Articles.

Thanks to all our members who attended the Annual Conference in South Beach, Miami, at the end of April. I'm writing this introduction on my way back to Singapore, which gives me time to reflect on and be thankful for our special HRPS community of intellectually challenging friends and colleagues. Special thanks to the five professionals who for almost 2-1/2 years now have volunteered their time and worked with me as this journal's Associate Articles Editors, and who were honored at the conference by receiving the annual and prestigious Walker Prize for their white paper articles on the five HRPS knowledge areas (edition 27.1). The winners and their knowledge areas are: Fred Frank & Craig Taylor (Talent Management), Ed Gubman (HR Strategy & Planning), Rich Hughes & Gina HernezBroome (Leadership Development), Jay Jamrog & Miles Overholt (Building a Strategic HR Function), and Joe McCann (Organization Effectiveness). The articles are available to download at www.hrps.org. If you have not been to the updated website, you should go there immediately!

Let's start with an analogy relevant now for our profession: Sales is to Marketing as Accounting is to Finance and as Human Resources is to --. Are we ready to fill in the blank? John Boudreau (of USC's Center for Effective Organizations) and Pete Ramstad (of Personnel Decisions International) have put this question to us in their article "Talentship and the New Paradigm for Human Resource Management: From Professional Practices to Strategic Talent Decision Science." The authors have coined the term "talentship" as the necessary next stage in our evolution (building on leadership and stewardship); others may reflect on the development of our profession and term the next stage "organizational effectiveness," as in my introduction in our HRP journal 27.1 describing the evolution of HR through name changes (Labor Relations, Industrial Relations, Personnel Administration, Personnel, Human Resources). Regardless of the term, our profession is evolving and changing. The transactional is being outsourced and the transformational challenges our models and capabilities. Our organizational clients have different experiences and expectations about what we can deliver. Maturity levels also differ in what we choose to measure and what that says about our role and impact. It is a big jump to move from volume measures such as "hours of training" to effectiveness measures such as "defect reduction" as a result of quality training. The traditional HR paradigm is one of service delivery, so we measure the services we deliver. When we step up to HR as a decision science, then we align with business strategy and can teach the frameworks that deliver business results. A parallel is that Sales may measure revenue per salesperson or quota attainment, but Marketing has a complete science of customer segmentation that informs and guides decisions about business strategy and resource allocation.

If Marketing has customer segmentation, then where is our HR science on talent segmentation? It actually exists and is developing in pockets (there were several references to this in our recent HRPS annual conference), but it has not yet evolved into a consistent, replicable, and teachable point of view. We should be able to do this and be held accountable for it. In some organizations, the human capital costs are 70 percent of total costs. In which roles does the difference between poor and great performance have the greatest impact on the organization? The authors give us a good framework to start our thinking, and we look forward to more advances in making this an executable model that allows us to guide the evolution of our profession. The alternative is to be passively shaped by the compelling economic and global issues affecting us, which is not so satisfying.

The second article is an interview I conducted with Marcus Buckingham regarding his newly published book entitled The One Thing You Need to Know About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success. Marcus is well known for the best-sellers he co-authored when he was part of The Gallup Organization: First Break All the Rules and Now Develop Your Strengths. He is now on his own and has further explored the nature of great managing and great leading. As might be expected, some of his assertions are immediately intuitively appealing and some will challenge our thinking. The conclusions are based on a limited number of in-depth interviews, meaning more research is recommended. Some of our readers may conclude that greater quantification is required before the conclusions can be accepted, and that is OK. We offer this interview as a conversation starter of interest to managers and leaders. The basic argument is that a great manager is focused on what is unique about the person and changes the situation to help turn one person's talents into performance, whereas a great leader is focused on what we all share in common and in many ways rallies people to a better future by bringing single-minded clarity and purpose to counteract uncertainty and fear.

The third article is entitled "The Unexpected Employee and Organizational Costs of Skilled Contingent Workers," by Jannifer David of the University of Minnesota--Duluth. Through a literature review and the presentation of a model to guide our thinking and inform future quantitative research, the author explores individual and organizational effects of the interaction between regular employees and skilled contingent workers (SCWs). The fact that almost 10 percent of the U.S. workforce could be classified as "contingent" (and that this is a growing number) suggests that more research is warranted on this topic. Concepts of equity and of risk-aversion are interwoven with the argument that unintended negative consequences can emerge with the interaction of regular employees and SCWs. Some of the conclusions may not be readily acceptable to or accepted by the HR community (e.g., continuance commitment policies for regular employees), but a better understanding of the differing motivations, inputs, and outcomes for these two types of workers would serve us well.

Richard M. Vosburgh, Ph.D. Vice President, Human Resources--Asia Pacific/Japan Hewlett Packard