Like one of those ancient wooly mammoths that the Russians periodically extract intact from the Siberian ice, human resources seem perfectly preserved in time somewhere around 1965. The mammoths, of course, are items of special scientific and anthropological interest. After all, they co-existed with human beings. HR, unfortunately, has not.

Why am I STILL reading in HR professional journals about: 

          - How to get a seat at "the table"

          - How to run an effective meeting

          - Four levels of measurement

          - Personality profiling

          - Surveys and evaluations

          - Yadayadayada....

          Merely introducing electronic surveys, or email communication skills, or (shudder) "e-learning" hardly qualifies as modernizing HR. It´s the same old-same old. The letters to the editor in these journals seem more concerned about what pronouns a writer used than what impact the ideas may have. And the ASTD and similar conventions are huge gatherings of low-level HR people, consultants, and largely boring speakers (built around the high-visibility celebrity speaker to draw the crowds in the first place).

Over the past 20 years, HR has steadily attenuated. Although budgets for training and development remain hefty (most organizations, frankly, prefer simply to throw money at problems than actually grapple with them), HR staffs have been depleted, transactional HR has been outsourced, and transformational HR has become the province of consultants.

There are some high-profile HR leaders in high-profile organizations, but I often wonder how much of that visibility is solely for public consumption. Let me ask you my nagging question: How many human resource executives have been promoted directly from that post to CEO or even COO of a Fortune 500 company? In the last five years, could you name five? I don´t think so. I´ve seen such promotions among general counsels, CFOs, chief actuaries, and, of course, top line executives. But I don´t see it in IT and I don´t see it in HR. There´s a good reason for it: HR is seen as a peripheral function.

Forget the seat at "the table." The meeting is going on in another room.

HR has to stop focusing on how many male pronouns appear in an article, whether someone is wearing a scent to work offensive to others, and how many "INTJs" are working in a given unit. Instead, HR ought to be focusing on:

          - Creating alignment among every position and corporate strategy

          - Marrying succession planning to career development and ensuring "bench strength"

          - Proactively helping line management with greater efficiencies and productivity

          - Optimally focusing resources on the product, the service, and the relationships with customers

Ultimately, HR should disappear completely into the line functions where key managers are held responsible, no less than they are for financial goals or ethical conduct.

Ideally, no one should have a career insulated in HR, trapped in the ice until discovered by curious explorers. The mammoths were big, ponderous, and tough. And they´re all dead, every one.