Mike Foster has had an amazing impact on the HR universe during the past 15 years. The serial entrepreneur founded AIRS, the Recruitment Training Company and The Human Capital Institute (HCI). Both organizations focus on the professionalization of various aspects of the HR marketplace.
Foster’s real strength is as an entrepreneur. His background is information businesses, not HR. He comes from the school of learning from doing. His companies grow on a seven to 10-year cycle. HCI is the third and it’s well positioned for success.
Foster’s philosophy is that business dominance is about how quickly you can change the game. It’s not always about efficiency; it’s not always about business model; it’s not always about automation. Inevitably, the game changer takes the prize.
Influencers
February 19, 2010
HR Influencer: Mike Foster
HR Influencer: Valerie Frederickson
"Lots of HR shops need rethinking. While the herd is going to head straight to outsourcing, I'd recommend hiring a senior level all star with a mandate to shake things up. The good thing about RPOs (recruitment process outsourcers) and HROs (human resource outsourcers) is that they drive change. The fear of losing your job either produces dramatic action or frozen terror.
"This is the time when HR can make a real strategic difference. Helping your organization be ahead of the economy, on top of the downturn...That's what HR's supposed to do. It's a shame that the post-layoff paralysis has turned so may operations into conservative, reactive quagmires.
"Why don't we take more people from purchasing and put them in HR? That gets at the question of expertise in managing complex contracts. I agree that the failure of many outsourcing contracts in the first wave was due to the inexperience of the customer. There's a serious shortage of people who understand programs management, project management, contracts administration and requirements development at the senior level.
"Good purchasing executives know how to do these things. As HR fragments the skills will be in increasing demand. Lots of executives are coming in from adjacent functions. The incumbents are often too ineffective.
"The best career advice I can give someone in HR right now is to act like this is your last day. Say what you mean and stick to it. Call it like you see it. Have an opinion and do something, anything.
February 12, 2010
HR Influencer: Marc Effron
A graduate of political consulting, Marc Effron got his MBA from Yale after five years working elections. He went to work straight away for a boutique consultancy that focused on HR strategy. Over the following 17 years, he moved through Oxford Health Care, Hewitt, Bank of America to his current job at Avon where he is the vice president of talent management.
Along the way, Effron authored several books and founded the New Talent Management Network. His approach to talent management, which is based on aggressive simplification, is part and parcel of his coming book. The new book (in stores during the second quarter of 2010) is called One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value. You can get a feel for the content by skimming through this presentation on One Page Talent Management.
Effron is the essence of a 21st century HR leader. He utilizes Twitter, and LinkedIn while publishing material on his own website and SlideShare.
HR Influencer: Sue Marks
Serial entrepreneur Sue Marks is the CEO of Pinstripe Talent, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing firm. A second-generation recruiter (she worked at her father's Management Recruiters, Inc. office), Sue knows the business inside and out. She built her first company, ProStaff during the course of 20 years.
In 1980, she left her father’s employ (at 24) to start ProStaff with a partner. She bought out the partner seven years later, grew the company to $30M by 2000 and sold it to a Fortune 500 company. Since then, she’s been a serial entrepreneur and angel investor.
She was an early investor in Virtual Edge, which ultimately sold to ADP. Founding Pinstripe in 2005, Sue began really demonstrating her passion for talent management and talent acquisition companies.
February 05, 2010
HR Influencer: Mary Kitson
At the chapter level, SHRM is awash in grassroots success stories. While national prominence and the associated broad influence are elusive, the local chapter provides a great platform for someone who wants to make a difference. Since HR is fundamentally a local phenomenon, great legacies are built as foundation elements in the local ecosystem.
Mary Kitson demonstrated a combination of alternate career path and broad localized influence. With deep roots in recruiting, strategic planning, OD, training and workforce analytics, Kitson is the sort of well-rounded HR professional who can make an organization sing. She's currently working for Mitre as an OD consultant for government customers who are leading multidisciplinary teams.
In addition to a fully articulated professional career, Kitson has been at the helm of an interesting leadership development program. The NOVA/Dulles SHRM Mentoring Program, founded in 1998, is the engine of professional growth in the Northern Virginia SHRM affiliates. The program produces a dozen well trained new leaders each year. With nearly 150 graduates, the program has an enormous span of influence.
And, at the center of it all is Ms. Kitson.
HR Influencer: Rusty Rueff
Rusty Rueff was a central part of the team that built Electronic Arts from a small company into a global giant. He was the first HR executive there to report directly to the CEO. The agile, studio-centric operation had managed to dodge the standard trappings of big organizations during its extended entrepreneurial phase.
Like most great HR leaders, Rueff's career is not exactly focused on the profession. Although he rose rapidly through the HR ranks at Pepsi (one of the HR academy companies), his passions are sales, marketing and entertainment. Rueff managed to integrate these things into a fast-paced career from management trainee to high-tech startup CEO and philanthropist in just under 25 years.
His father was a radio personality. The dinner table conversation was always about "what's hot and what's not." Rueff describes media analysis as the 'family sport.'
January 29, 2010
HR Influencer: Kevin Wheeler
As soon as he tells you he's from Vermont, a piece of the Kevin Wheeler puzzle falls into place. The small town friendliness sticks with him. Although he left home to spend seven years in Thailand (in the Peace Corps), Wheeler is quintessential, down-home Vermont, a clear thinker with the mannered reserve that comes from cold childhood winters. He's the only one of his family to have left home. When Kevin left, he kept going.
By far the most easily likable of the major figures in talent management, Wheeler's Vermont plain-speak dovetails nicely with his penchant for visions of the future. Wheeler tells a good story. When he does, it's usually about his passion, The Future of Talent.The gentle demeanor is a soft cover for a guy who like people and likes being with them.
Wheeler built his career portfolio with an astonishing track record in HR. For seventeen years, he was HR at National Semiconductor when it was the Google of it's time. He specialized in acquiring talent from Intel, their major competitor. Wheeler says, "Since no one knew what HR was, you could reinvent it. It was a great time to experiment. Pieces of the problem were easy. No one wanted to work for Intel, so picking them up was a snap."
HR Influencer: Libby Sartain
When she was 19, Libby Sartain knew that she wanted to be in personnel. “Back then”, she says, “there was no human resources department. It was industrial relations at best and personnel most of the time.” The plucky New Orleans native made her mark over the next 31 years revolutionizing the practice of HR wherever she went.
Always at the forefront, Libby was the first ever Chief People Officer (at Southwest Airlines). She ruled the roost on HR at Yahoo! for much of the past decade. If you look closely, you'll see her everywhere.
These days, Libby is enjoying being outside of the business world. After leaving Yahoo!, she’s started a consulting practice, wrote a new book and waded into a massive renovation project. Saying that she’s outside of the business world ignores the fact that she sits on the board of Peet’s coffee and advise a slew of small-startups. Libby flies to work almost as much as she did during her full time years in Silicon Valley.
January 22, 2010
HR Influencer: Robin Ferracone
As a direct result of this insight, Ferracone left the comfortable digs in big ticket consulting to form her own business. As Ferracone puts it, "What distinguished SCA Consulting from its competitors was the way we baked the strategy into the corporate goal setting process. When our work was complete, the strategy was aligned with business processes. We always asked, ‘What is the business result we are striving for?’ We let actionable ideas trump strategic brilliance.”
HR Influencer: Elaine Orler
She is the preeminent expert on the topic of harnessing enterprise recruiting systems to generate competitive advantage.
What keeps Orler focused, pushing both organizations and vendors to advance is the desire to “create a reality that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” She is creating that reality with some of the largest and most recognized brand names across the globe. For the truly great players in HR technology, success begins with a significant chunk of dues paying.
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