Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

No doubt, the organizers of the Society of Human Resources [SHRM] 63rd Annual Conference will tell you that their shindigs take a lot of advance planning. One assumes that includes their choice of venue, this year in Las Vegas.

Unable to substantiate my suspicions that the decision to congregate in the Mecca of smoke and mirrors had something to do with “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” I shall refrain from speculating that, if not that, perhaps some polyester PR plonker persuaded SHRM’s leadership that there is no better place to engage the dissenting voices going ga-ga for transparency than on the Vegas Strip. Where better to make a show of it!

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The Future of Work examines the challenges to conventional notions of work and organization brought on by new digital technologies and trends. As the velocity of change increases, institutions and individuals must adapt. Yet many structures, including those in education, government, business and the economy, often remain rooted in the past.

The report captures the insights of the Nineteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, where business leaders, technologists, international politicians, academics and innovators explored how global structures and institutions are being confronted by the 21st century realities of distributed knowledge, crowdsourcing, open platforms and networked environments.

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In reply to John Sullivan’s recent come-to-Jesus diatribe, Five Ugly Numbers That You Can’t Ignore – It’s Time to Calculate Hiring Failures on ERE.net, John Sumser now asks on HR Examiner: “Why not give the whole problem over to the training folks?”

For starters, I’m not sure changing scapegoats addresses the underlying problem.  There really is very little difference between abdicating responsibility to trainers for recruiting excellence — or whatever standard we used to aspire to — to  expecting “recruiters” to stop buckling under the weight of a hiring manager’s passed buck.

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‘The See-Through CEO’ » Amitai Givertz’s Blogversity Blog

Wired posts The See-Through CEO that explores the advantage corporate top-dogs gain from understanding and managing transparency as a strategic tool. The article weighs the pros and cons of radical transparency — as questionable a term as “totally honest” as if to suggest there are degrees of integrity — and cites some examples worth thinking about.

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Posted on Bells & Whistles:

I was lucky to be introduced to Laurence Haughton a couple of weeks ago. Laurence is the author of two books which have received enthusiastic reviews It’s Not What You Say… It’s What You Do – How Following Through at Every Level Can Make or Break Your Company and It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small… It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow – How to use speed as a competitive tool in business. I have added both titles to my bookshelf and you should add them to yours too.

Read it here.

As I read Jeff’s Hunter’ Talentism post Is Transparency Worth It? I find myself wondering why, having already complained of having a headache contemplating such things, he wants to take me into migraine territory.  Jeff Hunter quotes Jonathan Schwartz who is the CEO of Sun Microsystems – a blogger – noting that transparency for this CEO is not as problematic as it could be for some us given that he has little to lose with an authentically naked conversation.  After all, Sun Microsystems has been in the pits of late so what does Jonathan Shwartz have to lose with his transparency blogalogue?  To the contrary, Jeff Hunter argues he has much to gain. He goes on to say:

“I am still searching for an example of being “too transparent” costing someone a company, where there are many examples of lack of transparency (or “being caught in a lie”) doing a lot of damage.”

Well, needless to say, I can’t think of an example where being too transparent cost someone a company either, but then again, I do have a migraine dammit! And, as for “being caught in a lie” and “doing a lot of damage” let’s consider for a moment the scandal de jour.

Ex-U.S. Congressman Mark Foley is demonstrating the cynical side of transparency, coming to full disclosure late in the game. Mark Foley resigned his office in disgrace over his sexually explicit text messages to underage boys, confusing the roles of Congressional Page with Washington call boy.  In damage control mode, Mark Foley is now being very open about his homosexuality – not a crime – and is sharing with the whole world his struggle with alcoholism, made worse by the unresolved emotional fallout resulting from his own being manhandled as a boy by a priest. Sound familiar?

In reply to Jeff Hunter’s post, one wonders how this type of “transparency” would have advanced the politician’s career had he made these revelations on his resume, before being labeled as a hypocrite and corrupt pervert. If Mark Foley had made his problems known up-front perhaps the resulting debate would have led to a more constructive outcome with the possibility of our being sympathetic, not as we are now, disgusted.  But of course, that would not have been possible would it? Who wants an emotional wreck – another drunk – at the seat of government?

Being “too transparent” – drawing a parallel between the ambitions and power plays in business and politics, as illustrated here – can be a decidedly bad thing. True, coming clean after the fact makes the offense seem more pathetic than sinister and one could argue there was some authenticity in Mark Foley’s decision to resign on-the-spot, without creating an even bigger circus of the whole affair but really, at this point, who cares?

The connection here may be tenuous, I accept that.  My question is, is there not a time and a place for everything, including transparency?

I have had a number of conversations in recent days about authenticity and transparency and evangelism and corporate blogging and the human condition. I have to admit, these things rattle around my cranium causing me to have a headache, raising more questions than answers. How these converging and sometimes colliding concepts are being applied – talent management, marketing communications and selling, the points of intersection for me – is interesting but not quite understood yet.  Trying to reconcile the absurdity of all this hypothesizing with the working realities we face every day leads me to wonder how I will ever translate these value propositions into deliverables, actions that count for something in my world – productivity and profit, self-actualization. I guess I should just get on with it, right?

Creating the impression of being more self-assured than I am, I get by winging it: transparency this, authentic that, accountability up, turnover down, this one’s in, that one’s out, yada, yada, yada… Hardly real is it, creating an impression that you might be in the know and then winging it. You would think my er-um speech and fidgety behavior would give away my discomfort fluffing it with the experts who champion such lofty things. Amazingly, some acknowledge me as one of the initiated. Others, too polite to tell me that they see right through my highfalutin tootin’, stop returning calls. How transparent is that?

Even so, when we talk about the new paradigm for business and talent management – without quite grasping what it all means and how it might all work – it is because we want to believe that there is more to our dealings than the routine chicanery, the marketing spin, the misleading sales tactics, and the shark-chumming that we have somehow confused with best-practice, deal making and winning the war for talent. If that desire alone is not enough to advance the agenda, the bubbling of transparency and authenticity among our leaders, vaporizing in conversation and online, amounts to nothing more than reflux.

Of course, all these confessions affect my personal brand don’t they? At least I have come to realize the therapeutic benefits of this openness. I am mildly amused that my being so uninhibited and honest – about faking for example – is, in of itself, quintessentially authentic, doing my brand good. But then again, I might be kidding myself or worse, you might think I’m kidding you – like one of those synthetic blogger types – unwittingly unravelling any good this baring of my soul might have done. Ouch! That would be awful, wouldn’t it?

So there you are, there you have it. How much more transparent could you want me to be? If my being upfront with you in this candid and reflective way does not make up for my being poorly versed in the new lingo of naked conversations, forgive me, do.

The 25th Annual Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon weekend will be happening soon. The three-day weekend through October 1st is a festival of fitness and life. It includes lots of activities for children, fat people, fit people and the truly athletic among us – runners who can cover 26 miles of city streets without dropping down dead at the finish line. Now, to the casual viewer watching the six o’clock local news, or thumbing through the Star Tribune, one could easily overlook this annual event as another local happening that marks the changing seasons, feeding the human-interest stories local news media needs to balance the reports of mothers cradling dead babies in places far, far away. The Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon is a call to the community to participate in the beauty of being a community. It is both a celebration of life and metaphor for business.

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In a recently published article Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Forbes comments on the looming talent crunch for CEOs and other big-chiefs as if that is something we should be particularly concerned about. While the situation described by Forbes should give us pause for concern, I believe the shortage of nurses and teachers and welders may have greater social impact over time than the anticipated contraction among Forbes’ readership. That said, as a potential advertiser in Forbes I do read the article with some alarm.

There are over 70 million American baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964. Based on this fact, more than 40% of the U.S. labor force will reach the traditional retirement age by 2010. Contrast this with the number of workers between the ages of 35 to 44 – expected to shrivel by another 7% over this period – and the failure of our education system to produce the skill sets anticipated to be in most demand like technical, engineering, CEOs and so on – and we can begin to see a picture emerging post 2010 – interestingly the year beyond which the U.S. Department of Labor has been unable to forecast with any regularity – where technocrats, leaders and cronies are the only ones who can enjoy the comforts of modern society. Not unlike Russia during its Soviet heyday, or North Korea today perhaps. While this might sound alarmist, consider the implications of what the well-worn phrase “talent shortage” actually means. Unless Mexico has a trick up her sleeve secretly producing the next generation of CEOs to do the jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, then manicured lawns and fresh-picked tomatoes may become a thing of the past as we struggle with a general economic implosion.

Another esteemed publication widely read along the corridors of power and in executive bathrooms worldwide is the Economist. They have partnered with self-appointed thought leaders DDI and just published a coffee table how-to, The CEO’s Role in Talent Management. Reading the perennial gloom forecast in the Spherion Emerging Workforce Study as a primer, one hopes that in their last few years on the job, today’s CEOs can finally figure out what they should have done eons ago.