SHRM 2010 Conference, The Blog Outtakes, 2: Al Gore

This is the third in a series of blog posts which were written for SHRM’s 2010 annual conference in San Diego, as part of my membership in the Blog Squad. This one did not appear on the official blog but I had fun writing it and wanted to share it with you. Al Gore was really good, tailored his message well to the assembled HR folks, was funny (his trademark “Hi I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next President of the United States” was expected but still cracked up the 8000+ people in attendance). He wove HR and climate change together in an interesting way, which was not shrill, but with a steady fact-based approach. He was more optimistic than I expected, given the calamity in the Gulf, perhaps even because of that. Here is what I said:
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Monday General Session: Al Gore

By David Bowles @SHRM10 Blog Squad

I couldn’t help it. I had closed my eyes and was ready to hear that voice, the voice of Darrell Hammond, doing Al Gore on SNL and saying “lock box”. I felt that Darrell did it even better than Al, it was the slight exaggeration which made it so funny and played into Al’s reputation at the time of the Bush-Gore contest, 2000, for being a bit…how can I say? dull? A reputation which he slammed today at the San Diego Convention Center as he told funny stories and covered hugely divergent content with almost no notes.

I waited and waited to hear the Al version, but it didn’t happen. There was no lock box, Al didn’t talk about social security at all (which was what he was going to put into the aforementioned box). He had plenty of material without that.

Its hard to believe the achievements of this man. His introduction started with the Nobel prize of course, then the Oscar but then the unexpected (because I refuse to watch all the self-congratulatory shows) Emmy and a Grammy….who knew he could sing so well? I know he didn’t sing, but just the thought of it was almost as good as my “lock box” (actually it was for a “spoken word” album). Of course he was VP too, keeping the home fires burning while Bill Clinton was off doing what he did best…I mean of course balancing budgets, creating jobs and generally making us all more prosperous (those days seem far away right now but somehow this SHRM event has rekindled my natural optimism significantly). We haven’t even covered being on the Board of Apple at a time of its most extraordinary success, being also an adviser to Google, and the inventor of the Internet in his spare time (just kidding… I am sure he never said that). Think about it, what else would you want to do in life?

It seems what he wants to do is run his TV Channel, Current TV (which has won the Emmy) and keep spreading the word that we have to do something about climate change. I have seen his movie, and the data are familiar, but we received an update on the ice melting, the weather becoming more and more violent (the “1000 year” flood in Nashville, Gore’s home town, only recently, was a good example….how many thousand year events can one have before people realize, its real?)

What impressed me though was his in depth knowledge of business practices, especially those which are impacted by HR. He covered a whole range of them and reached out to the SHRM membership by doing so. We didn’t get the usual “climate only” approach, but instead he wove business sustainability into the climate situation. Imagine, he said, thousands upon thousands of jobs making windmills and solar panels, here in the US; no more wars to protect our oil supply, balance of payments issues greatly reduced. Imagine all this. His vision received a warm response.

But I never heard the words “lock box”, so I’m off to YouTube to get my Darrell/Al fix.

SHRM 2010 Conference, Vineet Nayar and Google’s Shannon Deegan

This is the second in a series of blog posts I wrote for SHRM’s Blog Squad at the 2010 annual conference in San Diego.  This one did appear on the SHRM blog but I wanted to share it with readers of this blog. See here for the previous post on Marcus Buckingham’s amazing appearance at the conference.

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General Session 6/29; Vineet Nayar and Panel Discussion

By David Bowles @SHRM10 Blog Squad

Vineet Nayar

Its not often you get to be in the company of CEOs who have such a stellar reputation as Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a $2.3B, 60,000 employee company in India.  Listen to this:  Tom Peters thinks he just might be the next Peter Drucker.  They study Mr Nayar’s management style at Harvard; the London Business School praises him, it goes on and on.  Added late to the General Session he turned out to be a bonus which I am glad I did not miss.  Now I have to go and get his book, “Employees First”, a philosophy which adds, but not in the book title, “Customers Second”.   Talk about changing paradigms, all that stuff about the Customer is King?  Forget that, that’s so…20^th century.

Some five years ago his company was on a ledge, “on fire” as he says, and they had to ask some deep questions about who they were, what kind of business they were in, and therefore what kind of business should management be in.  Nayar’s solution was to turn things upside down, literally, the org chart is now an inverted pyramid but unlike some other flipped pyramids (the airline SAS for example), the employee and not the customer ended up on top.

At the time of crisis, Nayar and his team realized something so critical that its worth discussing here:   they understood that management’s job is not to lord it over everyone, but to “induce the employees to add value” in what they call the Value Zone, that area (far removed from the CEO!) where the employees meet the customer.  The traditional approach breeds distrust;  this approach, driven by transparency, breeds trust.  Nayar’s personal 360 review is open to everyone in the company, that’s just one example of this.  He no longer talks “pyramid” but “sphere” for the way the company operates, which he describes as a true democratization of the workplace.  A great point he made: “how can we all work so hard to have democracy in our political life but shy away from it in our work life?”  Finally I also liked his three stage approach which he say he based on the great teachers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King:

1.  Create dissatisfaction with the status quo (“we can do better”)

2.  Create a romance of tomorrow, a vision for how things can be better

3.  Make the actions plans to get from here to there.

All of this is just management-speak unless it is lived.  Nayar deserves bragging rights: HCL cruised through the Great Recession with big gains in revenue, profit and head count.

An amazing guy.

Panel Discussion:

Shannon Deegan, Google Director of People Operations — Strategy, M&A and Staffing

This was a very good panel and although they didn’t discuss anything earth-shattering I was struck by a couple of things the Google guy (Shannon Deegan) said:

—no work spot is more than 200 feet from a kitchen (I was hungry when writing this, so listed it first).  This encourages working together throughout the day.

—Google encourages people to spend 20% of their time on their own projects which may have nothing to do with company goals.  Some of the best ideas have come from this, like Gmail.

–Because of their origin as an engineering company (both founders and the CEO are engineers) Google is a heavily data driven company.   This translates into very significant use of people surveys, both “pulse” versions as well as full blown total organization 100 question surveys they call “Google Geist”.  They slice and dice this data with as much enthusiasm as they do their ad revenue data.  As interesting as this, the fact that they ask if people want to be identified or not, and 90% click “identified”.  Truly amazing, and a sign of the level of trust they have built.

This is all very interesting for me, a survey guy.  The common refrain on the blogosphere now is that short surveys like Gallup’s Q-12 are the only way to go, or better still, banish surveys from the organization.  How interesting that GOOG (love that stock symbol) is going totally in the other direction, which is exactly what my increasingly lonely voice had been saying in my own blog (big surveys are a goldmine of what to do for employees to help them engage).  But don’t feel sorry for me: now I have some company and great ammo….

SHRM 2010 Conference, The Blog Outtakes 1: Marcus Buckingham

As one of SHRM’s Blog Squad at their recent annual conference, I had a chance to see and hear some great things. Not all that I wrote, however, got into the official blog. So like others on my blog team, I am giving you a chance to see what went on and share my impressions. It was a great conference with some fine speeches and interesting sessions with Al Gore, Marcus Buckingham, the head of Google’s People Strategy and many others. I focused on the keynotes and anything which was workplace morale or engagement-oriented. I also spent an incredibly touching day listening to material on hiring and supporting our returning vets.  Marcus Buckingham spoke on the last day and I did a “Prequel” for him, to introduce some of his ideas to those who had not read his books (which included myself until a month ago).  Here is what I said after he spoke:

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Marcus Buckingham-The Sequel

By David Bowles, @SHRM10 Blog Squad

Buckingham signs for almost 2 hours at SHRM’s Book Store

Let’s see if I can explain this to you: I had high expectations for this presentation, very high. As high as the blackened ceiling in the giant room where the presentation took place. Sure I had seen MB before on video and thought he was good. But this exceeded my expectations so much that they blew through the ceiling and threatened to penetrate earth’s atmosphere. I don’t use such hyperbole too much, but trust me, its true. I have seen hundreds of presentations and made hundreds myself as a consultant but I cannot remember when, if ever, I saw something so good. Its hard to put my finger on it, was it the disarming English humo(u)r, which he warned us about and then promised to raise his hand each time we should laugh at a joke? Was it the self deprecation, laughing gently at himself? Was it his hilarious comedy routine about his and his wife’s visit to their son’s Kindergarten, and the lessons about strengths and weaknesses which that gave us? Was it the way he went through a fact- based presentation with no notes and yet made it seem like an amusement park ride, not a serious topic like “Leadership”, which in fact it was. Was it his mastery of these facts and his use of stories and examples (like Rosa the super-housekeeper at an LAX Hampton Inn)? All of the above.

Afterwards, to show you that this man is more than a great speaker, he signed books from about 10.15 to noon. At 11 when I checked up on him and took some pictures, the line was still huge. As he eventually walked away he was graciously willing to briefly meet, and he said something to me which I won’t forget, after I told him how much I loved the presentation: “I was just out there entertaining myself, really”.

That’s the way it should be done. Thanks Marcus, in my view you were the star of the 2010 SHRM show, a high bar indeed.

SHRM 2010 Annual Conference…What an Experience!

I got back home yesterday afternoon from a 5 day assignment as one of the 5 Blog Squad members for SHRM’s annual conference (see our posts here). This is an event which takes no less than six years to plan….so next year’s in Las Vegas (with Sir Richard Branson and Michael J Fox) has already been in planning stages for 5 years. The scope of this thing is amazing: 11,000 attendees this year (up from 7,000 last year in the depths of the recession); 4 keynote speakers including Al Gore, Steve Forbes and Marcus Buckingham, and no less than 800 volunteers. Hundreds of sessions, usually 20 at any time period from which to choose, but none which conflict within the major topic areas like Talent, HR Law, etc. They pull it all off with such ease, it seems to fly along.

I’ll be honest and say that I never had been a SHRM member till this year. I had been too busy as a consultant and too wary of anything which smacked of bureaucracy of any kind. Consultants are Lone Rangers in the best of times and that certainly described me. But now that I know what SHRM is and what it can do I have become an enthusiastic convert. SHRM ROCKS!! Yes they literally rock, we were dancing before the first keynote to the Black Eyed Peas, and by “we” I mean a massive room with at least 8,000 people in it. A/V was fantastic, giant screens and super audio. I could go on and on but I want to say, that from the top of SHRM to the volunteers to the Book Store people to the Social Media people to the state organizers to …everyone I met….I cannot think of a friendlier, more competent or more hard-working organization. They treasure their members and it shows. The networking possibilities are great, as is the chance to learn new things and hear people like Buckingham, who hit the ball so far out of the park yesterday morning, it went into the next zip code.

I’ll write more because I learned things which are relevant to this blog but first I wanted to say, thank you SHRM, you gave me an opportunity and experience which was simply…unforgettable…and for that I am so grateful.

Can you tell I fell in love with SHRM at this Conference? I admit it……