New Florence. New Renaissance.

20 from 20: The Year HR finally turned strategic?

This is the third post in a series of 20 highlights from the Acrobatics during the crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and other series I launched last year.

Remember the scene in the movie, Dirty Harry where the Clint Eastwood character is told he is grounded and being transferred to Personnel? His response is (still) not very flattering to HR. It has been 50 years since that movie came out and we have come a long way. But at the midway point I was a Gartner analyst covering HR processes and started to hear "HR needs to become more strategic". I have continued to hear that since, but HR has mostly continued with more tactical, compliance oriented tasks. The phrase "employees are our most important asset" was glibly thrown around

2020 truly allowed HR to blossom and for executives to treat employees as essential assets. Josh Bersin does a nice job explaining in the excerpt below. My full interview with Josh is here. 

But don't just listen to us analysts - starting at 4.59 is Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri who describes the lengths they went to protect the employee base during the pandemic. He is very generous to his long time mentor and partner, Dave Duffield. (In a nice touch he did his interview with a Zoom background of Giorgio's Pizza. Every mom and pop restaurant could use that kind of endorsement given the impact lockdowns have had on small businesses).  The whole interview with Aneel is here 

And at 6.54 is Jeff Roberston, COO of Maxar, who added "Mr. COVID" to his job description. He describes various people-related protocols in his space tech company which does sensitive work for many government bodies. The fuller interview is here 

I conducted many more interviews about people issues with other C level execs and industry analysts last year. I would say HR has finally earned the right to be called Strategic. While Harry Callahan may still disagree, I doubt he would quibble with at least the designation of Essential after how the function stepped up in 2020.     

The Human Rainbow

How many colors are there in the human rainbow? By Angélica Dass’s count, at least 4,000. Since 2012, the Brazilian artist has been photographing people of every color and matching each subject’s skin tone to hues from the Pantone printing color chart to codify a unique chromatic inventory.

The project, titled “Humanæ,” has traveled the world and is featured in this month’s issue of National Geographic, which focuses on the idea of race as a social construct, rather than a biological one. Dass also gave a 2016 TED Talk on the subject (see below)

Artnet

 

Gore-Tex: Democracy and Innovation at work

In structuring their company, the Gores were more inspired by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor's management theories than by, say, Peter Drucker's. It's a bottom-up approach that com­panies often talk about, but few execute well.

Gore remains innovation-focused and market-agnostic. More than 45 million medical valves, stents, sutures, and other devices it created are walking around inside people. It makes vents for smartphones and materials for the Mars rovers. Today, the Newark, Delaware-based company has 10,000 employees worldwide and $3.5 billion in revenue.

Compensation--most of the company is owned by employees--is decided by a panel of peers. Associates use "dabble time" to create products that don't yet have a market, as was the case for mercury filters for industrial plants, developed long before regulation demanded them.

Inc

 

Great recruiting vid

From the SodaStream team, led by CEO Daniel Birnbaum.

Since the ad, it has agreed to be acquired by Pepsi for $ 3.2 billion