Leave it to our friends at the Society for Human Resource Management to take something simple and straightforward and make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Every year after its annual June conference, SHRM blasts out an e-mail touting the best-sellers at the SHRM bookstore from the most recent conference. I wrote about it here last year, noting: “They say you can tell a lot about a person by the books they read. If that’s true, what does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in Las Vegas tell you about the HR professional in the 21st century?”

It was a simple and straightforward list (SHRM also sends an annual list in December), and I leave it to readers to decide what to make of it.

Well, the 2008 book list is out from the SHRM conference last month in Chicago, but rather than simply listing the top-selling books (unranked) as they have in the past, SHRM has added this little caveat at the top of this year’s list: “Following are just some of (emphasis added) the top selling books, software, videos and accessories at this year’s Annual Conference event in Chicago, IL.”

I get adding software and videos to the list, but releasing a list of the “Top Sellers from the SHRM Annual Conference” (as their e-mail touts) that is only a partial list is just plain silly. What genius at SHRM thought this approach would work? It’s just another (albeit small and stupid) example of how all too often, SHRM is focused on the wrong things.

At any rate, here is the top-selling book list from the SHRM Chicago conference, partial or not. And my admonition from last year still applies: There’s some kind of message here; can you figure it out?

Effective Succession Planning—Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent from Within, by William J. Rothwell

Auditing Your Human Resources Department: A Step-by-Step Guide, by John H. McConnell

Create Your Own Employee Handbook—A Legal and Practical Guide, by Lisa Guerin and Amy Delpo

New Employee Orientation Training, by Karen Lawson

Performance Essentials in the Workplace—A Guidebook to Inspire Action and Improve Results, by Steve Gilliland

Human Resource Management (textbook), by John H. Jackson and Robert L. Mathis

Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable … About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, by Patrick M. Lencioni*

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, by Patrick M. Lencioni*

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees), by Patrick M. Lencioni*

New Supervisor Training (ASTD Trainers Workshop Series), by John Jones and Chris W. Chen

Perfect Phrases For Managers & Supervisors—Hundreds of Ready-to-Use Phrases for Any Management Situation, by Meryl Runion

Silos, Politics & Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors, by Patrick M. Lencioni*

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

Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers, by Karen Berman,  Joe Knight and John Case

How to Measure Human Resource Management, by Jack Fitz-enz

The Essential Guide to Family & Medical Leave, by Lisa Guerin and Deborah C. England

Employee Opinion Questionnaires: 20 Ready-to-Use Surveys That Work, by Paul M. Connolly and Kathleen G. Connolly

High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job, by Victoria A. Hoevemeyer

PHR and SPHR Certification Guide, by Raymond B. Weinberg

Perfect Phrases for Performance Reviews: Hundreds of Ready-to-Use Phrases That Describe Your Employees’ Performance, by Douglas Max and Robert Bacal

Ask the Right Questions, Hire the Best People, by Ron Fry

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

Employment Law Answer Book, by Mark R. Filipp

*Editor’s note: Patrick Lencioni gave a keynote speech followed by a book-signing session at the SHRM Chicago conference in June.

I’ve been on the road for the past week, so my apologies for being away from the blog during that time. Here are some interesting surveys that came across my desk while I was gone.

Soft skills rock:A recent poll of hiring managers by OfficeTeam, HR.com and the International Association of Administrative Professionals says that 67 percent of hiring managers say they would hire an applicant with strong “soft” skills even if their technical skills were lacking. However, only 9 percent say they would hire someone with strong tech skills but weak interpersonal skills. In addition, 93 percent of hiring managers felt that technical skills are easier to teach than soft skills. The point—and it’s true of everyone in the workforce, from administrative staff up to high-level executives—is that the ability to work collaboratively trumps all else. Technical skills are nice, but they don’t do much good if you can’t work with others.

Outsourcing still an issue: Global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas note that there is a growing trend toward greater outsourcing of work in the financial services industry. Writing about the recently announced merger between European banking giants ABN AMRO and Barclays, John Challenger says that “in addition to the 12,800 jobs the combined banks plan to eliminate, the banks announced that 10,800 [jobs] would be ‘moved offshore to low-cost locations.’ This comes just two weeks after Citigroup announced it would be eliminating 17,000 jobs and outsourcing an additional 9,500 jobs to low-cost locations inside and outside of the United States.” He adds: “The issue of outsourcing has fallen off the national radar over the last couple of years. … However, as the recent banking announcements prove, outsourcing is still a significant tool among corporations seeking to cut costs.”

A sobering prospect: Need another indicator that the gloom-and-doom talk of huge worker shortages is just overblown rhetoric? A survey by Bankrate.com says that nearly one in five workers “plan to work until death.” Wonder why that is? Well, the poll also found that 28 percent of those surveyed save less than 5 percent of their gross pay a year. This includes 16 percent of Americans who acknowledge that “they are not putting any of their paycheck aside for retirement.” If you ever questioned the need for automatically putting employees into 401(k) plans and other self-funded retirement vehicles, this poll should cure you of that.