Happy 2013! Time to let something go

Happy New Year and many, many thanks for spending a part of your New Year's Day here!

The new year figures to be another challenging, interesting, and hopefully succesful one for all of us, as we continue to navigate the demanding and always changing waters of the workplace, of talent management, of technology, and the thousand other things that will keep us occupied in 2013.

These last few days I have been re-running some posts from 2012 that I liked, were popular, or for one reason or another felt to me like they deserved another shot - maybe a newer reader or two missed them the first time and would find them appealing, that kind of thing.

But there was one more post from 2012 titled 'Carrying Costs', that I did not re-run, probably because I simply overlooked it last week, but that actually sums up almost exactly the kinds of things I've been thinking about heading into a new year.

The entire piece is here - but I'll save you a moment and re-state the key idea, that the burdens of what we carry with us from the past (professional, personal, doesn't matter), can be a kind of yoke that we can't easily shake, and that our inability to accurately and honestly reflect on our history holds us back to a degree that we often underestimate.

In 2013, if there is any one idea, theme, or goal I have in mind it's this - to be more honest with myself, to evaluate ideas, practices, technologies, habits, and progress more rationally, and to know what things to keep and what things to let go.

Have a wonderful, happy, safe, and productive 2013!

Counting them down: The #FOT25 Talent Management Blogs

Over at Fistful of Talent, the latest installment of the Top 25 Talent Management Blog Power Rankings was released. Well, not totally released... 

Yesterday FOT published the names of blogs ranked 25 through 6, leaving the Top 5 Talent Management blogs to be revealed live on the HR Happy Hour Show tonight at 8PM ET.

Yes, we will count them down from 5 all that way up to Number 1 tonight, we will be joined by several of the Top 5 bloggers, some of the crew from FOT, and hopefully some HR pros and blog readers to talk about their favorites. We will also dish on the state of the HR blogosphere in general, as it indeed has changed quite a bit in the last few years.

It should be a fun show in the best Casey Kasem tradition.  Just don't ask me to read any long distance dedications...

To listen to the show tonight and find out your Top 5 Talent Management blogs, here is the scoop.

The show will stream live tonight starting at 8PM ET on the show page here. You can also use the listener line at 646-378-1086, (Press '1' if you want to join the conversation). Finally, you can also listen right from this post, using the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

It will be a fun show and I hope you can join us to count down the Top 5 FOT blogs and share your thoughts about the list and the HR blogosphere as well.

Many thanks to Fistful of Talent and particularly Holland Dombeck for all the great work putting this together.

BONUS CONTENT - My spot on the Oracle Apps Blog

Please indulge a quick spot of self-promotion - today I have a post up over on the Oracle Applications Blog with some thoughts around the impact of social media and social technologies in HR, and the great opportunity and potential for HR leaders to leverage these technologies inside the organizations.

The post is titled, Beyond Record Keeping: What Social Means for HCM, and I hope you will check it out and share your ideas and comments about Social HCM there. And while you are at it if you are interested in staying connected to what is happening in the Oracle Applications space, the world of HR Technology, (or just want another opportunity to internet-stalk me), drop the Oracle Apps Blog in your feed reader.

The Oracle Applications blog is meant to be a resource for the HR community and will feature guest posts from key executives, strategy leaders, and Fusion Applications customers. And I will be posting there from time to time as well.

You’ll be seeing some new names and some names that you probably already know. The goal is to provide you with the information you need to get the most out of Oracle Applications today and identify new opportunities for your business in the future.

Thanks for the indulgence - tomorrow we will back to our regularly scheduled hijinks here on the blog.

Weekly Wrap Up - May 31-June 6, 2010

Another week another collection of posts!  And as I look back on this past week of posts I thought, 'Man, what was I thinking?'. But alas, what is done is done. 

I thought I would start posting each Sunday the summary of the week's posts in Tabbloid format. As you might recall from an earlier post, Tabbloid is a free service that lets you create a custom PDF format 'newspaper' from your selected blogs and other sites RSS feeds, and have that newspaper delivered via email on whatever schedule you choose.

Here is this week's collection of posts, in handy PDF format - Steve's Blog : May 31-June 6, 2010.

I hope making content accessible in this way is a help to someone out there, I will continue to post these collections on Sundays for the time being.  I hope that if you find them useful, or actually download the PDF and give/send it to someone that otherwise would have never seen these posts, you would take a second and let me know in the comments. 

This is one way to try to break out of the echo chamber, but it is certainly not the only way, and if you have other and better thoughts on how to do this, I would love to hear them.

Some other highlights from all the great posts and articles I read this week that I recommend:

Paying it Forward: Ideas Beyond the Traditional Merit Matrix - At Compensation Cafe, Ann Bares offers some new ideas and approaches to the staid, annual salary review process.

Blogging - from XKCD, a short but sweet take on how often bloggers forget the real key to building an audience, good content.

How Do You Define "Talent?" - Steve Roesler at All Things Workplace cautions us about trying to define talent using a laundry list of competencies.

Why Creatives are Confused - Scott Berkun takes a look at the problems that creative types can encounter as the climb the corporate ladder

Five Lessons From the BP Oil Spill - Andrew Winston at the HBR offers one of the best takes on lessons from the oil spill.  There has been so much written about this, but this piece does a great job of offering some solid advice without hyperventilating about it.

What did you read this past week that you would like to share?

You want to crown them?

This week I posted my first piece over at the Fistful of Talent blog as a regular contributor - although I don't see my little badge on there yet, what is up with that KD?

The crew at the Fistful of Talent publishes a quarterly review of their Top 25 Talent Management Blog Power Rankings, the latest version of which was posted today.  If you haven't already, I highly recommend checking out all the great blogs that made the cut and adding them to your regular HR and Talent reading lists.

To help you out, I set up this Google Reader shared bundle of the FOT Top 25 Talent Management Blogs that you can easily add to your reader.  You will notice that the bundle actually contains 28 blogs, I included the Fistful of Talent feed, FOT founder Kris Dunn's HR Capitalist feed,  and mine as well.  As a former member of the Top 25, and for the last hour I spent creating the bundle and writing this post, I felt entitled. 

Use the 'subscribe' button on the box below to easily add all these great blogs to your reader at once.

One final note, while it is really cool to be named on a list like this one, it is at best a fleeting honor.  I hope that we don't get too caught up in these lists, we continue to see them as fun and informational, and we try to use them to get more folks outside the bubble involved.

On that note, I close with the clip I immediately think about when I consider awards and 'crowning' anyone or anything. I give you the remarkable Denny Green: