Even in the last week a number of illustrations arrived one way or another that make the point that more of us see the need to change the model, but we sure aren’t there yet. They’ll take more than one post.

First, the winning student duo in the competition put on by the HR think tank (www.scnetwork.ca) that I volunteer and write for made it abundantly clear they see what the future of leadership should look like. But they put it in an oddly striking way that shows they know we aren’t there yet.

The contest requires envisioning what the world of work will look like in the year 2040, 28 years from now. In reality they seemed more to indulge themselves in what sounded like wishful thinking about what the world of work ought to look like when they enter it about 2 years from now. That, they said, should be a world where there are no bosses. In a fairly blunt way it was a plea not to subject them to what they foresee is the dominant leadership model today – and it was their one primary issue. Significantly our judging panel of senior Vice Presidents agreed, but also bought into the idea this was a distant vision. We all hope for the change, but can’t see how it could happen soon.

What the winners said more specifically was ‘”there will be no ‘jobs’ but instead companies will hire independent contractors, expert at their duties, for projects. and once hired these experts (read ‘us students’) will be left alone to do our thing because we know best, we’re trained, we’re smart and we’re perfectly capable (so there will be no need to boss any of us around).” This was the one salient fact they expect to see in future work – no command and control. It could hardly have come out much clearer.

When pushed the winners allowed there would be a small core of strategic decision makers in companies, supported by an HR staff whose job it will be to find and hire these project experts, but after that ‘no control necessary – once you’ve told us the aim, leave us alone.’ This echoes futurists like my friend and fellow speaker, Warren Evans, who for more than 10 years has presented the topic he calls “Hollywood Days and Cyber Knights” – based on the ‘hollywood’ model (also mentioned by others) of assembling teams of experts from various areas to do a film, who go their separate ways when it’s finished, then awaiting the next film project. and online ‘cyber’ knights, technology savvy contractors hired just as the students envisioned. The ‘controlling’ feature in such arrangements is talent and demonstrated track record. If you’re no good, don’t expect any other contracts.

The book “Free Agent Nation” by Dan Pink from 2002 makes many of the same points. While one can update the theory, the underlying premise is the same – get rid of command and control or more and more people will refuse to actually stay with you. They will increasingly prefer to depend on their wits and skills to get them a series of jobs so they are more or less autonomous.

These themes occur more frequently today in articles and books, yet we still see nearly 80% of leaders on-the-job using command and control style of giving orders. In a restaurant this afternoon, the manager walked by a “bus boy” and literally shouted, “clean the floor, get a mop, get going.” Apart from the obvious fact this man (not boy) was used to this treatment and didn’t flinch as I did, you have to wonder what that ‘boy’ will use as a management technique when he begins to run his own business as, like many other new Canadians, seems quite likely. Unfortunately abusive styles tend to perpetuate as we know from studies of abuse within generations of families. And so command and control perpetuates. It’s often just downright rude. It’s counterproductive. It’s soul-destroying and, worse from a business view, engagement-destroying and innovation-destroying, yet it continues on.

More on the evolution of leadership next time.

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This is an issue that’s not going away, nor should it. HR departments are woefully reluctant to spend resource money urgently needed elsewhere developing analytic power even though some realize they desperately it need long term if we are to see HR move into the 21^st Century effectively. But there are hurdles beyond simply money and if you read the sub-text of the article you can see some of them.

This is a brief piece culled from the presentations at a conference called Impact 2012: The Business of Talent held in early April by Bersin & Associates, a very reputable player in the talent development space. The topic was ‘Big Data’ another fairly new jargon term meaning essentially “all the data points in their myriad multitudes that it’s now possible to collect in and about organizations thanks to computers that now contain every living scrap of information.” Or as Wikipedia puts it, “data sets that grow so large and complex that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools.”

Right off we can see this isn’t going to resolve easily to the level modeled in Moneyball – one smart kid with a laptop who has read about and can collect the one metric by which baseball players should best be chosen (hint – not the highest batting average or most runs scored or most skills demonstrated [as the trainers used], but the most ‘on base hits’ – just getting on base eventually adds up to runs and scoring). Out of all the Big Data one can amass in organizations it isn’t as likely we can pick one or two metrics that will sort out ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ in the hiring and promotion games – although we can narrow down the field quite a lot and eliminate many foolish strategies that are currently common like who makes the best stand up presentations, for instance.

The problem HR faces is we don’t have a hundred year track record of collecting comparative statistics about individuals in organizations the way baseball has kept track for generations of players of their various averages and achievements. Lots is written about corporate superstars, but no one keeps track of their percent of successful mergers, for instance, let alone the minutiae of decisions each executive makes in the course of a ‘season.’ Nor are there even clear measures of when an executive has ‘won’ a game. It’s fuzzy math that’s required for sure – measuring complexity at its most complex.

What you can be sure of is some CEOs will skim the Wall Street Journal article and expect the precision of measurement they feel they get from financial reports, forgetting the even those are open to continual debate as to their accuracy, meaning and predictive value. This isn’t a field that can be mastered overnight with immediately predictable payoffs, but what is certain is that HR has to start developing opinions about what parts of it can be useful and how. And now is not too soon to start because it will take some time to build expertise especially when there is so little to model after.

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David Novak, chairman and CEO of YUM! Brands, a success story that grew out of KFC and others, spent years developing and spreading a program personally throughout his organizations. It’s rare for a CEO to be so directly involved and his success suggests strongly there are benefits to doing it from the top. It’s a tremendous model for others. He details what it takes and how to get it going in his new book, named after the program, Taking People With You. Reviewers on Amazon point out it’s really a course in ‘how to’ for getting teams and people working positively in the right directions and keeping them engaged.

Interestingly he makes the connection between the leader getting his or her own head and house in order first, then understanding others’ perspectives and motives and what they need to get engaged, too, before rolling out programs. Having said that, he emphasizes the necessity to keep rolling and rolling and rolling. Follow through is so often the missing ingredient especially with corporate leaders who tend to move on in their thinking to the next program they’d like to see once the general outlines of the last have been delegated to others. Novak makes it clear that’s fatal, that leaders have to keep pressing and reinforcing and, well. leading .the great programs if things are to continue to evolve and improve.

This is one book Boards of Directors should be reading and requesting their senior executives to operationalize. I haven’t seen anything else yet that comes as close as what I try to say about how to lead for results. A number of commentators pick up on Novak’s own comments that it’s common sense, but not so commonly found as we’d like. Nothing could be more true. As an antidote to ‘program of the month’ approaches to management, this should provide a road map for enduring growth, innovation and improvement throughout organizations.

It’s always a treat to read something you agree with wholeheartedly, even when it brings a bit of ‘wish I’d said that’ feeling with it. It’s truly great to see the ideas about how to apply coaching leadership principles effectively actually get implemented and pay off in practice. I think we’ll be seeing lots more over time as more and more organizations realize the benefits they can access so easily.

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Within a week the site was swimming in comments, including from a few who obviously read no further than the headline as often seems to happen.

The article is a fast read about Rotman’s third annual Design Challenge competition once again being won not by Rotman’s team nor even by an MBA team from any other school, but the top three spots were all from masters programs in design, that represented only 7 of the 23 schools entered. She calls is a ‘slaughter,’ which I suppose gives the headline writer the idea for that headline.

The gist of the headline, which most commenters picked up was that neither pure business nor pure design solutions really work well in solving business problems today. In fact you could note that this was Steve Jobs’ true success. He was primarily oriented to business and making money, but with a laser-like focus that the product had to appeal in design, both looks and operation, to the end user. What a radical idea – trying to achieve two ends at once, with the appeal to the customer taking precedence if one wants to actually induce them to fork over their hard earned dollars.en by an MBA team from any other school, but the top three spots were all from masters programs in design, that represented only 7 of the 23 schools entered. She calls is a ‘slaughter,’ which I suppose gives the headline writer the idea for that headline.

Some thoughtful commenters came had participated in the competition and pointed out that a number of the design students were MBAs taking design because they’d recognized its importance (thanks Steve). Others noted the competition was designed by an MBA school so its students would take seriously and learn more about the need for design not just number crunching (ditto Steve). No one pointed out that the master of this combination did not himself even finish university, let alone post-graduate work, perhaps one reason his thinking wasn’t confined to siloed boxes.

To their credit most of the commenters recognized this as the problem. And everyone recognized this is about solving key BUSINESS problems, not just a design or MBA problem.

Of course you know where I’m going with this. Maybe Rotman or some other business school should set up an annual HR Challenge. Why stop at Design and Business, why not add positive, business-supporting HR methods to the mix and ensure a long term creative base is developed and retained in the organization. Is there any better indication that business still operates in silos than competitions where it is a startling discovery that ‘both business and design count?’ How about all the pieces – business, design and human resources. and, oh yes, a few others as well. It is the HR part that sets people up to handle complexity and creative innovation, though, which makes its omission particularly glaring.

Would we then see post-graduate HR program registrants beating MBAs and design grads on business challenges, too? Would they be won by teams of MBAs who recognized they needed HR training and were taking it? I think we still have a ways to go, but we can see no one has yet so visibly proved the value of HR to business in quite the way Steve Jobs proved the value of design even as Dan Pink was beginning to write about the primacy of design in our future. To date we’ve had Jack Welch and any number of major professors write this way about HR, not to mention a number of other CEOs, some of whom will be highlighted in future posts. but it may not take root until a ‘Steve Jobs of HR’ comes along and wows the numbers people. Jack Welch’s results apparently not quite riveting enough?. What more will it take?

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Hence we have to ask whether executives can change, since they don’t seem to or at least not quickly.

The short answer is yes. Anyone can change when they decide to. It’s a matter of practice makes perfect and willingness to stumble a bit at first. Even the most arrogant can change if the conditions are right.

To be specific the key change we need for organizations to overcome the knowing-doing gap is for more senior executives to start leading by listening/coaching instead of the old telling/selling/controlling style. I was therefore happy to see a short video clip of Kevin Sharer, CEO of the major corporation Amgen, talking about this, sent out from the McKinsey Quarterly. The full article is worth the free sign-up if you haven’t registered before. It expands on the video and explains a bit more about why Sharer changed and how critical it is for executives to make the decision to do so.

I’m not sure I have a lot more to add except to say everyone needs to read and heed it. He certainly isn’t alone. In fact, he references the head of IBM as the source of his own insight, so there’s one more. More and more large company CEOs are arriving at this conclusion for the same reason Sharer cites – that failure to change to listening style means you’re likely to miss fatal signals in these rapidly changing economic times. He also alludes to the value of getting everyone contributing ideas, an equally critical reason.

The good news – we know what to do. The challenge – getting everyone doing it.

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Now for that one reader who is about to email to say he favors kids riding tricycles, this is intended tongue-in-cheek, which is to say ‘as a joke.’ Not quite so the recent Globe and Mail report of research in Germany showing banks that appoint women to their boards of directors take more risks. They seem to conclude perhaps women shouldn’t be appointed. That’s a joke for sure, but unintended apparently.

There’s science and then there’s bad science. Ideally reporters should mention the difference. In as many of the 209 comments on the article as I could handle, none seemed to mention some of the more obvious possibilities, choosing instead to suggest these women weren’t generally ready or meritorious enough. For one, perhaps those avant garde banks who riskily undertook to appoint women in this still dark day and age were already equally massive risk takers in other ways such as their investing proclivities.

Alternatively perhaps we’re so early in the era of appointing women that the majority of men still on these boards simply circled the wagons and kept women’s opinions (notably their supposedly more conservative opinions on risk according to the reporter) from having any sway. No, really, could it be the minority, women, were simply out-voted? Or to carry this a bit further, that the beleaguered men on those boards huddled together in even more ‘group think’ style than often seems the case and plumped for following the pressure they were getting from investors to ‘take the gloves off’ like the real men of neighboring institutions and take unwarranted risks to compete?

Or could it be that those men, hearing counter advice from women, decided in macho style to ‘do it anyway’ to show what terrific decision-makers they are? Let’s drag out all the stereotypes. Maybe the solution is to ban men and have all women? Or, like all-boy, all-girl schools, perhaps that’s a better principle for Boards?

Or, don’t even think, perhaps the research itself is flawed, that the supposed mountains of data didn’t cover enough territory and so showed an incorrect artifact inasmuch as the researchers themselves avow it to be only a very slight, marginal difference. Perhaps we shouldn’t jump too soon to an absolute ban on women on all boards until this potentially productive line of study can be replicated as with all good science.

Or should we perhaps, just perhaps, mention that most relevant prior research seems to show that mixed teams actually make better decisions – but only, ONLY if they are well-managed, something Boards aren’t entirely known for, aren’t typically structured for and often don’t seem to spend much time on? Given these observations it wouldn’t have surprised me if the shortfall was much larger. It appears, one might say, that boards with women are doing remarkably well in these early learning stages, to come close to parity, if indeed the presence of women has anything at all to do with the apparent result and it isn’t due to something else entirely. One might ask what cause and effect proof we’re getting, but oh heck, let’s just keep on the safe side and ban women. NOT! Maybe this is one risk sensible boards SHOULD take along with some efforts to learn better management practices in general.

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The offending item was the fact that whether evaluators noticed or one simply counted the sheer number of “friends” someone had, that turned up as a marker for success of those students with the most friends. Six months into a starter managerial job supervisors agreed these individuals ‘fitted in’ best. That echoes what I so often heard in management or, as a former CEO of mine expressed it, “I would never hire an Icabod” (referring to the stereotypical story of Icabod Crane and the Headless Horseman – a scared, shy, introverted school teacher pictured as frightened to death by just about anybody). At the early stages, extraverts often appear more adept. But we ‘slow starters’ can sometimes do things even better.

For those introverts out there who, like me, have had to learn to ‘fake it’ to appear extraverted and avoid this sort of stereotyping, let me point to a wonderful antidote in a new book … and video of her speaking at TED – Susan Cain.

She makes a strong case that companies need introverts to balance and add valuable knowledge, sober second thought and creative innovation to their mix. She puts her case so strongly you almost wonder if she’d recommend constituting a company entirely from introverts, but even in suggesting such a thing, you can see the flaws. Unfortunately the reverse doesn’t seem to be true. Any number of hiring managers seem to think an organization composed entirely of extraverts is exactly what they want.

The most important word Cain touches on, though just once as far as I could see, is – balance! We know people are all different, we know mixed teams perform better (though a bit tougher to manage, especially if they include introverts who are less likely to fall into ‘group think,’ as she notes). But that never stopped managers describing their ideal parameters for new hires as ‘outgoing, sociable, gets along easily in groups,’ etc., and saying overtly in a great many cases, ‘don’t hire someone quiet or reserved, we just don’t have a spot for that here.’

People tend to hire others like themselves. We have a vast history of promoting the most vocal, group-oriented individuals rather than the ones we have to encourage or even talk into taking managerial roles. It’s not surprising at all that the extraverts who are so often in charge tend to want others like themselves, not those mysterious thinkers as Julius Caesar distrustfully notes (in Shakespeare’s typically insightful words), “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much.”

Of course, Cain cites laudable examples of introverts throughout history who have achieved remarkable results. We’d be surprised if 30% of the population didn’t find some spots where they can contribute. So why should her pitch be necessary? Have things changed over the years as she believes? Or should they?

We introverted thinkers are often quite capable of ‘faking it,’ a concept I felt completely alone in inventing in my teens when I realized I’d have to learn to survive in a far more extraverted society than I could imagine coping with. In time I believe I even moved further along the scale toward actual extraversion since I accustomed myself to so many situations in which skills that seem more natural to extraverts began to seem natural for me, too. In many ways I believe I benefited by recognizing the value extraversion brings to situations and attempting to at least emulate it when needed if not actually feel it. In some ways this is another advantage introverts have over extraverts – they can learn the value of both, whereas many extraverts seem blind to this. Perhaps that’s because we introverts keep quiet about our secret, as we tend to do about a lot of what we observe and think, lest we be recognized for the socially challenged individuals many of us are thought to remain.

The key for strategic HR is that we can’t allow flawed exclusionary evaluations to prevent hiring or promoting people of any class who are needed to create results, no matter what the ‘common opinion’ may be. The key element to look for in new hires is a balanced view that appreciates what each person can contribute, not a ‘one size fits all’ sociable template that misses valuable potential.

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The published account of the research itself is typical – a little difficult to digest, though well linked to references. Their caution is worth mentioning – small sample sizes, relatively informal methods for some elements – but nevertheless, as the authors note, someone has to take a first stab at this. It isn’t an issue that’s going away nor is it one we can easily form conclusions about without controlled study – at least not conclusions beyond the now common observation that drunken party photos don’t represent good employment recommendations.

In this case somewhat experienced raters were OK’d to access the public profiles of the subject college students and were able to judge reasonably well if a given student would fit in and contribute better than others to an entry level manager job measured by bosses evaluations 6 months later. The correlations don’t approach certainty by any means, but seem better than if one looked only at the tests filled out by the students alone.

There are many, many gaps. Is it really surprising that taking a look at someone’s extended personal life record – like reading their diary or being privy to a long stream of private thoughts – might offer more insight than a 15 minute multiple choice check-off? Are we validating the use of Facebook or questioning the tests?

Suggesting an open resource any one can theoretically look at for free could replace a common hiring practice may be dangerously over-promoting its value.

In one item the researchers note that sheer number of friends influenced raters’ opinions. Fewer than half of the potential participants had a publicly-available profile, a very important statistic from the study, so we know nothing about the potentially more savvy half who either avoided Facebook (a small number) or hid the more personal stuff from view (nearly half of everyone who had a profile at all).

Ignoring privacy and subjectivity concerns and illegal human rights-related information from profiles, we have to ask on this issue, for instance, should we therefore advise job seekers to a) make sure they are on Facebook lest absence be construed as ‘unsociable,’ b) collect a large number of public ‘friends,’ and c) take care that activities on their visible pages or ‘walls’ are constructive, managed, while hiding their ‘real’ activity behind privacy controls, etc.? All these are likely good bits of advice considering what is tending to get used illegally or not, but they are also somewhat onerous requirements having nothing much to do with learning what’s needed to actually do a job.

The surprise seems to be the rarity of law suits so far. Only one thing seems certain – you can’t order people to give you their id and passwords so you can see their hidden material, a pretty basic privacy issue like asking them to hand over their personal diaries and order every friend to be completely open in commenting to prospective employers. Typically further rules are being fought out in cultures that emphasize separation of work and personal life to a greater degree. You only have to google “discriminattion facebook recruiting” to get a pretty clear idea that this issue is potentially much bigger than we see today. Who wants to risk being first on the legal firing line? We know someone will get mangled.

Of course, this study touches just one of the vast number of questions that can be researched. At what point one wonders, for instance, do we conclude a person has so many ‘friends’ they’re wasting too much time, time that would detract from what they might put in at work? Aren’t all these evaluations double-edged swords that observers might well evaluate in totally opposite ways. One evaluator might be offended by a single swear word while another might find lacking any suggests an uptight priggishness.

Given widespread belief that hiring managers and recruiters are widely using whatever Facebook items are open to them, we routinely hear recommendations that organizations avoid the possible legal fallout by employing third party companies to evaluate and provide only legally acceptable information and conclusions (a new option for those ‘discredited’ testing companies?). That not only sounds expensive, but we have even less understanding of what might influence these newly-minted experts. Who could we reasonably trust when virtually no objective research yet exists? Yes, the research has to start somewhere, but it behooves intelligent observers to refrain from drawing sweeping conclusions from such early, limited efforts.

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In particular, from an analysis point of view, one SVP speculates that HR requires women’s traits of nurturing while others point out their supposedly stronger skills for multitasking or shifting gears continually which are needed since no two days are alike in HR. There’s also a definite overtone that a significant portion of the work in HR is ‘housekeeping’ – yes, some actually use that word with not only its residual ‘mom’ overtone, but the less stated idea that it’s routine drudgery. Hey, what job doesn’t have that component! Do we think engineers, doctors and bankers don’t have those days?

All the speculation is just that. We will never know all the reasons, but perceptions are critical and almost certainly continue to both distort our understanding of this simple HR fact and lend to it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all what men choose ‘female’ jobs… like nurse, secretary or elementary school teacher? Well, a growing number, but will It ever equalize and does that matter? Probably not in our lifetimes.

Most report difficulty attracting men into the profession, while women have thrived. One can only assume as the article does that women’s advancement in HR has been accelerated because more women are available in the workforce and now in executive ranks as they have increasing levels of education and interest in executive work and HR has been an ‘automatic’ entry point into the C-suite where there is pressure to find more women. More exist in lower HR ranks and, again we may assume, for the still-reluctant men under pressure at the top to produce gender balance, this was an area where they thought women could do least damage. Are we squirming enough yet? Truth hurts, but in this case, does it matter?

Insightfully the article recognizes that women have advanced in levels and numbers even as HR has become MORE important to organizations and is being recognized as a greater driver of results than many other more male-dominated functions. Whoa, nelly, what’s happening here? Are the up-and-coming women doing a better job than those old white guys who got side-lined into HR? All these conclusions are possible when no facts are available to contradict them. As one of the latter, I like to think I did a good job, but…?

Some speculate that men like jobs that are more ‘black and white’ to use a rather un-PC metaphor for ‘clear cut,’ unambiguous, without paradoxes, or perhaps where one man is a clear-cut boss empowered to give absolute orders. Again, insightful I think as a question to ask. Is this because women are ‘naturally’ more able or willing to deal with conflicting ideas, paradoxes or even, for that matter, conflict itself or power that comes only through influence and not ‘authority’ – or at least deal with these in a more constructive manner than reaching for a sword, gun or fist? In view of the fact that 30 years ago it was commonly said that women were handicapped entering business because they hadn’t learned team work by playing on teams the way men had, this seems like a bit of reversal to now imply women ‘naturally’ cooperate better… or is it?

I don’t think we have the answers to these sorts of questions and perhaps never will, but in today’s state of evolution they’re worth examining just as baldly as these often-closeted conversations about ‘too many women in HR’ continue to occur. For me, as long as HR continues to be recognized as rising to the level of importance it desperately needs to function well and presumably those in CHRO roles are doing increasingly well at their jobs, I am not going to worry too much about which gender is getting those promotions. I can’t help it if men and women tend to look for stereotypes to explain trends.

What I look for is the day when the trends sort themselves out in the logical manner – that men and women are all unique individuals who bring different skills individually to their work – that some men are just as good at multitasking and ambiguity and some women are happy to apply their skills to more clear cut, logical tasks like engineering equally with anyone else. If job and program applicants today follow the stereotypes and everyone advances, that may be enough from this generation I suspect. What happens when women ‘fill up’ HR, when they reach the maximum they could conceivably reach – 92%, 95%? Will they finally be able to ‘spill over’ into other roles.

Wait a minute, is this just proof women are smarter strategically? When we see Jack Welch saying unequivocally HR is the second most important job in the organization, will it be long before some of these outstanding new female CHROs start to flood into CEO roles? I found HR to be a highly remunerative profession, worth learning the skills for. Apparently some women are discovering that as we speak. Men…?

Can we hope and work for better? Always! As long as we write and worry about how important it is to have both men and women in each role, the more we need to face the fact this would be a non-issue if we truly believed they were equally effective, that there were no significant differences between them, how we perceive them or between the roles. To write about them is to acknowledge we’re not there yet, most people can’t see each other or our roles as equals or equally important.

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In the retail area, to take just one example, I know a growing number of people who are happily renewing much of their wardrobes via cast offs from trend-setters who buy the latest fashions and then give them away almost immediately – give them away to the point where Goodwill and similar organizations are unable to handle a tenth of what comes to them despite shipping mountains of stuff overseas. Are these trends that will continue, grow, fade or disappear? Should clothing retailers take the Best Buy route and offer to take trades on clothes that are still relatively new if the customer wants to buy the latest? Weird? But who knows? Like most things, this model won’t appeal to every customer or even perhaps the majority in the foreseeable future, but with the growing emphasis on ‘green’ who can say for sure? Many people didn’t think self-checkouts would catch on and their expansion has been admittedly slow, but still steady and growing.

The best route seems to be small pilots around a core objective of concepts that seem to have potential, but how many of these should you run at any given time, who will work on them, how will they be monitored and judged, how long to do you give them to make money? You can take Amazon as an example at one extreme, where the make money piece would be more than ten years away from massive initial and on-going investments. During most of that initial start-up time nay-sayers insisted this ‘interesting idea’ would never work. Now it’s changing the entire publishing and retail industries and it’s annual report shows respectable profits, but also a list of possible dangers to continued business success that read like a handbook on risk. Apparently this doesn’t dissuade many meaningful investors, though the general investing public continues edgy.

The answer you choose has to depend on your own risk tolerance and ability to generate or find capital. But even more so it will depend on having people who can take sensible, calculated risks and know more or less when to back off. This is a significant leadership challenge and, since leadership is learned primarily by trial and error, the people you trust with these decisions (including yourself) need room to make mistakes and re-orient to better projects routinely.

Building a business has never been for the faint of heart, but to build at the pace many organizations need to achieve today requires the ability to lead others in the same processes. No single individual can conceptualize all the possible directions, tangents or spin-offs that will appear as opportunities, nor can one person be in the right spot to recognize all those options and dive into them quickly enough to matter.

If there is any doubt left that leadership is the key skill needed today, it only requires looking at the businesses that are succeeding to see how much it matters. But a casual review typically fails to make clear the number and type of leaders below the key figure. More needs to be studied to establish how this works. Typical biographies of the most talked-about individuals, like a Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, mostly fail at achieving this apparently because it’s easier to write about secretive, micro-manager individuals than collective efforts. What we do know, from Jobs’ bios especially, is that the ability to motivate others to extraordinary effort and results is a critical skill, yet we still fail to hear much about the individuals thus motivated or what they accomplished, as if all that’s required is the skill of motivating and then micro-managing everyone. That’s not a plausible combination for most. Again from Jobs bios we know that many of his key people feel they accomplished stuff as much despite him as because of him, though they typically say the challenging overall environment was a key feature for them.

The opposite approach is more characteristic of Google – a strong core objective and philosophy, but lots of freedom for the troops to experiment officially or otherwise during the 20% of their actual work time they are allowed to work on their own ideas and projects. It seems likely this is a more reliable model with greater sustainability, but time will tell and much of this challenge is still so new, the real handbooks on replicating these successes hasn’t been written.

So – strategy? Start from where you are and move in one of these directions – one that expands engagement and fosters sensible trial and error within some boundaries, toward some overall goal, but otherwise fairly open – that seems to be the formula most likely to succeed at this point in our evolution. One way or another, develop people who can lead and manage others because that’s the incontrovertible piece – we can’t do it alone.

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Perhaps the key is simply to encourage everyone at every level to innovate, since product life cycles seem to have become increasingly short. How long can an iPhone or an iPad dominate? Will it be longer than Sony Walkmans, eight track tapes or eight millimeter projectors did? My smartphone was obsolete when I bought it some eight months after its introduction. It has been superseded about 8 times after a year of use and is now virtually prehistoric according to the booming companies making fortunes on planned obsolescence, a term that long ago was applied to the car industry – and we know what happened there.

Retail might not seem so temporary, but we see companies changing strategy two or three times a year in some cases to try to get ahead or keep up. Airlines and cruise lines require staggering long term investments in equipment, but seem to have to regenerate their pitches continually and guessing whether short or long haul or luxury or economy should dominate seems to change while we’re still thinking about the last iteration. Hotels trade properties and renovate them into new images constantly to try to get the right mix of offerings into the right neighborhoods.

Behind all these efforts are strategies that, for shorter or longer periods of time, dominate their respective executive teams’ thinking. Injected into the mix are entrepreneurial efforts from startups constantly getting things going and being bought by big outfits attempting to buy new ideas that they’re too unwieldy to think up and test themselves. Thus Fast Company magazine highlights Y Combinator” – an incubator firm that hothouses many, many startups for just this purpose.

Any company that doesn’t fall into this frenzied struggle to innovate is thought to be in danger of becoming a Zombie – a firm that’s fat, successful and in danger of sitting so long on its past successes that it is becoming one of the walking dead.

Are you getting heart palpitations yet? Your kids think you’re a dinosaur, your customers want something new this month, next month and the month after and you haven’t figured out how to get your employees on side with the latest sales program that was sent out three months ago.

Well, here’s another problem – 60% of your managers don’t want to manage according to a recent UK poll of 4000 managers. They’re mad at HR now because they perceive it to be focusing TOO MUCH on strategic contributions to your businesses. They want a function that takes the weight off THEIR shoulders for dealing with people, hiring, disciplining, developing – the parts of the job they dislike and fear most.

So while you’re just waking up to the fact that HR can be strategic and help improve innovation capability across the board, your line managers are desperately keen to avoid it. OK, face that resistance, maybe drop the in-house innovation strategy that requires you to develop real leaders and just buy some of those expensive startups to bring in new ideas and energy. But then you have to worry about how they’re going to be integrated, who will manage them. It won’t be the startup guys whose dream was to build a new product, get tons of money for it and disappear to build something else. They don’t want to be managed and your in-house guys don’t want to manage them OR their new ideas. If they thought managing the same old employees they know and replacing one or two and getting the same old day to day successful stuff done was too hard, how much do you think they’re interested in something harder?

Did someone say we need to develop willingness and ability to show initiative and leadership at every level? Well, really, that’s not so new. We’ve been hearing that for decades now. It’s just more important today than ever before. Sounds like more reasons HR just got more important. Knowing the real underlying problems helps set us up to find solutions, but only if we face the facts squarely no matter how scary they are. Whichever direction you take with strategy, getting people ready and able to deliver on it is increasingly important. We don’t have years to get them onside, but days.

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There is an endless supply of products and services that purport to improve the functioning of people and the achievement of people-related results in organizations. Since people actually do everything that a company does, obviously anything that improves how people work and their productivity, or saves time or effort should be of value. So every consultant has an argument that their product should be championed by the ‘people-champions’ in the organization and the moment they don’t the world is going to hear about it. But is the value worth the cost?

My musing on this for the umpteenth time was set off by a Karl Moore article entitled “Why Does HR Too Often Kill Innovation,” published in Forbes with co-contributors by David Creelman and Phil LeNir (of Coaching Ourselves), all of whom I respect. This looks once again like a headline writer attempting to snare readership with an inflammatory title, but even so, I take issue with the general thrust.

HR, as they eventually point out, is in a state of evolution and many departments now do what they recommend: “HR often suffers from a bad reputation [often, may I note, through no fault of their own!]. They are seen to get in the way of the business rather than help it along. HR can go a long way in building rapport with managers if it encourages them to experiment with things they think might work, providing only enough support to ensure there are no uncontained risks. This will lead to rapid learning, happier managers and a better loved HR function.” At least there’s a nod to constructive advice here that I can support.

But the article leads off with a different message: ““Whatever you do, please don’t mention this to anyone in HR, they will kill it”. That quote may sound odd but it is real. The ‘it’ being kept secret from HR is an innovative learning program.” One must assume this is an experience from Coaching Ourselves, which I will say outright I believe is a great program, very inexpensive, that deserves to be embedded in many more organizations.

Having said that, not all programs deserve to be promoted and the suggestion that HR kills excellent programs is a lot less true than if one says that HR kills a lot of crappy programs that would waste an organization’s hard earned dollars for very little or no return. One of HR’s less pleasant business duties, that in fact prove their worth in truly understanding the business and its objectives, is to keep a lot of inappropriate offers from wasting time and money. There’s no doubt some good programs get killed along the way, often lost in the press of garbage that HR managers have to put up with, if I can be blunt.

I’m all for HR stepping up and encouraging managers to try out low cost, high involvement programs like Coaching Ourselves, but I can’t fault them all for not always being able to pick out the differences. Like their line managers HR are often overwhelmed by the sheer daily demands for their time. Yes, I can see how frustrating it is for consultants. I tried very hard to give them an ear and regretted brushing some off brusquely at times when I was just too busy.

Unfortunately my soft approach often seemed worse. Rather than tell a salesperson outright I thought their product was an expensive, useless waste of time, I’d try to make some positive comment about how it might fit (somewhere else) and explain rationally why we just wouldn’t have the money or time. Unfortunately with all the rejection salespeople get that tiny ray of positivity often seemed to just egg them on. They would ask if they could phone again next week, month, quarter, season, year or when else did I think management might have an interest? No matter how much I tried to back-peddle at that point, they’d keep phoning, emailing, reminding and reviving their efforts until finally after sometimes as long as several years, they stopped calling, perhaps having moved elsewhere themselves or just tired out and become disgusted with another recalcitrant HR executive who wouldn’t listen to reason.

The fact is that as much as we hope HR will treat product pitches rationally and recommend those that make sense for their businesses, from a business point of view, we also have to be ready to acknowledge their rationale when a rational manager says ‘not for us.’ The idea is that salespeople are supposed to LIKE rejection because as sales gurus are quick to say, ‘if you hear no ten times, you’re that many times closer to hearing yes.’ That means, may I point out, a ‘yes’ that comes from another potential client, not from asking me the same question and getting ten no’s and thinking I will say yes on number 11.

I recall saying no to at least 10 DiSC-type test salespeople from different providers with the same explanation – too expensive at the typical asking price of $75 to $150 per test. I would explain that in retail, hiring thousands of people a year, we would perhaps consider testing 1000 or so if the price was maybe one tenth of that and they’d laugh and think they had me on the hook, liking their test, but not with enough budget. Some walked away, but quite a number kept on phoning to see when the next budget would be. Until finally I tried to stop one guy with the usual ‘hey, I know the test type, but it has to be one tenth the usual cost.’ He asked, what would that be and I said ‘maybe $10 a copy.’ ‘No problem,’ said he, ‘in fact less if you buy more.’ We did – using hundreds if not thousands over the next few years. So all the scoffing from more expensive providers finally got me into the right zone both for us and the new provider.

Sorry that the key in selling is to listen to the customer, but when a buyer, HR or not, says ‘too expensive, too time-consuming, no fit, or whatever’ they shouldn’t have to say ‘your product sucks’ for that to mean ‘no.’ HR just isn’t going to promote every product if they are applying the very business skills they’re so frequently accused of not having. But if you’re lucky, they will tell you logically why not and perhaps that can even help you to creatively improve your product instead of accusing them of lack of creative thinking. Oh, and let me be clear – ‘not all salespeople are this way,’ but sorry if I bite back after being bitten a few times too often. If two bites don’t make a right, maybe we can all be more positive with each other. I have no trouble with people telling me constructively what they’d like from HR, but I get upset with people telling the world that most of HR sucks based on these situations. End of rant. for now.

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Few company cultures can be characterized as entirely ‘good’ (I don’t only mean virtuous, though that should be one consideration). We’re never really sure exactly what ‘good’ is for an organization culture. Continued, sustainable top-level success undoubtedly requires continual balancing and some of that shows up in the discussions around Apple. Even the latest controversy is one example – in the words of the New York Times quoted by no less than the Hollywood Reporter, “The New York Times story highlighted what some former Apple executives called the "unresolved tension" between a desire to improve factory conditions and the pursuit of cheaper products delivered faster.” “Unresolved tension” can be another name for a challenge you’re attempting to balance, and so it seems here.

Cook jumped into the fray, saying of course Apple cares about employees, while others admit they’ve known about labor abuses for some time. Such contradictions undoubtedly characterize the efforts of many companies to find better, cheaper ways to produce their products, but still safeguard staff. As long as it’s being worked on I’m sympathetic, but what about Apple’s own internal culture which hasn’t exactly generated consistently positive reviews and may or may not improve?

I may get around to reading the newly published book “Inside Apple” by Adam Lashinsky, a respected senior financial editor, presently for Fortune, or I may just wait and see, but I think some of the answer is contained in the book’s subtitle: “How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works.” Secretive, Really? Those words telegraph a message.

For good measure I read the Amazon review by master reviewer Loyd E. Eskildson. It’s typical of the tangled way we get information that free reviews like Eskildson’s form an enormously helpful resource today. The book’s official publication date was January 25 (yes, 2012), though it was likely available in preview earlier, and there were already 7 reviews by January 28 and another 18 within two more weeks.

Eskildson has reviewed over 3000 items according to Amazon (?! not all books, but still ?!), positively appreciated by more than 30,000 of nearly 48,000 readers – about 60%. And here’s a quote from his comments, “Steve Jobs was a micro-manager, bully, made ‘impossible’ demands and took a non-excuses perspective, and made Apple a very secretive entity. Fortune magazine Lashinsky, however, manages to provide useful insights nonetheless. The secrecy about future products and its management methods was intended to make life more difficult for its competitors, avoid stealing thunder from existing products, milk additional free media coverage on product launch days, and avoid disappointments if the eventually released product failed to match the hype.” I even take the slight grammatical glitches without worry because writing 3000+ reviews can’t leave tons of time for proofing and the content is otherwise clear and concise.

Wow – a goldmine for free on a book a few days old. That nails Apple’s culture for sure – remember the law suits, criminal charges, firings and threats over the lost prototype iPhones? Just one example of their operations. Secrecy is widely believed now-a-days to be antithetical to creative innovation. We’re told we have to break down silos, to share information across departments to stimulate ideas and there are plenty of examples pointing in that direction. Amazon’s de facto culture certainly follows that in allowing anyone and everyone to express more or less whatever opinions they wish about everyone else’s books and products, to our great benefit.

Should we conclude that Amazon is right and Apple culturally wrong? Jobs held it together, forcing creativity out of a secretive culture, but can Tim Cook or anyone else? Only time will tell. What it demonstrates is that when assessing leadership there are few absolutes, few opportunities to make either a quick or definite decision about what’s best or worst other than judging purely by results. and the latter, as we know from Enron’s mighty reputation up to just one day before their scandal, can be a very temporary measure.

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Zeroing in on GM a year after its return via IPO as a public company, she notes it tried to revamp its culture on a number of occasions previously, but quickly fell back into its old way. She wonders whether this time will be different.

She concludes only time will tell if the culture change sticks, but this time the inputs are bit different: the unions are more cooperative, poor dealerships and factories have been closed and wasteful model duplication eliminated. In other words, there is almost literally only culture left on the table as a failure point. She doesn’t limit her critique to GM, citing a number of times when the US auto industry and others have been declared on the way out and then hailed as fully recovered only to go through the cycle again as soon as the companies began to believe once again in their own infallibility and success and old habits return.

The bottom line – it’s at least as hard to change culture, that amassed body of habit that organizations develop, as it is to change our own personal habits – poor diet, lack of exercise, procrastination or any of the hundreds of other challenges we face individually – and make them stick.

This has to be the biggest corporate culture change experiment of all time – a $50 billion bailout – will it have a payback? $50 billion for just one company! The US has recently pushed the banks into allocating just half this amount to help a massive number of underwater homeowners. Europe is hesitating at turning over not so much more, $179 billion, to bail out an entire country that could bring down the entire European Common Market. One could conclude that such a bailout for just one company ought to have a guaranteed likelihood of working. But that may be wrong. That’s why this is such a terrific experiment, if perhaps not the wisest use of money we could dream up. If it can’t work for whatever reason, we may have to conclude this sort of culture change is a foolish gamble.

Don’t hold your breath. This isn’t likely to be the over-night fix so many would like to see. That’s probably why the last year’s IPO shares have fallen by a third in price. It’s maybe easier than expecting a new US President in one term to eradicate the effects of the worst spending debacle (Iraq and Afghanistan), the worst domestic financial meltdown and subsequently one of the worst developed world meltdowns in history, but it probably depends at least in part on those being fixed.

GM has had a good start in one way – with pent up demand after the meltdowns leading to an massive 10%+ increase in auto purchasing. They were aided further by Toyota losing sight of its own cultural strengths and producing problem vehicles for the first time in memory plus massive setbacks from the Japan tsunami. With these three boosts on its side, GM has, in one year, retaken its status as seller of the most vehicles world wide for the moment and it has a chance to re-build its culture in a new image while Toyota struggles to restore its to what it used to be.

Whatever happens, this is a contest to watch that is as important to future strategies in HR as any in history. We can’t know for sure when, if ever, we can expect a definitive victory. In fact, it’s arguably foolish to expect that at all. What we really need to see is whether any of these giants can not only re-orient and recover temporarily, but whether they can keep adapting, changing and innovating to last another 30, 50 or 100 years. In theory that ought to be possible. In practice it will be a massive comment on the evolution of human behavior whatever the outcomes.

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In fact, was approached not long ago by a fellow speaker (www.laughlong.com) who is going to target HR as a potential market for humor programs at work. He’s already commented, partly in jest, that HR isn’t exactly filled with laughing matters. In fact, I’m probably going to agree when it comes to our demeanor when dealing with laid off or fired employees, harassment complaints, human rights and the like – not the best times to appear to take things lightly let alone find them funny.

I agreed to the interview with some trepidation that it might reveal how little I know about the subject and opinions I have may sound unfortunately humorless. No one really wants to appear as sourly serious all the time as dealing with on-going internal disasters might suggest. I fear he undoubtedly knows more about the subject than I so I could easily be tongue-tied and find nothing to say (however unlikely that is for someone like me who lives to speak to audiences, even individuals as audiences). Fortunately Jim’s web site reassuringly asserts that we all have a funny bone (which I think is true despite those certain individuals that every HR manager eventually meets). So I thought it wouldn’t hurt me to take a shot myself.

Maybe I was just in the mood to find things funny in the HR/leadership world. In any case this article from the Calgary Herald struck me in particular. Perhaps it shouldn’t. The subject company, www.kudosnow.com, really exists and was set up for a serious and important purpose – to promote managers and employees giving each other kudos and thanks for all sorts of contributions they make.

In fact, increasing the recognition we give each other and especially that leaders give their team members is strategic. It’s been shown to improve future results, boost morale and engagement measurably and reduce problems in the workplace. If that isn’t strategic in terms of what we want for results, it’s hard to find anything more so… and easily done for free. That’s a point we’ve made often right here in this blog, so what’s funny about a system designed to boost those objectives?

Well, maybe you just have to be in certain frame of mind. The first thing that struck me in this article, though worthy enough to be pointed out in an HRPA daily news roundup, was ‘why can’t we just do this face to face.’ Call me old fashioned. Maybe it’s a version of the tired joke that Gen Y staff text each other in the next cubicle rather than lean over and talk. I’ve got nothing against texting, but for a boss giving kudos?? Not my choice as a standard routine.

I can see how building up a pile of kudos would be reassuring and refreshing over the usual silence that surrounds one’s best efforts in most organizations. But I have a feeling more satirical writers than I could have a field day with this. It’s like Facebook where one person racks up 42,000 friends and I might have 5, where certain people’s pages become ‘go to’ spots for enormous followings while the average person’s is read by a handful of cronies. Does it mean I’m unworthy? Might cause some anxiety!

Most of all I picture stern CEOs rushing back to their corner offices to pound out 15 or 20 kudos a day to keep the wheels of engagement humming rather than exerting the exhausting effort required to say “thank you” out loud to people during the numerous conversations they have each day. I expect putting it in writing will make it more impactful, to use good management jargon.

Now, it will be on record, sort of like being in the employee’s personal file. Oops, hold on, is that legal? Would we, at least in our Canadian jurisdictions, require regulatory changes to enable us to put kudos on record without first getting the employee’s permission? Must the system build in disclaimers? What if others see a kudo before the employee him- or herself? No sense of humor, that’s us in HR for sure.

Seriously, I smell an opportunity for us to suggest this before the CEO gets this advice from his neighborly lawyer friend. He needs to command a new HR program launch – collecting signatures from every employee so the CEO can start delivering these all important kudos without fear of law suits or reprisals. Now if we could just get those senior execs to write the blurbs in positive way, not the usual kudo: “Hey, your program that just added $5 million in sales needs to be ramped up with 12 new segments. Can you do that by Wednesday?”

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