It’s T-minus four days to the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in New Orleans, and all I can think about is how brutally hot it’s going to be down on the bayou when things kick off Sunday.
According to the newspaper, “The list of local thoroughfares erupting under the searing heat continues to grow, [and] a busy section of Interstate 10 in eastern New Orleans between Read Boulevard and Bullard Avenue buckled Tuesday afternoon. In Algiers, much-traveled Gen. DeGaulle Drive near Carlisle Court popped apart, damaging cars and detouring traffic after expansion joints could no longer contain the expanding panels of concrete.”
It’s got to be pretty hot to buckle roads, and worst of all, it doesn’t look to improve anytime soon.
“A ridge of upper level high pressure has become centered farther west over the southern plains, but the extended period of very hot weather will continue today [Wednesday], with a highs that could climb above 100, the weather service said,” according to another Times-Picayune story.
“Temperatures [in New Orleans] will be in the mid-90s Thursday and through the weekend, but high heat indices may reach dangerous levels each day.”
Regardless of what the attendees do, Workforce Management will be covering the 61st annual SHRM Conference & Exposition at http://www.workforce.com/, with daily e-mail news blasts and with a big conference wrap-up next week in Workforce Week.
As for me, I’ll be sweating away in New Orleans and writing a daily Last Word column, blogging and even tweeting on Twitter (I’m at http://twitter.com/johnhollon).
If you can’t make it to SHRM, or perhaps have just decided to stay home and stay cool instead, check our site for the latest conference developments from the Big Easy. And don’t hesitate to drop me a note, if you have questions or comments, at jhollon@workforce.com.
With summer finally drawing near—and I always know it’s summertime when the annual SHRM conference rolls around—it’s time to get a fix on those books you really want to read this summer. As I said when I served up my first summer reading list back in 2007, if you want to multitask and combine your reading with an opportunity to glean some great management wisdom, here are five books on my summer reading list you might want to add to yours:
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton. You might not believe it based on this blog, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anything that is philosophical in nature. That’s why I’m intrigued by the premise of this new book by Alain de Botton. That, despite the fact that we spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations that we often chose at a young age without a great deal of thought—we rarely spend much time asking what our occupations really mean to us. “With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom,” says the description on Amazon.com, “Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art—in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.” Given our current economic condition, this is a great time to reflect on the nature of work and career, and this seems like a good book to help do that.
• Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve heard Gladwell speak several times, and I really enjoyed his earlier books like The Tipping Point and Blink. That’s why I want to make some time to finally get to his latest book with a very strong workforce component: Why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? That’s certainly a question I want to get the answer to, and Gladwell’s notion about the myth of the “self-made man” and his premise that superstars “are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot” is one that ANYONE who manages people should think about.
• The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It, by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath. This book won’t be released until the second week of July, but I have a review copy on my desk and I must say, this looks like a worthy follow-up to Bob Sutton’s The No-Asshole Rule (another book you need to read if you haven’t already). The two Christines examine the toll that bad behavior can have on otherwise well-functioning companies, and they reveal strategies that successful organizations are using to stop incivility before it takes hold. I’m not sure if they have all the answers to this eternal problem, but I’m going to take a read and see what they say.
• Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, by Michael A. Lerner. I’m fascinated by Prohibition, mainly because it is an object lesson in how an overzealous minority can push through a law that no one really wants and just about everyone tries to ignore. There are some good workplace issues that come out of it, and reading how New York coped with Prohibition has to be fascinating. This is a book that’s been on my nightstand for a year. This summer, I vow to get to it.
• The Last Editor, by Jim Bellows. It’s not often you get to read a book about or by someone you worked closely with, and that’s my connection to this autobiography by Jim Bellows. He hired me and was my first editor back at the late, great Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I learned a lot about life and journalism from watching Jim, and I’m sorry I missed his funeral this spring when he passed away at age 86. A consummate street fighter who loved the challenge of being at the No. 2 operation in town, Bellows developed superstar journalists like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin as well as generations of guys like me. Plus, Jim was a great editor and sharp businessman who knew how to battle a bigger and better-funded competitor to a standstill—lessons we could all use today.
Got a good workforce book worth reading this summer? Let me know what it is; I’ll list the best suggestions I receive here in a future blog post.
I hate to always be the bearer of bad news, but here’s how bad it is for business conference travel this year: “U.S. companies canceled an estimated $1 billion worth of conferences in the first two months of this year and trimmed back on others,” according to a story in today’s Los Angeles Times.
This shouldn’t be a news flash to readers of this blog, because I have been writing about this trend since the beginning of the year (see “In 2009, Are Conferences Going, Going Gone?”). It’s been very clear to me that there has been a great deal of denial around business and conference travel, particularly why it’s happening and how bad it actually is (see “2009 Conference Update: It’s Ugly, and Getting Uglier”).
What is news in all this is the fact that: a) We’re finally getting some honesty instead of just wishful thinking when it comes to 2009 conference travel; and, b) That the business and conference travel industry still believes (wrongly) that the problem is simply due to the mess at American International Group, when in fact, it can really be attributed to our larger economic downturn.
The Los Angeles Times story says that hoteliers and other industry executives are calling the current conference travel “the AIG effect, after the insurance company that took a public drubbing for spending freely on corporate perks despite its financial turmoil.” This is certainly true, but only up to a point, because it doesn’t fully explain the massive drop-off.
The bigger issue, in my view, is the huge economic downturn that every business and organization in America is dealing with right now. Yes, the finger can be pointed at AIG (and Wells Fargo, and others) for taking government bailout funds and then continuing to travel and do business as usual, and for the public backlash that ensued, but that’s not the real cause of the problem. The real issue is pretty simple.
When times get tough, discretionary travel gets whacked at virtually every company—big and small. And, that’s really why a billion dollars in conference travel got whacked in January and February.
“With bookings dropping and self-denial replacing conspicuous consumption, the AIG effect is battering a hospitality business that was already suffering from a slowdown related to the recession,” the Times story said. And it also pointed out this fact: “Nearly 200,000 travel-related jobs were lost in 2008,” before the “AIG effect” took hold. The Labor Department expects another quarter-million of those jobs to be lost this year, but that says to me the impact of AIG on conference and business travel is wildly misleading.
In the HR and workforce management space, conferences are seeing attendance drops of anywhere from 30 to 50 percent. For example, Training 2009 in Atlanta in February reportedly had 800 attendees this year, compared with 2,000 a year ago. Another conference, the 2009 ERE Spring Expo at the San Diego Convention Center last month, reportedly had 500 total attendees compared with around 1,100 at the same event in San Diego last year.
So, I ask again: Have you canceled any HR or workforce industry conference travel this year? How many fewer events are you going to and what impact has the recession (or even the AIG effect) had on you and your organization’s travel this year?
I’d love to know, so either attach a comment at the end of this blog post or send it to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com.
Not only has the musical entertainment gone from the predictable oldies vibe of the past few years to someone a little more current (Sheryl Crow) but now SHRM has a first-day keynote speaker for the 61st annual conference who actually can speak in a relevant, contemporary way to the challenges facing human resource professionals today. Believe it or not, SHRM has landed former General Electric CEO Jack Welch.
Welch, who has been touted as the “greatest manager of the 20th century,” is pinch-hitting for former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who has been “assigned by NBC to produce a special report from Afghanistan in late June,” according to a e-mail from O’Neill and SHRM. As much as I believe that Brokaw would have had some interesting things to say, his keynote would probably have followed the pattern of those 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.
I wrote this back in 2005, but I think it is as true today about Jack Welch as it was back then: “In Jack Welch’s world, HR is not only a key part of the business, but HR people in the organization need to have special qualities to help the managers throughout the organization build leaders and careers.”
Some might disagree with this assessment, because Welch also is known for creating the infamous 20-70-10 employee assessment plan (known by its critics as “rank and yank”), where the top 20 percent of GE’s workforce each year got a big raise, while the bottom 10 percent was shown the door. In fact, Welch was frequently critical of HR, as former GE human resources vice president Bill Conaty points out. But Conaty also details how the former GE chief exec was intimately involved in all manner of HR issues.
No matter how much Welch’s appearance is costing, or what he actually says, I think it is money well spent. And if SHRM is really on the ball, they’ll make sure they tout his HR insight and credentials. In fact, it might actually be something to get people to come out and attend the SHRM conference in New Orleans and perhaps slow the downward slide in attendance.
I could be wrong about this, of course. It’s entirely possible that no single speaker or performer—not Jack Welch, Sheryl Crow or even President Barack Obama—could get people to change their minds about attending SHRM in New Orleans, given the realities of the current economy. What do you think about this? I’d like to know if you are going to attend SHRM in June, or perhaps are now considering doing so, and why. Just post a comment at the end of this blog or e-mail me directly at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll share any thoughts I get in a future blog post.
If you appreciate really good business books—the ones that are truly insightful, inspirational and demand that you keep them close at hand—a title like The 100 Best Business Books of All Time pretty much hits you over the head and says, “Read me!”But I’ve been disappointed in books like this before, as I noted last summer when I reviewed another title that claimed it had compiled lessons from “the best management books of all time.” That certainly was a wild overstatement, but pretty much par for the course when you get an author (or two) with a limited or narrow view of business and management.
I have a surefire way to spot a book like that, and it’s simple: Look to see how the authors feel about Peter Drucker. If you have studied or understand business much at all, you certainly know that Drucker is considered to be the father of modern business management. Any book that purports to be a collection of the greatest business writing ever needs to have something by Drucker. If it doesn’t mention him at all, it’s a good indication that the authors/editors don’t have the foggiest notion of what constitutes great business thinking. You should close the book as quickly as possible.
That’s why I feel I can recommend, with a few reservations, The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s list includes not one, but two Peter Drucker classics: The Effective Executive and The Essential Drucker (but, oddly enough, not his best and most groundbreaking book, The Practice of Management). Any business book compilation that lists two from Drucker has immediate credibility with me.
There are other pluses, and few minuses, that I found in The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Some of them include:
Plus: Listing a Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, as one of top 100 business books. Some might quibble with this, but that just shows they haven’t actually read much by Dr. Seuss. He’s full of great observations and lessons about both business and life, but I actually think the better Dr. Seuss title in this regard is the underrated but insightful I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
Minus: Throwing in not one, but two Marcus Buckingham titles: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Given that Buckingham essentially says the same thing Drucker did about playing to strengths and not weaknesses, why would you read Buckingham when you can get it from the master instead?
Plus: Including such modern titles as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Leading Change by John Kotter and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni along with all-time classics such as Dale Carenegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Winston Churchill’s Never Give In!
Minuses: Missing some great books such as Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule, DisneyWar by James B. Stewart or anything by Harvard professor Michael Porter, who wrote the Five Forces of Strategy and Competitive Advantage (although the authors mentioned some of Porter’s Harvard Business Review articles instead).
Overall, I’d give The 100 Best Business Book of All Time a B-plus. It’s a good book to help you get a sense of what great business thinking is, but it has some flaws. And maybe in the real world, that’s about as good is it gets.
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pretty much hits you over the head and says, “Read me!”But I’ve been disappointed in books like this before, as I noted last summer 
