HRevolution

Borrowing from the biological sciences, I’d like to point out inbreeding is not a great way of evolving. Last week, I received a flyer from IQPC with the following excerpt from one of the presentations:

HR IQ Tip
Don't recreate the wheel; look at the competition, take their wheel and put a white wall on it.

Remember, this is a workshop where you go to learn how to do your job better. I’m all for taking shortcuts and learning from others’ mistakes, but I’m concerned that our industry lacks any original thought. I see a lot of recycled bad ideas.

Working in HR has become one grand avoidance of thinking. Take the concept of ‘best practices.’ The idea is you can accomplish more by copying someone else’s effort. This is a good idea run amok. That makes it a bad idea. The message is “Don’t think, copy someone else!” Somehow this makes you smart. This emphasis on best practices implies we’re too lazy (or too stupid) to give any thought to our situation. We’d rather copy someone else (preferably a name brand organization, if you please). It has reached the point of inbreeding. And, as biological scientists might predict, we’re getting dumber.

The ‘don’t think’ approach is a big reason HR is in such a sorry state. And any bureaucratic organization that has trouble quantifying it’s value is in a SORRY STATE. This “let’s look at what they do” has been taken to such extremes that our entire paradigm is inbred. Everyone buys into the same not-very-well-thought-out ideas (so-called “best practices”). Look guys, there’s no substitute for thinking.

Why would a company consider putting non-HR people in charge of HR? Because they might start thinking. How can you trust your human capital to people who don’t think about it?