It's hard in the modern world: A DisruptHR Cleveland Preview

Next week I will have the great pleasure of attending and presenting at the DisruptHR Cleveland event to be held Thursday, February 5 at 5:30PM at the Music Box Supper Club  - (event details and registration here).

The presentations at the DisruptHR events follow the popular 'Ignite' format - each presenter has 20 slides that auto-advance at 15 seconds per slide resulting in a total of 5 minutes to tell their story. It is a fun and exciting, (if a little bit frightening) format for both speakers and the audience.

My little talk, (and it is almost complete, please relax DisruptHR Cleveland organizers, I will get it to you soon), has a working title of 'It's hard in the modern world'; or, 'A 5-minute review of humanity's relationship with technology'. 

As I said, the presentation is not 100% complete, so I won't post it here yet, but I did want to share the central theory behind the talk, and also solicit some ideas and feedback if readers are so inclined that I may consider as I finalize the slides.

Here it is:

While 'modern' advances in technology seem incredibly disruptive, the entirety of human history has been nothing but a series of (mostly), technology driven disruptions. Fire, the wheel, metallurgy, farming - these and many more tech advances were just if not more disruptive to humanity than Candy Crush Saga.

At the end there will be some profound conclusions/recommendations/wisecracks to help sum up and interpret that assertion, but that is the basic idea behind the talk.

My questions to you, dear readers, are these:

Are we really in the most technology-driven disruptive period in (at least recent) human history?

Are things really different now?

Do I have a chance of convincing the good people of Cleveland that the modern age of technology is not more disruptive than the transition to the Bronze Age from the 'Run or be eaten alive age?'

Hope to see lots of folks out in Cleveland next week!

SLIDES: Culture-Strategy-Talent and Rock-Paper-Scissors #HSCC14

I had a great time yesterday presenting at the Halogen Software Annual Customer Conference in Washington, DC. The team at Halogen always puts on a fantastic event for their customers and this year's event was no exception.

My presentation, the slides from which I am sharing below, (if the embed doesn't work for you please click the direct link here), was titled Culture-Strategy-Talent: Organizational Rock-Paper-Scissors, and was created from an idea I had a year or so ago about how it has gotten really trendy and popular to focus almost irrationally and singularly on organizational culture at the expense of other really important factors in business success - like strategy and talent. Sure, company culture is important, but it is certainly not the only thing that should be important to HR leaders, and it might not even be the most important thing HR should be concerned about.

Here is the deck, and I will have a couple of closing thoughts below the slides.

Culture - Strategy - Talent: Organizational Rock - Paper - Scissors from Steve Boese

I think culture matters. I do. But I also think lots of other things matter too. Like actually having a compelling product/service, an actual market opportunity, the ability to read and react to the competitive environment. And oh yeah, the 'simple' business of finding, attracting, developing, aligning, and retaining the kinds of talented people that are needed to execute that strategy and that create and evolve what we call culture. I think the best organizations and the most successful HR leaders understand this and don't let chasing 'culture' all the time detract from the (I think more important) work of building teams of great, talented people and helping shape organizational strategy (and executing that strategy).

What do you think? Are we too focused on culture these days?

I had a great time with the Halogen customers and staff and many thanks to them for including me in the event.

SLIDES: Big Trends in HR Technology for 2014 and Beyond

I wanted to share the presentation slides from a Human Resource Executive Magazine webinar that I co-presented yesterday along with Trish McFarlane, VP of HR Practice, Principal Analyst from Brandon Hall Group.

The title of the presentation is Big Trends in HR Technology 2014 and Beyond, and while often these kinds of 'trends' talks (including many that I have done the last year or two), tend to focus on 'trends' that are really just far-future kinds of speculation or are simply repeats of ideas that have been talked about for some time, Trish and I tried to keep the talk grounded more in research and the actual experiences of many of the leading organizations that will be part of the upcoming HR Technology Conference in October.

You can check out the slides below, (here is the direct link in case the embedded slideshow does not render for you), and I will try and sum up at least a few of our key points below the deck.

What were the high points, or keys that we shared on the webinar that we hoped would resonate with attendees? I will give you the Top 5.

1. There are 3 dimensions for potential impact of HR tech - organizational, managerial, and individual - and the most successful HR tech projects resonate and add value at all 3 levels 

2. The key organizational decision drivers for the replacement of HR technology vary depending on the type of HR tech. For Core HR systems, better integration is the primary driver. For talent management however, User Experience tops the list.

3. Selecting the 'right' HR technology solution involves an analysis and balance of 5 factors: Cost/ROI, Technological fit, Cultural fit, system capability/roadmap, and complexity/UX.

4. For both Core HR and for Talent Management tech, an increased demand for better integration across the HR systems footprint, as well as with other corporate systems is driving investment and the attention of corporate leaders. 

5. We are not really talking as much about 'mobile' or 'social' as discrete concepts, but rather a more comprehensive idea of 'User Experience', at its many levels, will increasingly influence systems development, purchase decisions, and user adoption rates, (and therefore, ROI).

There was plenty more to talk about, both in the slides and on the webinar, but I hope the 'Top 5' above gave you a little bit of a feel for what we discussed.

Thanks to Human Resource Executive and to webinar sponsor Castlight Health for having Trish and I on the webinar.

Happy Thursday!

Which tech advice is good advice? #SHRM14

Been spending a little time working on the final bits of the presentation titled "What Did the HR Tech Salesperson Say? Demystifying HR Technology Selection and Implementation", that Trish McFarlane and I will be giving later this week at the SHRM Annual Conference, and by way of preview (and since it is interesting to me) I wanted to riff on one section of the presentation, where we plan to discuss ways for 'normal' HR pros to conduct HR technology research.

With blogs, social networks, LinkedIn, podcasts, about 1,345 Twitter chats, etc. there is no shortage of advice, opinion, and information out there about anything and that of course includes HR technology solutions. 

But which sources of advice are good advice, or at least, relatively better than some of the competing alternatives? I think you can break down and then compare sources of advice on HR Technology solutions on a simple 2x2 grid with the X Axis being "Informed" and the Y Axis being "Biased" (or at least the potential exists for bias based on history, contracts, or other less obvious drivers of biased opinion.)

Here's my take on the "Who can you trust/who knows what they are talking about" chart:

What do you think? Too harsh on some of the vendor-driven content? Not giving the Online Pundits their due? Does your Mom know a lot more about HR Technology than I calculated?

Look, the exact placement of any of these sources of information on the plot of 'Informed/Biased' is subject to debate, interpretation, and certainly exceptions exist for any of them.

But the larger, and more important point I think, and one we will make during the presentation, is that any source that you as an HR pro uses as an input into your research/decision process needs to be evaluated and scrutinized carefully.

Lots of 'experts' really are not that expert - they either never have actually bought and implemented HR solutions in organizations themselves, or haven't done so for a really long time. Some consultants purport to be vendor solution agnostic, but might only have a chance at scoring some billable work from you if you select a specific vendor's technology. And lots of people with blogs and Twitter accounts have no idea what they are talking about, (possibly me too).

So in the SHRM session, we will try to take some of the mystery out of what can often be a one-sided, vendor has all the power kind of dynamic, and give you the HR pro some tips, tricks, and secret code to help you better understand the process, and hopefully that will lead to better outcomes.

And, we will have a bunch of HR Happy Hour shirts to give away at the session as well!

If the entire economy can fit on one slide, then you probably have too many slides

...and this blog post title is way, way too long.

Check the below image, spotted over the weekend on Business Insider's piece titled Here's The Entire Debate About The US Economy In One Huge Slide:

The slide presents, (simply I admit), what the financial services company sees as the key assumptions and challenges for the US economy in 2014, offers up some alternative and plausible implications of these assumptions, and then presents what it feels are the most important data visualizations (that are not too hard to look at), that support both the assumptions and the conclusions.

Think about it, they are attempting to distill a subject as large and complex as the economy of the USA down into one slide. Sure there are lots of data points and subject areas that are not and can't be covered in just one slide, and sure, the presentation gurus out there will cringe at the notion that there are way too many words in way too small a font to pass muster, but the overall effect I think is outstanding.

All the important data points, the reasoning, the charts - everything that this presenter needed to lead his/her talk about the state of the economy all laid out on one page.

I know I have gotten into a really bad presenting habit over the years of simply adding more and more slides to just about every presentation that I have done. Slides are free, right? Just add another one with a cool picture and a word or two in 64-pt font. 

But I think that approach makes you a little lazy and also can easily result in ponderous presentations that end up going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The tightness and the focus required to distill your content into its smallest container possible also forces you to consider what is truly important about the information and arguments you are presenting and to think much more about what you are going to say about that content, rather than spending umpteen hours scouring the stock photo sites for the 'right' images.

This has to be the next HRevolution contest - the 10 minute, one-slide presentation.

Have a great week all!