My HR Practice

As I work through my "Re-Connecting, Refreshing, Re-Tooling" career stop, I have spent a great deal of time reading about my chosen profession.   I have grown to realize that HR has, for a generation or more, been searching for relevance .  Here's Dave Ulrich in a 2012 interview with Dan Schawbel from Forbes on the future of Human Resources: " For the last 20 years, we have been enamored with “strategic” HR where the strategy is a mirror that reflects what HR should focus on.  We now believe that HR should look through the strategy to the outside world.  Strategy becomes a window on both the general business conditions and on specific stakeholder expectations so that HR can connect their work to external factors . " With all due respect, it is as if we have deemed to be insufficient our operational excellence charter that asks us to help our managers recruit and hire great people.  To solve for creative and effective ways to compensate them and to inc...

So you love to play the saxophone, and were thrilled to go work for Sax4u, Inc.,  a global company that is all about the saxophone.  Steve Jobs talked about doing something that you love, and there are few things in life that you love more than playing this amazing piece of brass.  In fact, you have a shrine dedicated to Clarence Clemons from the E-Street Band in your man-cave. Oh, how you miss him!  But I digress. Following Mr. Jobs' advice has been good for your career.  You have grown and advanced to a point at which you are the head of Human Resources at Sax4u.  Your parents are so proud! In fact, you now report directly to the CEO and are a member of her  most-senior-leadership-team.   Every Monday morning you sit in the executive conference room, with Starbucks skinny latte piping hot and in hand, and commiserate with your fellow most-senior-leadership-team members, including the heads of: design, marketing, finance, sales, manufacturi...