Musings of an HR Guy…Connecting the Dots
Despite working in a heavily Toyota-oriented environment for many years now, I still take in my breath at how profound (yet deceptively simple) the Toyota Way philosophy is. It keeps revealing its timeless wisdom when stress-tested against both predictable cycles as well as black-swan convulsions. I am usually quite cynical about grand narratives and pristine... Continue Reading →
Workplaces can sometimes be like the dentist's fish tank in Finding Nemo. Your cast of characters is made up of the most outlandish specimens, each with such unique stories of how they got there. There is a comradeship in their shared incarceration. The cast includes some favorite most likely to get ahead (Nemo), a lurking... Continue Reading →
Confidential discussions concerning employees are pretty much the bread and butter of HR. However, the tone of these discussions is sometimes not too far removed from plain old gossip - or at least driven by the same base motivations that animate the slanderous tongue. It gets tricky when you are in a conversation which is... Continue Reading →
OK's newsletter today had a seemingly pithy observation: people do not have initiative-fatigue in companies, as no-one decries something new; what people have is lack of completion fatigue - that sense of frustration at vacillating intentions and aborted initiatives people see around them. While I agree with some of the wisdom in the statement, it... Continue Reading →
I can't help marveling at how the maturity, sophistication, and impressive intellectual capital of an organization seems to become so feckless and cramped in the face of forces that derive from patently short-sighted motivations. All it takes is for a few key people gifted with lumbar pliability to convince the circus master of their contortionist... Continue Reading →
An aphoristic remark I heard at John's recent farewell is worth recording. While it could be easily dismissed as a bit of mildly amusing word play of the greeting card genre, it has an amazing poignancy because of who made it and whom it was about. The laconic and mysterious ex-MD of Poland had specially... Continue Reading →
Notes to Self 