Should CHROs be in charge of innovation?

I argued in a recent article that the Chief People Officer needed to own the organization’s automation strategy. The idea was to contribute to the company’s growth capacity while compensating for the inevitable cost cutting that the first wave of IPA will bring about. However, he should not walk alone: to succeed in this endeavour, he should also leverage Talent and L&D strategies to favour innovation.

CEO agenda for 2014 : build the management dashboard for your soon-to-be digital organization

The digital technologies that are slowly invading each step in the value chain of our corporations will transform what it means to lead and to manage them. Incumbent leaders would do well to take a deep, hard look at how digital technologies are transforming their corporation and then understand what new breed of talent they should develop to master this revolution.

Professional communities and the pace of time

Acceleration, by Hartmund Rosa, should be compulsory reading in business school, and it was actually recommended to me by the CEO of a client.

Hartmund Rosa defines three causes for acceleration, technological acceleration, social change acceleration and acceleration of the pace of life. These are major trends, and even though they are some times softened by havens or deceleration (relative deceleration), they are trends that corporations need to cope with to compete in an increasingly social market (I am using compete in a positive way, like in compete to provide the best customer experience ...).

Put it in another way, leaders must ensure their company moves faster than any other if they are to survive.

But acceleration is also, and foremost, a dangerous trend. I tend to think of it alongside other trends like the second economy or the third economy. It is already producing some frightening results, and the existing business mindset, without deep changes, will only make things worse.

There is reason to be optimistic though. Michael Fauscette writes in Enterprise Irregulars that community building is the major initiative for 2013, in the social technology field. This is important. Because communities are one of the few spaces where time is deep. In fact, communities can accelerate time around them while providing a slow conversation space, a somehow protected environment, where relationships, genuine caring, subject interest, shared responsibility, mutual trust, provide the virtual equivalent of the ancient British Clubs ... Communities are the new people-centric environments, where people have the possibility to reclaim mastery of time.

Which reminds me of a great insight from my friend Alain Garnier, "social technologies are moving the focus of work from space to time".

What I am more concerned about is how companies will manage to develop the community managers (I prefer host or owner, or the French "animateur") in their existing HR processes. The only answer I have today, I have called it unleadeship.

The year we kill social business

Social Business (or #socbizz in Twitter) has reached buzzword status. If you want to live by the ambitions that were behind it, you probably need to kill it.

Dreams (and nightmares) of an HR leader

HR Officers need to jump on the driving seat (or committee) of major technology projects (HRIS ones, but also social business, big data, mobility and even BI). Otherwise, they might loose their influence or even worse, their soul, in the next few years.

Future of organizational development: framing for a learning experience

If HR is to assume a leading role in the next generation, social, organization, it should lead the way in framing the working & learning environment that will allow the emergence of meaningful learning and working patterns within this organization.

This next generation, social, enterprise builds upon external trends, as it is now commonly admitted that the social web is opening new horizons for business organizations, from user experience (consumerization of IT) to new learning models (social learning). By understanding the inner workings of this social web and successfully adapting them to the specific goals and constraints of business organizations, HR has yet another opportunity to reinvent itself and the way it impacts organization and talent development.

Unleadership

If we are serious and ambitious in our drive to transform our organizations into next generation social enterprises (or social businesses), we need to unlearn most of what we think we knew about leadership, and focus our R&D efforts on next generation leadership.