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I am not a philosopher, but I like reading short philosophical essays on specific topics. I was browsing through some old books recently in search of a quote for my latest presentation and came across what I would call a really awesome “wake up” quotation from Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “There are always two parties, the party of the past and the party of the future; the establishment and the movement.” A substantial point lurks in this observation – the future belongs not to those who possess a crystal ball, but to those who are willing to challenge the biases and prejudices of the “establishment”. The future belongs more to the unorthodox than it does to the prognosticators, more to the movement than to the starry-eyed. If you take this thought slightly further, it becomes clear that every company is in the process of either becoming an anachronism irrelevant to the future or of becoming the harbinger of the future.
What should my organization do, you might ask, in order to own the future, and not forfeit it? From talent management perspective, many of us rely on analysts to provide comprehensive sources of information and ideas related to HR transformation. But think about it – if everyone buys the same report, don’t they get the same set of ideas? Let’s stay on this thought for a minute – if everyone gets the same set of ideas, then what is the actual competitive advantage associated with the analyst insight? Turns out, it is not in the insights at all – it is in the execution of the ideas that you read about. Some would even go to the extent of proposing that the head of HR, in order to achieve a measurable level of transformation, should really be a CHOO – Chief Human Operating Officer – not purely a strategist. And finally, HCM analysts should provide at least an equal amount of execution insights, as they do with the amount of insights related to pure facts and data. Otherwise, we are just fiddling while Rome burns. What are your thoughts?
This entry was posted
on Friday, November 20th, 2009
