Category: Human Resources

At work, our goal has always been to stay up with state-of-the-art in industry.  To that end, I attended a Chief HR Officer Summit with industry HR leaders last month, and I participated in the Global HR Summit in Dubai.  Last year, when I learned that Google’s Chief HR Officer, Laszlo Bock, provided his insights covering the past fifteen years, I quickly purchased and read his book.

Google has grown from 6,000 employees to almost 60,000, with seventy-plus offices across more than forty countries, and Fortune has named Google the “Best Company to Work For” an unprecedented five times in the United States (incidentally, NASA was just named the Best Place to Work in the Federal Government for the fifth straight year!).  While Google receives more than two million applications each year, they hire several thousand, making them twenty-five times more selective than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton!

For my HR friends, there are a number of gems here.  For leaders, Bock claims his insights will “help transform how you live and lead.”

Click here to learn more about Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock.

This summer, following my invitation to deliver a keynote presentation to the Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conference in Denver, I noticed that David Foreman was also a featured speaker.  His book, Fearless HR, had just been released; and our NASA Human Capital community had just discussed how we needed to be more “bold” in charting a path for the future of human capital in NASA.

So, I was intrigued and read Foreman’s book.  Dave Ulrich—whom HR Magazine named the most influential thinker in HR of the decade—provided the introduction, noting how Foreman’s work offers HR professionals a positive pathway forward, based on evidence and practical tools.  Ulrich outlines four trends to consider:

1. HR is not about HR. In leading companies, HR shapes business value because HR does not start with HR, but with the business.
2. HR is not just about talent. For 20 years HR has been focused on talent, and the war for talent has been the dominant metaphor for HR.  Leading HR professionals manage both the workforce and workplace, talent and teamwork, individual competence and organization capabilities. Under the adage, culture eats strategy for breakfast, HR insights on culture move HR to a leading contributor to sustained business results. HR professionals must now become the architect for an organization’s capabilities and build a shared culture.
3. HR for HR has arrived. HR professionals need to apply their insights to their own function and work. HR departments are increasingly becoming professional services units within their organizations where they turn their expertise on people, performance, information, and work into line manager client value.
4. HR professionals demonstrate competencies that deliver business results.

With that introduction, I encourage you to explore David Foreman’s perspectives.

 Click here to learn more about Fearless HR.