Rehumanising HR

Ok, ‘rehumanising’ isn’t a real bona fide word I know, but you get what I mean. There are a lot of seemingly disconnected but actually complimentary rehumanising movements going on to change things.  In the economics profession, we have the newly launched World Economics Association (WEA)  calling for economists of all shapes and sizes to wake up to the disastrous unreal world thinking that largely missed the crisis and in still clinging to discredited models is sadly in danger of being associated with astrology.

There is the movement in 2.0 knowledge economy native businesses (think Google, Starbucks, IBM) led by anti-political anti-Wall Street ‘geeks’ to tear up every traditional accepted wisdom after another, from how their companies are structured (or not) to how they leverage data about their people in order to align their internal creative capacities to outside competition. The numbers that make these people tick and which inform their decision making are very different - light years different – than the whole ‘gut trusting’ leadership of before. They are changing a generation of leaders and employee perceptions of what it means to account for their decisions and their role in them too.

There are fund managers and credit rating agencies (AXA and Moody’s to be exact) who are similarly breaking new ground here and getting out of their comfort zone to understand what’s going on. They know their own part in what went wrong. They know the clever intricate unfathomable math they previously relied on isn’t working, so they’re opening up to measuring and evaluating businesses from new angles (such as in the case of Moody’s and the healthcare industry, the ‘maturity’ of a providers talent management strategy).

So in economics, we have a major rethink going on. Long overdue. Radical. Needed. In business, we’re seeing new models based on a much more enlightened real world view of people potential. In the financial community, we have a recognition that actually this ‘soft stuff’ might actually be hardening up and telling something important. It might actually have been the real hard stuff all along. Certainly something more important and more usable than rear view mirror balance sheets.

The question is: as these folk move into HR's territory, how long will HR compete?

Here are a bunch of free ebooks including the ideas of regulators, investors, HCM gurus and others on where this is all heading. And a free network and digital library full of more late night reading.

Just in case.