Open-ended introductions

• Human capital implies “accounting” and people are not things.

• How do I get my members inspired about learning? Change way of thinking about learning. More broadly, to rethink how associations engage in the process of learning.

• “They don’t want to be developed.”

• Allowing people to be the way they need to be…to maximize their potential. Having the flexibility to bring out the best in people.

• Day to day lives, ability to impact their organizations and themselves

• Tell me a story. Community is a necessary element for sharing knowledge. Community can’t exist without passion and enthusiasm. “The Story of Zero.” HR – resembles the work of the secret police, notably dishonest. Reincarnated as a storyteller.

• KM evolving to more than the plumbing, more toward human capital management. Work is often drudgery. If we spend more of our life at work, why not make work a better place to be?

• Human capital makes human beings into adjectives.

• Amending the Prussian model of push learning. How to nurture pull learning, the silent, individual ah-ha process.

• What can happen virtually? Thinking IBM = I’m by myself.

• Turned in paper at new job, got it back with red ink, “I didn’t know you wrote this; you couldn’t have known this,” no problem, no punitive/demeaning situation, great learning experience.

• Whole systems change. Working with legacy management systems. KM, business process mgt, and learning – how do they interrelate?

• We’re breaking a paradigm, not easy to do. Dozens of successes out of hundreds of apps. The successes are never under the purview of HR or OD, who are invested in the status quo and to whom paradigm-breaking is a threat.  SOL Learning to lead, a ten-day workshop, largely deals with identifying one’s dysfunctions.

• It’s the people, stupid. Bring your heart to the table. How to you learn?

• How to attain self-motivation of learning?

• Three out of four managers at the department of labor could retire at any time. What they take out the door is the knowledge of how to make things work without them. This brain-drain is society-wide.

• Tribes. Corporate communities, customer communities, learning communities, work communities. Looks at caring, relationship-building, the nature of work. Emphasize the verbs, not the nouns. Use more than 5% level of potential.

• Marriott. “I’m empowered” button. May I have it? Let me ask my supervisor. Dance analogy. Focus on the people who are close to boogying, not trying to get the wallflowers into watcher roles.

• Bob Guns: How do you negotiate a mutually rewarding employer/ee contract?

• How to help everyone lead a fulfilling life? Developing a career management brand.

• I basically work for a plumbing company. Struggle going on between the hard and the soft; folks like us are trying to bring it together. Another issue is scaling. Democratization of society, individuals and ideas. The Federal government is not the right model; it’s not the sort of democracy we see going on in the workplace and society.

Topics to explore

1. Language/metaphors
2. Metrics
3. Designing for the individual
4. Right role of technology
5. Leadership’s new role
6. Emotions & inspiration
7. Workplace “quality of life”
8. Hard vs Soft

Starting points, not limits on subject matter

Spiral recording of conversation

Eric suggests “Café Society”

“Headlines” for me were:

• value/values 
• economic/humanistic
• work/life
• short term/long term pendulum
• spiritual, corporate citizenship
• invisible hand, invisible foot

Headlines from others:

• Organizations – locus of learning relationships or no?

• trust in learning and the challenge of finding a way to do that

• unresolved tension between organizations & values

• perfect storm – things are changing but we don’t know how

• uncertainty and experimentation around deriving value from/as humans

• great value in creating organizations where social connections are fostered: bridge value and values

• power of conversation, people and their stories

• listening happens. Sense of wonderful fully enlightened. Beginner’s mind.

• Pat human capital talk doesn’t capture the essence of the discussion

• Leonardo da vinci: men of genius sometimes work best when they work least. Pause that refreshes. This type of work too often dismissed.

• Leverage the paradox (soft/hard, value/values), don’t try to reconcile it

• Need the vocabulary to address these issues

• How do we inspire the masses? How will people find out what they need to be learning and why?
  

• Human fulfillment = ƒ knowledge^{(learning + experience)} + context

• Fulfillment doesn’t go far enough; must embrace all of the elements of “being human”

• Hard/soft language: now at stage where soft at parity w/ hard. Struggle for the soul of organizations. Heart is losing ground but will not disappear.  Language breaking down.

Next topic: work, living, learning

To ponder:

• "uncartesianize"

• Life becomes work; work becomes life. Leaders need to understand that we seek meaning from the workplace
• Corporate karma for human fulfillment

Stephen Denning, The Springboard, How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations

United Nations Development Programme

Special Libraries Association

 

My white paper for Forbes may address the opportunity for the modern-age CEO to improve the lives of his workers/colleagues.

 

Comments received from others

"Human Capital Management" -- good to the extent that it implies that humans are assets (capital) not costs; bad to the extent that it implies that humans can be managed. My experience tells me that human beings can be inspired, persuaded, coached, motivated, led, and under some circumstances even directed (but never as effectively as when led), but never managed. It is simply a "manager's" delusion to think that his/her actions constitute management.

Truism and example of above: You can tell a person how to do something and he/she will listen; you can tell a person what to do, and they may [under the right circumstances] comply. But... you can not both tell a person what to do and how to do it and expect them to willingly comply (this is an example of where the concept "directed" refernced above would apply). That is the fundamental flaw in the concept of human management.