Four Groups Blog

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

Welcome to the second quarterly roundup of the latest thinking and developments around leadership, HR, innovation, talent management and organisational development. I have tried to pick out the most interesting or thought provoking of the high volume of articles, surveys, blogs and webcasts. In this issue, articles and examples have been included from the likes of Capital One, CFO.com, Cisco, McKinsey, Microsoft, Harvard Business School and Towers Perrin.

Summary for Q1 2009

Unsurprisingly, the financial crisis is still uppermost in people’s minds and new ideas and insights are slowly emerging, interestingly not always from organisations which one would term the “HR establishment”. Over and above this, other themes for this quarter include;

• Leadership development is going nowhere fast
• HR’s relevance to an organisation’s success
• HR acting more like a teenager, or not
• Command and control, enterprise 2.0 and amplified workers
• Successful recruitment via a self directing process
• A lack of creativity and death by data
• The big picture HR role
• Innovation, change and new ideas

As always any comments and feedback are welcome!

Tag Cloud

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We were recently featured in a piece on the HR Matters site. We spoke about our work with 4G and how it can aid understanding and problem solving efforts. Here’s a quick introduction.

We discussed the idea that people-based issues can be managed in a systematic and structured manner, something that Bruce is firmly in support of. 4G represents a proprietary approach developed by his company to understand and predict intangible aspects of people’s personality, interaction and values. However, our conversation was not so much about 4G itself but about taking a holistic approach and the how’s and why’s of it.

The full piece can be found here and our thanks go out to Rowena Morais and Isabella Chan for bearing with us!

Anne Freedman at HR Executive very kindly published our “Boom or Bust for HR?” article back in January. Thanks Anne!

The introduction is below.

Is 2009 the year the HR function finally enters its ascendancy as organizations place greater emphasis on talent management and putting strategic HR activities at the heart of the business? Or is HR destined to remain a transaction-based cost center as leaders still struggle to rise to the challenge?

If you’d like to read the full version, it can be found here.

Nick Carr takes a wonderfully tangential view on pharmacology and productivity.

I recently commented on the Nature editorial that made a case for “the responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy.”

The writers of the editorial, a distinguished group of academics, had noted that artificial “cognition enhancement” could boost the performance and productivity of many workers: “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it.”

In a posting today, the law professor Frank Pasquale takes the next logical step, offering a modest proposal for also allowing the use of “cognition-dulling drugs” by the healthy.

It brings a whole new meaning to work-life balance!

We lose the opportunity for change, or for texture or creativity…

(at least according to Seth Godin)

Here’s the full piece…

Is everything okay? Unless you work in a nuclear power plant, the answer is certainly no (and if you work there, I hope the answer is yes.) No, everything is not okay. Not in a growing organization. Not if your company is making change happen, or dealing with customers. How could it be? And yet, that’s what so many managers focus on. How to make everything okay. We spend so much time smoothing things out, we lose the opportunity for change, or for texture or creativity. Instead of working so hard to make everything okay, perhaps it is more helpful to work hard at living with a world that rarely is.

Reading it again, do we really want things to be just ‘ok’ or do we need to revisit the mission statments again?

I think it was Henry Ford or was it Barack Obama who said;

Being OK is what makes America great

Can anyone remind me please?