Top 100 v1.72 Laurie Ruettimann
It would be very easy to dismiss Laurie Ruettimann as a lightweight or vacuous. (I was going to use the word flaky but that means undependable and Laurie is never that). The personality behind Punk Rock HR and the current author of Cynical Girl, Ruettimann takes /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,3/”>free cialis pills a very 21st Century social media orientation to her work as an HR pundit. Articles about her cats and pet peeves are integrated tightly with common sense answers to HR conundrums.
The outer superficiality is like the ’spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down’. Claiming Penelope Trunk as her inspiration, Ruettimann delivers Mary Poppins in the same way that the Brazen Careerist channels Helen Gurly Brown. Ruettimann is busy in the midst of an experiment to see how educational approaches can be adapted to make great HR palatable.
Leadership styles are changing. The model of HR credibility, rooted in trying to pass as a member of the dark-suited-pasty-white executive team is dying. Emerging in its place is a looser, more intimate leader who fails publicly, is easier to get to know and comes with the quirks and foibles that make real people who they are. Laurie is at the leading edge of this shift. Occasionally awkward looking, new and better approaches often have difficult births. Part of Ruettimann’s influence comes from her willingness to go first, to be at the edge of this new and improved style.
More than a few very serious old timers treat Ruettimann’s method and content with disdain. In the drive to build credibility for HR, much of the sense of humor required for effective leadership has given way to a dour focus on ROI. When HR is busy being the hatchet-man (I mean person), it’s easy to lose sight of the basics of the human part of this thing. Cheerful even when bitter (it’s that magical nanny thing), Ruettimann has little toloerance for ogres.
21st Century communications channels are not the same as they were in the industrial era. In a time of intense quantification, influence might be best understood as a function of audience size (yep, it matters). Ruettimann’s deep influence on the industry (whether you like the style or not) comes from the size of her audience and her willingness to hit the road to build it. Influence doesn’t come from great ideas or virtuous behavior (it would be a wonderful world if it did). Instead, people follow the people they can see. Without an audience, good ideas are useless. With an audience, anything is possible.
Laurie is using the skills she learned in her formal HR career to build a communications channel. Smart enough to know that she has a lot to learn, she builds with charisma and common sense. If you stop to think about it, who has a bigger platform? Lots of people are listening. SHRM solicits her strategic advice.
After moving into HR straight out of college, Laurie found she was great at hiring. “I know how to deconstruct a narrative,” she says. “That’s how you find the connection between a person and a job.” She rose quickly into Recruiting leadership slots and branched out into the rest of HR.
In 2007, following one more move, she started blogging. A decade in HR served as the foundation for her writing. She quickly developed the style she is still known for three and a half years later.
“It’s all about connecting people, all about the conversations. The current crop of blogging advice is pretty awful. It’s focused on the process, not the things you need to do.”
We spoke about the things driving HR’s evolution.
“HR is being pulled apart. Part of the problem is that HR simply hasn’t delivered. /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,3/”>free cialis pills The other element involves the fact that technology eliminates HR’s traditional role as coordinator of administrivia. That said, much of HRTechnology is lost on me. It’s technology for the sake of technology. HR is not about Tech; it’s the relationships, the management of behavior and the generation of results.”
Moxie is a key element of creating results in an organization. Ruettimann is at the very beginnings of what will be an extraordinary career. By brashly putting herself out in front, she’s built an opportunity to make some interesting things happen. If you want to understand how influence works, watch the way Laurie uses hers in the next couple of years.
Top 100 v1.70 Jay Whitehead
Jay Whitehead creates stories that people live in. A long time resident of the media world, Whitehead is a plot maker who generates big narratives. He sees places where people might spend time and sets about creating the reality. His stories become institutions
Eight and a half years ago, Whitehead launched HRO Today Magazine. After noticing that HR Service companies were exploding and that there was no center to that universe, he started publishing. Ultimately, he built out a professional association and a calendar of events. Today, he continues to play a role in the HRO world.
He’s done the same thing for Corporate Responsibility Officers, Silicon Valley VCs, and PCs. Variously, he was involved with Upside, CMP, PC Magazine, the launch of Apple’s Lisa, HRO Today, and Corporate Responsibility Magazine. He’s the author of The Post-Carbon Economy
When I say that Jay creates stories that people live in, I mean that his creations take on a life of their own. Where there weren’t gathering places, there are now networks, meetings. publications and so on. Whitehead usually puts his stake in the ground and then other things navigate around it. He seems to generate seed crystal that becomes significant chunks of commercial reality.
For the past decade, he’s been doing it in and around the HR landscape. The mainstream HR leadership simply couldn’t embrace the outsourcing movement. As HR Services and Recruitment Processes became more effectively executed outside the organization, the burgeoning movements needed homes, identities, trade associations, customer forums and so on. Whitehead spotted, energized, organized and executed. His creations create industry frameworks.
Jay says that the threads that tie his life together are
- a fascination with media
- the ability to tell a good story
- a genetic proclivity towards helping others work more effectively.
He’s a testament to the notion that communication skills really matter. Coming from a family of union workers and educators, Whitehead is wired to focus on the development of new centers.
We talked at some length about the trends that drive HR. The Corporate Responsibility movement is merging with HR to create an emerging role that accelerates the overall shift to transparency, according to Jay. While not all companies are suited for a transparent management approach, the ones who aren’t are luddites or laggards. Whitehead sees responsibility, sustainability and clear reporting as the foundation of 21st Century business practice.
As HR full acknowledges the fact that as few as 40% of the people who work for a company are employees, the operating definition of Human Capital will open up. Transparency matters in what are now the majority of employment relationships. Payment timing, contract terms and the firm’s ability to deliver on its promises, long beyond the reach of HR, are coming into focus.
Finally, HR is being used as the lever for virtualization. The people who work for a company, regardless of their relationship type, are increasingly operating at a physical distance from the plant. HR’s role is to figure out the optimal places for virtualization strategy and implementation.
We talked briefly about the people who influence HR. Jay pointed quickly to the CEOs of software companies and senior execs in the large consultancies. The vendors have better visibility into smart approaches and have more control of the look and feel of implementation than any of the folks inside an HR function. Whitehead’s view is that the levers that drive most HR performance are /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,day/date,2011-01-13/”>cialis sales online well outside the walls of the company.
As I’ve moved through the process of interviewing people in the Top /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,day/date,2011-01-13/”>cialis sales online 100 Influencers project, I’ve noticed this same thing. The people who work in HR are not as influential as those who work on it. Whitehead’s perspective is illuminating. The people who work outside the company’s HR Department all tell stories that people live in.
Whitehead is in the midst of a long term project to run 50 marathons. He’s that kind of endurance player. Up to this point in the Top 100 Influencers in HR project, he’s the player who is farthest outside of the box. He’s also the player with the largest sphere of influence over new and emerging ideas and organizations.
Top 100 Influencers in HR v1.68: Lisa Rowan
Lisa Rowan is one of the two or three primary reference points in the analyst landscape. Plainspoken and rooted in common sense notions, Rowan’s history is laced with the foundations of HR automation. She views enterprise technology with the wizened eye of someone who has been in the trenches.
After a decade an a half of industry marketing and engagement, Rowan moved to the IT Analyst firm IDC in 2004. Her bio is self explanatory:
Lisa Rowan serves as IDC’s Program Director for HR and Talent Management Services research. In this role, Ms. Rowan provides expert analysis focused on both the business services addressing HR and talent-related process issues, such as human resource consulting, processing services, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services; and HR IT Services, such as systems integration and IT consulting.
For the ten years prior to joining IDC, Ms. Rowan held business development, product management and marketing positions in the human resource software and services markets. Ms. Rowan held director positions in both business development and marketing within Genesys — a provider of human capital management software and services based in Methuen, Mass. Prior to Genesys, she held positions in both technical marketing and IT at Digital Equipment Corporation.
As a result, she has gained a depth of experience with both core human resource and talent-related services, and understands firsthand the unique challenges her vendor clients face. Ms. Rowan is an active member of a number of HR organizations and serves on the board of directors for the New England Chapter of IHRIM (International HR Information Management society.) Lisa’s influence and industry impact was recognized recently as she received IHRIM’s Summit Award for 2008, the association’s highest honor and was named to HRO Today Magazine’s list of 2010 HRO Superstars for the third year in a row.
She is frequently invited to present her industry knowledge and views at industry events and to the press. Ms. Rowan holds a Masters in Business with a specialization in marketing and product management from the University of Southern New Hampshire. She received a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Back round, competence and style aside, Rowan is a central part of the landscape because she has her finger on the pulse and people really listen to her. From her seat, she sees the ebb and flow of technologies and emphases. The HR Industry is maturing, across the board.
Rowan’s calendar is a meticulous, structured jaunt through the year. She writes forecasts at the beginning of the year and Market Analyses at the end. In between is a hurdlers course of breaking news, speaking engagements, inquiries from buyers and sellers, custom research and an endless supply of reading material.
Rowan’s voracious appetite for new ideas is at the heart of her success.
We talked about the major trends that are driving the evolution of the industry. Rowan noted a balance between maturing technologies (which are smartly outsourced) and emerging technologies where the inventors and innovators are outpacing the market. Payroll and benefits management are at the mature end; Talent Management is near the midpoint and Mobile and analytics are at the edges of acceptance.
HR Transformation came up in our conversation. Rowan sees major change as unavoidable as the result of the dramatic force reductions in HR Departments. Outsourcing and the use of consultants is going up while automation is increasingly used to cut costs and reduce manpower. The Transformation of HR will be a consequence of these market variables.
In Lisa’s view, Mobile technologies will have a dramatic impact on HR. From approval processes to self service comp and benefits, the use of handheld personal devices will come to dominate the space.
Finally, Lisa sees a big future for analytics in the industry. “Think back to Jac Fitz-Ens and forward to Dan Hilbert. The history of HR is all about increasing the flow and meaning of data. Talent Management is just a waypoint in that process. ”
Keep your eyes out. Lisa Rowan is often a major presence at industry events. If you get a chance to talk with her, take it.
Top 100 Influencers in HR v1.65 Jim Holincheck
Gartner (IT) is the preeminent IT research firm. With 650 analysts covering over 1,000 subspecialties, the firm wields mighty influence over the IT industry. Their value proposition is nicely summarized by a customer (who i quoted on their website):
“Without Gartner, we’d likely find ourselves perpetually overspending on technology and taking more time to complete technology-enabled business initiatives.”
Famous for its magic quadrant and hype cycle view of technology adoption, a positive review from Gartner can make the critical difference for companies entering the market. The company specializes in creating a simple view from the complex barrage of information that overwhelms its customers. One way of thinking about the company is that it creates intelligence out of chaos for its clients.
Sellers need Gartner’s approval. Buyers depend on the firm for everything from contract analysis and acquisition guidance to environmental scans of business intelligence about emerging tech trends. These two complementary realities create a powerful niche for Gartner in the operations of its clients.
Jim Holincheck is the head of the Gartner operation that covers Human Capital Management. As the Managing VP – Applications: ERP – Finance, HCM, and Procurement, Holincheck is singularly powerful in the Enterprise software arena. That he has such dramatic impact in the HR ecosystem is a testament to his incredible capacity to cause things to happen.
Holincheck’s blog lists the following categories of interest in the HCM space:
* Call Center Workforce Management * Compensation Management * Contingent Workforce Management * E-Learning * E-Recruitment * Employee Performance Management * Global Solutions * High Performance Workplace * HR BPO * HRMS * Human Capital Management * IT Workforce Management * Retail Workforce Management * Sales Workforce Management * Service-Oriented Architecture * Software as a Service * Software Market Consolidation * Talent Management Application Suites * Workforce Analytics * Workforce Management
After a career on the partner track at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in the software intelligence group, Holincheck got his feet wet as an analyst at Giga Information Group.
These days, analyst firms point heavily to the data that drives their conclusions. The role is so powerful that there is a constant pulling and shoving between the firms and the marketplace. Gartner has been particularly adept at navigating this dynamic.
In his current role, Holincheck spends an enormous amount of time on the phone with individual or groups of clients. Coupled with writing and public speaking demands, you start to wonder where he ever finds the time to manage his team, let alone think coherently about the future.
We talked for some time about the flood of data that is about to hit the HR operation. We have an enormous store of information about what people know and what they do. Still, the applicability of this data to the workplace remains hard to clearly envision. Jim is very aware of the difference between a pioneer and a practitioner. It’s very easy, he says, yo let your view of the future get too far out in front of the real world.
As he looks towards the future of HR, he believes that practitioners will want:
- Social Media as a Sourcing Mechanism: Finding and connecting with the people you really want to hire
- Data Driven Innovations That Improve the Quality of Hiring Decisions
- Next Generation Performance Management: Moving beyond the automation of 20th century MBO programs to flexible performance leverage that continuously meets dynamic business objectives
- Next Generation Workforce Planning: Dynamic systems that facilitate the development of agile talent pipelines and scenario based acquisition plans
Most importantly, Holincheck sees an emerging end to the idea that people are all one thing. “The same people play different roles. They can be a candidate, an investor, a customer, an employee, a neighbor or a supplier. Often they play multiple roles. The fact that we are starting to have enough data to differentiate these aspects means that there will be ongoing pressure on internal silos to share decision making.”
That’s a clear vision for the future of HR as a fully functioning organizational peer.
Top 100 v1.61: ERE Expo – Center of Influence
Influence is hard to distinguish from celebrity. Being well known is one of the components of influence. (It’s almost impossible to be influential if no one knows who you are.) We are in the age of the democratizion of celebrity, the post-privacy world. People rise to the top and fall back down faster than one hit wonders with a 1970’s recording contract.
The more enduring an influencer is, the more the influencer is like an institution. It’s sort of a circular definition that means that tenure is an important aspect of the scope of a particular influencer. It’s not the only factor, however. Some people accelerate onto the world stage quickly and have influence that is disproportionate to their time on the stage.
That means that influence is a balance of momentum, duration, impact and reach. New technologies enable their early adopters to achieve a faster success. The fundamental mechanics are the same. Momentum, duration and reach are readily measurable online. Impact is harder to quantify.
There are also ‘nests of influence’; places where influencers congregate and the story gets developed. There are a number of online communities ranging from ERE and RecruitingBlogs to HR.com and the recent HRTechConference group on LinkedIn. Over the past couple of years, these niche communities have dominated the online conversation. Their aggregate influence has grown dramatically over the past decade. Before that, ERE was alone in the field. The online ‘nests’ shape the daily dialog of sales reps and industry players. They drive the small talk in conversations between industry members.
They can’t hold a candle to to the impact of the physical events in the industry. The landscape is littered with some obvious and some not so obvious centers of influence. ERE’s Expo, HRExective’s HRTech Conference, SHRM events and the OnRec events all come quickly to mind. Each of the HR Silos (Talent Management, Learning, OD, Compensation, Benefits, Performance Management) all have their own professional associations and events. There are also a number (maybe as many as 40) of small intimate groups that offer peer to peer networking for executives in the Industry. There are even other events that blur the line between the large public expos and the small intimate gatherings. The SharedXpertise family of events falls into this category.
We’re going to look more deeply into these ‘nests of influence’ and their aggregate impact on the industry in a later piece.
Last week marked the 10th anniversary of the ERE Expo. Held in San Diego, the event saw about 400 industry influencers, practitioners and vendors swirl together for something that resembled a wedding with education modules. Like all of these events, there were a number of recurring themes:
- One of the most interesting demos I saw was from an unlikely source. PCRecruiter is an industry stalwart ATS and Recruiting system used by high end professionals. Their latest iteration essentially eliminates the application specific interface in favor of a deep integration with the Microsoft Office suite. What you end up with is new toolbars and reports with no pure application interface. It seems like the beginning of a powerful trend…the rapidly disappearing user interface. More on this later.
- One could be excused for having the feeling that social media is the second coming. Many speakers waxed on about the ultimate consequence of new publishing tools and social networking. Any attempt to suggest a modified view was met with disbelief;
- Another key theme, often expressed by vendors and practitioners alike, was the idea that all job applicants should receive relationship treatment; that every applicant is entitled to certain inalienable rights. Again, suggesting otherwise was met with incredulity;
- Social media was also heavily represented in the vendor arena. The vendor floor offered the full spectrum from substantial booths by JobVite, BrazenCareerist and Jobs2Web to single person alliance machines from Jibe, InsideJob, BraveNewTalent and LokLoq
- Rather than dying, the job boards seem to be having a renaissance. SimplyHired, Indeed, Monster and CareerBuilder all exerted heavy influences on the dialog.
- Partly because SourceCon was held on the first two days of the week, it seemed like sourcing really developed industry respect. There seems to be a real career path emerging in the sourcing disciplines.
- It was the year of the RPO. As costs continue to be cut, the outsourcing of all or part of medium to large company Recruiting is increasingly an option.
The influence of an event like ERE is something to behold. Over the course of the event, you could hear vendors shifting their pitches as they came to understand the positioning of their competitors. Ideas flow quickly at ERE as the networks rub up against each other and swap gossip, intelligence and insight.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that something less than 1% of working professionals attend trade shows. When you’re in the swirl, it’s all consuming and all encompassing. It really feels like ‘this is the market’. The ‘echo chamber’ effect makes it feel like the messaging from the event is viral and very contagious. The truth is somewhat different.
There are plenty of bigger events. None have the influence per capita of ERE’s twice annual expos. The show is really about the schmooze that goes on in the halls outside of the formal conference.
By John Sumser
Hank Stringer has been in and around the Recruiting business for 31 years. In that time he’s seen all of the sides of the equation. He’s been in executive search, corporate recruiting, contract recruiting, CEO of a big league Recruiting Software company. If you poke at anyone with legs in recruiting, they’l know or know of Hank.
Hank tells a fantastic story about his first assignment. He dialed his way into the office of the CEO of a large Oil Company and was given a search for a “land man”. When the oil company leader finally had a chance to meet with Hank, Hank’s youth and inexperience became obvious. As he was being shown the door, Hank asked if he could cjeck back in a couple of weeks. The CEO was gracious enough to allow the earnest young recruiter a return visit.
When Hank got to the second meeting, he noticed a pile of resumes on the executive’s desk. Asking to see the top one on the pile, Hank began a recitation of the qualities and characteristics of the fellow’s resume. There were fifteen on the desk and Hank had talked with eight of them in the two weeks. While that was insufficient to get him the deal, it built a foundation for the rest of Hank’s career. The CEO was gracious as he showed Hank the door again.
You will never meet a better prepared, more enthusiastic, humble leader than Hank Stringer. What he got form that early encounter was a deep respect for graciousness. (It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s from Texas where gracious is a food group like Barbeque).
Hire.com was one of the bright shining stars of the first wave of Recruiting infrastructure compaies. While Hank had been poking around the edges of technology for years (He was a recruiter during the buildup at Dell), in 1996 he began in earnest. I can remeber an early visit to the company that was then called ‘World.hire’.
Over the course of the next decade, Hire.com became an unshakable part of the Recruiting landscape. The firm is resposnible for a number of ideas that still hold sway in the cyrrent crop of recruiting tools. In the end, Hire.com was purchased by Authoria (who recently acquired Peopleclick.)
Hank went on to author a book with Rusty Rueff (Talent Force). The book presents a systematic approach for making talent the key competitive discriminator in your company. The book, as you might imagine is propelling the second phase of Hank’s career.
Influence is a complex thing to pin down. Part popularity contest and part vision, the ability to wield influence does not come easily for every one. In Hank’s case, the exercise is easy.
Social Media has turned a range of things upside down. Like all publishing innovations, the baton passes first to the heaviest users. It’s only time that rearranges the players to adequately reflect real value. In the early days, like now, the opportunity for young unknown players to make their mark is significantly different than it is at other times.
Kurt Lewin, the psychologist founder of force field analysis and action research, is credited with the “Freeze-Unfreeze-Freeze” model of social transformation. In that view, the status quo is held in place by a series of counterbalancing forces. Change is only possible when there is an interruption in the force field. The window for change is short and closes as a new status quo emerges.
That’s where we are. The old order is undergoing an unplanned rapid evolution driven by the arrival of new social media tools. Yes, there’s a lot of noise. Yes, there’s a lot of well intentioned crap. But, new paths of influence are being created while we watch. Today, it is possible for a young person with limited experience to command the attention and bandwidth of an entire profession.
There are all sorts of new and interesting phenomenon. Trolls, people who look to interrupt conversation for the joy of conflict and the love of their own voice, have free reign in an environment that tries to be egalitarian. Wikipedia describes a Troll “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” As yet, there are few governance mechanisms that allow administrators to deal with the disturbance.
One of the interesting challenges facing us all is how to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s the result of a Troll or an overenthusiastic geek with diarrhea of the mouth. There are amazing nuggets of novel insight and truth hiding in plain sight. The noise, growing more severe as blogs continue to proliferate, obscures much of what’s potent. At the same time, more and more amazing stuff is just under the radar.
I spent an hour talking with Lance Haun about how he finds new and interesting material in the deluge of information. Lance’s formula is that a piece has be about solving a unique problem by a unique person. He searches and sifts for exactly this kind of information. “The net is cluttered with repetitive topics and lists of stuff. I’m looking for something authentic that works.”
What Lance thinks matters. One of the top two or three voices in the online HR environment, Haun is nearly everywhere. He blogs, he talks, he chats, he advises. He has been able to convert a young career into a platform for developing expertise for a couple of reasons. One, he’s willing to work late into the night, well after his HR job at a startup is done. Two, he asks questions, looks for answers and celebrates the new.
As number 3 in the Top 25 Online HR Influencers, Lance was described as:
“Lance Haun is one of the industry’s most prolific bloggers. He practices what he preaches by reaching back and reevaluating what he says. One of the folks who is working in HR while writing about it, Lance predicts that 2010 will be the year of the HR Rock Star. He’s one of them. Recently, he began working for MeritBuilder as their VP of outreach. He’s in the business of “Helping companies understand and influence their culture and employee engagement through positive and portable recognition.”
In Lance’s view, it’s all the product of hard work. I asked him if he actually had a social life. He allowed that he likes to sleep late on Sundays and squeezes in a social life before he works through the night.
His current company, Merit Builder is a startup in the recognition program space. Lances is enthusiastic about the product, the project and the team. He’s enjoying a level of influence that few people his age have tasted in this profession.
