If you follow me on Facebook, you know I’ve been on a long, slow journey to becoming a less chubby dude. Last fall, I topped out at 260+ pounds. This wasn’t the heaviest I had been but it was pretty close. Prior to hitting my max, I had tried every fad diet that allowed me to continue eating meat (and tangled with a few that made me reduce meat input significantly). They all seemed like sound approaches. 10-20 pounds might come off, but in a few months, the diet would collapse.  I would end up traveling or visiting some place that made strict diet requirements impossible to follow and would fall back into old eating habits. I would be back to square one soon enough.

I’m not a dietician or a medical doctor but that’s not good for you.

So when I posted a while ago that I had lost significant weight (as of this writing, down 43 pounds over 8 months), it seemed surprising even to me. I had three holidays at various families in the winter, a vacation to Hawaii, and I traveled for work. I managed to continue losing, on average, 1-2 pounds a week.

What changed? A couple things:

• I kept track of how much I ate and how I felt — I committed to doing this using an app called MyFitnessPal to let me easily track calories. 
• My brain was reprogrammed pretty quickly — Using this app consistently, I could estimate most meals pretty easily in my head after a few months. Proof being, I didn’t use the app at all in Hawaii and afterward? I lost about a pound. Same with travel and the like.
• I started moving — I tried couch to 5k but I’ve been sedentary for so long, it was pretty pathetic and painful. Slowly, I’ve been able to jog longer and further distances while increasing my stamina. Hiking distance and hills has helped the stamina as well.
• I started lifting heavy things — Since I work from home, I spend conference calls where I’m not required to take notes lifting up random things. My stool and heavy things within easy reach of my desk are all targets. When I make it to the gym, I slowly build strength doing that though it hasn’t been a huge priority at this point.

The whole goal has been to simply slowly adapt my habits so that I know things like: how full I should feel, what foods give me energy and help me think, and how often I need to be active and what sort of things I can do. It seems like basic stuff but when you’ve been ignoring it for more than a decade, it is a new feeling.

When people ask my secret, that’s literally it. Listen to real science on the issues, keep track of what you do, and listen to how your body feels. Eat well and exercise regularly. Also, clean behind your ears. It works.

Yet, I still drink coffee and energy drinks. I still eat bacon and cookies. I still like beer, wine, and some good rum or bourbon (though, not as much anymore). Now, I surround those things with mostly good choices while avoiding overindulgence.

The toughest challenge hasn’t been the diet or getting back into exercising though, it was the realization that there is no real shortcut for this. I could go faster, if I cut more calories, or ran more, or lifted more. But there is no shortcut to losing 80 pounds. There is no shortcut to getting back into running, hiking, or playing basketball after so many years out. It’s humbling and motivating to know how long it took to get to this place and how hard I’ve had to work at it. The rewards and regrets of easing off a decade of unneeded weight (and everything associated with that) is finally hitting home.

Bring your own device (or BYOD) is all the rage. Device policy and administration is beyond my pay grade. For that, you can talk to Steve Boese. What I can tell you is that there are a couple schools of thought when it comes to thinking about employee wants and technology from the HR perspective:

1. Screw these guys. We pay them good money, they get to heft around an eight pound ThinkPad and a locked down Blackberry.
2. Screw these guys. We don’t pay them good money but they are still our employees and have to do what we say. Drop that three year old tech on them!
3. BYOD stands for buy your own device, right? It can’t cost more to administer these different devices than it does to purchase them.
4. We should subsidize the purchase? Hell, for that why don’t we just buy them what they want (within a certain group of choices) and retain ownership of it?
5. We bought brand new computers in 2009! We don’t have them budgeted for replacement until 2014.

This conversation drives me crazy. This is the raging debate about bringing your own device to work?

How about this: why don’t you pick the policy that actually increases the performance and satisfaction of technology users in your organization?

Maybe this seems like a common sense thing to you. I hope it does. But too often, HR (and management, or finance, or whoever you want to assign blame to) break it down to a straight cost discussion or a political power discussion. This is dumb and I’ve dealt with it in the past, too.

For example, we had well paid developers doing programming on single 19″ CRT monitors (those big, boxy, tube monitors) when 22″ LCD panels were available for under $500 a pop. Why? Because buying new monitors was too expensive.

Ignore the stuff out there about huge productivity gains with multiple monitors. Or, take it with a grain of salt. The fact is, you don’t need huge productivity gains (or losses) to gain back an ROI. A very modest increase in productivity (we figured in our calculations to be about 5%, studies said that it could be much more) meant we were getting a return on our LCD purchases within a couple of months. Over the life of a decent LCD panel, it would pay itself off 12-fold in productivity gains. The same could be true of any device you purchase or subsidize so that the employee can be as productive as possible.

Even if it isn’t about performance, shouldn’t employee satisfaction also be a consideration? I’m not saying you have to change to a BYOD policy or a corporate owned, personally enabled (COPE) policy either. Some employees are just going to dig the equipment you provide and mandate they use (and sometimes, that equipment does kick ass). Some of them won’t care. But if it does matter and it does impact performance or satisfaction, isn’t it worth a more thoughtful consideration than disregarding out of hand an additional cost that is likely a pretty small fraction of the total cost of employment?

I don’t really care what you choose in the end. At all. But if you haven’t thought through more than just raw costs on it, I would urge you to consider all of the factors in play here.

What’s your policy on devices? Do you do BYOD or COPE? Is your CIO the tech overlord?

This week, my blog turns seven. My first post? It was about a candidate that showed up with booze on his breath.

After that post and the one right after? I got my first writer’s block.  I was already out of ideas and I just started.

I’ve mentioned before that this blog wasn’t my first step into blogging. I did the LiveJournal thing for awhile. I even resorted to updating static HTML before blogs were a thing. One thing is for sure, though: this blog has been more productive than any of those other things.

Some people hit a wall with writing. I get it. I can say that other than the last month and a half, I’ve been writing pretty consistently (3-4 times a week) for this entire time. It hasn’t always been here, of course. But it’s been somewhere.

I’m still here and I still have stuff to write about. Why? Because I unabashedly believe that proper talent management is the most important thing organizations can do to succeed. Everything else flows from that. Good HR, recruiting, management, and training practices make a huge difference and great organizations appreciate that. My views, my position in the industry, and my career has evolved which make it fun to continue writing about but the industry is changing as well. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes recklessly. I’m cool with both.

Do you know how to explain that slight obsession to someone who doesn’t get it or doesn’t care? Why I view sports through a prism of management? Why I can’t help but overhear interviews at Starbucks or one-sided phone calls in airports talking about the person’s formal performance review? I haven’t figured it out yet.

I know some people are wishy washy about the HR space. They come and go from the scene. I’m all about cashing paychecks at the end of the day too. I like the ones that have stuck around and have invested their careers in it, even if I don’t always agree with them. Even if they sometimes hold us back. Even if that sometimes describes… gulp… me.

Here’s to another seven years of writer’s block, staring at a blank screen on my couch for hours, and massaging pop culture, sports, and my cat into posts about HR systems, performance management, recruiting, training, bad managers and anything else I come up with. And thanks for sticking with me.

I’ve been out of day-to-day HR for four years. It was one of the best decisions that was ever made for me. That’s not just because it set me on my current career path (whatever that may be), but it opened up a space for someone who liked doing HR.

I’ve obviously stayed close to the space in that time. This week though, I got a little closer than comfort to the function. HR software provider Silkroad invited me (and, for full disclosure, paid my way there) to their users conference in Florida.

Those who know me know I don’t go to most conferences for pure education. Usually it was either my conference (so I was working), I was speaking, or I was covering the conference as a journalist (so I was focused on reporting what I saw).

That wasn’t the case here. This time, I was at the conference like an attendee for the most part. Outside of a lunch with Silkroad executives, I was focused on experiencing the conference like a normal HR person would. So I listened to the keynote speaker on the first day (Dan Pink) and there were some parts where I saw some uncomfortable laughs from my pseudo-colleagues:

• When he suggested that performance reviews were simply CYA’s
• That to get the most out of white-collar, knowledge workers, you had to start first by paying them fairly and well

I won’t play armchair psychologist but I’ll tell you what I heard from attendees:

“I love the ideas, Dan. We’ve tried to convince our executive team for years on this. It is hopeless. We’ll drive engagement the best we can within our constraints.”

The theme transpired in other areas of the conference too. New social tools within Silkroad’s product are great but scary, as these HR pros imagine the worse case scenarios. They imagine how they sell this to an executive team that is probably thinking the same as they are.

And that’s fair. I’ve seen what a little bit of openness and social in an inappropriate and immature workplace looks like.

I’ll tell you what I saw: I saw a product that got out of its own way, allowed HR pros to do their job better, and to push employers toward a more progressive and engaged workforce. What I saw were HR pros driven by compliance, efficiency, old-school executive thinking, and squeezing value out of the product without making things uncomfortable at their job.

Let me be clear: I don’t think this is a problem with Silkroad, or with their HR customers. I’m sure the same story gets played out at other user conferences, regional SHRM meetings, and happy hour get togethers among HR pros.

When you follow the bleeding edge of HR like I do, you might assume that everyone is going the way of progressive HR. I love that part of HR. It keeps me fired up and it is something everyone can aspire to.

In that same vein though, we should also acknowledge the uncomfortable reality of HR as it largely exists today. Should we be happy with it? Should we think that’s all we can accomplish? No. The answer is clearly no. But let’s acknowledge that we need tools that not only help HR pros move forward but also tools that help them deal effectively with the present.

I was asked to chair this week’s Recruiting Innovation Summit, put on by my former employer ERE Media. At it, we explored some of the leading edge ideas from people who are as passionate about making recruiting better as I am.

It was also the first time I ever emceed an event. That experience is probably another post altogether.

As part of my new position as part of The Candidate Experience Award council, I paid special attention to recruiting trends and technologies that will improve the candidate experience. The event did not disappoint on that front. There are some really cool ideas that are bubbling up from early adopters, entrepreneurs, and people that build products at some of the big boys. Here’s how it shook out from my perspective.

Making the application process better

A couple of the newer solutions we saw at the Recruiting Innovation Summit really tackled some ways companies could improve the application process for candidates.

iMomentous talked about their mobile apply. Talent Board Member Ed Newman really dove deep into the idea that a mobile apply approach isn’t going to be just a nice thing to have, it is going to be a must have. There are a lot of companies out there trying to crack this nut and it is going to become a reality (though it isn’t going to happen overnight).

Resunate had something really interesting: a way for candidates to optimize their resumes depending on the job description. Imagine if this was on the front-end of your application process? Helping candidates putting their best foot forward could be the ultimate candidate experience play.

Making the candidate experience fun?

Two different types games impressed people at the summit this year.

ConnectCubed created a couple dozen games that actually help employers determine if someone will be a good fit for a job. What they found is that people played the games and enjoyed them, even if they weren’t necessarily going for a job. It was one of the more fascinating ideas presented and I wished that they would’ve shared more of the games.

RMS embedded their employer brand into an actual game. They got a lot of eyeballs from a lot of people who might have not otherwise seen them. Best of all, it came to you in a fun environment of trying to prevent a world disaster (right up their alley, if you know what RMS does).

Monitoring the candidate experience

Last year’s startup competition winner Mystery Applicant came back to talk about what they have been working on since they won the award last year. It was fun to understand just how much data they are pulling in now about the candidate experience. The deeper we dive into the data, the more we know we need The Candidate Experience Awards.

There are many more companies (new and old alike) out there taking on the candidate experience either directly or indirectly. Whether that means a smoother apply process, better communication, or understanding and relieving the pain points in your process, the level of importance is only going to continue to grow.

There’s a lot of people out there who don’t have a passion for their chosen career. Maybe there is limited emotional fulfillment from it or maybe it is just completely soul crushing. There’s a lot of in between.

I’ve learned from Laurie Ruettimann that the answer to your career crisis is not to change jobs and follow your dream of becoming whatever it is you think you want to do. The answer to your career crisis is to do something with your life that is fulfilling and find something in your career that you can live with and pay the bills.

That’s basically what I told people in this podcast for ReadItFor.Me but I’ll take it one step further and tell you that if you’re good at your job, you’ll be happier overall.

Take this from someone who has done career changes thinking that following my passion was going to be an awesome experience, fulfilling in its own right. It can be but if you’re not good at it or you’re constantly struggling, you can actually start to hate your passion. That’s not good.

Now I used to work in Human Resources as a practitioner and manager. I really believe that good HR is the difference maker in all organizations. That without good, foundational HR, your potential reach as an organization is limited. It is so foundational that when it is done correctly, it doesn’t even seem like HR, it just feels like it is the secret sauce that keeps everything moving. People are on the right page, they enjoy working together, and there is a culture that supports and enables a higher level of function.

Oh, and everybody is good at what they do.

I don’t think I was good to bringing the nuts and bolts to this overarching philosophy to fruition in the workplace. I was impatient and when things slowed down, I eschewed collaboration, and dropped buy in. I was discouraged and I actually started to doubt everything.

By the end of my HR career, I was done. I wasn’t sure that I’d be done with HR completely but I knew it wasn’t going to be me going back into the same position I was in before. I’m sure there were improvements I could have made but I also knew what I wasn’t going to be good at in the long term.

When you’re good at work, you have more opportunities to get paid fairly for what you do and you have more control of where you live and where you work. Those are important things. If you’re really good at work, you aren’t devoting all of your mind share to fighting through work issues and you can devote it more to something you are really passionate about. If you want to play in a band that has weekend gigs or you want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, these aren’t things you’re going to be getting paid for but they are things you can pay for with a job that you’re awesome at.

If you have a job you’re passionate about, that’s awesome. But if you don’t, that shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. Maybe you’re not crazy about sales but you are crazy about taking three week trips to Italy in the summer. Getting very good at sales makes that happen. Then you’ll see your job for what it really is: a vehicle for making your passions happen, whether it is in or outside of your chosen career.

I have a startling confession to make: I like Star Trek: The Next Generation. I know. You’re shocked. While I was a big fan of the Star Trek movies, I wasn’t a big fan of the original series. But The Next Generation? Yeah, that got me going.

So they have the entire series up on Netflix and I’ve been going through it a few episodes at a time. All of the campy goodness is just great. I watched an episode last night that made it clear that HR obviously exists well into the 24th century.

First of all, some context for all of you who aren’t Trekkies. In the 24th century, within the Star Trek universe, Earth is part of a utopian alliance of alien worlds called the United Federation of Planets. The series takes part during a relatively peaceful period where everyone’s needs are taken care of. Nobody is hungry, there aren’t supply shortages, and nobody worries about getting paid. Basically, the people who work on these faster-than-light starships are there because they just want to be there and they are enriched by their work.

In an episode in the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge disobeys an order from Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Captain Picard takes La Forge into his office and reprimands him, telling him (and I’m not joking), “This incident will have to be filed in your permanent record.”

Here was my response to my wife while we’re watching this:

Me: @#$%&!# HR?

Her: What?

Me: HR! There’s HR in a utopian 24th century!

Her: (laughs)

Look, I love HR, but if Earth does turn into a utopian, peaceful society, I hope nobody has to be working in the HR office at the United Federation of Planets.

Last fall, I bought myself a Samsung Chromebook for my birthday. Coincidentally, I also got one of the first units because I ordered it directly from Google when they initially released it and they shipped them from California so I got mine quickly. When I received it, I pulled it out and wanted to type something out on it (because I use my computers primarily for writing, that part is pretty important to me). I busted out a long review and posted it on Amazon as one of the first reviews and that was it.

Or so I thought.

The Chromebook has been one of the top selling laptops on Amazon for nearly six months (#1 as of this writing). My review has been reviewed as helpful by 4,842 of 5,048 raters (just shy of a 96%) and has been read by many more thousands of people. It has over 300 comments on it. I get web traffic and e-mails about the Chromebook several times a week.

I submit to you, quite humbly, that it is probably my most viewed writing on the web. It doesn’t exist on my site and I don’t get anything from it (other than the random visitor or e-mail).

I will tell you, I thought of writing the review here but it didn’t make sense. For one, it doesn’t really fit in with what I typically write about. So I was fine posting it to Amazon because I knew it would get read heavily by those in the midst of a buying decision. I was writing impartially, so I was trying to cover the device—warts and all—even though I was generally a fan of it from first boot.

As the comments started rolling in, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that my own site wasn’t receiving much of any benefit. Even for those who found me, most wouldn’t be interested in being long term subscribers. The more I thought about it though, the more I was pleased. I don’t make a lot of money on this site but I really don’t believe most blogs generate significant income from advertisements (or any other creative, content-oriented approaches). Instead, I think most people who blog earn opportunities and an audience that would be tough to land otherwise. They may get an opportunity to write but more frequently, they get other opportunities to provide value.

I think if I was so focused on just building stuff on my own blog, I wouldn’t be able to do fun things like write a huge review on Amazon.com and wonder if there is anything to it. I would’ve wrote it here and it would’ve received three comments. I wouldn’t have wrote my article about purple squirrels for the Harvard Business Review blog.

With so many off blog alternatives for writing, it is easy to see why a lot of people abandon the blog concept altogether. One thing I am convinced of is that if you are serious about content creation, you need a hub. This is my hub. I may give out Twitter or LinkedIn sites on my bio as well but all roads eventually point back here. I may have spokes of content out there but if someone wants to get back to me, there is only one place that happens.

It’s not a new or unique idea but it is one that I have come to fully embrace. While I may not write as often as I’d like to here, I know I will always have something to write about and that keeping a strong hub is important. And while I’d like to see this site continue to grow, I know the bigger opportunities will come from outside of me writing a blog post here. That’s why posting externally and trying new things is still important.

I spent a week in an office for the first time since July 2009. I have spent days in coffee shops, co-working spaces, and other people’s offices but never a full week of that in one place and at one desk.

I thought it was going to be mostly annoying but to my delight, it was mostly not that at all. I don’t know if that’s because of my great new co-workers or nearly four years of office sensory deprivation talking. Let’s just call it both.

Somebody asked me if I liked working from home and I responded enthusiastically that I do. When asked why, I said something along the lines of, “I’m kinda a loner.” It felt like a loser, cop-out answer. The more I thought about it though, the more it felt right and not at all like a weird response that a guy who doesn’t interact much with people in person would say.

Okay, maybe it is a little like that.

I’m not going to get into the introvert/extrovert thing because it is out of my pay grade, but I will tell you that some people are fueled by having activity that surrounds them and some people are fueled by having calm around them. Some people like a mixture of both environments.

I’ve worked with all of them. I worked with a lady who would jam her earphones in and blast some Enya or whatever New Age music she had on her playlist so loud, I could hear it from where I sat. Interrupting her meant certain death. Similarly, some people pulled themselves into meetings and conversations and then would rush back to their desks and pound keys or make phone calls.

I could deal with both. I liked a certain amount of social time but if you put a gun to my head and ask me what I preferred, it was probably that time to myself that keep things moving along for me.

So when I say you kinda have to be a loner to work from home every day, I really mean the kinda part. You don’t have to be anti-social to make it work. But without thinking about it, you have to fall on the side of being powered by internal forces rather than feeding off the energy of people close by. Otherwise, those coffee shops are going to make a killing off of you and fellow customers won’t always be appreciative of your desire to chat.

For a little context, a few years ago, I wrote a post about how you shouldn’t have a social media policy for your organization. In it, I said:

My point is that however you’d treat the employee in a similar real life situation is how you should treat them when it comes to social media. There are very few truly unique situations when it comes to social media and then it goes back to my point about not making policies for a handful of employees or possibilities.

And about a year ago, I wrote a post about how these social media disclaimers (i.e. “My views do not represent that of my employer”). In it, I said:

I’ll tell you what that disclaimer means in the real world: jack squat. Only, at least on Twitter, I never can tell people how ridiculous the whole disclaimer actually is in 140 characters without sounding like a jerk. And also because this statement is ridiculous for a wide variety of reasons, all of which need to be further explained.

Trish McFarlane asked me if my views have changed on social media policies in the last few years. Succinctly, the answer is no. I’m not going to go all, “let’s fight the man” on this one but I, for one, will not be signing any social media policy. I would recommend most people do the same.

Now that’s a bit tougher if it is embedded into a handbook, obviously. As a former HR head, I also wouldn’t necessarily advocate just breaking those rules because social media policies are dumb.

Then again, you should probably break those rules anyway.

I don’t know if anyone has ever been fired for a pure social media policy violation. I have to believe it is pretty rare. What policies like this help with is:

• Getting people with hard-to-pin-down performance issues onto a performance improvement plan with greater ease
• Firing people who probably needed to be fired anyway for a variety of reasons
• Getting people on the boss’ shit list closer to the firing line
• Firing people who were egregiously awful on social media (who – policy or not – would have been fired anyway)
• Firing people who violated other guidelines already covered (NDAs and confidentiality agreements)

If that’s how you want to operate, you can do all of that without a social media policy. In fact, many organizations pull it off with great frequency. But can we be real?  If you’re having issues with people using social media in your organization, a policy is a super ineffective prescription. As I said in my social media post, education should always be the top priority for those who want to be a visible presence online. And you should stop hiring people that you would be worried about getting online and actually saying the words that come into their minds.

You remember that, right? (RSS/e-mail subscribers may have to click through) If you had AOL back when dial-up internet was still the hottest thing on the block, this cheery but brief “goodbye” meant that you were signing off. You couldn’t chat with your friends, receive e-mails or access the storehouses of data that existed on the internet without dialing back in. That sounds great, other than the whole speed issue. We’ll get to that in a bit.

The big news is that today is my last day at ERE Media. I start a new job with The Starr Conspiracy next week (I didn’t even take a long weekend!). It has been a weird few weeks. I know new routines will settle in with time and new co-workers will become more familiar but I’ve been with ERE for over three years.

I’m a huge fan of what ERE does for the industry. The team is great and they’ll continue to move forward. There have been no sour feelings from me during any part of the process. I stayed on longer and worked harder than any other exit I’ve done. I still care about their mission and I cared enough to know when it was time to pass the reigns to other capable hands.

I don’t want to single out anyone but I can’t say enough about ERE founder David Manaster. In an industry that can seem full of egos and outright bastards, he’s a great change of pace. I trust, respect, and, most of all, thank him for allowing me to come on, break things, and make a mess. If he starts working on something new, you better be paying attention.

I’ll be writing a bit more here and for The Starr Conspiracy. And I’ll still be obsessed with HR, recruiting and sports. I get to still work on cool things. I feel completely dumb when I tell people how I got where I am right now. I’m a lucky dude.

It will be weird logging out of my ERE accounts today, though. I’ll imagine that short but cheery AOL “goodbye” as I click logout. I won’t be completely disconnected this time but I will feel a certain end to all I’ve done here. That’s both the best and worst part about that short goodbye.

“Our goal is to reduce turnover by 25%.”

No it isn’t. I hope not, at least.

Having reduced turnover as a goal leads to all kinds of strange, short-term thinking that lead to deranged organizations. A counter-offer when your 325th best salesperson decides to take another job? Lengthening the corrective action review process? Pushing beyond the budget on labor costs because your team is too expensive? Ploys and programs designed to cater to middle and low performers who may be a flight risk? Yep, yep, yep and yep.

You may even have an executive who is looking at some dashboard in a system and she is instructing you that you have to get control of turnover. She may want to build some goals around reducing that number. Nod your head and then walk out of her office and ignore that.

Reducing turnover may be an okay outcome but it is never a goal. And even if it is an outcome, it is a lousy, broad measuring stick. 2% turnover sounds great until you realize that your organization is bleeding only high performers and high potentials.

So can we agree that reducing turnover is a stupid measuring stick and that it shouldn’t be used as a goal or outcome?

Maybe? I’ll take it. If you are using it for an outcome, make sure what you’re measuring is meaningful.

If someone in your organization is complaining about high turnover and reducing it isn’t a goal or outcome, what’s the proper response? The proper response is finding out what the real issue actually is:

1. Our labor costs are too high. How are we investing labor dollars? Why can’t we do a better job of doing that?
2. Our recruiters are spending too much time on replacements. Is there a resource allocation issue or are we short on recruiters?
3. We’re losing people after 6/12/18 mos. What are we doing in our hiring process that sucks so bad?
4. A top performer left. Yeah, his boss was an asshole. Maybe we should get rid of him?
5. Our culture needs to be changed. Guess what? Culture change will cause massive turnover too.
6. We aren’t performing well as a company. And you found a metric that may or may not have to do with that? Really?
7. The company isn’t well managed. Trying to blame general management issues on turnover is like blaming In-N-Out for your gut.

Turnover is a symptom like body aches. Body aches can be really bad when you’re sick because it can indicate the flu but body aches can be fine if you’re getting back in shape. Should you keep track of turnover? Sure, and if you can, get as granular as you can (who is leaving and why?). Does reducing turnover take precedent over increasing profit, value, and company performance or reducing costs, administrative burden and culture issues? No, never. And don’t forget that.

Back at the first HR Technology Conference I attended in 2009, Kris Dunn took a picture of my badge and made fun of me. It said, “Lance Haun – Blogger”. And I have to admit, walking the floor at that conference (my third as a blogger) was a little weird, too. I would tell speakers, vendors and attendees, “I’m writing about some of the interesting things happening in HR technology.” They would tell me they never heard of me. Huh? Are you on Twitter? Do you read blogs? Are you part of any LinkedIn groups? Have you heard of Kris Dunn? Or Laurie Ruettimann? How about Steve Effing Boese?

No? Okay.

It was a good lesson. I was different from most of these folks. If you look at my desktop setup, you see two monitors. I barely even look at the second monitor because that has five Twitter streams going simultaneously. Sometimes it feels like the matrix. I’ll magically see when someone who doesn’t tweet that much cut through the static because I haven’t noticed their avatar stream by for a long time.

My brain is full of really stupid crap.

So bloggers are different. And a piece from Andrew Sullivan which links to this outstanding piece by Jonathan Bernstein lays it out:

[T]he more important lesson that really can’t be repeated often enough is that reporters, columnists, bloggers: we’re not normal. Even worse: of the not normal — the people who pay a lot of attention to politics — we’re not even normal in that group.

Which, if you replace politics with HR and recruiting, you pretty much have me nailed.

My dependence on Google Reader and Google Alerts used in concert with it is astounding. I’m not going to PR sites to search for news that somehow hadn’t made it to my inbox. I cut through, on average, 200+ unread items before I get out of my PJs. And that’s after clearing it out at 6pm the following night.

So when I talk with people about how I get my news and how I follow what’s going on in our industry, their eyes glaze over in 2.3 seconds. Honestly, I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s a habit, like getting my caffeine intake for the day. There’s nothing exciting about it but it has taken dozens of hours to perfect and spotting interesting stuff is easier because of that.

So when some blogger tells you how to use Twitter (like I have, over and over), be just a tiny bit skeptical. It’s not that they are necessarily a superuser. In fact, I’ve seen a lot of blogger Twitter usage and it, at times, is fairly primitive. But it is very focused on one thing typically: dissecting and discerning interesting stuff going on in the space. Between who we choose to follow and how we list people, these feeds are amazingly useful.

If, you know, you spread information for a living.

Bernstein’s bigger point is that bloggers have to remember the bubble we operate in. What is old news within our circles might not hit mainstream people in our industry in a year. That’s a common issue and, outside of the most critical, need-to-know issues, I don’t really have a problem with that.

For bloggers, it is probably safe to do two things: never assume knowledge and never forget that you’re weird.

I’ve thought a lot about ideas. Especially over the last couple of months, I’ve been bombarded by them.

Talk is cheap, though. It is easy to talk about new ideas and new ways of doing things. It is another thing to get through the 523 excuses, roadblocks and challenges that stand in the way of them.

When I look at new, exciting technologies (or processes or ways of thinking), I think about adoption curves and the entrances into new organizations. But it is more than that.

I think a lot about human nature when I think about new idea adoption. In order to take on a new idea, you either have to kill the old one or you had no idea to begin with.

Hey, sometimes it’s both.

I think about it in the context of the marriage equality movement. No matter what happens with the Supreme Court decisions, there is a long road ahead for people’s viewpoints and ideas about marriage to change. The landmark civil rights act in the United States is almost 50 years old and there are still a lot of people who would gladly return to before that came to fruition.

It is frightening to give up something you’ve believed in for a long time. While you can talk a good game about being open-minded, when the rubber meets the road, I’ll bet you flinch. Killing familiar ideas is tough and it takes patience, whether it is the idea that paper-based payroll was somehow superior or personal feelings on important legal, cultural and political issues.

There’s also a point where you don’t necessarily want yield to new ideas either. It is hard to understand whether the reason you’re hesitant is because it is the right thing to do or because yielding to new ideas is uncomfortable in its own right.

One thing is clear though: if you were more comfortable with murdering your own dumb ideas or at least did it on a more frequent basis, you’d be able to tell the difference a lot easier.

If you’ve read any business blogs over the past few years, you’ve probably seen some sort of stock “Leadership is better than management” post. It always seems to be an either/or proposition, too.

In that post, you’ll invariably read the author extol the power that leadership brings to typical management challenges: workers who don’t perform well, don’t always do what you ask them to do, or engage in behaviors that discourage their colleagues.  Becoming a better leader, they say, will help you avoid these challenges more easily because people will be inspired to do what you ask them without you have to be a big bad boss. And who likes bosses, right? We like leaders.

Of course, I’ve never written about that. Not because I don’t think leadership skills have value (indeed, they do) but because rarely have the people I have seen manage employees exhibit one trait or the other singularly. The pure leader and the pure manager are as common as a unicorn.

Thank goodness, too.

Can we admit to ourselves that the great recognized leaders of our time also had some fantastic management skills as well? Can we also admit that had they chosen to shun management for pure leadership, they would have been seen as abject failures?

Okay, probably not. Yet.

If you take an example from the sports world, coaches have to be good at both leadership and management to be successful in their field. If you’re in a basketball game with the game on the line with the final possession, you have to both inspire your team to be great (even after a brutally long game) and know that you have the right game plan that your players will follow to the end.

Basketball players, even great ones, question their coaches (even, yes, great ones). With limited time to brainstorm possibilities with your team though, the coach is the focal point of drawing up this final play. Whether or not you question the coach on his decision, you are going to follow through on it because you know there are consequences for not doing so.

That final play outcome is going to be driven by authority and by good management. If a coach can’t do that, they aren’t going to win consistently.

Take an example from politics. A president can be great at leading and inspiring people without being super effective at their job because they seem unwilling (or unable) to drive results through authority and managing people and results. Is that an unfair jab at President Obama? A bit, sure. But every time I hear about our obstructionist Congress (which, they are), I hear about it from someone who doesn’t want the President to do the same things his predecessors did to drive their agendas.

The point is: you need leadership and management. The best leaders, the ones we laud, do both.

May 13th-15, you should pack your bags and head to San Francisco for two of the most interesting events in HR and recruiting (and I happen to be involved in both of them). Both of them will be held at the same location and there will be lots of cool (and different) people at each event.

The first is Influence HR, being held May 13th. If you’re involved in the human capital marketplace (either as a vendor, marketer, PR or consultant), you should make it down to this one day event. There are some legit speakers and I’ll be moderating a panel on how not to suck when pitching to journalists and influencers. Don’t worry though, we actually will have real PR people, journalists and people that have done both on to tell you the real deal. I’ll try to wrangle it and make it interesting.

It’s a topic near and dear to me as I get pitched everything good and bad under the sun from HCM providers. You can do better, trust me.

You want to come? Great, use this link and this discount code (iHRHaun) for a special discount.

The second is the Recruiting Innovation Summit, being held May 14-15th. Now, full disclosure, the company I work for (ERE Media) is the one putting this on and I am heavily involved in the agenda. That being said, what we are doing is completely different than past summits. We are going to be doing quick hits of 20 minutes a piece of innovations from recruiters, vendors and startups along with thought-leaders pushing the envelope on what’s really coming next in recruiting. We’ll be interspersing discussions from several panels as well some significant networking time as well.

This is a conversation about the future of recruiting. The agenda is filling out quickly though so if you want to see how you can be involved, get in touch ASAP.

Want to come to that too? Cool, register here and use this discount code (RIS13LH) for a special reader discount.

Can’t wait to see many of you folks there!

A couple of months ago, I demonstrated what the true point of Twitter was. I knew I forgot something though…

The biggest HR story of the week has attracted so much attention, it is now completely impossible to avoid. Yahoo decided late last week that it would stop allowing its employees to work from home.

Everyone freaked out.

Why?

• The trend has been to allow more flexibility, not less
• Some employees were promised this perk
• Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer isn’t a good mom; therefore, suck it parents
• Yahoo just wants to get people to leave
• They should know how to manage people without looking over their shoulders
• We’re going backwards! This isn’t progressive!

I’ve received no less than three press releases calling attention to the situation which means this issue has already jumped the shark.

The best part about those press releases? Each of them came to a different conclusion based on “studies” and “data.”

Let me take this snark level to eleven: If Marissa Mayer burned Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters to the ground, I wouldn’t look for some deeper meaning to that action. Outside of a few people I know there that I would personally feel bad for, I wouldn’t think that it is indicative  of some trend of CEO’s burning their corporate headquarter buildings to the ground. I wouldn’t be playing armchair psychologist trying to figure out what drove her to do it. I wouldn’t be writing passionate articles about how she made a huge mistake and that CEO’s shouldn’t be burning down their corporate headquarters. I wouldn’t write that she is anti-feminist because she prefers burning buildings to the ground instead of, well, not burning them to the ground, I suppose.

Do you get it yet?

Burning a company’s headquarters to the ground is way worse (and much more psychotic) than making people who are paid money by you come into work at an office and be physically there for a set period of time. And if I can’t be bothered to care about the former, I certainly won’t care much about the latter.

Marissa Mayer knows more about Yahoo’s problems than any of you yahoos and has a lot more skin in the game than anyone else (except maybe a few institutional shareholders). That’s not reason alone to trust her but it certainly should be enough to stop inventing crazy ideas about why this is happening and look at the move in context:

• Yahoo is hurting
• They don’t know what they don’t know
• They brought in Mayer to fix it
• This is not indicative of a larger trend

Will Yahoo lose some people? Yes. Do you seriously think that they didn’t know this going into it? Yeah, I don’t think so.

I love working from home and if this impacted me unexpectedly, I wouldn’t be super happy about it. But it also wouldn’t be a news story and certainly nobody would be making wild claims about my boss and his motivations.

Unless he burned down our headquarters, of course. Then, at least he would make the emergency services report.

Several years ago, five sports-obsessed talent pros created The 8 Man Rotation. Steve Boese, Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, Matt Stollak and myself make up the crew. An annual e-book, driven magnificently by the professor Matt Stollak, soon followed. Thousands of downloads later, it has become the e-book for sports fans that just happen to dig the talent management part of the sports game.

In the third edition, the crew is back with 150 pages of goodness for you to digest. China Gorman and Dwane Lay start things off right with the foreword and Lizzie Maldonado gave us a logo. We also have a website now where you can view and download all three editions.

So enjoy the 2012 edition of The 8 Man Rotation!

I’m not a birthday guy. For my 30th, my wife and family arranged a surprise birthday party for me and it was literally the most surprised I’ve been about anything. Not because I didn’t deserve it (of course I deserved it) but because I’ve never been big on my birthday. It comes and goes.

The party was pretty great, though.

This last year though, I took my birth date off Facebook completely. It wasn’t secret. My birthday can be found (a good sourcer or identity thief could probably locate it). And a few people wished me happy birthday (thankfully, both my parents remembered without the aid of Facebook). For the most part, it went under the radar, including by a few people whose birthdays I know.

Luckily, I didn’t cut them like some would.

My main intention wasn’t to mess with people or try to play the gotcha game with them. In fact, my only hope is to relieve people of the chore of writing a meaningless happy birthday on my Facebook wall without any semblance of feeling. Happy birthday, stranger. As casually and thoughtlessly as a nod to another person as you walk by on the street.

This seems to be one of those courtesy things that made sense when Facebook was truly about a place with just your friends. When I had 25 people as friends, wishing a happy birthday was a natural thing because I’d probably find a way to do it anyway for these people. It just doesn’t scale, though.

As I have seen birthdays hit my Facebook feed, I’ve tried to calendar the ones that are more important to me. For someone with some serious memory issues at times, calendaring is the only way to go. Since I am constantly looking weeks ahead, it helps to remind me better than just seeing the date pop up on Facebook the day of the big event.

For everyone else, though? I’m not wishing you a happy birthday. Not if I’d never be invited to a birthday party or have a reason to know one way or another. Not if we’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve never connected on birthdays.

That might be bad news for Facebook, too. They are trying to make money by allowing users to gift tangible objects through Facebook. I wouldn’t be surprised if they suddenly flipped my privacy settings for hidden birth dates.

If your birthday is a big deal to you, I’ll pick up on that. I’m not dense and I’m not uncaring. But when 200 people are wishing you happy birthday on Facebook, we should also be honest with ourselves about the depth of those sentiments. If you’re a regular birthday wisher, can you remember the people you wished happy birthday to in the last week?