The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill´s Kenan-Flagler Business School was rated in the Financial Times´ 2004 business school´s survey top 10 for new skills and learning, course design, program objectives achieved and value for tuition. U.S. News and World Report ranked it in the top five public university business schools in 2005. In joint sponsorship with SHRM, UNC´s Executive Education is launching a new program called Strategic Change through HR Technology and Business Innovation. The first seminar runs June 5-7, 2006. HR.com´s Leadership Analyst, Karen Elmhirst, spoke with RBC Centura Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Area of Entrepreneurship, Albert H. Segars, about this new program.
KE: Al, perhaps you could start by telling us about your role at UNC.
AS: My area of academic research and teaching is innovation. I focus on the development of good ideas and then the transformation of those ideas into products, services and processes that benefit business.
KE: Given your involvement in technology and innovation, what are the trends HR professionals need to be paying attention to?
AS: One of the big trends in HR is talent management. The idea of being innovative in your search to find the right people to take your organization where you want it to go is increasingly critical. Many times companies institutionalize hiring. A position comes open and you just hire for that same position, without a view of redefining what the role could be in order to help the company move forward. It is interesting to work with companies who can´t seem to go in the direction that they want to go and when you look at their talent management, you see that they have institutionalized a hiring pattern that keeps them from being able to move forward.
We do this a lot in higher education. If we lose a finance professor, we immediately replace that person with another similar finance professor, when really what students and businesses may want is someone with experience in some other area of finance, like derivatives or international commerce.
On the other hand, there is Cirque de Soleil, which is an organization I have been working with lately. They are one of the more innovative entertainment acts out there but what they really struggle with is the talent management process. They are constantly on the lookout for new performers, new managers and creative artists that can continue to help them create the kind of magic that they need to create. They are really looking at the idea of strategically managing talent and that is one of the trends that we all need to be looking at.
I also think that technology is another trend. How can technology help enable HR to alleviate the workloads associated with processing and utility, and move more toward the planning and strategic aspects of HR? HR also needs to be asking itself, "What knowledge and skills do we need for the future?" If technology is going to allow us to free up HR positions in the company, we are going to want to create new roles with different kinds of people.
Using online communities and technology, like HR.com, is another trend. People are looking at sources of knowledge beyond the traditional areas. Rather than turning to the internal corporate archives, I might go to a website or a community of practice to try to understand how another person or organization has dealt with the same challenges.
The mobility of technology is another huge trend along the same lines. Apple´s new iPod can play video and that changes the whole concept of training and communication and knowledge gathering. The best companies are going to realign their HR organizations to take advantage of that. Others will view iPods as a toy and will lose out. I am amazed at the number of companies that ridicule new technologies. You have to look beyond something like the iPod and its ability to store and play music and see the possibilities it has for training and education.
KE: Al, you work with executives on a regular basis. What are you seeing and hearing as the biggest pain points in business today?
AS: Innovation and growth are huge pain points. Organizations are struggling to find new ideas. My wife and I recently saw that they are coming out with "Rocky 6." To me, this is a clear indication of Hollywood running out of new and interesting ideas for movies. Companies are wrestling with the same issues - not just in products, but in functions as well. The idea of how you come up with the next idea is a pain point and so is finding the talent to come up with those new ideas and implement them when they do come along.
I also think that being responsive to the marketplace is another pain point. It is very difficult to beat the competition to the market and hire the talent before your competitor hires the talent. Speed is really of the essence these days.
We talked earlier about technology and there is a little bit of skepticism around how technology can take you to a place of innovation. Technology is a tool. We can shape it, but at the end it is the people you have that take you over the goal line. There are no computers yet that can come up with ideas. The emphasis still needs to be on people. In terms of talent vs. technology, it is 70 percent people and 30 percent technology.
KE: What it is it that is limiting innovation?
AS: I was at a graduation ceremony several years ago and the (then) chairman of AT&T was standing near me on the platform and he asked the dean if the school produced innovative graduates. The dean said, "Well, they were innovative when they got here." He was making a joke about it, but maybe we do discipline students to think too much about cost cutting and the bottom line. Maybe we train people not to come up with new ideas or to say that it can´t happen. We need to question those assumptions. We follow rules that don´t exist. I want to say, "Why can´t we do something?" There is a corporate urban legend in companies that tells you what you can and can´t do. Without question, a lot of employees just follow that. In other words, companies do not always reward risk taking.
KE: What role do you think low employee engagement has on an organization´s ability to innovate?
AS: Lack of employee engagement also limits innovation within organizations. There is this breakout of senior management, middle management and the lower ranks. The people who really have good ideas are the people who are dealing with the customers every day. There is a point where employees just give up. They throw out good ideas and it turns out that the competitors took that idea and did something with it, so there is a reluctance to give out new ideas.
There is also what I call "the reliance on the Messiah." The idea is that the CEO should come up with the good ideas. In most of the innovative companies that I have worked with, the CEO almost never comes up with the good ideas. In fact, it is highly unlikely that the CEO would come up with a good idea because they are so far removed from the customer. The CEO is more of an endorser. They act as someone who can make the idea become a reality. It is going to be a team that comes up with the next big thing. Teams come up with good ideas, not a Messiah.
KE: The flip side of that question is, what seems to be working well in organizations today, if anything?
AS: Lots of things are working well. Companies like Apple are questioning the boundaries of their business. Are they too broad or too narrow? When Apple got into the iPod business, a lot of executives were saying that the company was Apple Computer and not Apple Music. But they realized that the boundary of their business had expanded. We need to constantly ask ourselves if we need to redefine our boundaries. This also applies to HR. I always try to encourage the people who I teach to rethink the role of HR. What are your boundaries? How are you contributing to the organization? Have you drawn your boundary too narrow? Too wide? How can you best leverage new technological innovations?
KE: What led UNC to embark on and develop this new program called Strategic Change through HR Technology & Business Innovation?
AS: Time after time, HR professionals are asking how they can be more strategic and innovative. We started looking at innovation and how it actually occurs. Some companies that I have talked to, like Apple and Cirque du Soleil, are very forward thinking. There are also some good innovation stories from the past, like the Wright brothers. They should not have invented the airplane. They had everything working against them. All the scientists and knowledge was with the government, but that benefited them. They came into the problem with their eyes wide open, knowing that they had to discover their way towards flight. It is a great story of innovation.
I try to impart to executives a change in thinking rather than a change in skills per se. It is how you approach the problem, how you define the problem, and how you define the solution that is key. Many times trends and problems take us to places that we don´t want to go. With the Wright brothers, the answer to flight was contrary to what some of the prevailing theories were. The scientists couldn´t let go of those theories. The evidence was taking the scientists in a direction they didn´t want to go, but the Wright brothers were going to find the solution wherever it might have been. Many times it is a matter of retraining someone or enlightening them to think of problems in a different way. In some cases we just have to get out of the way and let the person solve the problem. That is something that has resonated with us ever since we started HR programs here at UNC. How do we think differently about that? We never had HR professionals who wanted us to talk about how to use technology or build technology. What they wanted to understand was how they could identify the new best uses for emerging technologies. We took that track and it has been very successful for us.
KE: To whom is this new program directed?
AS: This program is geared to senior-level HR professionals who want to understand key trends in technology and business innovation and actively create the HR organization of tomorrow. Participants will learn how to frame technology and innovation-based projects within the strategic direction of the firm, build a solid business case and allocate resources for maximum return.
One of the unique aspects about this program is that it was developed and will be delivered by me and two other faculty members, and none of us are HR experts. Our background and expertise is in innovation, technology and finance. We provide an opportunity for our HR executive participants to look with us at the strategic business issues that cross multiple disciplines. Our participants don´t need to hear more about HR, they are already very knowledgeable about that.
KE: In your literature, you talk about the "productivity paradox" that many firms have encountered, where more money has been invested in technology and yet, productivity has remained stable or even declined. What is needed to turn this situation around?
AS: One of the best innovations that we have seen out there is "innovation is simple." This means trying to do more with fewer information systems, fewer databases and less spending in technology. That is the innovative idea out there right now. Some companies measure their innovation by the percentage they spend on technology. A company might say that they spend 10 percent of their budget on technology and therefore they are innovative. But how do they use that 10 percent? Sometimes I can go back to a company and tell them that they can do more with a 20 percent reduction in technology spending per year and they are blown away. The productivity paradox is that we are spending more on IT, but we are less productive.
HR has to step in at some point and teach people how to use technology. When do you send an email and when do you pick up the phone? When do you have a meeting and when do you try to do everything online? Many times technology can result in less productive organizations. We have an overwhelming amount of information available, but much of it is not what we most need. What we most need is often buried and difficult to access.
When I began my career I was an engineer. One of the best hires I ever made was when I hired an industrial psychologist to be a part of our project team so she could explain how people perceive and use technology. She revealed an incredible world to us about why people would and would not use different technologies. She was our most valuable team player.
KE: Given the impending talent shortage, what role can technology play to help HR and their business partners better manage the people side of business?
AS: I´m seeing the most effective organizations using a combination of high-tech and high-touch to maintain talent. We are seeing traditional technologies like web pages. What are interesting are the non-traditional technologies like the blogs and the podcasts. Those are new and cutting edge and haven´t achieved mainstream status yet. Those are giving employees insight into the company. It also works both ways; people seeking talent are also finding people in the organization that they didn´t know were there. As an example, a group of employees at a particular company had a blog and they were talking about what they were doing. Senior management was looking for someone with a particular talent to manage a new project and they found that person through the blog. People that may be hidden in the organization are able to surface within the organization by using technology. We tend to frame people by their jobs. We try to simplify what a person is as much as we can, perhaps because we are trying to work within our own cognitive framework. Technology allows us to see a greater profile of a person or what a person can do through their experiences.
KE: As we see more people coming into organizations as free agents and doing project work, technology can greatly assist us in terms of keeping track of our extended workforce population and their skills and competencies, yes?
AS: If you attack that problem by building a lot of databases or traditional information technologies, that information will still be buried because you can´t access it easily. If you use more of the multimedia types of technologies, like a blog, that technology is simpler and it works the way we do. It builds information constructs the way we would build them in our own mind. It can reveal those secrets if you design the information technology to work the way people work.
KE: I think that it is important people have the resources and tools to manage their own careers and know what opportunities are available. That way, they can be more proactive and meet their needs for mobility without necessarily having to leave an organization. What role is technology playing regarding career planning?
AS: An employee can use an intranet to find out what their benefits are and do all of the back office form filling. The next generation of employee self-service is going to be career development and succession planning. From a talent management view, if you don´t figure out how to use it, your competitors will.
KE: One of the things that is mentioned in the literature on your new program is that is helps solve the "right" problem and set the "right" metrics. Please tell us more about that.
AS: We have developed some cases and research where we look at how a company defines the problem, how they set metrics, and how they perform against those metrics. A great example in HR is International Paper. When they were developing their ERP system, they set forth a metric of how many HR employees that did clerical tasks could then be turned into coaching and career development personnel as a result of the new technology. The project had a focus and an identity and a known end. That is something a lot of technology-based projects lack.
KE: Do you provide information in your program on how to manage the change process?
AS: We do. We give good examples and bad examples of implementing change. We teach people how to identify and deal with unexpected challenges. That gets a lot of interest from participants. In fact, we run the continuum from behavioral change to the structural processes, techniques and metrics for measuring the impact of change.
KE: Let´s say that I am an HR professional reading this information and I´m looking for a few compelling reasons why I need to fit this new program into my busy schedule. What will I walk away with that I didn´t have before?
AS: Real world examples of how firms have successfully met the HR challenges of today. We are working toward helping you develop a unique strategy that you can employ. No standard recipe exists, however, you´ll receive enough information to know what to do next. We invite participants to ask the hard questions and it is a very interactive format, with lots of discussion and networking with peers to share both successes and failures.
One of our faculty, Professor Ron Williams, worked with IBM for 30 years and is now on our business school faculty. He has vast applied experience on how to strategically examine outsourcing, insourcing and vendor selection. We also work with our participants to help them understand how to build their best business case for an initiative and we have them present the business case to our resident finance expert, Professor Bob Connolly, "Mr. CFO," as he is affectionately known.
So this program provides a unique perspective on HR as it relates directly to the larger business strategy issues surrounding technology and innovation.
KE: I noticed that this program is jointly sponsored by SHRM. For SHRM members, what does this mean?
AS: We have another program at UNC called The Business of Human Resources which focuses on helping HR professionals build the business skills required to be strategic. That program is also jointly sponsored by SHRM, meaning that they help us market the program to their members, their members receive a discount on the program, and the program counts toward recertification.
Our new program is a spin-off of The Business of Human Resources and offers the same advantages to SHRM members.
KE: What are the specifics as to when your first program launches?
AS: Our first program will take place June 5-7, 2006 at our University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
KE: To find out more, where should we direct our members?
AS: Please call us at 800.862.3932 with questions, or visit us at www.exed.unc.edu for seminar details and registration information.
