Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
Business trends discusses the implications of economics, employment, mergers, acquisitions, and regulatory changes on talent, leadership, recruitment, and human resources issues.
I just finished reading the Congressional Final Committee Report of the Boeing 737 MAX and it’s quite a story (I marked it up for you to read.) It contains many lessons in leadership, so let me offer some thoughts.
First, for many decades Boeing has been an engineering icon. When I graduated from ... Read more»
What have companies done to respond to the pandemic? Here’s the answer: today we launch the first in a series of research studies on The Big Reset. We call it The Big Reset Playbook. 
This report summarizes more than 200 hours of interviews, in-depth case studies, and group discussions with 600 companies around ... Read more»
I’ve been watching US Labor Productivity data for over a decade and for many years after the 2008 meltdown found it lagging. We struggled to rebuild our companies after the financial crisis and many of the new “labor-saving” ideas (digital tools, organizational transformation, automation) were not increasing output per hour worked. In fact, labor productivity ... Read more»
This week EdCast joins the list of vendors who announced products for intelligent talent mobility, career pathing, skills matching, and talent marketplace. It’s a big move by Edcast (putting them directly in the mix with Workday, Gloat, Degreed, Fuel50, Eightfold.ai, and others), but it also points to something bigger: the market for talent management ... Read more»
It’s August, we’ve been dealing with the pandemic for almost six months, and a few things are becoming very clear. Let me share four lessons you may not have considered. And this week I put this into a podcast, which I hope you enjoy.
1. Tech has been the savior of this crisis.
In fact, ... Read more»
I have been loving TikTok for quite a while. Not only is it entertaining, positive, and fun to use – it demonstrates a groundbreaking new design, one that clearly works well (800 million users!). And while you may think the company is a bunch of hackers, that’s not true. ByteDance is a sophisticated ... Read more»
One of the hottest tech companies in the world is ServiceNow. The company’s Q2 earnings were a barnbuster (30% YTY growth, 40 deals over $1M, and now running at a $4B annual subscription runrate – at a 97% renewal rate). The stock is now trading at 23 times sales (more than twice the multiple ... Read more»
This week SAP, which is now worth nearly $200B, decided to spin off its $8 Billion acquisition of Qualtrics, which happened less than two years ago. Why? Here’s what’s going on.
First, under SAP’s ownership, Qualtrics has been growing like a rocket.
Today SAP sales teams all over the world sell and embed ... Read more»
One of the biggest problems we face is the challenge of Fatigue. And Fatigue has an impact on the Pandemic, our relationships, and our work.
The Pandemic has been going on for almost six months, many of our cities are slipping backward in infection, and the political system in most countries is dysfunctional. Here in ... Read more»
It’s a strange time. A recent poll of 2,000 Americans found that only 5% believe things are “going well” and 40% believe they’re “going badly.” And new research by Towers Watson shows that employees are more stressed about health and financial security than ever.
But in the middle of all this, another trend has emerged: ... Read more»
Over the last several months we have all been going through a lot of change. Our lives, families, and organizations have been disrupted. The economy has seen the biggest drop since the 1920s. And our companies have had to totally re-engineer how we lead, manage, and support our people.
And one of the biggest questions ... Read more»
As we enter the fourth month of the global Pandemic, it’s becoming clear that The Big Reset is real. Society is changing in some positive ways. Let me give you a list of ten to think about.
(We have been conducting in-depth meetings with more than 150 HR leaders around the world and we are ... Read more»
We all know the unemployment rate is very high. Overall nearly 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment this year (roughly 1/4 of the workforce), and while some have gone back to work, most stores and offices are still not fully open. But it’s important to know the “rate,” because policymakers and business leaders ... Read more»
I want to tell a story about an entrepreneur, and in the process tell you the story of an industry: the industry of online learning.
It All Started in 1998
The Netscape Browser was launched in 1994, and within four years (1998) a cottage industry of online learning had begun. Internet bandwidth was spotty, video ... Read more»
As violent and asymmetric as the pandemic has been, we’ve had a lot of conversations about the positives. People are spending more time with their families, business leaders are more empathetic, and companies are trying harder than ever to create a safe and financially healthy workplace.
Well this week we take a step backwards, and ... Read more»
