Bob Morris on HR Transformation: A Book Review

HR Transformation: Building Human Resources From the Outside In
Dave Ulrich, Justin Allen, Wayne Brockbank, Jon Younger, and Mark Nym
McGraw-Hill (2009)

In an uncommonly informative Introduction, the authors assert, “Our point is that HR professionals often focus entirely in the function of HR rather than externally on what customers and investors need HR to deliver. If HR professionals are to truly serve as business partners, then their goals must be the goals of the business. Transforming HR professionals into business partners isn’t an end in and of itself; it’s the means to a strategic, business-oriented end.” Those decision-makers who have that specific objective would be well-advised to absorb and digest the material in this book.

Written in collaboration with Justin Allen, Wayne Brockbank, Jon Younger, and Mark Nyman, Ulrich and his RBL associates offer what they characterize as “a handbook for HR transformation” in which they synthesize and summarize everything they have learned about it. Specifically, what a transformation is and what it requires; what it isn’t; what works, what doesn’t, and why; how to plan it; how to mobilize the resources needed (especially people); how to launch it; how to measure progress throughout the transformation initiatives; and how to apply the lessons learned to sustain a constant refinement of what HR is and does to increase its impact and value.

Here is a brief excerpt from the Introduction: “Simply stated, we propose that the biggest challenge for HR professionals today is to help their respective organizations succeed.” Obviously, to accomplish this worthy objective, the authors correctly assert that there are certain factors that must be present. Here are three:

1. It is imperative that the HR professionals themselves recognize the authenticity of this challenge and not only accept but embrace it as a unique opportunity for their own development but also for what the transformation will enable their organization to accomplish.

2. It is even more important that senior managers recognize the need for the transformation and commit to its completion whatever resources that may require. They must also be patient. Change initiatives worthy of the name are messy, complicated, unpredictable, and sometimes stalled temporarily. The change agents need and deserve senior management’s full support.

3. There must be a game plan for the transformation process and I think the one that the authors provide in this book is eminently worthy of careful consideration because it is cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective. What I like about it is that it combines some of the best features of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies without limiting the options of those who select it. In fact, the authors provide invaluable advice with regard to how to modify the four-phase model to ensure that it fully accommodates the needs, interest, and objectives of the given organization.

Readers will especially appreciate the authors’ skillful use of various reader-friendly devices that include “Tools,” “Tables,” “Figures,” and dozens of checklists that facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of key points. In the Appendix (all by itself worth far more than the cost of the book), the authors provide (Pages 217-222) an inventory of all the tools that have been inserted throughout their narrative.

Bob Morris on Design-Driven Innovation: A Book Review

Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean
Roberto Verganti
Harvard Business Press (2009)

Does design drive innovation or does innovation drive design. The answer is “Yes.” The success of each approach depends almost entirely on what Roberto Verganti characterizes as “radical research” and those who either conduct it or support those who do. In his introductory Letter to the Reader, Verganti explains that this is a book on management. More specifically, “it’s about how to manage innovation that customers do not expect but eventually love. It shows how executives can realize an innovation strategy that leads to products and services that have a radical new meaning: those that convey a completely new reason for customers to buy them. Their meanings are so distinct from those that dominate the market that they might take people by surprise, but they are so inevitable that they convert people and make them passionate.” Or what Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba describe as “customer evangelists.”

Verganti calls this strategy “design-driven innovation” because design, in its etymological sense, means “making sense of things.” Therefore, think of design-driven innovation as the R&D process for meanings. This book shows “how companies can manage this process to radically overturn dominant meanings in an industry before their competitors so and therefore rule the competitors.” Throughout his lively narrative, Verganti responds to questions such as these:

1. How to innovate by making sense of things?

2. How to integrate design-driven innovation with an organization’s strategy?

3. How to initiative and then sustain productive interplay between “technology-push” and design-driven innovation?

4. Why do some companies invest in design-driven innovation and others don’t?

Note: Verganti’s comments in response to this question will be of great value to readers now determining whether or not design-driven innovation is appropriate to their organization’s needs, objectives, and resources.

5. What are “interpreters” and what is their role in the design-driven innovation process?

6. How to locate and then attract key interpreters?

7. How can an organization develop its own vision?

8. How to leverage the “seductive power” of the interpreters?

9. When establishing what Verganti calls the “Design-Driven Lab,” where to begin?

10. What is the “key role” of an organization’s senior managers and their influence on the organization’s culture?

However those involved are identified (e.g. “interpreters”) and their functions are defined, whatever a given organization’s goals and resources may be, questions such as these suggest critically important issues that must be addressed by its business leaders. If I understand Verganti’s core thesis, it is that the process by which to do that must itself be design-driven. That is to say, a competitive advantage can be achieved and then sustained only by innovative thinking about innovation. Only then can those who are involved “make sense” of what to do and how to do it for their customers.

Recommended Readings:

The Breakthrough Imperative: How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results
Mark Gottfredson and Herman Saenz

Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success
Dean R. Spitzer

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson

HR Transformation: Building Human Resources From the Outside
Dave Ulrich, Justin Allen, Wayne Brockbank, Jon Younger, and Mark Nym

Interview: Dave Ulrich

Dave Ulrich

He is Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan where he is on the core faculty of the Executive Program, Co-Director of Michigan’s Human Resource Executive Program, and Advanced Human Resource Executive Program. His teaching and research addresses how to create an organization that adds value to customers and investors. He studies how organizations change, build capabilities, learn, remove boundaries, and leverage human resource activities. He is also a partner at the RBL Group, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value. He studies how organizations build capabilities of speed, learning, collaboration, accountability, talent, and leadership through leveraging human resources. He has helped generate award winning data bases that assess alignment between strategies, human resource practices and HR competencies. Ulrich has published over 200 articles and book chapters as well as authored or co-authored over 20 books, including Results-Based Leadership , The HR Scorecard, The HR Value Proposition and The Workforce Scorecard , Beyond HR, Leadership Brand, HR Competencies, Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By, and then HR Transformation: Building Human Resources from the Outside In.

Morris: Before discussing a few of your books, first a few general questions. At what point in your life that you realize that you wanted to focus on understanding what maximizing human development requires and then how to help individuals as well as teams and even entire organizations to achieve that?

Ulrich: Eons ago in college, I wanted to go to law school. It was my boyhood dream. I took a course called “organizational behavior” from a master teacher who captured my imagination. He asked us to examine how organizations work and be alerted on how to improve them. He challenged us to see organizational issues in where we worked, what we read, and how we lived our lives. I ended up writing a 15 to 20-page paper every week for 15 weeks. He told me afterwards that I had found my niche. Decades later I figured I had “OCD” … organization compulsive disorder … where I constantly look at finding how to organize better. This torments family and friends when I go to restaurants, airplanes, churches, or other organization settings and offer unsolicited advice.

Morris: Looking back over (let’s say) the last decade, what have been the most significant changes in HR operations and management of them?

Ulrich: About a decade ago, HR began to serious focus on outcomes not activities. It was not enough to hire someone, but to make sure that you are hiring the right person. As HR aligned to strategy, the focus was less on what HR activities were done (e.g., how many leaders received 40 hours of training), but on the outcomes of what was done. A second shift was finding technology-based ways to do the transaction work often affiliated with legacy HR. The work ended up in service centers, being outsourced, or on line for employee self-sufficiency. This freed up HR professionals to focus on the more strategic and transformational parts of their job. Finally, line managers began to realize that competitors can more easily copy price, product, and technology, but the way to manage people and organization was a unique advantage that competitors could not easily copy. HR has become more strategic not because HR wants to be strategic, but because line managers need insights that good HR professionals can offer.

Book Review: HR Transformation

HR Transformation: Building Human Resources From the Outside In
Dave Ulrich, Justin Allen, Wayne Brockbank, Jon Younger, and Mark Nyman
McGraw-Hill (2009)

Ulrich and his RBL associates offer what they characterize as “a handbook for HR transformation” in which they synthesize and summarize everything they have learned about it. Specifically, what a transformation is and what it requires; what it isn’t; what works, what doesn’t, and why; how to plan it; how to mobilize the resources needed (especially people); how to launch it; how to measure progress throughout the transformation initiatives; and how to apply the lessons learned to sustain a constant refinement of what HR is and does to increase its impact and value.

“Simply stated, we propose that the biggest challenge for HR professionals today is to help their respective organizations succeed.” Obviously, to accomplish this worthy objective, the authors correctly assert that there are certain factors that must be present. Here are three: (1) It is imperative that the HR professionals themselves recognize the authenticity of this challenge and not only accept but embrace it as a unique opportunity for their own development but also for what the transformation will enable their organization to accomplish. (2) It is even more important that senior managers recognize the need for the transformation and commit to its completion whatever resources that may require. They must also be patient. Change initiatives worthy of the name are messy, complicated, unpredictable, and sometimes stalled temporarily. The change agents need and deserve senior management’s full support. (3) There must be a game plan for the transformation process and I think the one that the authors provide in this book is eminently worthy of careful consideration because it is cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective. What I like about it is that it combines some of the best features of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies without limiting the options of those who select it. In fact, the authors provide invaluable advice with regard to how to modify the four-phase model to ensure that it fully accommodates the needs, interest, and objectives of the given organization.

In an uncommonly informative Introduction, the authors assert, “Our point is that HR professionals often focus entirely in the function of HR rather than externally on what customers and investors need HR to deliver. If HR professionals are to truly serve as business partners, then their goals must be the goals of the business. Transforming HR professionals into business partners isn’t an end in and of itself; it’s the means to a strategic, business-oriented end.” Those decision-makers who have that specific objective would be well-advised to absorb and digest the material in this book.