on reinventing the universe, every great leader relishes the opportunity to “think things through” from scratch.

3)   Great Leaders are Secure People. Successful executives thrive on differences of opinion. They surround themselves with the best people they can find: people strong enough to hold a contrary opinion and argue vociferously for it. Great leaders crave challenges, and this means hiring the most challenging people they can find with no regard for whether today’s challenger might be tomorrow’s rival.

4)   Great Leaders Want Options. Long before it became fashionable,Mobley was a huge proponent of diversity. However his definition meant a diversity of opinion rather than the kind we usually associate with political correctness. Mobley’s great leader constantly demands diverse options from his team, and uses these options to produce creative decisions.

5)   Great Leaders are Tough Enough to Face Facts. At heart Mobley was a spiritual man who valued the Truth for the Truth’s sake. Successful executives face facts, and this means being open to the truth even when it is not what we want to hear. One of the most successful executives I know offers cash rewards to anyone in his company who can prove him wrong. Great leaders have a nose for B.S and abhor it.

6)   Great Leaders Stick Their Necks Out. It is a natural human trait to fear being evaluated. We crave wiggle room so we can deflect blame and get off the hook when things go wrong. In business what is often passed off as a collaborative effort is actually just an attempt to avoid individual accountability. Great leaders want to be measured and evaluated. They continually look for ways to measure things that may seem immeasurable, and they cheerfully accept the blame when they are wrong or fail to deliver. The old adage that success has a 1000 fathers while failure is an orphan does not apply to great leadership.

7)   Great Leaders Believe in Themselves. While great leaders crave advice, options, and strong colleagues, they all share a profound belief in themselves and their judgment. Mobley described great leaders as “people stubbornly following their star who don’t know how to quit.” Holding this stubbornness in tension with a willingness to be wrong is perhaps the greatest trick that every great leader must perform.

8)   Great Leaders are Deep Thinkers. Managers get things done. Executives must decide on the things worth doing in the first place. Though very difficult to quantify, great leaders are deep thinkers. They constantly dive below surface “facts” searching for new ways to knit those facts together. Great leaders are generalists not specialists driven by an omnivorous curiosity. They know that the answers they are seeking will probably emerge from outside business and from disciplines that may seem utterly unrelated.

9)   Great Leaders are Ruthlessly Honest with Themselves. Self-knowledge is perhaps the most critical trait that all great leaders share. Leaders question assumptions and disrupt complacency by relentlessly asking the question: “What is the business of the business?” This exercise develops and refines the organization’s mission and purpose, and it is little more than the age old question “Who am I?” applied collectively. If you are not clear about the purpose of your own life how can you provide a sense of organizational purpose for others?

10) Great Leaders are Passionate. They may be loudly charismatic or quietly intense, but all great leaders care deeply about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Perhaps most importantly they care about people. Every business is a people business, and passionately caring about people whether they are employees, customers, vendors or stockholders is an essential leadership value.

Once Mobley compiled his list, he was faced with another even more difficult problem: How do you instill values and transform attitudes? He discovered that unlike supervisors and middle managers, executives shared another trait: They were constitutionally untrainable and reacted with hostility to any effort to “brainwash” them with “training.” Worse, Mobley discovered that values and attitudes are not only impervious to typical training techniques, but hectoring people to change often had the unintended consequence of hardening existing attitudes instead.

As the result some deep thinking of his own, Mobley eventually realized that what was needed was “a revolution in consciousness” rather than the kind of step by step curriculum that leads to a single “right answer.” Taking a leap of faith, he decided that the values and attitudes he was looking for could only be brought about as a side benefit or unintended consequence of what almost might be termed “spiritual work.” Rather than converging on a super set of skills, the IBM Executive School fostered the divergence that values uniqueness and individual authenticity.

The risk of failure was real, but if Mobley was going to produce people willing to stick out their necks he had to stick out his own first. He abandoned lectures and books in favor of games, simulations and other experiential techniques designed, not to “train,” but to “blow people’s minds.”

As for the personal accountability and measuring results, Mobley’s record speaks for itself. He ran the IBM Executive School from 1956-1966. It was his students that turned IBM into the fastest growing and most admired corporation in the world in the 1960s and 70s…

August Turak, Contributor to Linkedin 

New Blog Connection

I am pleased to announce that my blog has been added to the Network Corporation at www.tnwinc.com

What is Innovation?

What is innovation? The Oxford English Dictionarydefines it, somewhat unhelpfully, as: “the action or process of innovating”; but, then elaborates: “a new method, idea, product, etc.”  It then goes on to note: “innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organization.”

As innovation is so important, I thought I would unpack the idea a bit. Many people think that “true” innovation is the invention of genuinely novel things which have never before been seen in the world. However, this is a very high bar at which virtually everyone would fail. Humans have been around for over 200,000 years and there are billions of us, so most things, one way or another, have been thought of before.  In my view, this strict definition isn’t particularly helpful.

I think a more useful definition is something like this: “The recognition and implementation of an idea or combination of ideas which brings a unique utility not before seen or used which adds value by fulfilling a consumer need.”

I spent Christmas 2011 reading Steve Job’s biography by Walter Isaacson. I have always thought of Steve Jobs as intrinsically innovative; but, what was special about him was not that he came up with entirely new ideas – the graphical user interface on the Macintosh, for example, had been invented by Xerox Parc and there had been many MP3 players before the iPod – but, that he came up with unique combinations; which, taken together, added real, never-before-seen value to the consumer.

Take the iPod: As a music player, it was certainly very elegantly designed; but, its capacity was well below the best that was available--at the same price--on the market at the time. What Apple did was combine the player with the web (in the form of iTunes) in such a way as the combination was unique. Suddenly, tasks that were really difficult, or close to impossible to do on the player, could be done on the Mac, thus freeing the player to do what it did best: play music. And, by deconstructing the album into songs--and miraculously persuading the music industry to play ball--it created a huge new market for legal downloads. The rest, as they say, is history.

Or take the iPhone: There were smartphones before the iPhone; but, they weren’t very smart. The iPhone’s unique advantage, apart from the legendary great design, was the App Store. Suddenly, the phone could become whatever you wanted it to be; thus, the real revolution in smartphones that we are living through today was born.

Google provides another good example: Google’s revolutionary idea, apart from its blisteringly good search, was AdWords. But, Google didn’t invent key word advertising; that honour went to Idealab that spun-out GoTo.com which was later renamed Overture and was then bought by Yahoo!. However, it was Google who hit the jackpot with search advertising, and it did so by reinventing the model. Overture had ordered ads by whoever bid the most that quite often resulted in the top advertisement not being the most appropriate.  It was simply the one with the deepest pockets.

Google changed the rules. It ordered results partly by the bidding and partly by the success of the ad which was measured by how many people clicked on it and on the quality of the ultimate landing page. And, it also limited the power of those with the deepest pockets by charging only one cent above the amount of the second highest bidder. These innovations revolutionised the medium.

So my argument is innovation comes from  the real innovators who can be—and often are--those that take ideas already out there and reinvent and recombine them in ways which create real utility for the user. As Steve Jobs said, paraphrasing Picasso*: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

In the innovation process at RBI Data Solutions, we always try to think as broadly as we can about customer problems. Of course, we would love to invent some genuinely and completely novel services that the world has never seen; but, we are just as happy if we construct combinations of already-existing components, provided we produce an elegant solution in the end. We are not yet as good as Steve Jobs at this process, but we are working on it.

First published on the internal Reed Elsevier Innovation website, February 2012

reblogged from Jim Muttrams blog bloggingrbi.blogspot.com

The Role of Identity in Successful Post-merger Integration

In an elementary school math class, stating that 1+1=1 would quickly incur markings from a teacher's red grading pen. But in the world of mergers and acquisitions, 1+1=1 is the goal: Taking two (or more) companies and seamlessly integrating processes, products and people.

When trying to pull off a successful deal, however, many senior executives focus their attention on the financial aspects of a merger and fail to consider their psychological implications, Wharton management professor John Kimberlysays. In a new paper, "Making 1+1=1: The Central Role of Identity in Merger Math," Kimberly and co-author Hamid Bouchikhi, a professor at ESSEC Business School in France, discuss the common mistakes firms make in their efforts at identity integration and offer four approaches for ensuring that deals work on an emotional level.

According to Kimberly, the traditional "merger math" is that one plus one will be greater than two, that merging two companies will create an entity that is greater than the sum of its parts financially. Executives tend to pay the most attention to that principle, he says, focusing on the financial architecture of the deal. But he notes that the "new" merger math has two pieces to it -- economic synergy and psychological synergy.

In addition, says Kimberly, firms should not confuse identity with culture. "Culture has to do with 'the way we do things around here.' Culture is very powerful and very important, and the cultural differences between one organization and another need to be taken into account in any sort of effort to combine operations." But Kimberly says identity issues are more deeply embedded in the fabric of organizations as a whole, and in how individual employees see themselves. "It's the answer to the question, 'Who are we?' It's the areas of agreement around 'who we are' that are the basis of the identity of any company." 

Merging two or more firms "seriously disrupts the identities of the two involved organizations, generates fear of identity loss on one or both sides, and raises questions about the identity of the new combination, which may hinder trust in and identification with it," the authors note. Integration "cannot succeed before employees of the merged entity feel a sense of belonging to a single enterprise with which they can identify and to which they are motivated to contribute."

In some cases, the identities of players in a potential merger may be so at odds that "no matter what you do in the post-merger integration phase, it's just not going to work," Kimberly says, noting that this is particularly true, for example, when the two organizations contemplating a merger have been fierce competitors for decades. "To expect that the employees of the two will suddenly become willing and enthusiastic collaborators is a stretch, to say the least." Another thing to watch out for is when the two organizations have served different customer segments that have different service needs and require different organizational and managerial approaches. While the rationale of broadening the customer segments served by the firm may be seductive from an economic perspective, deeply embedded organizational routines and their psychological consequences may get in the way, Kimberly warns.

The unhappy merger of Dean Witter and Morgan Stanley illustrates the danger of underestimating the significance of the psychological dimension, Kimberly says. That's why the researchers stress that firms need to begin thinking about the issue at the start of any merger process. Delving deeply into a firm's (particularly a competitor's) identity can be difficult during the secretive early stages of acquisitions. "You bring in some outside resources that are skilled in making these determinations and you listen to what they have to say because they'll have access to data that you don't," Kimberly notes. "Then you have to make a judgment about whether what they come up with is convincing."

Potential Pitfalls

Once executives determine that identity issues are a barrier that can be overcome, Kimberly advises that they think early on about what type of integration strategy they plan to use. In the paper, he and Bouchikhi use several real-world examples to detail the common mistakes that businesses tend to make when dealing with the emotional impact of mergers and acquisitions.

Many firms simply choose to ignore identity as a factor. The researchers write about SSL International, a company they worked with that came about as a result of a three-way merger. The firm waited more than two years after the deal was completed to deliberately focus on identity integration -- and only after a severe crisis caused the board to bring in a CEO from the outside.

Once the company began to think about identity, executives realized that, although all of the merged businesses had operated in the same sector, there was a disconnect because some employees had spent their careers making and selling products for large professional clients, while others were used to manufacturing and marketing branded goods through retailers. "Ultimately, management divested the businesses serving professional customers in order to focus on the integration of those operating in consumer branded products," the researchers write.

In other cases, firms may make the error of mistaking culture for identity. To illustrate this pitfall, the authors point to the attempted merger of the local branches of French savings bank Caisses d'Epargne. Employees shared similar values and ways of working -- but a key part of their identities was viewing their branch as independent and distinct from the other branches. The merger created "'Us vs. Them' reactions that culture was not sufficient to preempt," the researchers write.

Another common pitfall is confusing outward characteristics, such as a firm's name or logo, for its identity. For example, the authors write that when SBC Communications took over AT&T in 2005, the former opted to use the latter's name for the merged entity. But the majority of the post-merger executive team, including the chairman and CEO and the heads of finance, strategy and human resources, were from SBC. Thus, it was that firm's identity that prevailed, the researchers say.

Executives also can become so caught up in selling the merger to external audiences, such as stockholders and the public, that they forget about gathering support internally. Companies may also run into trouble if leadership sends mixed signals about identity integration -- verbally detailing one plan, while taking actions that suggest a completely different approach. "They're trying to get something past the public, and they do it without thinking about the implications," Kimberly notes. "When they shift gears and do a turnabout, all of a sudden there's a set of consequences, both internal and external, that they have to deal with."

In the paper, the authors point to the example of Kraft's purchase of United Kingdom-based Cadbury. Although Kraft executives have publicly stated their intentions to preserve Cadbury's identity, "early decisions regarding the dismantling of Cadbury's corporate headquarters and the transfer of decision making to Kraft's European headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, suggest that the Cadbury organization is set to die."

Solutions

Kimberly and Bouchikhi offer four potential approaches for achieving identity integration: assimilation, confederation, federation and metamorphosis. Assimilation occurs when one firm is completely absorbed into the other's operations and identity. At the other extreme, confederation allows both organizations to preserve their identities, names, management structure and autonomous decision-making. Falling somewhere in between are federations, in which the merged firms keep their identities but also develop an overarching character that both can thrive in. Finally, a metamorphosis involves both firms dissolving their former identities and creating a new entity that did not exist prior to the merger.

Before deciding what avenue to take, company leadership must consider to what extent they want, and to what extent it is strategically prudent, to preserve the identities of each firm involved in the merger. "It's important for senior management to understand those four different approaches and what they mean with respect to how much you need to know about your partner in the operational sense and in an identity sense before the merger is consummated," Kimberly notes. Merging identities more tightly -- for example, through assimilation -- often achieves the most cost savings, he adds, but those methods also require that more attention be paid to identity issues.

Kimberly cites the merger of Japanese automaker Nissan with French car company Renault and that of Air France and Dutch air carrier KLM as examples of confederations where the acquiring firm (in those cases, Renault and Air France) left the acquired companies' identities intact, while at the same time introducing new manufacturing and managerial practices. "At some point down the road in both cases, these firms will become more fully merged entities," he notes. "At that point, leadership will have to again confront this identity issue of who are they going to be. Are they going to be KLM or Air France? Are they going to be Renault or Nissan, or are they going to keep the brands differentiated?"

Often the deciding factor in such a debate is the relative costs of remaining separate as compared to the value generated by keeping either or both firms' identities intact. For example, Unilever purchased American ice cream company Ben & Jerry's in 2000, but has gone to great lengths to preserve its autonomy -- to the point where it is difficult to find a mention of the British-Dutch conglomerate on the Vermont-based brand's website. "Ben & Jerry's has a very distinctive identity and a very distinct sense of who they are and how they are separate from and different from other people in the same business of producing ice cream," Kimberly says. "It's a very clear, distinct and value-creating identity."

Published: February 29, 2012 in Knowledge@Wharton

Cloud Security: DataLocker Lets You Encrypt Your Sensitive Dropbox Files For Free

We’re all becoming increasingly reliant on consumer cloud services, as cloud storage providers like Dropbox make it easy to share and store files, folders, images, sync between platforms, and more. They make our lives easier, but because they store an enormous amount of potentially sensitive data, there are some inherent risks. While Dropbox is for personal use, it and services like it are increasingly being used by businesses — another example of the ongoing consumerization of enterprise and IT.

It’s also true that most people want their data in their cloud service to be synced across all platforms on which they have the app installed, mobile, desktop, etc. So, with individuals and companies storing sensitive data in the cloud, cross-sync can make for some potential security problems, and it’s not really something you want to do at work.

That’s why virtualization provider AppSense has created DataLocker, a set of mobile and desktop apps for iOS, Windows and Mac that enable users to encrypt sensitive information in their Dropbox accounts for free — without giving up the convenience of cross-platform syncing.

DataLocker is the first product from “AppSense Labs,” the company’s new research arm, which is dedicated to building consumer-friendly solutions around cloud, mobile, and data that work within traditional IT infrastructure. As the boundaries between personal and professional computing are blurring, AppSense Labs will look to ride that wave with new products that capitalize on this transition, making it easier on consumers and enterprise, piece by piece.

And to that point, DataLocker is a great first step in alleviating some of the worry over the security of our personal information as it moves about the cloud. With the advent of Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, businesses will have to decide whether these proprietary clouds are something they want to adopt. In iCloud’s case, user accounts are tied to Apple not to businesses, which may lead to some businesses balking at using the service to share sensitive company information.

This is where DataLocker could really come in handy. For now, it’s focused on Dropbox, but there’s potential for it to move beyond Dropbox, even if iCloud/SkyDrive integration isn’t in the cards. Businesses want to use friendly cloud services, and encryption of sensitive data is key to encouraging further adoption.

As to how the app works? It’s fairly straightforward, users simply install the app and link it to their Dropbox accounts, at which point they can upload new files, protect them instantly, while browsing and viewing existing and protected Dropbox files.

Evolving Expertise

The latest Human Resource Competency Study conducted in 2011 indicated that HR is becoming an even greater influence in the following areas out of a score from 1 to 5, 5 being the highest score: 

• a credible activist - 4.23
• strategic positioner - 3.89
• capable builder - 3.97
• change champion - 3.93
• HR innovator and integrator - 3.90
• technology proponent - 3.74 

The take-a-ways from this latest study show that HR has been stepping up its' game since the study first took place in 1987 and has the same pattern all across the globe, not just the US. The six (6) domains of HR competencies have an impact on both the perception of the effectiveness of the HR professional and the business performance where the HR professional works. 

The study details which was conducted by David Ulrich and his associates @ RBL Consulting Group can be found in the January/February edition of the Human Resource Executive or  at www.hreonline.com .   

The Value of Knowing Your People

I had a great discussion with an former employee today that really emphasized the value of knowing your people.  We talked about what was new with the company and what had changed. The discussion led to that there were still employee asking about me and that they missed my coming around each day to see them and get to know what they did as well as how they felt about their careers. So imagine that after four years has passed they still think about how HR impacted their life and that HR cared about them as individuals and about their career. 


I have said this since I first got into HR that the cornerstone of what we do and how we do it is based on the linkage we have with employees and what the employees think of us, not what we think. The value of getting out of your office and mingling with employees has a value that you cannot imagine. So I will say again, there is so much value in getting out of your office and getting to know your employees personally and their job functions. It is long lasting and and provides a direct link to your success and the value you bring to the company. 

Pinterest: Everything You Wanted to Know About 2012′s Hottest Startup [INFOGRAPHIC]

Pinterest has emerged as the runaway social media hit of early 2012. You probably knew that already. But did you know the company just has 12 people? Or that 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women?

Lemon.ly, a visual marketing firm, took a deep dive into the data to catalog Pinterest’s stunning rise and produced the infographic below. What’s clear is that with 10 million users, Pinterest has already made its mark in terms of web design influence, if nothing else.

It also has the potential to become a forum for satire, as this fake Mitt Romney account illustrates.

Since the company appears to be the hottest thing going — at least at this writing — consider this a snapshot of the next social media giant or the answer to tomorrow’s trivia question.

Why Share Your Expertise?

A lot of times people ask me why I blog, tweet, share stuff online. They think I am wasting my time. But its is because of such sharing that I have discovered and learned more than other people who look forward to learning as a formal "event" that they or their employer has to pay for.

Online sharing of ideas and opinions are like a dialog and often helps in helping you think about an issue in more clarity after the discussion than you had before. Connecting around learning online also leads you to discover content in various types from text, to documents, to slides and videos.

Hyperlinking makes online content dependent on what the user needs rather than what an author or trainer wants to convey. It gives the adult learners an option of going deep into a subject or to keep it at a surface level. 

When you share your skill you also ensure that others look at you as an authority, if they find your content compelling. People can vote with their feet and leave when the value of that content falls, when better people start sharing their content too!


So Guatam really answers the question people have asked me. 


Gautam is Platform Evangelist and India Marketing Lead at BraveNewTalent and blogger at Gautamblogs.com. He specializes in the areas of HR, Organization Development and how businesses can leverage Social Media for Organizational Learning and Employee Engagement. 

How to Understand the Big Picture

This quick post is really for those HR professionals who are not at the VP, EVP, or CHRO level. 


Make sure you see the big picture in your organization and not be fixated on the lower level HR issues you deal with on a daily basis. To do this you need to understand the "Big Picture" and understand the cornerstones of the strategy, technology corridors your company plays in and the frontiers your organization will play in and blaze new trails. 


So how do you do this when you are confronted with the day-to-day issues and projects you have to deal with to meet your VPHR's or CHRO's objectives. I found that the best way is to make sure you and your fellow HR staffers understand the strategy from a grass roots basis. What do I mean from that, here is what and how to do it:

• make sure you staff meetings have on the agenda the overall strategy of the business,
• ensure that your head of HR also provides a detailed map of how the company intends to address each strategy component, and how that effects your direct HR responsibility,
• understand completely what the competitive issues are and how the organization will address them,
• make sure that the cornerstones of the organizational strategy is linked to your division or line of sight responsibility, and 
• make sure that the managers and superiors you manage have the same understanding.

I have found though my many years of HR experience that the "Big Picture" is only understood by a choice few and the information does not always flow down stream the way it should. I have also found that if you are not excited about what you do and the company you work for your interest is not where it should be and for that reason, you should move on or get lost in the maze. 


A quick word to the wise - be aggressive, assertive, and intelligent on how you get the information without making waves along the way.  

Can You Hear Me Now? The Impact of Social Media on Your Workforce

Can you hear me now?

That ubiquitous phrase made famous by Verizon became quite apropos at the end of 2011. After the most embarrassing debacle in history of marketing/pricing, Verizon was forced to backtrack, put their tail between their legs, and somberly walk away from what they thought would be another revenue steam.

Netflix was faced with the same situation in mid-2011.

What was the major connector to both of these events? What was the determining factor that drove them to make an immediate u-turn? The answer: social media.

Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2011 was the protester. What drove the protest throughout the world that drove their movement? Again, social media was the key.

Two of the most driving forces going into 2012 are social media (and the power of it), and the employee, regardless of the level of engagement.

The pendulum has swung

What is the Future of Human Resources

HR plays a critical role in any economic environment and most critical in a recessional economy. The keys to success are: stay close to the CEO, make sure your HR strategy is aligned with corporate strategy, stay close to your customer base, add value by testing the theories of the company, products, and services, know the business inside and out,  understand the dynamics of the organization, know the managers, don't rest on laurels,  think outside the box, don't get caught in administration, and most of all be real so the organization embraces you and your HR team.


I am sure each of you have additional comments on how to make sure your future in HR is bright and secure. Don't take anything for granted and make sure you make an impact on the business daily.