One of the great treats of the summer is when I open my e-mail to find the list of best-selling books from the SHRM store at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference.

It’s not because I love book lists or what they’re selling at the SHRM store. No, I love the annual SHRM store conference book list because it gives me an opportunity to see yet again how the people at SHRM who put out this list can continue to water down what was once a useful comparative tool and muck it up by not ranking the annual best-sellers and by also throwing in stuff like top-selling software and videos. (Videos? Did they miss the move to DVD?)

My guess is that they do it because they don’t like lists that allow readers to compare and contrast what people are reading from one year to the next, and perhaps make a few assumptions and draw some conclusions.

That’s probably why SHRM has watered down the summer list of best-sellers from the annual conference, although this year they’ve removed the caveat from last summer (these are “just some of the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories at this year’s Annual Conference”) and now simply say that they are listing “the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories from this year’s Annual Conference SHRMStore in New Orleans, LA.”

So, I present here again this year, without further comment, the best-sellers at the SHRM bookstore from the recent conference. And, as I always say, you can tell a lot by the books a person buys. If you agree, what does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s SHRM New Orleans tell you about the HR profession during the summer of the Great Recession?

• Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success—and Won’t Let You Fail, by Keith Ferrazzi

• 101 Tough Conversations to Have With Employees: A Manager’s Guide to Addressing Performance, Conduct and Discipline Challenges, by Paul Falcone

• Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro

• Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice, and Competitive Advantage, by William H. Macey, Benjamin Schneider, Karen M. Barbera and Scott A. Young

• Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz

• 101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems, by Paul Falcone

• Management Courage: Having the Heart of a Lion, by Margaret Morford

• The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness, by Dave Ramsey

• The Essential Guide to Workplace Investigations: How to Handle Employee Complaints & Problems, by Lisa Guerin

• New Employee Orientation Training, by Karen Lawson

• Booher’s Rules of Business Grammar: 101 Fast and Easy Ways to Correct the Most Common Errors, by Dianna Booher

• How to Deal With Annoying People: What to Do When You Can’t Avoid Them, by Bob Phillips and Kimberly Alyn

• Please Sue Me: The Guide to Safe Hiring and Firing Practices for the Frontline Manager With a Short Attention Span, by Hunter Lott

• State-by-State Guide to Human Resources Law 2009, by John F. Buckley

• Linkage Inc.’s Best Practices in Succession Planning, by Linkage Inc.

• Auditing Your Human Resources Department, by John H. McConnell

• Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability), by David Marcum and Steven Smith

• The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance, by Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, and Dave Ulrich

• Leave the Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time … and Feel Great About It, by Laura Stack

• Loyalty Unplugged: How to Get, Keep & Grow All Four Generations, by Adwoa K. Buahene and Giselle Kovary

• 2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases That Really Get Results, by Paul Falcone

• The Personal Credibility Factor: How to Get It, Keep It, and Get It Back (If You’ve Lost It), by Sandy Allgeier

• What If? Short Stories to Spark Diversity Dialogue, by Steve L. Robbins

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

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.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

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.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

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.
Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

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.
Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.