Concept Marketing Group Inc.

Ulrich has published over 90 articles and book chapters as well as authored or co-authored a number of books, includingResults-Based Leadership (1999), The HR Scorecard (2001), The HR Value Proposition and The Workforce Scorecard (2005), Beyond HR and Leadership Brand (2007), HR Competencies (2008), and most recently,Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By and then HR Transformation: Building Human Resources from the Outside In(2009).

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of Ulrich.

Morris: Before discussing a few of your books, first a few general questions. At what point in your life that you realize that you wanted to focus on understanding what maximizing human development requires and then how to help individuals as well as teams and even entire organizations to achieve that?

Ulrich: Eons ago in college, I wanted to go to law school. It was my boyhood dream. I took a course called “organizational behavior” from a master teacher who captured my imagination. He asked us to examine how organizations work and be alerted on how to improve them. He challenged us to see organizational issues in where we worked, what we read, and how we lived our lives. I ended up writing a 15 to 20-page paper every week for 15 weeks. He told me afterwards that I had found my niche. Decades later I figured I had “OCD” … organization compulsive disorder … where I constantly look at finding how to organize better. This torments family and friends when I go to restaurants, airplanes, churches, or other organization settings and offer unsolicited advice.

Morris: Looking back over (let’s say) the last decade, what have been the most significant changes in HR operations and management of them?

Ulrich: About a decade ago, HR began to serious focus on outcomes not activities. It was not enough to hire someone, but to make sure that you are hiring the right person. As HR aligned to strategy, the focus was less on what HR activities were done (e.g., how many leaders received 40 hours of training), but on the outcomes of what was done. A second shift was finding technology-based ways to do the transaction work often affiliated with legacy HR. The work ended up in service centers, being outsourced, or on line for employee self-sufficiency. This freed up HR professionals to focus on the more strategic and transformational parts of their job. Finally, line managers began to realize that competitors can more easily copy price, product, and technology, but the way to manage people and organization was a unique advantage that competitors could not easily copy. HR has become more strategic not because HR wants to be strategic, but because line managers need insights that good HR professionals can offer.

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You are cordially invited to visit these Web sites that provide an abundance of resources:

www.TransformHR.com

http://www.daveulrich.com/