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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Perry, let’s start by talking about HR people and I wanted to ask you, in your experience, are they aware of this paradigm shift in leadership that’s happening out there in the world and do they understand how they’re going to be able to contribute to it?
Perry: I think it’s a really good question because so I’m an HR practitioner by background for about the last 15 years, but I’d say probably over the last five, there has been that recognizable shift and so what I’ve seen is that there’s a small group of HR practitioners who have almost been waiting for this and have really, really pushed on and have really grasped the opportunity by more liberated ways of running organizations, by more humanist tendencies in leadership. But I would say that is the shame at the moment is that it is a small sort of band of people that have grasped that shift and that many of them are still tendering and administering and stewarding what I would call the more orthodox leadership and management sort of principles. Some completely unaware of this shift, others are aware of it, but don’t really think it’s for them and so I think if you were to distribute it on a curve, you’ve got classic innovators and early adopters and you’ve got this majority that are sort of late to that thinking.
So generally I’d say awareness is quite low, so I talk quite regularly to HR practitioners both on stages and in sort of smaller forums and even if I mention things like Zappos and Bertsorg who are two of the more progressive organizations which many people have heard of, I get some blank looks and I kind of think, wow, okay, so it hasn’t penetrated your thinking space yet or infiltrated your world. And then I explain the principles about it and you can see a shift, you can see then a curiosity about it, but it still feels like it’s a huge leap for people operating in public sector, maybe even in not-for-profit and in for-profit areas who kind of think, well, this sounds like it’s just some little trendy movement and might work for technology companies, but I don’t think it’s for me.
So there could be some surface level denial and lack of belief in that sort of shift. Yet when you speak to the enlightened few, there’s huge energy, there’s huge belief, there’s a massive amount of belief that that is a prevailing change that we’re seeing and they want to be part of that and drive that through with their organizations and their colleagues. So we’ve got a lot of work to do is how I’d sum it up. I think there’s a big awareness gap to bridge and then once you’ve bridged the awareness gap, then I think getting it into practice and into practical application is an even bigger ask, but I remain steadfast in the belief that this will soon become an ever-growing norm and it’ll be difficult to not be aware and it’ll be difficult to not have implemented some of this. So a long way to go is my summation of that.
Lisa: Right. And you mentioned this awareness gap that many are sort of still unaware of some of the changes and transitions that are needed. So two questions really. One, how can HR professionals close that or bridge that awareness gap? What do they need to do? And two, once they are aware of the shift that’s happening, what kinds of skills and knowledge are HR people going to need to develop in order to be successful in this new world?
Perry: Yeah. So I think the awareness thing comes from, I guess, a professional development agenda which has been hitherto sort of underwhelming. So for example, in HR, once you’re qualified, let’s say, as a CIPD-ranked practitioner, many people think, oh, that’s it. I’ve got that now. I’ve arrived. I am now just going to tend to business as usual, and they don’t feel like they have to go and explore much of the new world.
So I think there’s something in the continuing professional development field that probably needs some form of reinvention, and I know that a chartered body like the CIPD is desperate to get a lot more of that thinking in that space. So I’ll give you an example. The CEO there has partnered with another organization to create something called The Future of Work as Human as an attempt to put the future on an agenda and as part of something that can stretch the vision, I guess you’d say, of those existing practitioners. So that’s a way of trying to see an orthodox institute trying to prod its members into action and sort of enlighten them a little bit and spark some creative thinking.
But individual practitioner groups per se, so I think there’s something where if one person discovers something that’s really new, dynamic, interesting, and perhaps on the edge of current thinking, they’ve got an obligation to share that with people and go, hey, I’ve heard this story about, and start to bring some of those conversations into their team environments and so on. So I think there’s an individual responsibility and a collective responsibility. I’m seeing a lot more of it permeate into the HR press though, so magazines and websites and the whole kind of social media blogging world is starting to reach out and bleed out a little bit more. Soon it will be unavoidable and then you can see the gap will have to close.
Things like recent government legislation around gig economy, the Uber ruling, some employment law legislation is now coming to the attention of what I would call established and orthodox practitioners going, hey, I didn’t even know this stuff was going on. And they’re then being forced to look at their own company’s situation about hiring casual workers or freelance individuals or contractors or whatever it is. That then starts to give a curious feel then to about where’s all this coming from? Why is this such a push? Why is this headline news? And then they start to pick up a trail, I guess, of examples where this is becoming a different sort of thing for them to get their heads into.
And then I think there’s an obligation on managers and leaders within companies who are starting to pick this up to turn to their HR professionals and say, have you seen what’s going on here? I want to know more about emotional intelligence. I want to know more about inclusiveness in the workplace that involves my teams. How can you help me do it? So I’m hoping there’ll be some inward pressure too from companies who realize that the orthodox ways of working aren’t really working. And we’ve hit productivity lulls, if not dips.
So I’m interested in things like the RSA’s research that Matthew Taylor’s doing to look at the gig economy and the work that is going on in places like the Work Foundation. So I think it’s starting to bubble up to being an almost irresistible sort of trail of events. So there’s something in that. And then your second question was skills, wasn’t it? What skills do they need?
So I think once the awareness gap starts to close and there’s more curiosity and more practice-based narrative that they can attach themselves to, then I think they do need to start thinking about some skills. And I guess a couple of those skills, one is their connectedness. If they suddenly realize that they’ve been a bit disconnected from all this and they’ve been sort of a bit vacuumed by their organization, then don’t just think that’s going to go away because it’s probably a sign that there’s more out there to discover.
So open up, look out, be a bit more bold and daring in where you start to research what’s going on in the world. So as we know, there are plenty of resources out there once you start to unravel the threads and the links to new thinking, new case studies and reforms and so on. So the curiosity thing I think is the first thing they’ll have to enhance. And then their own networks. I think if people have been a little bit oblivious to this shift, it’s possibly because they’re operating with people who themselves are perhaps a little bit disconnected from that.
So they ought to be a little bit more adventurous in who they network with, maybe join some entrepreneurial networks and some startups and start talking to some practitioners who’ve got different elements to what they do and kind of not just hang out with HR business partners or not just converse with reward practitioners, but actually go out and network with people who can create an intelligence feed to them. So networking, curiosity.
But then I think the other key skill is they’ve got to be a bit innovative, whether that’s a skill or a thing. And that means experimentation. That means trying out small scale activities that might change the way they recruit people from a certain minority background. It might be what they do to learn a new technology discipline. But I think got to be a bit more experimental or playful and sort of sparky about their innovation, so get more creativity going. So curiosity, networking and creativity, I suppose, would be the three things I’d urge people to start focusing on.
Lisa: Right, and you mentioned Buurtzorg earlier. Because a lot of organisations nowadays seem to be reinventing HR a little bit, even changing the language, like people operations or people officer and things like that. And even some organisations have roles now, like chief happiness officer and things like that. But then organisations like Birzorg are going at another end of the scale where they’re getting rid of HR altogether, and they’ve kind of replaced a lot of HR with their IT system, and then kind of self-organising teams and coaches. So a provocative question then, is there a role for HR at all in the future?
Perry: Well, I think in its current orthodoxy, it acts as a kind of a super administrator for a number of sort of fundamentals that are built from the machinery that we operate in. So that’s hiring people to job roles that are vacancies in themselves, and then the contractual exchange that goes on before somebody then comes to join your company, and then the commitment to do some learning and development with them, and then the performance management and the ratings.
All of this stuff feels like it’s very mechanistic, and it feels like it’s born from the mechanised age. As we go into something that’s more liberated, free-flowing, adaptable, and so on, then I think HR, as we know it, will have to make some serious changes. Some of those things will probably need to remain, like, for example, having payroll, for example, how people are paid.
But even that comes into question when you hear of a German consulting company who pay some of their technologists half in Euros and the other half in Bitcoins. And I sometimes put that example to HR professionals who look at me going, what did he say, Bitcoins? What the hell are they? And so, again, there’s a big gap to close about some of those unorthodox things that are happening. But HR, as we know it, could be largely automated.
It could be largely self-serviced in the way you describe, both in the Bertsorg model or the technology that connects people and self-regulating environments where people have a budget for their own learning and development, and they spend it, and there’s accountability that’s open, and a little bit like HCL Technologies did where you can open tickets on a help desk and people can see them, and that provokes right kind of actions. But HR’s got a gift that it’s probably almost like a trump card.
It’s not played as much, which is around things like change and organization design. And I think that’s where I’ll see the power coming through. So those HR practitioners that know organization design and development and are very change-oriented are going to be, I think, even more in demand as businesses go, hey, there’s no such thing as unfreeze, solidify, and refreeze. There’s no such thing as unfreeze, solidify, and refreeze anymore.
It’s a constant state of fluidity, that sort of liquid organization concept that Stelio Versara in Italy uses with his organization. So I can see those kinds of HR people literally reinventing it. And so whether it’s the OD comes out from the HR library and becomes the most used book, I sort of think that’s the philosophy I will see HR practitioners doing much more worthwhile work in the future of that ilk. The administration, even some of the casework and investigation and employee disciplinary stuff arguably should be the domain of either their sort of line manager or their learning partner or somebody who’s got some duty of care responsibility for people.
So I can see that shift towards more of that design and the fluidity that’s necessary. And of course, learning. So, you know, a lot of people have seen HR and learning developments, two separate entities. I’ve always seen them as part of the same function, which is you rightly describe now as being called the people and development function. And I think learning as a concept has probably been kept behind a sort of a gated firewall where people have to seek permission to do some learning activity because it’s time away from productive work. We know that’s complete rubbish, really. And the fact that people learn more, apply more, become better, be more productive, serve customers better, more fulfilled, more satisfied.
So I can see us having a much more learning pro culture. And that’s where, again, I think those parts of HR that lean towards that will come to life. So super administrators, automated resolution disputes, I think will be more sort of there’ll be relationship brokers and then design, development and change and fluidity will become the sort of hallmarks, I think, of a reinvented HR function. So it won’t be HR as we know it, whether we even call it HR is up for grabs. I doubt we will.
Lisa: Right. And I guess another thing that’s on the horizon as well is this whole thing with AI and it’s very kind of prevalent in the press at the moment about that we’re going to lose millions of jobs to automation. What role do you see HR playing in that context?
Perry: A significant one, actually, yeah, because I suppose what we’re getting into the realms of is things that can be automated will. So that Oxford University research that talks about 47% of jobs that are currently existing will probably be automated or robotically redesigned in some shape or form is a likelihood. So when you look at that, that’s a significant element that needs managing in some sort of careful, almost societal way.
So rather than just saying, look, you know, your job’s being done by a robot, off you go. I think there’s almost like an ethical, moral thing that HR needs to do about reskilling people to move into areas where there still needs to be human intervention type work. So I tend to think it’s a good thing. I tend to think it’s those things that are of high repetition and they’re very sort of mechanical. And I think Dan Pink talked about this in Drive. Those will be the sort of routine elements that will be computerized and automated, leaving human beings to then do much more of the heuristic work, the variable work, the human work where there’s so many multiple variations of an outcome because you’re trying to serve a customer’s need or solve a customer’s problem, that in itself, it’s more challenging, it’s more rewarding, it’s more stimulating, but people will need some element of reskilling in order to do that.
So I see HR playing a massive role in doing that sort of reskilling exercise. And I guess then that ethics and morality thing I talked about earlier on, which is just because you can doesn’t mean you should, the famous Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park, which David D’Souza talks about a lot. There will be some companies who will say, look, you know, we can do this, but actually we want to be a human only, you know, almost totally organic organization in harmony with technology.
So you’ll get some people who will trade off that fact. So people who don’t want to talk to a call center robot may be comforted by the fact that their insurance company is still manned by human beings who will adapt to the very nature of an individual and unique problem to solve and provide, you know, a premium concierge type service. And people will still want other people to do that work. So to some degree, not just economics will decide this, but almost, you know, sociology and psychology of human beings, talking to human beings may dictate how much of that 47% comes true versus not.
So that’s where I think HR’s got a massive role in the design and the skilling of people who are otherwise displaced by technology. And I don’t think we’re prepared for that at all. So I think there’s a huge amount of diagnostic and scenario modeling type activity to go on. When you heard, I can’t remember, was it Foxconn who made a huge amount of people redundant in one fell swoop? HR there must have been an absolute nightmare because so many people’s lives were destroyed by the fact that they weren’t given alternatives, they were just let go.
But that would have been the most unfulfilling HR existence ever. And I can’t see many HR practitioners wanting to vote for that kind of work. They would want to save the human race in as many ways as they possibly can by helping people redeploy, rescale, rediscover who and what they’re meant to be doing and help them do that.
Lisa: This is a bit of a tenuous link, but you mentioned Jeff Goldblum and Jurassic Park. So speaking of dinosaurs, in terms of the big corporations out there in the world, the kind of big giants who still operate in the very kind of old-fashioned ways, do you think those big corporations will succeed in transforming? And if so, what will that look like?
Perry: It’s one I’ve been watching probably for about the last, again, sort of five, six, seven years, where I’ve seen all these nimble new startups. Google hasn’t been around for that long, and yet look at how huge it is and how much value it’s created in an economic sense and in a sort of a presence. I think most of them will struggle. I think when you look at the shifts in things like energy and transportation, although I saw something recently where Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar are starting to really, really sort of almost Tesla-ise themselves and go down the electric car road. And so I think some of them are starting to see the writing on the wall and they’re starting to think, hey, this is essential for our survival.
You may see some enlightened large corporations who will exist, but they will be, I think, very different in their construct and in their ethos and their principles. So I think they’ll be less about pure shareholder value and more about maybe a triple bottom line type of capitalism where they’ve got an impact on society and the environment. I think if you can see a company, no matter what size, is doing its best for good in those three ways, then I think you’ll still like it as a consumer.
What I find really interesting, though, is not necessarily that competitors and other products and market shifts may negate their size as an advantage, but the whole fabric of the economy is potentially something that over the next five to 10 years we’ll start to see torn apart. You know, universal basic income trials and pilots, the flattening down of the costs of things.
If you look at Salim Ismail’s work on the exponential organization side of things and just how much it doesn’t cost you now, it’s like, you know, a penny to produce a microchip component in a smartphone or a device. You kind of think, geez, this stuff is almost going down to zero cost for production. The 3D printed house I saw recently online with this sort of concrete construction that actually is robust and solid and is a fraction of the cost of normal conventional building techniques makes you think, if things are driving down so much and they are so cheap, it’s almost like, why do we need to earn lots of money to buy things which now we’ll either rent as a service or we just don’t need to spend much to own?
So the whole economic change and shift is something that really interests me and will probably be harder for those larger organizations to cope with than even these nimble, agile organizations which aren’t quite so big and heavy who are starting to take huge amounts of market share. If I worked for a big company and I had a senior role in a big company, I’d be very worried about all that and I would be desperately trying to create a spin-out or recalibrate the entire machine.
Whether it means that we see a disaggregation and so it goes more localized entities and services but under just a brand umbrella, that might be the thing that we see where it’s a bit more franchisee-type modeling rather than huge copy-making elements that just happen to operate in different jurisdictions. That, I think, would see a change. I suspect we won’t see the end of big corporations but I also believe they will be very different in how they feel and they’ll be held to account in very different ways.
Lisa: Yeah, it brings to mind another related point in Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest documentary, Before the Flood. He speaks to this Indian woman and she talks about how developing countries can sort of accelerate the process and avoid some of the mistakes that developed countries have made in terms of from an energy and environmental standpoint. So I’m curious, as a lot of people like you and I are discovering and reading about and experimenting with new ways of working and organizing that are more conducive to the kind of VUCA world that we live in, do you think emerging markets like Africa, for example, will be able to skip the kind of industrial pyramid, hierarchical phase that many of us have gone through and adopt more responsive ways from the start in models like Bertsall, for example?
Perry: It’s an interesting one that I think has another dimension, which is the culture of the country or the region itself. So for example, if you were to ask me about that same question, but mention Asia, then that would probably elicit a slightly different response to Africa because in Asian family and cultural structures, the hierarchy is actually quite a revered element to it. Yet we know from the sort of 1970s, 80s and through into the 90s that Japan was an economic tour de force for many years.
And in fact, the American model adopted much of the Japanese practice in things like lean manufacturing and so on and so forth. So let’s take Africa then as an example. Yeah, I mean, if you look at its use of technology, it literally didn’t bother hardwiring anything. It just went straight to mobile and has formed economies around mobile. I think it’s Clay Shirky’s book that looks at how swiftly you can generate funds and pay people using mobile transactions. And so why would anything else apply?
So if that’s the spirit of African commerce, to use that as a kind of connecting term for the whole lot of it, I don’t see any reason why they would want to go down the road of overly sort of formalized structures. They wouldn’t have to copycat what goes on in European and American businesses. And so the culture there might be much more entrepreneurial. It might be much more about collective effort. It might be much more about distributed technology.
So I suspect, yeah, when you combine that sort of energy and spirit with the sort of normal business, conventional sort of routes to market, like endorsement, funds, market share, all that kind of stuff, then hey, yeah, I can see it happening. I can see an entrepreneurial Africa and maybe even we’re already seeing parts of India. I think India today took over the UK as the sixth largest economy in the world. So it’s almost seems like it’s wrong to call them developing nations. They are developed and I think they’ll continue to develop beyond their current capability.
So yeah, so Africa I can see going that way. Maybe South America I can see taking on some of those challenges as well. And I guess combined with things like education standards and entrepreneurial spirit, eradicating poverty, overcoming health issues, all these things I think provide a perfect storm for parts of the world that still have increasing birth rates, not declining birth rates. So literally the talent supply is huge. The will is there and then applied that with skill. Yeah, I think watch out world, it’s coming. And I don’t think they’ll repeat the same mistakes as us. I think they’ll be wanting to learn from much more entrepreneurial model and may shift directly into that paradigm you opened up with, which is this more distributed power ethic, this much more inclusiveness and this more adaptable sort of format and structure.
Lisa: Yeah, and you mentioned there a little bit about education and entrepreneurial skills and things like that. I saw today that LinkedIn released a list of skills that are gonna be the most kind of desirable skills that HR and recruiters are looking for in the kind of coming years. What, in your opinion, are some of the skills that professionals, not just in HR, but in general and young people should be developing in order to kind of equip themselves for the next few years really? Because the shelf life of a skill now is what? Four years, six years?
Perry: Yeah, something like that, yeah. So I know the post you talk about in LinkedIn and it does talk quite actively about technology skills like SEO and data presentation, all those kinds of things. And of course they are, because as the world gets more digitally dependent and connected to each other, yeah, we probably are gonna need to, just as we can write out a superb business proposal, we are probably gonna need to code and build our own apps. And as a result of that and the increased reliance on it, we need to get more technology security and ethically savvy.
So we’ll need to know all about. And as virtual reality and augmented reality software becomes a lot more accessible, then the way we’ve designed buildings and the way we can imagine scenarios playing out will probably happen in a virtual world before we ever commissioned a project manager to do something. Not to mention that the vast quantities of data that we’ve got, which are both useful when you know how to mine and interpret and analyze them, but absolutely useless if you can’t do anything with them. It’s just a mound of data.
Yeah, all those skills are incredibly useful and they’re probably incredibly lacking in the education world as we know them to be. So yes, the technology of that ilk is one huge area where I think we are going to see an increased amount of people spending a lot of their time and effort in. And my connection with Romania is a good example, actually, because Romania has already, I think, identified and started to turn out some of the more promising coders, designers, and developers in the technology world, which is why they’ve got one of the fastest broadband connections in the world. So yeah, so that’s crucial. That technology stuff is crucial.
But increasingly, I think we need to also center ourselves on human elements like psychology and sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and all those sort of things. People have been talking about neuroscience for ages, but we’ve almost been talking about the circus trick side of neuroscience, like habit forming and all that kind of stuff. But deeply, deeply understanding what brings people to life, what motivates them to do good things, where it starts to go slightly wrong is very important for us to understand and be more conversant in as leaders and as project managers and as generators of great ideas and great schemes. So yeah, I think literally it’s those two tracks that would fascinate me. It’s like understanding humanity much, much more, and understanding technology much more deeply and adeptly. I think if you can combine those two things, then boom, I think you have a serious sort of proposition on your hands, what it means to be an active, productive, and entrepreneurial human resource in the sort of second to third decade of the 21st century.
Lisa: Now, you and I are big fans of self-management and self-organisation and companies who are particularly progressive and experimenting with interesting ways of working. I’m curious to know, what is your opinion regarding managers or no managers? Do you think it’s possible for an organisation to be truly responsive and adaptive with managers, or do you think in order to be a completely progressive organisation, it has to be manager-less?
Perry: So, I took a great deal of comfort in Gary Hamill’s Future of Management back in 2007, where he talked about management as a 20th century technology whose time has passed, and I tend to agree with that, that it is a 20th century technology the way we have management now.
However, I’ve been to some organisations and spent time with them where some form of leadership still exists, and there’s management, but it’s a totally different type of management. It’s management of things like process, which are necessary perhaps to get a product from concepts and design into actual tested and practical deployment, but less about managing people as an extension of a machine-like process.
So, where I’m seeing the shift in management is that it’s all about more the process. So, that kind of thing is becoming like a super skill, and then leadership comes into how you get people to operate together, get the best from them, work to their inclusivity and diversity, and so on. So, that comes back to that point I talked about earlier on, which is knowing people much more, both at an individual relationship level and what makes them tick and how you get the best out of them, create the conditions for success, and so on.
Now, that doesn’t need you to have prescriptive, almost like rule-based systems. It’s more about principles and philosophies and about open conversations and dialogue. It’s about challenge for good and all those sort of things. So, I see the leader and the manager, as we know, becoming much more like these coaches, scrum masters, and inspiring figures who can conceptualise a theme, who can set a certain sense of direction which people can add to and adapt and change and build on, much in the way that we’ve seen some of the social movements in the past.
So, managers will be less administrators of task and punishment and much more like galvanisers of spirit and skill and those sort of things. So, that sort of self-organised is definitely where I see us going. I believe in the principles of self-organising, that once people build up a certain degree of confidence and competence in what they’re doing, then they need to be left to get on with it. The more rules and policies and things you try and put around people, the more that feels like it’s a straitjacket stifling their creativity and their energy and their commitment to the reason they wanted to do that work in the first place.
So, getting managers out of the way of that is brilliant, but occasionally you get people who go, I just wish there was somebody who could just help me understand that I’m making a difference, and so have that dialogue that says, hey, your work is so valuable. Look at that chain reaction that you set off with that idea of yours that’s now given us a new revenue stream or saved the lives of 50 people. That feedback thing is still pretty valuable. I think we still like that, but I don’t think it needs to be in that parental tap on the head, you’ve earned 15 points, here’s 20 quid at the end of the month type thing that we get now.
I just think that’s gone. That moment has passed and we’re much more into, does this enrich my soul? Do I feel like I make a difference? Can I look myself in the eye and go I’m a good human being who does good things for others? I just happen to wear a badge of corporateness, but I don’t work in an organisation that I’m just a number. So, that sort of self-organise where people feel protected and valued and have good access to inspiring figures who can help them learn more and be the best version of themselves, brilliant. Anything else? No.
So, it sounds like most of the things that I agree with are things like your Morning Stars and your SEMCOs and your VALVes and your FITCs and all those kind of things. So, those examples give me a huge heart because they prove you can do it by getting out of the way. You can make it profitable and sustainable and human at the same time and I see no reason why we can’t all start to adopt that sort of practice.
Lisa: Right, so management itself isn’t inherently good or bad, but for you management can add real value when it’s more almost like a coaching kind of role.
Perry: Yeah, so I wouldn’t even call it management. Management of task is almost I think going to become like a specialist function, but management of people will disappear and you’ll have leaders of people who will coach and guide and inspire and support and enable.
I’ve learned from some amazingly competent and confident managers and if I didn’t have them around, I could have discovered my way to a solution, but I liked having them there as a buffer, almost like as a tandem skydiver, all those kind of things. Loved all that. What I didn’t like was when people tried to micromanage me and put their processes in my face and tell me I wasn’t as good as I knew I could be and it was like, well, who are you to do that? So, I think get rid of that dark satanic version and keep the light angelic version. Hey, boom, I’m in.
Lisa: Now, I know you’re a big book fan and you are an avid reader of management books and all those kinds of things. So, we’ve been asking people for recommendation for listeners of a book that either you’re reading currently or you’ve read recently that has inspired you. What would you say?
Perry: Can I cheat and give you two?
Lisa: Sure.
Perry: Okay, the reason I say that is because one is an older established book and the other is a quite new one. So, the established book is The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. So, it talks about the learning organisation. It’s been around for about 20 plus years, nearly 30 years. Yeah, I read it again with some real verve the other week and it just almost felt like somebody just written it based on a case study of an organisation they found last week. It was much more progressive than I think even I gave it credit for at its time. So, that is a book whose time has come, I think, The Fifth Discipline.
And then, I guess, I mean, yeah, there’s quite a few that I will know people know about but I’ll name check one that did have a really kind of wow effect on me and that was The Seventh Sense, a book by Joshua Kuparamo that talks about the networked world that we’re in now. And there was some massively philosophical moments in that book for me because he’s learned from Zen Buddhist masters and all sorts.
And when you see how the world’s going, you can really start to appreciate just how the sort of the old and the new that are combining and both sort of tearing apart at the moment. We’re in that kind of epoch and he has a really nice way of describing how you can equip yourself to navigate yourself through that world, make the best of it and what he hopes the world will look like as a result of those networked shifts. So, Fifth Discipline and Seventh Sense. So, they’ve both got numbers in, so that’s quite cool, isn’t it?
Lisa: And is there anything that you’re particularly excited about at the moment in the world of work or in the world of HR?
Perry: I guess I do get excited about the fact that more people are sort of magnetized towards this concept of a new form of work, both from an HR learning background and from all sorts of other backgrounds. So, I’m finding myself networked with comms professionals, designers, marketers, technologists, and that feels like it should be.
So, yeah, it’s almost like the thing I’m most interested in, which I’ve loosely bracketed as HR, you know, the whole old design and the new ways that people can get more out of their work, have an appeal to people whose roles in the past didn’t have to address that, like technologists and marketers and, you know, sort of graphic designers and stuff. But everybody seems to be coming together, going, hey, this work thing, yeah, it’s a bit crap, isn’t it? So, if I see some new stuff, I’m drawn to it, and I want to share that with other people who believe in it.
So, I love the fact that it cuts across all of those previously held sort of disciplines and differences and silos within the sort of corporate world. So, that gives me a great deal of excitement because it’s almost like this is the universal thing that unites us all about wanting to change work, not what your skill set is, but what your belief and your energy is towards. So, I think that’s what excites me because it isn’t then just, you know, HR’s role or technology’s role to change it. It’s everybody’s role. So, yeah, a very sort of band of brothers and sisters who are from totally different backgrounds and totally different professional disciplines all converge on the same topic.
Lisa: You can hear from his answers that Perry is a brilliant speaker. In fact, I highly recommend watching his TEDx talk about the future of work. HR often gets a really bad reputation, but it’s hard not to be inspired by Perry’s vision of how it could be. I like the idea that HR’s role needs to become about helping organisations to better understand technology and humanity.
The book of the week, as recommended by Perry, is The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper-Ramo, all about digital disruption and the future of work. And he also snuck in a bonus book, an old classic, Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, which Perry says is so current it could have been written yesterday.
So, thank you for listening. I hope you’ll join us again, and be sure to follow Perry on Twitter. Anything he shares, I promise, is worth checking out.
