Them’s fightin’ words! That was the hackneyed, ungrammatical (yet entirely heartfelt) retort that popped into my mind when I first read page 105 in the January 15 issue of Fortune. There it was at the beginning of the third paragraph: “I don’t mean improve HR. Improvement’s for wimps. I mean abolish it.”
There was more. Much more. A man listed in the masthead as sitting on the Board of Editors of one of America’s leading business publications compared the HR department to “the asp in Cleopatra’s bosom.” He noted that, “just as Georges Clemenceau said, ‘War is much too serious to be entrusted to the military,’ so human capital is too important to be left to Personnel.” And he argued that everyone would be better off if the entire HR function was simply outsourced.
Some of Thomas A. Stewart’s comments were clearly little more than attention-getting rhetoric. Nonetheless, his basic premise could not be misinterpreted. In disbelief, I checked the cover date once more. Yes, it did say 1996 and not 1986.
Many of the charges he levels against HR—that it is out of sync with the needs of the business, that it is a policy-enforcing bureaucracy—were still true in the mid- ’80s and, I’m sure, are still true in a few organizations. Overall, however, I would argue that HR has done a better, more compelling job of reinventing itself to face the ’90s and beyond than most other corporate functions.
Stewart’s argument begins to fall apart when you consider just some of the HR departments that we’ve written about in the past couple of years. Does he really believe that HR at Levi Strauss, which exists to support the values and aspirations that have driven the company to record profits, is nothing more than a bureaucracy? That the City of Hampton, Virginia, would be better off without the job redesign, cross-training and reward systems that have helped the city compete with the private sector? Or that the training that’s so clearly been instrumental in the success of Disney’s theme parks could just as well be outsourced?
I’m sure Stewart doesn’t believe any of those things, but feels that these examples are the exceptions that prove the rule. Even if he were right about that, though—and he isn’t—his suggestion to simply abolish HR doesn’t make sense. Consider the issue raised in this month’s cover story: gangs infiltrating the workplace. This is a serious problem that must be addressed. If HR doesn’t face the challenge, who will? If HR doesn’t figure out how to stop violence on the job before it happens, who will? If HR doesn’t figure out how to staff up for overseas expansion, who will? And on and on.
Even Stewart acknowledges toward the end of his piece that employees are the “competitive advantage in the new economy.” Sadly, he continues by asking whether HR is a worthy trustee for such an asset. “Nothing is more dangerous than a group of people trained in the art of monitoring compliance with rules, fluent in a language that does not include a word for ‘customer,’ and who have time on their hands and are looking for something to do,” he says.
Angry yet? I hope so. Stewart’s ideas are outdated, misguided and smug. But I believe he’s earnest, which means that somehow we’ve all failed to reinvent HR’s image as effectively as we’ve reinvented the function. Now’s the time to change that. Read Stewart’s piece, then fight back. Refute it throughout your organization and refute it to Stewart directly. Tell him what you’ve accomplished. I plan to do just that. It’s time HR enjoyed the respect it deserves.
Personnel Journal, February 1996, Vol. 75, No. 1, p. 4.