Management Today’s Richard Reeves gives a pretty scathing review of the first in a series of CIPD reports entitled ‘Futures‘. His criticism is in no way leveled at the CIPD itself (in fact, he says of the organisation’s new chief executive Jackie Orme that ‘nobody has made me work harder for my fees, nor earned my respect more quickly’). Nor does he question the intent of the reports as an exercise in thought leadership. Rather, his issue is with the lack of progress made by the opening publication, Leading Through Uncertain Times.
“With a few exceptions, the contributions from both CIPD insiders and external practitioners are a mish-mash of old platitudes… If the series keeps up like this, they should rename it ‘Histories’.” Now I actually think that Leading Through Uncertain Times is rather good. I agree with Richard Reeves that it is not ground breaking or extraordinarily innovative, but it does exactly what it says on the tin. And I entirely believe in its most important and recurring message - that to respond to the credit crunch by laying off staff is to sacrifice some of your most valuable assets, namely the intellectual capital that will help your company recover after this whole economic mess is over.
In the report, Stanford University’s Jeffrey Pfeffer recalls some words of wisdom from Ann Rhoades, head of HR at Southwest Airlines during the inevitable downturn in the industry after 9/11: “Why would we put our most important competitive asset, people, on the street where they can be snapped up by the competition?” It is a sentiment shared by the CEO of iglo Birds Eye, who states his intention to “grow our way out of this problem”, and by the AMV Group chairman who wants to “take an unfair share of the best talent and an unfair share of the best work.”
Yes, it is a bullish approach to talent management, recruitment and rentetion, and one that isn’t easy to maintain. The straightforward choice with the least risk for businesses is to cut their most expensive resource in response to falling demand. But - and apologies for the use of one of Reeves’ “numbing clichés” - there aren’t many companies that have really thrived through tough times like these by playing it safe. And the thing about is clichés is that they normally got that way by being right.
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on Jul 10th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
I apologise, but, in my opinion, you are not right. Let’s discuss.