"It's time to blow up HR and build something new. Here's how." This slogan, with a picture of a bomb with a burning fuse, appeared on the front page of the summer double issue of the Harvard Business Review magazine focused on HR. The magazine achieved its goal - to attract the attention of HR professionals and provoke fierce debates, and not only on social networks.
"It’s not that we don’t like HR; it’s just that we believe it can be improved," explains HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius in his editorial. Human resources, in his opinion, should abandon the long-term proven "best practices" and establish a forward-looking agenda.
How can we "blow up HR"?
An article by Peter Cappelli, a Wharton School professor, entitled Why We Love to Hate HR ... and What HR Can Do About It describes everything that is wrong with HR. He follows the development of HR in the United States from 1900 to the present, and notes that most US companies still manage HR according to the rules set in 1950s.
The second HBR article on "blowing up HR" is entitled Bright Shiny Objects and the Future of HR. It was written by John Boudreau, a Marshall School of Business professor, and Steven Rice, former HR director of Juniper Networks. We can read how the company has developed an innovative HR model with a real impact on business results.
The series of articles about the need to change the current approach to HR completely closes with the article entitled People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO. It was written by Ram Charan, a renowned management consultant, popular speaker and author of several best-selling books on management, in collaboration with Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company, and Dennis Carey, Vice Chairman of Korn Ferry. The authors encourage companies to start taking HR more seriously and put HR directors into the role of real strategic partners who will become the third members of the existing CEO-CFO pair.
HBR for free on the web during summer
The Harvard Business Review magazine has opened its archive on the web this summer, so you can read all the articles until the end of August on its website hbr.org (or directly under the links above).
If you would like to read more detailed abstracts of those articles in Czech on HRNews.cz, let us know by commenting on this article or in the discussion we will open on this topic in our LinkedIn group here.
As we already mentioned, the provocative topic of the July-August Harvard Business Review magazine has already sparked a series of expert discussions and opinions by leading HR personalities. Dave Ulrich, the author of HR Business Partnership, also got involved. We will publish an article summarizing his opinions in the next few days.
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