When I heard that former General Electric CEO Jack Welch had been chosen to replace former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw as the opening General Session speaker at SHRM’s 61st Annual Conference & Exposition in New Orleans, I wrote that it was an inspired choice because it was “so different from keynotes given over the past few years by Queen Noor, Bill Cosby, Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell and Sidney Poitier: interesting in the broad sense, but completely and totally divorced from anything specific that HR faces.”

Say what you will about Jack Welch, but he ALWAYS has a lot to say about HR.

To that end, Welch gave some of his great management and business insights to SHRM attendees in a question-and-answer session with Claire Shipman of ABC News. He was provocative, funny, a bit earthy and generally entertaining. And as someone who has heard him talk on numerous occasions, I can tell you that Welch didn’t just lean on what he has said so many times before.

One of his key points: Trust is an essential quality for all human resources professionals, and that means both trust going down to employees (they need to trust that you’re helping them) and coming down from your boss (who needs to also trust in what you are doing to manage the workforce). Welch believes that the best HR people exhibit pastor-parent behavior: They keep confidences (like a pastor) but can also tell it straight (like Mom or Dad always could).

One interesting moment came when Welch asked the audience members to raise their hands if the HR leader in their organization had equal status to the company’s CFO. Only a few of hands went up, and Welch said that this is proof that HR still must do more to get the respect of their organization—and that more organizations need to push for HR-CFO equality.

Welch also said that holding on to top talent is going to be a bigger challenge because “what you hear is, ‘I want to get the hell out of corporate America.’ ” More workers, he said, are opting to become entrepreneurs in the wake of the huge number of layoffs and corporate downsizing. “HR needs to challenge the organization to be more exciting and more accessible,” Welch added, “because people just don’t trust corporate America.”

Overall, Jack Welch delivered an upbeat HR pep talk here in New Orleans, and his presentation was the most focused and HR-specific opening speech of any I have heard in the past half-dozen SHRM conferences. I didn’t agree with everything he said—for example, I don’t buy his argument that women must make a decision between having children and getting a high-level executive position—but then again, I never agree with everything anyone ever says.

One last thing: There was also probably more written about this SHRM speech than any other in the history of the organization. I had a hard time keeping up with the tsunami of HR “tweets” and blog posts flowing live from the ballroom at the Morial Convention Center, where Welch was speaking.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Never have so many written so much, so quickly, about so (relatively) little. As much as I like Jack Welch, the social-media flood to get out his speech was overkill, and probably a sign of the times. I don’t think we’ll be able to shake it anytime soon.
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