[incompetence] eliminate human resources for a start

This mini-series began with "There may be a reason", continues with this article on "Human Resources" and concludes tomorrow wih "Failure Analysis".

The series is a reaction against the massive losses of the past few months in governmental departments and it focuses on the private sector first.

The first and most overwhelming obstacle or bottleneck to an organization, be it public or private sector, is its Human Resources Department.

The most charitable thing that can be said for Human Resources departments is that they are on a hiding to nothing. It's their very nature and the things they're expected to do which make them failures. Here is a compendium of comment from analysts, HR people themselves and from business men and women, in no particular order.

* HR departments can be needlessly bureaucratic, obstructionist, stuck in the "comfort zone" of filling out forms and explaining company benefits, and too closely aligned with the interests of management yet lacking the business knowledge to be effective strategic partners.

* Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources said:

"Companies are pushing more and more work onto employees, and HR departments are becoming the mechanism for doing that. As a result, the idea that HR people are there to represent workers -- or at least deal objectively with their concerns -- is pretty much gone."

* With companies continuing to cut back employee benefits such as healthcare and pensions, HR departments have found themselves "increasingly the bearer of bad news to employees."

* According to the August 2005 cover story in Fast Company magazine, entitled "Why We Hate HR," HR people are not interested in an "open-minded approach" when it comes to making exceptions to company policies, including pay schedules.

"Instead, they pursue standardization and uniformity in the face of a workforce that is heterogeneous and complex.... Bureaucrats everywhere abhor exceptions -- not just because they open up the company to charges of bias but because they require more than rote solutions."

[My note here: "Flair" is not encouraged in system oriented businesses like McDonalds - there appears little scope for enterprising flair. I ran a cricket team once which was packed with boys capable of defence. We'd lost several matches with charismatic strokemakers getting out to clever balls and so we went in with "percentage" players. Worked well until one day it required someone to seize the initiative. None of our boys could. HR operates this way.]

* "Who does your company's vice president of human resources report to? If it's the CFO -- and chances are good it is -- then HR is headed in the wrong direction."

* Why HR is useless and even damaging:

1) Companies hire inexperienced and unqualified people to handle HR, but expect them to perform at higher levels than they are qualified.

2) Companies do not invest in HR as they do in other departments.

3) Many small to medium size companies have HR people that are strategic partners.

From business people

* USC suggests that HR people consistently overestimate their contributions as strategic partners. Not that they don't contribute--but the line managers they work with typically value this partnership less than does HR.

* While I don't doubt that there are many unqualified HR professionals out there, there is also a definite lack of excellent programs offering graduate degrees in HR.

* In my experience, too often what HR professionals miss is a sound business perspective. Most HR people that I've worked with have a pretty good handle on regulations and behavioral pitfalls but a very poor understanding of risk. Everything is viewed as a possible worst case. Yet in other parts of a company, departments handle risk/reward/cost trade offs all day.

* I work in the consulting field with a lot of companies in my state, I have seen first hand how CEO's do not value HR. They do not ask their HR person's opinion, they leave them out of major decisions, and they proceed to make decisions without a clue of the consequences they are about to incur.

* David Ulrich who wrote, in Human Resource Champions, that HR has four roles to fill in an organization: Strategic Partner, Change Agent, Administrative Expert and Employee Champion. HR departments appear not to succeed in any of these.

* In the field of IT, HR has even less reason to exist. Why? Well, in a personal sense for this chap, here are three reasons:

1. Recruiters don’t know anything about programming and are ignorant of virtually everything related to software development. Many hadn’t even heard of Boost, O’Reilly, or the C++ Users Journal. They didn’t understand the significance of my credentials.

2. Recruiters view my freelance experience as a negative point, even though they say they want “self-motivated independent problem solvers”. Apparently I am too independent!

3. I only computed two years of a university degree in computer science.

In other words, IT is a field where the bit of paper is of far less value than hands-on development incorporating latest technological ideas.

* Personnel Today decided to give the HR profession, as a whole, a 360-degree appraisal. First, in our 360-degree appraisal of HR survey, we asked our readers to rate the knowledge, performance, priorities and effectiveness of themselves and their HR department.

- Some 59 per cent of [HR employees] rated their HR department as extremely or very effective.

- 20 per cent of managers said their HR department was extremely or very effective. Another 43 per cent said it was not very or not at all effective.

- 46 per cent of managers said they experienced unnecessary red tape from HR.

- A healthy 80 per cent [of HR employees] declared their HR department offered good value, and only 10 per cent said no.

- However, a shockingly low 31 per cent of managers said their HR department offered good value for money, and 48 per cent said it did not.

* 5 Reasons to Hate Your HR Department:

1. They think you are a resource

2. Talking to them accomplishes nothing

3. No real understanding of you or your job

4. Inflexible policies and red tape

5. They pretend to be on your team

While most HR people are well meaning and while some HR departments are helpful to their employees, there is a reason why so many negative stereotypes exist.

My own further comments

HR are amateurs in business. If they were any good at business themselves, they'd be in there making money. They're not. By and large, they're the same PC do-gooder inflexibles who look to further regulation as the solution to systemic ills and as a substitute for effective analysis.

They are used by management to point fingers at anyone but the management [after all, management employed them and paid them] - therefore they have zero function in an organization in anything but a book-keeping sense.

Failure Analysis is looked at tomorrow and it can be seen that the bottleneck to efficiency called Human Resources quite clearly needs to be eliminated and its resources reallocated in order to make the analysis and repair job and ongoing efficiency of an organization actually work.

[tramvai of dreams] of trees and camshafts

The Linara Tree

The Linara Tree is very special. First you have to be super-intelligent, 20 years old and so beautiful that men would weep and gnash their teeth.

Then you must go to the black sea and get a smoothed pebble of a reasonable size, bring it back, wrap copper wire around it, attach two glass eyes for stability, then add white cotton foliage.

Now it's ready to present to your professor. Спасибо огромное, милая!

What a day. Next week I plan to post a photo of just the type of thing one must put up with over here - five of them today and every one could grace a Vogue magazine cover.

Then to the cafe and the paths were so treacherous it was just a shuffling slide the whole way. Perfect example of what I wrote about last week. Only minus 5 and yet so cold my back froze up through the jacket - the wind was coming off the lake and it was bitter.

The girls I cheerioed the other evening were there and "clustered", the pea and ham soup was wonderful, a warm time was had by all and then it was out into the chill again. Shuffle, stop, shuffle, stop, hood up, gloves on and still not enough. This was going to be tough but the soup was nice.

Tramvai eventually came to the wind whipped stop and all augured well, Higham the Iceberg stumbled up the steps, the feeling came back to the body and then, right in the middle of the busiest intersection imaginable, four lanes in each direction, the tram stopped. Now I hadn't wanted to say anything but the dirty great metal camshaft rolling around the tram floor was in for a surprise.

Suddenly the driver, a woman, came running out, the conductress, a woman, helped her lift the shaft off the tram, the lights changed, the horns reached a cacophany, the shaft turned out to be a tow bar and suddenly we were towing another tram, we stopped, the driver came rushing out, they both got off and collected the shaft and flung it back on the tram, the driver hurtled into a lady passenger, the conductress smiled at my dumbfounded expression, the tram started and that was the end of the fun.

Life can be difficult over here but it is never, never boring. Actually, the body core temperature I think did drop a fraction and the back hasn't responded in the warm flat so perhaps off to bed now is the answer.

[presidency] obama, meet oprah

Time posts an interesting point of view on the Obama-Winfrey connection:

Winfrey's endorsement — and her announcement that she will appear with Obama at campaign events in Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire on December 8 and 9 — helps bring the following four things to Obama: campaign cash, celebrity, excitement and big crowds.

The four things that Obama has on his own in great abundance — without Winfrey's help — are campaign cash, celebrity, excitement and big crowds.

Perhaps but surely it's not going to hurt either.

[incompetence] there may be a reason

This mini-series begins today with "There may be a reason", continues tomorrow with "Human Resources" and concludes the day after wih "Failure Analysis".

The series is a reaction against the massive losses of the past few months in governmental departments and it focuses on the private sector first.

Dave Cole sums up the lost disks saga:

Apart from providing endless fodder for fake eBay auctions and amusing photos, one thing that I hope comes out of Revenue-gate is a desire to keep tabs on data protection, privacy and computer security in all public bodies.

To that end, I think the Government should cause to be published, all in one place, the relevant policies from every bit of government. A Royal Commission should investigate and make recommendations on whether current procedures are sufficient and whether a standardised set of policies would be preferable.

Good analysis as far as it goes but makes the same mistake as many equally astute analysts in assuming the system actually works and that party politics and the juciciary are actually the real source of power.

So George Osborne says Labour is "now officially in crisis. Everything Gordon Brown promised about his premiership - competence, honesty and change - has been blown away in the last few weeks. " What's he talking about "in the last few weeks". My goodness party politics is a bore because it signifies nothing in the end.

The articles called Micro-Control 1-8 are not particularly wonderful but they do include links fed by men and women who have dug deep. These few bloggers outline what really is happening, not unlike the inimitable Wat Tyler does in a more government based sense.

The aforementioned bloggers have shown beyond reasonable doubt that the old enemy inside Europe is indeed moving into Britain with its practices and procedures and has been doing so with a far more wide-ranging agenda than the average person will accept.

There's an understandable tendency to assume the incompetence of losing CDs and all the rest of it as almost par for the course – well of course a wicked man like Brown would preside over an incompetent civil service, wouldn't he? He's NuLab, after all. And of course Bush needs a minder.

But for me, that assumption's not enough. Let me explain.

I worked in the civil service in HM Customs and though I could write a book about that experience, nevertheless, it was just not true that incompetence was endemic. This was in the 70s. We had a situation where 15 pence was unaccounted for one evening and we were kept there until 20:50 going over and over thousands of the day's dockets to find the error.

There was a real top-down demand that everything be ship-shape. Losing five CDs would have been enough for an internal inquiry. Now we are seeing such a continuing litany of error, gross error and I really wonder how such gross error continue? Departments are known for covering their butts, not for such mammoth scandals as these, at least not so often and not so continually.

There are only two ways I can see. The incompetence is either embedded in the essential weakness of modern team-based procedures [see Hewlett Packard] or else tacit acceptance comes down from above, as Abu Ghraib also seems to have done. I'm not referring to direct orders but to far more subtle things.

For example, a junior clerk used to make an error. He was jumped on by a superior because the superior would be jumped on from above and so on. Now the junior clerk's just told to be more careful and his team carries the blame. That's a quantum shift.

The rationales which are now possible were not possible earlier. The new work procedures are always going to have teething troubles, aren't they? Give us time to get things working – these are exciting new procedures, after all and there'll be new ones next year. £5 million mislaid – well, we're still getting our command and control structure right to meet 21st century challenges.

And all the while, Julia Middleton and her ilk are pushing the necessity for change in workplace and regional command practices. Change, change, change, so there's no breathing space for stability and efficiency to emerge. New ideas, always new, with a litany of rhetoric and labels to support them and to vilify traditional practices.

We had this in education, [see link here and this link which links to links here], a field where faddiness is endemic and wholesale changes were made in the 70s and 80s. Look at the result of the fads now.

The truly evil men, those with malice aforethought, are both subtle and removed from the immediate machine which produces the non-functioning people who make the errors. They're never going to be caught out actually doing anything evil – they just fail to do good when it is required [the church during the war for example]. They just appeal to and help along human nature, natural folly and incompetence and let the sheep do the rest.

And one small part of this overall thrust is that team based solutions in “modern” business are always going to equal avoidance of direct responsibility – blame it on the team and punishment is blunted. How do you sack an entire team? A great structure to produce dystopic results.

A huge amount of the blame can also be laid at the feet of HR [post coming up] in organizations and was there ever a set of serpents such as these – incompetents in business, telling staff that they're on their side but in reality either in with management via the cursed monthly evaluations or else marginalized and irrelevant. Get rid of HR now.

The last thing is failure analysis [post coming up] or lack of it in any effective way. Experts rail at top down hierarchies and say that team-based approaches solve the problem. Do they heck as like – they just defuse and decentralize blame giving and taking.

So, as long as the mania for change for change's sake continues, gross errors will continue. I admire Dave Cole's implicit faith in the system, calling for a Royal Commission but I can't share this faith, not when the system is undergoing such radical change on the back of an almost maniacal EU drive.

[russia] election on december 2nd for us

The NYT reports:

President Vladimir V. Putin today accused the United States of trying to taint the legitimacy of upcoming Russian parliamentary elections by pressing a group of prominent independent election observers to abandon their attempts to monitor the campaign.

Mr. Putin contended that the monitors, who are deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had canceled plans to appraise the parliamentary balloting at the urging of the State Department in Washington.

Well, I'm in no position to comment. I'm indirectly involved in this election and I'm privy to what many Russians say. On the other hand, I'm known to be connected with one side in the matter so not everyone comes out and says what they think.

One of the strongest detractors I know admits that the majority do actually support Putin and are therefore hoodwinked and she doesn't assert coercion. If only those obervers would remain, they could see for themselves.

I'm intending to go to one of the polling stations and last time I went, I can say this categorically - I watched many going into the room in the school [as in the west] where the booths were with curtains [as in the west].

I saw a ballot paper and it listed just the names of the candidates, although there was a big poster in the foyer with all candidates and which party they were from. It may be that this time the parties are listed but it scarcely matters - people know anyway.

I saw people go in and then come out of the booth, walk across to the table and slip the folded ballot paper in the letterbox opening in the sealed metal box [as in the west]. There were no cameras and the closest armed guard was outside the polling room and he looked bored.

Clearly no one was expecting trouble as it's pretty well a foregone conclusion - most pundits say Yedinaya Rossiya will pick up around 75% of the vote.

Even if assertions were correct and undue pressure was brought to bear, it still doesn't alter the fact that the ballot paper is marked in a curtained booth and then goes straight to the one box with all the others.

Of far greater concern to me is the plan to cut out our trams - I need my tram home and do not wish to go by car nor by bus. However, I'm fighting a losing battle because it seems to have been settled.

The only ray of hope is that my mate said they've been saying this for the last ten years so hopefully they'll threaten it for another ten years too.

[once a champ] sampras' amazing feat

OK, it was a “friendly”. OK, there might have been a bit of skylarking here, I don't know. But it seems amazing to me:

Pete Sampras' win over Roger Federer in Macau this weekend does nothing to end arguments about who is the greater player, but the American is convinced the world No.1 will smash his records.

Following two defeats last week in their three-match Asian exhibition series, the retired Sampras came back strongly at Macau's Venetian resort-hotel Saturday, defeating the Swiss maestro in straight sets 7-6 6-4.

Sampras, who admitted in a press briefing after the match that he came to Asia hoping to be competitive and to take a set off Federer, is predicting that the 12-time Grand Slam champion will beat his mark of 14 and eclipse his rankings records.

Sampras, 36, held the top ranking for a record 286 weeks in total and finished as world number one for a record six consecutive years.

36 years old? Wow! And not over a former champ nor even a current Top 10 but over the reigning World N1. That's awesome.