Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
As we enter a heated political period, I’m left with a simple and important idea. When an organization sacrifices its values, it tends to suffer over time.
How, for example, did Boeing sacrifice its values of engineering to void its safety culture? I’m sure it was a lot of small “profit-centered” decisions that ultimately resulted ... Read more»
This week UKG announced a layoff of approximately 2100 people (out of 15,000) in a strategic move to focus on even larger growth opportunities. As AI sweeps the technology industry, I think we’ll see more of this to come. And only a few days later, Intuit announced the layoff of 1,800 people, explaining the ... Read more»
This week, ServiceNow held their annual user conference with more than 22,000 IT and technology professionals, and they announced some significant enhancements to their strategy. ServiceNow’s goal is to integrate the enterprise with a new layer of workflow software that can connect anything to anything, and then give employees, customers, and leaders access to information ... Read more»
Each year I pour through the World Happiness Report and this year it’s particularly insightful, so let me interpret some of the results.
First, the US happiness ranking (1-10 scale) dropped to #23, a full 13% below Finland, the happiest country in the world. And this is disappointing. Over the last 15 years the level ... Read more»
The American economy has transformed itself. Covid-19 was first identified in January of 2020, four years ago. And despite the peak unemployment of 14.7% in Spring of that year, the US economy is now booming. Here’s the evidence:
Bloomberg reports that 80% of the S&P 500 Index companies reported earnings above plan, exceeding the ten ... Read more»
This week we witnessed one of the most amazing business stories in years. Meta announced a 22% reduction in headcount coupled with a 25% increase in revenue, resulting in a net income of $14 Billion, up 203% from the year before. This means Meta, a $160+ billion company, is generating 35% net profit after ... Read more»
For the last two decades I’ve written about HR predictions, but this year is different. I see a year of shattering paradigms, changing every role in business. Not only will AI change every company and every job, but companies will embark on a relentless search for productivity.
Think about where we have been. Following ... Read more»
In this podcast I recap 2023 and discuss the big stories for 2024, and to me this year is a tipping point that changes business forever. Why do I say this? Because we’re entering a world of labor shortages, redesign of our companies, and business transformation driven by AI. We’ll look back on 2024 and ... Read more»
As we learn more and more about corporate implementations of AI, I’m struck by how they feel more like traditional IT projects every day.
Yes, Generative AI systems have many special characteristics: they’re intelligent, we need to train them, and they have radical and transformational impact on users. And the back-end processing is expensive.
But ... Read more»
We just completed a large study of the 4-day work week and the results are clear. Under the right conditions it really works. And the results are very positive: improvements in employee health and wellbeing, increases in productivity, and overall improvement in revenue, profit, and customer service.
Wait a minute. Are you actually saying that ... Read more»
As many of you know, HR professionals play a vital, complex, and constantly changing role in business. These 30 million professionals hold more than 250 job roles and leverage over 400 skills to help companies with all aspects of management: recruiting, development, leadership, coaching, diversity, pay, benefits, hybrid work, and more. And they must also ... Read more»
Every day we read about an iconic company that’s falling behind. This year it’s Disney, Nike, and Nokia, but over the years we’ve seen hundreds of innovators fail to adapt to change. I remember when Digital Equipment eclipsed IBM, only later to fall into disrepair and be acquired by Compaq, who was then acquired by ... Read more»
There are lots of economists waiting for the labor market to “cool,” enabling unemployment to rise and inflation to slow. Yet despite these projections, unemployment remains at a 45 year low and it’s still hard to hire. Why the change? Our research clearly shows that we’ve entered a whole new economy, one that makes labor ... Read more»
This week we published my keynote speech from Irresistible 2023, and I encourage you to watch it. Here’s the story in brief, and I’ll be talking a lot more about this at the HR Technology Conference and Unleash 2023 conferences in October.
The Post-Industrial Economy
Business leaders are confronting a world of opportunity ... Read more»
I’ve been an analyst covering HR Technology for more than twenty years and there’s one big thing I’ve learned: it’s a tough market for entrepreneurs. While it looks like a massive and easy-to-understand space, the competition is brutal and HR professionals are very pragmatic buyers. So when companies with new ideas like Humu come along, ... Read more»
