Thursday, February 3, 2011 by Franklin Bros
I was chuffed as usual to be recognised last week as a top global online influencer in leadership (at #16). One more gong for the cupboard.
Thanks to John and the HRexaminer team.
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by Franklin Bros
This was last Thursday, just before coming out to Doha, and started with a full day spent with a group of senior HR folk courtesy of JSB. As well as learning about HR 2.0, everyone there got on twitter and did some tweeting, though we sort of ran out of time (it is a big agenda) and my idea of them posting their ‘workbook’ reflections on a blog didn’t quite take place.
Then it was onto CIPD West London and same thing again (see picture). However this time we got a lot further – at least on the interactive piece – see this second blog, again including all the tweets. The progress was thanks almost totally to an absolutely fantastic blog squad that turned up for the event – including, as well as host Rick @FlipChartFT:
Wow! – what a team! Thanks to you all.
More tweeters for the #HRevent tweet-up next year!
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by Franklin Bros
Other than a couple of recent trips to Egypt, where I wouldn’t want to be right now, it’s been my first time back in this neck of the woods for some time – basically since pre-recession when my earlier consulting work, and plans to move to Dubai, dried up.
And I have to say it’s good to be back. To an extend this links to my earlier comments that there is new in HR. And here, they’re doing it! Despite the bust, the rulers in this area of the world remain highly ambitious, and this ambition translates itself through into business, and into HR.
It’s refreshing to say the least, and I wish we saw more of it back home.
Can we have some of the weather here while we’re about it?
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by Franklin Bros
So – you can still win a ticket to come to the Economist’s Talent Management Summit with me – and with Matthew Hanwell from Nokia who I was presenting with – who’s coming with me too. I made Matthew complete the survey as a price for giving him a ticket, and here’s his explanation of his responses (or at least my recollection of these) – which also relate to the presentation we gave together (I’ll need my ticket winner to undergo a similar conversation too!).
Key business challenges?
Key HR challenges arising from these?
What would you say are going to be the major challenges for your business and HR team this year? (yes, OK, I know it’s February already, but what can I do?). Complete my survey here.
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by Franklin Bros
First up: the Summit (henceforth known as #hrevent)’s first tweet-up / twitter 101 class. Running this together with Charlie Elise (@charlie_elise) from HR Zone, we expected about five people. So it came as a bit of a shock to have what must have been close to one hundred. This meant we didn’t manage to get everyone on twitter as we’d planned and which had consequences later on…
Then I co-presented a session on HR 2.0 with Matthew Hanwell (@matthew_hanwell) from Nokia. If you want to know what this was about, register for my webinar on 15th March!
The session worked really well, and deserves its recognition as the conference’s best. Shame though that, despite the tweet-up, so few people were tweeting still – meaning that our backchannel display wasn’t quite as engaging as I’d hoped.
There were other sessions on social media too – including one on social recruiting with James Purvis from CERN (@cern_jobs). But I disagree with Richard Mosley in his uninspiring session on ‘employer branding 2.0’ that social media was everywhere this year. It got some attention but deserves much more. And social approaches (which were really the focus of mine and Matthew’s presentation) deserve more attention still.
Hopefully this will come through in 2012 through more speaker presentations, more tweeting, and more displays of twitter backchannels too.
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by Franklin Bros
First up, last week’s HR Directors Business Summit in Birmingham, UK. As an overall summary, I’d say this was a great event – and not just because of my participation in it which I’ll summarise in my next post. One of the things I liked about it was the much greater focus on innovation, and ambition, than last year.
So back then, I became seriously concerned, and blogged, about how depressing I found it that every session seemed to emphasise ‘we don’t need anything new in HR’. Attendees, and even more so the speakers, seemed to got themselves to believe that HR is simple – that’s it all about doing easy things well. One of the speakers in the final panel even put this forward as a summary of the conference herself.
What rubbish I thought – and still do when people suggest this view. (Good) HR’s isn’t easy. It’s not simple. It ain’t the same as our fathers’ HR. Good HR is complicated. It’s focused on intangibles. On differentiation. On uniqueness and innovation. And it’s based on new ideas and emerging experiences.
So why was I happier this year?
Well we started off with Lynda Gratton, which generally sets things off well (I do wish she would do less self-promotion though). Lynda emphasised the need for HR to get better at understanding the future, helping us focus on the things which are most important. She also gave a good plug for social media noting Nokia’s statistic about 5 billion people being connected around the world – and that it’s these connected people who will change the world. (She could have suggested HR people get connected too – there were very few of us tweeting in the session - see my next post. And despite Lynda’s belief in connection, and her regular blogging, I still don’t think she really understands what social media’s about).
Then I attended what was just about the best session for me (no, still not one of mine) – delivered by Lynne Weedall at Carphone Warehouse / Best Buy Europe. Lynne emphasised the way that work has changed and will change further still. We’ve come to a chasm and won’t be able to jump over it in small steps. She talked about the need, which I have also described, to think from the future back – to have a vision and work back from there. To do this, HR people need to pose impossibly questions or at the very least, ask themselves what would fundamentally change their organisations. And they need to look to do things differently (to zig where others zag). All music to my ears.
The change theme was reinforced by John Mahoney Phillips from UBS talking about human capital metrics (see slide) and even using the phrase ‘creating value’ in a meaningful way.
So – a lot more focus on ambition, innovation and a desire for new ideas than the year before. Of course my summary could just be down to the few sessions I attended. Or just a result of chance emerging from the speakers which were selected. But maybe, it’s a sign that HR’s feeling more optimistic again. That we’re starting to raise our eyes above short-term restructurings to look towards what’s going to support the future of our businesses.
Of course, not everything was so rosy – for example, the suggestion from Tesco’s Therese Proctor that the credibility of the HR function relies on getting the basics right. Well yes, but… (let’s just not go there now). And of course, this was also the point at which we learnt the UK economy had shrunk again (making Vance Kearney from Oracle’s suggestion that we’re getting bored talking about recession appear even more out of touch). So if there was more optimism this year, it’s certainly possibly that this was badly out of place!
What did you think if you were there? And if you were, or not, are you feeling more optimistic now?
Also see summaries of the conference at
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Friday, January 21, 2011 by Franklin Bros
The survey will now close on 29th January.
Internal HR practitioners who are in or can get to the UK this Summer have the opportunity to win a free ticket to the Economist’s Talent Management Summit in London on 9th June.
(The winner will, however, need to be wiling to engage in a short discussion about their responses which I will publish here along with the overall summary.)
If you can’t get to London for the Summit then you’ll still have my gratitude for completing the survey for me!
Picture credit: BotMultichillT
Technorati Tags: HR,talent,human capital,management,predictions,forecasts,2011,survey
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