I worked for Kemper Insurance, several years ago, and many of my HR colleagues were former AIG employees. Some of them worked directly with Hank Greenberg. I remember one conversation where a colleague of mine ended a story about AIG by saying, “Hank Greenberg is the devil.”
I said, “Yeah, that’s great. Who the hell is Hank Greenberg?”
Those were the days when ignorance was bliss. Now things are so bad that I’m talking about credit default swaps and the downfall of AIG with a little bit of credibility. These are scary times, yo, and I wonder if HR has the solution to some of these problems?
- What’s the role of HR in this new climate of compliance and federal regulation?
- When will HR start paving the way for more thoughtful compensation programs? (Was HR in the room when the decision was made to offer lucrative and binding compensation agreements to executives and derivatives traders without a link to specific performance metrics? How do we prevent this from happening again?)
- Can HR help a company grow in a smarter way? Can we prevent a company from getting too big to fail?
I’m sick of seeing Barney Frank and John Boehner on television. Someone get an economist/HR professional up on TV –
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I volunteer…
M
I’ve often taken the role of playing the dummy (insert joke here). In discussions around any topic that I feel we are moving to quickly on as a company, certainly without due dillegence (other than the lemming mentality of “everyone else is doing it”), I ask questions and ask to have things explained to me at an 8th grade level. I learned this as a training tool in the Army, that if you can break things down to this level you can teach almost anything to anyone. What I have found in the past is that if you ask for this level of explanation and it can’t be easily provided then it puts more onus (I hate that word btw) on the individual making the recommendation to truly prove they truly understand what they are asking for before moving on.
As a bonus, someday I will share how this same technique gets me tons of free stuff and upgrades.
Thing is when Obama said to Geithner to freeze those bonuses, he is trying to act like a third party HR. However, he can’t do anything, but Congress can if the can enact that if AIG is giving bonuses, they must pay a high rate tax.
Of course, HR should have been on the ball about this and we do need HR pros who need to be economists. Sadly, everyone of them are in baseball, which is corrupt on its own.
@Mark Good luck, dude.
@Jimmy WHY AREN’T YOU BLOGGING?
@Tracy I’ve heard the extra-IRS-tax on the bonuses. You know what? I say don’t pay the bonuses and say, “F–k you. Sue us.”
David Simon, creator/producer for HBO’s “The Wire,” one of the best shows on TV, IMHO, wrote a letter to his fans at the end of the show’s run. His indictment of America and its citizens is telling, and speaks to what you’re talking about with AIG.
Simon wrote, “We are a culture without the will to seriously examine our own problems. We eschew that which is complex, contradictory or confusing. As a culture, we seek simple solutions. We enjoy being provoked and titillated, but resist the rigorous, painstaking examination of issues that might, in the end, bring us to the point of recognizing our problems, which is the essential first step to solving any of them.”
Here’s an example of this (from Reason Magazine). Once again, Simon is speaking to a group of law and order types, looking for some easy solution to America’s urban drug problem. Some idiot asked a question, as people often do that went something like this: “Well, what is the solution? Give me the paragraph; give me the lede. What’s the solution, if not drug prohibition?”
Here was Simon’s well-thought out response, the kind of response that no politician would come up with, and the average American, who would struggle to understand 8th grade concepts (@ Jimmy) probably couldn’t follow:
“Look. For 35 years, you’ve systematically deindustrialized these cities. You’ve rendered them inhospitable to the working class, economically. You have marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you’ve alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal. And you want to sit across the table from me and say ‘What’s the solution?’ and get it in a paragraph? The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick. How long is that going to take? I don’t know, but until you start it’s only going to get worse.”
And then the idiot looked at Simon and went, “But what’s the solution?” Simon says he had to be restrained. I think I would have had a similar reaction.
Really? HR?
Since I’m still slugging it in the corporate world and you are the light that seeps into the crack in my drop down ceiling, I’ll let you know what HR has been doing for the last 3 months.
Trying to figure out the COBRA subsidy in the ARRA.
At least that’s per what comes in my inbox. 47 different webinars and legal updates on the COBRA subsidy. Really? It was that difficult to figure out?
I’m putting this comment out there right now…is HR a career killer? Does anyone even take us seriously? I’m having a hard time taking us seriously. Seriously.
@Jim This is why David Simon is brilliant. I want to take the bricks, one by one, and chuck them at the general population.
@Really You deserve a post. You got one.
I am an econ major, have worked in a line of business and am now in HR. Sadly, there are not many people in HR who understand the business and yet are trying to give the business advice. I think of HR like teachers. The best teachers understand what it is like to be in the ‘real world’ because they teach from practicality rather than just theory. HR should be the stewards of the company as you are suggesting, but HR needs to lead the company as a business person first. Unless the HR person has been a business person it is pretty hard to understand and be able to have the credibility that you need to push back hard on some of the absurd decisions being made. We talk about having business acumen – go do a stint in a line of business if you really want to increase your business acumen.
@JJ Well said — business acumen comes from experience. I believe it helps HR when we can expand our horizons. Rotational assignments help… but they’re expensive and labor-intensive. It’s too bad.