In the future, the ways in which HR professionals will serve as business partners will continue to morph. The bar has been raised, and some HR professionals will–and others will not–make the grade.

Click here to read the full Egon Zehnder Thought Leadership article.

The business partner model is often not implemented properly – primarily, by failing to, as a first step, ensure HR really understands what the organisation and its line counterparts do. This lack of understanding leads to HR using ‘assumed’ need rather than ‘real’ need and the subsequent delivery of ‘HR best practice’ that the line neither needs nor wants…

Click here to read Chris Roebuck’s article from HRMagazine.co.uk.

Ten timeless tests can help you kick the tires on your strategy and kick up the level of strategic dialogue throughout your company. Click here to read the entire report from the McKinsey Quarterly.

In 2005,  Fast Company‘s Keith Hammond published a scathing article, Why We Hate HR. Hammond argued, “HR is the corporate function with the greatest potential — the key driver, in theory, of business performance — and also the one that most consistently underdelivers.”  Today HR still has mixed rep but Dave Ulrich, a great HR thinker, is pretty convincing on how we should rethink our view of HR. Though it may be HR themselves that need to grasp the nettle.

Click here to read more from Karl Moore’s Forbes article.

CEOs are in love with speed! They are constantly ranting about the need for speed in new market entry, time-to-market, cycle-time reduction, and the resulting competitive advantage that speed can provide. Speed is so important in today’s hyper-competitive business world that if you were forced to come up with a single word that best describes the current climate, “speed” would have to appear among the top descriptors.

HR can play a role in increasing speed throughout the organization and it’s time talent managers step up and acknowledge that.

Click here to read the entire article by Dr. John Sullivan.

If you are a CEO of a fast growing company with more than 20 people, do you have a VP of HR?

Click here to read more from Brad Feld’s Feld Thoughts.

What do Apple, the Indiana University men’s basketball program, and the CBS Evening News have in common? For starters, each is associated with iconic leaders.

Each also has been criticized for a lack of effective succession planning.

Click here to read the article from Business Insider.

The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.

Read Thomas L. Friedman’s entire New York Times article here.

What distinguishes a company that has deeply engaged and committed employees from another one that doesn’t? It’s not a certain compensation scheme or talent-management practice. Instead, it’s the ability to express to current and potential employees what makes the organization unique.

Click here to view the full report from the Harvard Business Review by Tamara J. Erickson and Lynda Gratton.