Every three years since 1995, HR researcher Edward E. Lawler III and his colleagues have conducted a survey to assess the human resources function, measuring how it is changing and determining how effective it is. It’s the only long-term analysis of its kind, and the 2007 survey results have just been released in Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions.
Anyone hoping to read it to see how far HR has come will be disappointed. The times may be changing. HR is not.
The most-discussed issue in HR circles (aside from why everyone hates HR) is whether the human resources function has finally become a full partner in shaping an organization’s business strategy. Sadly, the 2007 survey found little or no change since 1995 in the extent to which HR reports being involved in business strategy, according to Lawler and his co-researcher, John W. Boudreau, both of whom are with the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
Think of how the business world changed between 1995 and 2007: We had the rise and fall of Enron, and the exposure of compromised executive ethics. We had a dot-com crash and suffered a national security crisis triggered by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, both of which racked workforces across America. Since 1995, we’ve seen the growth and dominance of the Internet in the workplace, with related technologies that promised to streamline HR record keeping, recruiting, performance management and benefits administration. But despite of all that, and despite all the books, conferences and articles that have told HR it can and should have a strategic focus, it apparently hasn’t happened.
Lawler and Boudreau note few changes in the importance of HR services and the characteristics of an effective HR function. They also find little change in efforts to rotate people into, within and out of HR. This kind of rotation is critical if HR practitioners are to have an understanding of how other parts of the business work, and, if they hope to be well-rounded enough to be considered business partners and possible candidates for a CEO spot someday. Virtually no HR professional has managed to achieve that at a Fortune 500 company. (Xerox’s retiring CEO, Anne Mulcahy, shouldn’t count; she was in HR, having done a three-year tour of duty there, but wasn’t from HR.)
Perhaps the most disappointing stagnation of all can be seen in the amount of time HR spends on rote activities. That hasn’t changed since 1995, when respondents said they spent 15.4 percent of their time maintaining employee records. (In the late 1980s, it was 22.9 percent.) In 2007, the time spent on this non-strategic activity increased to 15.8 percent. Lawler and Boudreau dryly note that respondents “may have perceived more change in their role than has actually taken place. In short, they may be guilty of wishful thinking and a selective memory.”
The same wishfulness can be seen in a question about strategy. Again, the needle barely moved. In 1995, respondents said they spent 21.9 percent of their time in activities associated with being a strategic business partner—being part of the management team, being involved in strategic HR planning and working on organizational design, for example. In 2007, they estimated it to be 25.6 percent of their time. In both instances, they estimated (incorrectly) that they were currently devoting substantially more time to strategy than they had in prior years.
Although the authors mostly maintain a dispassionate and scholarly tone in the book, frustration with the static state of the profession seeps through: “It is almost an understatement to say that the world of business has changed dramatically since 1995. Thus it is surprising, indeed shocking, that how HR spends its time has not. It is perhaps less surprising that HR continues to believe it has changed, even though it has not! But this may be a major problem if it leads to HR executives believing they have made progress toward an objective they feel is important when in fact they haven’t.”
This gets at the heart of HR’s aspirational problem: Its desire to be strategic may be unattainable in the vast majority of organizations. Most companies don’t understand or want strategic HR, the authors say.
“The existing role and activities of HR are well institutionalized in a kind of codependency relationship,” Lawler and Boudreau write. “The individuals in the HR function are comfortable in their current role … the recipients of these services are happy to have an administrative function that removes what they see as onerous HR responsibilities from them.”
Late in the book, Lawler and Boudreau quote a senior HR leader as saying that it is “easier to find an organization that understands and supports strategic HR than to try to change an organization that does not.” That might be the best career advancement strategy yet for serious HR game-changers.
When I was on my first whitewater rafting trip several years ago, one of the safety instructors told us: “Assist in your own rescue.” If you’re thrown out of the raft, in other words, don’t just flail around in a panic—help your team get you back onboard.
Last week, in a bicycle spinning class at my gym, the instructor said that if the exertion was too much or too little at any point, we could dial up or dial down the tension knob that controlled the wheel. “You control your own tension,” she said.
As it turns out, those are the points being made in Positivity by Barbara L. Fredrickson. A professor of psychology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a researcher in the science of positive psychology, Fredrickson says that we all have within us the ability to change our response to the world, to manage our moods and improve not only our relationships, lives and health, but also our workplaces. To some extent, we can even make them more successful, she says.
If you are rolling your eyes right now, I understand. At a time like this, in the face of what could very well be a global depression, it sounds crazy to talk about using meditation and positive thought to effect change. What we really need, you might say, is to get the economy to start thinking positive thoughts.
But I thought Fredrickson might be on to something, so I stuck with her book.
If you’re put off by puffy self-help books, as I am, you can be assured that this is not one of them. It is vehemently anti-smiley face and free of cute illustrations. There is no “Fake it till you make it” philosophy here.
In fact, Fredrickson writes, lab experiments show that people whose positivity was not “heartfelt” had levels of the stress hormone cortisol as high as people who admitted their anger or depression.And such fakery is dangerous. In one study, scientists found that “insincere positivity put [men in the test] in as much coronary danger as did anger. Mountains of research tell us that anger kills. This new discovery suggests that insincere positivity may kill too.”
(That same experiment, by the way, uncovered a “tell” for fake positivity, which you can look for in your next staff meeting, if you’re so inclined. It’s called the “non-enjoyment smile.” The non-enjoyment smile engages the muscles that raise the lips, but doesn’t activate the muscles that circle the eyes.)
Although Positivity is not a workplace book per se, it does have some business applications: Managers with greater positivity are more accurate and careful in making their decisions; they are more effective interpersonally, Fredrickson says, citing research in the field. They “infect their work groups with greater positivity as well, which in turn produces better coordination among team members and reduces the effort needed to get their work done,” she writes.
The book also offers a description of an ongoing experiment among business teams. The high-performing team in the experiment had unusually high positivity ratio—about 6:1 (That means that for every negative statement or interaction, they performed six positive ones). The low-performing team’s ratio was 1:1. The average team came in at 2:1.
Finally, Fredrickson’s book is a tool kit for how to develop your own positivity and get to a 3:1 ratio at which positivity begins to have significant impacts in a person’s life. The book includes both a positivity self-test on paper, and a link to an online version to track whether you’re raising your positivity level: www.PositivityRatio.com.
Fredrickson talks frankly about the limitations of positivity: It won’t keep bad things from happening, she writes, and she offers a pretty harrowing example from her own life. She also describes how she used her field—her own medicine—to cope with her husband’s serious illness.
“As I see it, there are two basic responses to hardship,” she writes. “Despair or hope.” We can either wallow in misery or be buoyed by resilience, a skill that Fredrickson argues can be learned. We can, she says, control our own tension. And assist in our own rescue.
If you appreciate really good business books—the ones that are truly insightful, inspirational and demand that you keep them close at hand—a title like The 100 Best Business Books of All Time pretty much hits you over the head and says, “Read me!”
I have a surefire way to spot a book like that, and it’s simple: Look to see how the authors feel about Peter Drucker. If you have studied or understand business much at all, you certainly know that Drucker is considered to be the father of modern business management. Any book that purports to be a collection of the greatest business writing ever needs to have something by Drucker. If it doesn’t mention him at all, it’s a good indication that the authors/editors don’t have the foggiest notion of what constitutes great business thinking. You should close the book as quickly as possible.
That’s why I feel I can recommend, with a few reservations, The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s list includes not one, but two Peter Drucker classics: The Effective Executive and The Essential Drucker (but, oddly enough, not his best and most groundbreaking book, The Practice of Management). Any business book compilation that lists two from Drucker has immediate credibility with me.
There are other pluses, and few minuses, that I found in The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Some of them include:
Plus: Listing a Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, as one of top 100 business books. Some might quibble with this, but that just shows they haven’t actually read much by Dr. Seuss. He’s full of great observations and lessons about both business and life, but I actually think the better Dr. Seuss title in this regard is the underrated but insightful I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
Minus: Throwing in not one, but two Marcus Buckingham titles: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Given that Buckingham essentially says the same thing Drucker did about playing to strengths and not weaknesses, why would you read Buckingham when you can get it from the master instead?
Plus: Including such modern titles as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Leading Change by John Kotter and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni along with all-time classics such as Dale Carenegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Winston Churchill’s Never Give In!
Minuses: Missing some great books such as Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule, DisneyWar by James B. Stewart or anything by Harvard professor Michael Porter, who wrote the Five Forces of Strategy and Competitive Advantage (although the authors mentioned some of Porter’s Harvard Business Review articles instead).
Overall, I’d give The 100 Best Business Book of All Time a B-plus. It’s a good book to help you get a sense of what great business thinking is, but it has some flaws. And maybe in the real world, that’s about as good is it gets.
As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.
But for the most part, flexible work arrangements still seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
That’s why I was eager to read Mass Career Customization, a book written by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, two Deloitte executives who created the program of the same name at the New York-based consulting firm. Benko is chief talent officer at Deloitte and Weisberg is senior advisor to Deloitte’s women’s initiative.
I first heard about Deloitte’s mass career customization program a few months ago at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm that advises law firms on work/life balance issues. Benko and Weisberg made the presentation.
Benko immediately got my attention by saying that the problem with flexible work arrangements today is that they “look at the job instead of the career.” She explained that if we look at the entire course of an employee’s career, we will see ups and downs in areas like pace and workload. The trick, she says, is for companies to create a formalized process around these ebbs and flows.
Mass career customization attempts to do that. At Deloitte, which has been piloting the program for the past two years, employees are each given a profile demonstrating where they are in regard to four categories: pace, workload, location/schedule and role. “This profile gets embedded into the employee’s career development,” Benko says.
By establishing this profile, Deloitte employees can discuss the option of “dialing up,” as well as dialing down. That makes the conversation not just about reducing workload, but also about accepting more responsibility, she says. For employers, the program offers an opportunity to better manage their talent, because at any given time they will be able to access a snapshot of who is working full steam and ready to take on more responsibilities and who isn’t.
In their book detailing the program, Benko and Weissberg provide very clear examples of how mass career customization can be implemented, complete with visuals of how an employee’s profile may change throughout his or her career.
It is incredibly easy to understand, but also very metric-based, making this program not just another soft flex-work offering. It is new, however. Deloitte is just now rolling out the program to all 38,000 U.S. employees, so evidence of its ultimate success remains to be seen.
But so far the pilot offers some promising results. Of the 7,700 employees who participated in the pilot, 30 percent showed interest in dialing up or dialing down; 13 percent ended up applying to do so and 9 percent got approved.
The fact that not every employee is clamoring to dial down should serve as evidence that this is a program worth evaluating. And the book also provides lots of other reasons (talent shortage, different needs of changing workforce, etc.) why HR executives should embrace these programs.
But what I like the most about this program is that it isn’t designed just to make working moms’ lives easier. By giving employees the option to dial up or dial down, mass career customization makes the conversation much bigger—and that to me is what will determine its ultimate success. It also moves the idea of flexible work beyond the domain of working moms.
For companies that want to create a more engaged workforce, have the ability to easily identify and move talent around their organizations and maybe even get some buzz for doing something forward thinking, reading Mass Career Customization may be a good place to start.
I’m a sucker for management books. I read a lot of them—a habit I picked up in business school—and over the course of time I’ve developed a pretty good eye for what is truly great management thinking, as well as what is just run-of-the-mill management chatter.
Unfortunately, that’s not what you get in The Management Gurus—Lessons From the Best Management Books of All Time. Chalk it up to the lack of truth in advertising here. While there are some decent lessons from a few solid management thinkers, there is nothing that rises to the level of Drucker, or Collins, or Porter, or even the writing of Jack Welch.
At first I thought that this might be a simple rights and permission issue, but in the foreword of the book, “author” Chris Lauer thanks no fewer than 10 different publishing houses “who allowed the words and works of their authors to be featured in The Management Gurus.” No, this was simply a failure of imagination and marketing run amok, because The Management Gurus fails to deliver on its promise of bringing together “the best management books of all time” the same way the fast-food joint down the street fails to deliver on its promise of serving “the world’s best hamburger.
There are a few others, like Warren Bennis and Kenichi Ohmae, that are worth a look and some time, but really, is this enough high-level management writing (and thinking) to sustain the overhyped notion by the publisher that this book contains “lessons from the best management books of all time”?
Worst of all, this book has Jeffrey Krames writing on Jack Welch and The 4 E’s of Leadership. I don’t know Jeffrey Krames, but why would you possibly have someone like him writing about the management wisdom of Jack Welch instead of simply publishing an excerpt from one of the many management books written by the great Jack himself? It’s like traveling to China and seeing a movie about the Great Wall instead of walking on it yourself.
My advice is to take a pass on The Management Gurus. You would be better off getting a subscription to the Harvard Business Review—or better yet, reading firsthand some of the management books by real, honest-to-god business gurus like Drucker, Collins, Welch and Porter. This may take you a little more time, but it will be a lot more valuable. And a lot less full of hype.
= Member Only
Every three years since 1995, HR researcher Edward E. Lawler III and his colleagues have conducted a survey to assess the human resources function, measuring how it is changing and determining how effective it is. It’s the only long-term analysis of its kind, and the 2007 survey results have just been released in Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions.
When I was on my first whitewater rafting trip several years ago, one of the safety instructors told us: “Assist in your own rescue.” If you’re thrown out of the raft, in other words, don’t just flail around in a panic—help your team get you back onboard.
If you appreciate really good business books—the ones that are truly insightful, inspirational and demand that you keep them close at hand—a title like 
As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.
I’m a sucker for management books. I read a lot of them—a habit I picked up in business school—and over the course of time I’ve developed a pretty good eye for what is truly great management thinking, as well as what is just run-of-the-mill management chatter. 
by the late, great Peter Drucker, 
by Michael Porter, 
by Collins and his partner Jerry Porras, or maybe even something more current, like Bob Sutton’s 
or 
by Malcolm Gladwell. Now that would have made for a great book.
, and that certainly belongs in this volume. You can also make a case for the excerpts from 
. I don’t know Jeffrey Krames, but why would you possibly have someone like him writing about the management wisdom of Jack Welch instead of simply publishing an excerpt from one of the many management books written by the great Jack himself? It’s like traveling to China and seeing a movie about the Great Wall instead of walking on it yourself.
