In honor of the Bastille Day on Tuesday, July 14, and the fact that the French manage to work less (and gripe more about work) than just about any other country in the industrialized world, here are some workforce odds and ends for you to ponder:

• Jack Welch at SHRM, plus eight: Never mind that Jack Welch spoke to the Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in New Orleans more than a week ago, and that his talk has been widely reported by the small army of journalists, bloggers and Twitter users who attended (including yours truly). No, never mind all that because what Neutron Jack had to say isn’t news until The Wall Street Journal says it is news, as it did Monday when the newspaper finally reported on his speech a full eight days late.

The Journal’s better-late-than-never hook to the Welch speech is that the former General Electric CEO had “some blunt words for women climbing the corporate ladder: You may have to choose between taking time off to raise children and reaching the corner office. ‘There’s no such thing as work-life balance,’ Welch told the SHRM conference June 28. ‘There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.’ ”

That may sound like big news to The Wall Street Journal, but frankly, I’ve heard Welch talk about that before in other speeches, and although I mentioned it in my blog post on his SHRM speech the day he said it, it didn’t strike me then, just as it doesn’t strike me now, as the big deal that the Journal made it out to be. In my book, this is simply the Journal trying to play catch-up when they are a week late and several dollars short.

• RIP, talent-shortage hype: Remember all the overblown blather about the great talent shortage we were going to have due to the retirement of the baby boomer generation en masse? I had fun on numerous occasions skewering that silly piece of conventional wisdom (starting back in 2007), and I keep finding more and more evidence that older workers are hanging on to their jobs as long as they can.

Here’s the latest: a study by Golden Gateway Financial that shows that the number of respondents who planned to retire before age 70 dropped from 67 percent before the financial crisis to 40 percent today. Yes, you can point to the recession as a big reason for this, but as I pointed out on several occasions, baby boomers were headed this way even before the economic downturn. It’s just another reason why boomers are so hard to get a good handle on, especially when it comes to workforce planning.

• Public hirings and firings are a difficult business: It’s always tough working as a major-league coach or manager, and part of it is from the very open process in which these executives get hired and, usually, fired. Just this week, Washington Nationals manager Manny Acta got canned, and his departure, although public, lacked some of the fireworks and histrionics  I’ve written about before.

It’s one of the reasons why big-league managers and coaches get compensated as well as they do (although not nearly as well as most CEOs). Few have the career success that guys like Phil Jackson achieve, so for most major-league managers, the nice pay is simply some upfront compensation for the public abuse that inevitably comes when that day of public reckoning finally arrives.

So RIP, Manny Acta. Too bad your big-league managerial career wasn’t longer, but it could have been worse: You could have been employed and fired by Al Davis.

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I’ve been busy with the SHRM conference in New Orleans this past week, so here are a few leftover July Fourth fireworks for you to ponder over the long holiday weekend:

• Good fallout from the recession—workplace jerks have gone into hiding. I don’t know if I believe this entirely, but Joe Queenan made this point in this week’s Wall Street Journal, and it is an intriguing one. Here’s the gist of his argument:

“Jerks are annoying, but they aren’t stupid,” he writes. “They know that first-class nitwits make mouth-watering targets for human resource officers with layoff quotas. The office jerk has not disappeared. He is merely hiding in the hills. One day, he will come down from the mountains and wreak havoc again.”

And, Queenan feels that the jerks-in-hiding dynamic is actually one of the really good things coming out of the economic downturn.

“The grim specter of the return of the office jerk is perhaps the only reason some of us wish this recession goes on for a while,” he writes. “At least that way, some of the more odious office jerks will have a chance to get run over by a truck or start writing a blog. The solitary blogger is unquestionably a jerk, but a self-employed jerk is a threat to no one.”

Hmmm … I think I may have encountered a couple of these solitary blogger/jerks at SHRM in New Orleans. You know who you are. And yes, I’m with Queenan that the self-employed jerk is a good thing for workplace harmony everywhere.

• Prospects for SHRM San Diego 2010—it will New Orleans deja vu all over again. I predicted many months ago that events like SHRM’s big annual conference were likely to see up to a 50 percent drop in attendees this year given the tough economy, and although I hate to say it, my forecasting was right on the money. (Shows you what a pricey MBA can do, I guess.)

So, here’s an early prediction for SHRM 2010 in San Diego next June: Don’t bet on attendance to be any better than 2009 in New Orleans. In fact, it may actually be a little bit worse.

Why do I think this? Overriding Reason No. 1 is because we will soon be going into the budget season for businesses and organizations planning for 2010, and given the lackluster unemployment numbers that came out today, it is clear that we aren’t going to be out of the woods with this recession for a while.

This means that companies will continue to hold tight on discretionary travel for events like the SHRM conference for another year, at least.

Overriding Reason No. 2 is that SHRM 2010 is in San Diego.

This bugs the hell out of us West Coasters, but people living east of Denver get all worked up about long trips to the Pacific Time Zone. This is more perception than reality, of course, but my educated guess is that there will be a lot of would-be SHRM attendees who will opt out simply because they think San Diego is just too far to travel to.

Of course, the SHRM pooh-bahs who plan this big annual event may be able to have some impact on San Diego attendance if they heed some of the big lessons from New Orleans as it applies to speakers, but like all things with SHRM, I’m not holding my breath.

 • “Workplace From Hell” story, July Fourth edition. If there is one workplace you don’t want to work at today it is United Airlines, where they had a computer meltdown at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

Now, I used to be a mega-frequent flier on United, but their service and customer experience has absolutely gone in the toilet the last few years. I don’t fly them much anymore, so I can’t say this with 100 percent certainty, but my guess is that today—leading into a long holiday weekend with a major computer glitch at its biggest hub—is a day that neither United workers nor customers will soon forget. Great fireworks for a happy Independence Day, indeed.

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I mentioned this briefly in my latest Last Word column from here in New Orleans, but really, SHRM hit the right mark with its speaker lineup at this year’s annual conference. SHRM was both good AND lucky.

First, the lucky: Everyone lucked out when former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw had to bail out of the conference for a reporting trip to Afghanistan (no beignets in Kabul, I’m afraid), and that opened the door for former General Electric CEO Jack Welch to step right in.

This isn’t a slam on Brokaw, but rather, an acknowledgment that the Society for Human Resource Management’s big-money opening-session speakers have traditionally been long on star power but short on business acumen, or advice specific to human resource professionals. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: As much as I believe that Brokaw would have had some interesting things to say, his keynote would probably have followed the pattern set by Queen Noor, Bill Cosby, Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell and Sidney Poitier. They were interesting in the broad sense, but completely and totally divorced from anything specific that HR faces.

Jack Welch changed all of that, of course, and I would be shocked if he doesn’t set the standard for all SHRM Sunday speakers for years to come. A pox on SHRM’s house if the people who program this mega-event don’t hear the message from their membership on this, loud and clear. Once they’ve seen and heard the bark of Neutron Jack, they won’t willingly go back to the sweet stylings of Queen Noor.

As I also noted recently, the other top-line speakers were equally impressive. I didn’t hear Earl Graves Sr., the founder and publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, on Monday, but that’s only because I’ve had 30 years of hearing publishers jabber in my ear. I couldn’t voluntarily submit to listening to yet another one, although I heard that Graves spent a lot of time talking about the legacy of HR in the civil rights struggle. I’ll bet it was pretty interesting.

Tuesday’s speaker was Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, and although I have heard him many times before, I forgot some of the good stuff—like his account of entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash winning over somewhat snooty Harvard MBA students with her business smarts and ability to read an audience.

 Like Welch, Kotter was pragmatic, although a little broader in his material. Still, hearing about leadership and change from a guy who has written 17 books on the subject (when does he find time to teach?) is something HR people really need.

I’m going to miss Wednesday speaker Lee Woodruff (author of best-seller In an Instant); I’ll be back at Workforce Management world headquarters in California. But the choice of Woodruff reinforces my point that this has been one of the strongest overall SHRM speaker lineups in years. And with Tuesday night’s musical guest, Sheryl Crow, the best musical choice in quite some time too. (Sorry, Hall & Oates.)

So here’s the big question: Will SHRM’s brain trust figure out that they made some good choices this year, but also lucked out with Jack Welch? Will they heed what everyone is saying here in New Orleans and tailor the Sunday speaker to the audience, or will they revert back to the old ways next year in San Diego?

I am praying for the former, but fearing the latter.
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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.

How hot, you may ask? Here’s what the New Orleans Times-Picayune says: It will be street-melting hot.

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.”

There are a lot of great things to do in New Orleans, as I noted in my Last Word column from this week’s Workforce Management SHRM 2009 Conference Planning Guide, but it’s possible that the heat and humidity may actually prompt HR professionals to sit through a lot more sessions and conference activities inside the air-conditioned Morial Convention Center.

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.

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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.

This doesn’t bode well for some of the other large HR-related conferences later this spring, such as the IHRIM Technology conference in San Diego this month, and both the WorldatWork Total Rewards gathering in Seattle and the ASTD Conference and Exhibition in Washington at the end of May. I expect similar attendance drops at all of these traditionally well-attended HR industry events.

Of course, SHRM’s annual conference in New Orleans at the end of June is already bracing for a lot fewer attendees this year than last year’s event in Chicago, and I’m afraid that not even Jack Welch as a keynote speaker can help with that.

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.

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