Aren't you amazed that senior executives of major companies still believe that succession planning works! I know I am. From the looks on the faces of Hosni Mubarak and Colonel Gadhafi during their last televised rants to their street side citizens, I can tell they are surprised their sons won't be succeeding them in the family business.

Why is it we (meaning just about every large company) aren't able to develop and plan our successors any better than the average tinpot Middle East…

Here’s a scenario for you to try out: One of your management team rushes into your office one cold Monday morning all out of breath. She is one of your sharper managers and she seems to be very excited about something. She pulls up just short of your desk and, after several sharp intakes of air, she announces, “I want to implement a new human resources practice here at Widgets Inc., one that we will…

I was reminded, again, the other day, that the best recruiter for a small business is an engaged and valued employee.

Big businesses rarely have the opportunity to convert a customer into an employee. Even Starbucks has become a poster company for poor customer service stemming from poor employee experience. Small businesses, however, have a daily opportunity to check both their customer service and their recruiting brand. Just ask your customers if they would like to work for…

At lunch today I was reminded that the mythology of generational differences in the work place is still out there. You know, the belief that twenty year olds are dis-loyal gaming fanatics who lack discipline, focus and patience, while boomers are the opposite of all that, whatever that makes them. Whenever I hear this stuff I am reminded of a seminar I attended where David Foote, author of Boom, Bust and Echo, reminded us that twenty year olds have always behaved like twenty year olds, and…

Anyone who has read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell knows that what we think we know about how good decisions are made is mostly wrong. For most of the past sixty or so years the 'scientific' method has been in vogue with accountants, CFO's, purchasing departments and strategic planners (and, you guessed it, HR). Want to make a good decsion? Reach for the slide rulers (my age is showing) and the spreadsheets. List the relevant criteria, find the option that meets the greatest numbers and pull the…

As an example of using a chain saw when a scalpel is needed, is there a better one in HR than Behavioural Descriptive Interviews? Most people in HR have no idea what the background is on these ubiquitous interviews, don't understand why they were developed, and, as a result, advocate their use in the wrong places. Before I start my rant, some disclosure, I am Certified in Behavioural Descriptive Interviews, right from the source, DDI themselves. But that doesn't mean I have joined the cult,…

You may get reminded every day, as I am, that you are not twenty anymore. Especially now that both my guys are in their twenties. It's hard to take when things that you thought were so cool just aren't now. As a field HR is no worse than say, law, or accounting, when it comes to not keeping up, but that's like saying big hair is no less cool than spandex.

Take compensation, for example. Most small businesses have adopted religiously the concepts of salary grids, annual salary…

Sustainable, non-toxic, and low on chemical fertilizer, Organic HR is something I have been developing for the last couple of years, based on over thirty years in the trenches of large and small organizations. Throw out lengthy interviews, do away with performance appraisals, and stop giving annual salary raises to everyone.Since it is unlikely that large organizations will ever see their way out of the tangled web they have woven for themselves my focus is on small business (under 150…