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Weekend Stuff: Beautiful-er!

After the stunning loss in Game 5 last week after leading 7-0 in the 7th inning, Carlos Pena of the Rays put a positive spin "That's the beautiful thing about baseball. You have to get 27 outs. Cannot just run the clock out"

I will tell you what is beautiful-er. When the home team only has 24 outs and does not need the bottom of the 9th to close the series out.

Where are the rollbacks?

While the oil industry can never win the PR game, gas prices for the most part follow crude oil prices as the chart above shows (at least in the USA - in other countries, significant subsidies and taxes reduce that correlation). So, in all the other doom and gloom it is nice to see gas down below $ 3.00 a gallon.

Even better, most other food and other commodities are down substantially. So, where are the other price rollbacks? Like airlines which tacked on all kinds of fees in the last few months? Like products which either reduced sizes or tacked on large increases in the last few months?

And what about technology vendors? With the rupee down, Indian vendors should be rolling back prices. For years now, software vendors and outsourcers have been offshoring a bulk of their staff and not rolling back prices. Or consolidating and not rolling back their savings in SG&A. Other vendors are using open source components and automation to become leaner but not passing along savings.

Recessions may be tough on investors, vendors and workers, but they are generally good to buyers. Expect to see the Walmart smiley faces on many more products in the next few months.

Weekend Stuff: Game 7, Bottom of the 9th

I wish our Rays had finished it off on Thursday, but here we are...

Does anyone doubt any more that 2008 will go down as probably the best ever in sports? When I wrote this in July, we had not witnessed the spectacular Olympics, the US rebound in the Ryder Cup and now this baseball excitement.

Actually, does anyone doubt that 2008 will go down as one of the most memorable (not all enjoyable) ever - with the economy and the US Presidential Race?

Larry being...everything but Larry

He has been compared to P.T. Barnum and Atilla the Hun

To Genghis Khan

To God

To a Samurai warrior

And now Tom Wailgum at CIO Magazine compares him to the Monty Burns character in The Simpsons

I have flatteringly compared him to a Medici during the Renaissance

He has been far more entertaining and influential than Manny...but we just cannot seem to accept Larry being Larry...

The talented Mr. Kutik

I spent some time this week at Bill Kutik's annual HR Tech conference in Chicago. I had not been to the conference in a few years and boy, has it grown - 250 vendors in the Expo, over 2,000 attendees.

The other big change - other than in the title of the conference, no one seems to use the term "Human Resources" any more (of course, some organizations never migrated past "Personnel"). First person I ran in to at the Expo was Terry Hunter (of  The Hunter Group fame) a fixture in the market segment and he summarized it "Every vendor here is pitching Talent Management. And of course, SaaS".

Bill Kutik's signature session during the conference - a vendor "shoot out" - focused on, you got it - Talent Management (Authoria, Cornerstone, salary.com and SoftScape provided the props for the OK Corral)

Jim Holincheck, who has tracked the market for a while now at Gartner and can claim much of the credit (or blame) for the Talent Management moniker told me it is a term both buyers (even at the CEO level) and vendors can relate to. Alternatives like "Human Capital Management" were too high-falutin'. 

While vendors appeared to outnumber buyers at the conference, I met with 2 Lawson customers and 3 Workday customers. For different reasons (to be covered in a separate post) they all seemed very happy with their solutions. Update: here is the post about the customers I talked to.

While there was a smattering of innovation - a panel on how web 2.0 will affect the discipline,  a handful of "cool HR vendors" - you had to wonder how the masses of vendors differentiate when everyone claims to do Talent Management. Indeed, Jason Averbook who runs Knowledge Infusion told me some of his more sophisticated clients like Target have not been able to find even with that much choice a good fit for their needs.

Larry Dunivan of Lawson interviewed me about what innovations I would have liked to have seen at the show and I gave him my perspective. Update: download my chapter on HR Innovations in a new book HR Horizons

I did leave the show with admiration for Bill for having grown the show successfully for years now. And with a note that I needed to see Matt Damon again in this movie..after all, talent is the buzzword du jour.

Update: Bill Kutik's own POV on the event, and links to other bloggers who posted on the event

Now if he could also reduce meetings by 30%

Good friend Ross Mayf ield writes in Forbes about "email hell"

"According to Gartner Group, 30% of e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext (that Ross co-founded) customers commonly decrease e-mail volume by 30% and moving e-mails to collaborative workspaces that are designed for one-to-many or many-to-many communication. "

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

May be Ross can start something called Anti-Social to allow employees more "alone" time :)

Can Microsoft catch a break?

The USA Today blogs about Microsoft's new technologies aimed and disabled and aging folks...and the comments talk about Microsoft products leaving their computers disabled!

Weekend Stuff: The city that works

Definition of Chicago: "Tough city to get people to relocate from or to".  Its citizens are tough to move. I am in the latter category. I  have over my career turned down 3 opportunities to move there - primarily due to the winters.

But I have always appreciated the efficiency of the city, even on those nasty winter days. Subways straight from O'Hare and Midway airports. Rental cars at the Midway terminal building - 20 to 30 minute savings each way.

And this visit, I saw another dimension of the efficiency. On my way to the McCormick Place for the HR Tech show, the event bus took what is called the Busway.  When I boarded the bus, I asked the driver how long he thought it would be. 10-15 minutes. Right, I said with the steady drizzle outside. We made the 2.5 mile ride, parallel to the railway tracks and only open to charter convention buses, in 8 minutes.

McCormick, one of the largest convention centers in the world, can have up to 25,000 folks on a busy day. Using the Busway keeps hundreds of buses and taxis from clogging the streets.

And allows visitors to leave the city with another pleasant memory to add to their other favorable views of the city.

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