Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:10 Today I want to spend a significant amount of time talking about what we've learned about skills, jobs, and job architecture, and tell you a little lesson about what we can learn from the genius bar at Apple. It turns out, as most of you know, the existential issue going on in companies right now, at least big companies, is the need to build a new job architecture and a skills taxonomy. And the reason for that is that the pandemic has radically changed everybody's job, created much more cross-functional teams and forced companies to really rethink how they go to market, what they sell, who they sell to, delivery strategies, and really their whole digital go-to-market strategy. And every company I talk to, whether it be an insurance company, an energy company, a tech company, a telco, is being disrupted by some new form of technology or an adjacent technology that is encroaching on their space.
Speaker 1 00:01:07 So how do you run a company for execution today but also designed for agility and adaptability for the future? Now, if you go back to the beginning of organizational design, and I've done a lot of reading on this and talked to a lot of you about this, companies were originally designed in a hierarchical way to focus on industrial scale. And the reason for that was that most of the big businesses in the 18 hundreds and 19 hundreds were manufacturing and distribution companies. So you had a small number of managers and a large number of workers. Even the railroads were set up this way and managers were the ones who decided what to do. And labor were the ones that did the work. Today, of course, that's actually mostly been automated and most of the human work in companies is consultative value add service jobs. In fact, 80 to 90% of the jobs in the United States can be classified as service jobs.
Speaker 1 00:02:00 They're not necessarily in the service industry, but they're service jobs. Even a software engineer is a service job because it's a creative job. Creators, sales people, marketing people, communications, customer service, consulting, financial jobs are all human-oriented jobs. And so the strict hierarchical function, which was designed around scale and ever-increasing improvements in productivity and efficiency as we added more people, just doesn't work because we need human beings to be creative and problem solvers around the technology. Now, I was asking myself, you know, after having studied HR for so long, and by the way, I'm gonna give you three industry examples. I'm gonna talk about hr, I'm gonna talk about telecommunications, then I'm gonna talk about Apple. Why do we have an HR department? Why do we have an engineering department? Why do we have a sales department? Why do we have a marketing department? I mean, why do we even have those departments?
Speaker 1 00:02:52 Well, somehow over the last two or 300 years, it actually goes back to slavery. By the way, the the best business organization people were the slave owners. But I won't take you down that path. It turns out that those are clusters of expertise that belong together. So obviously we need to market and sell and distribute and deliver and design and support and consult and serve clients. But if we have one person trying to do all of that, they're not gonna be very good at it. So the organizational structures that we have today, which are very, very institutionalized into our job models and our recruiting systems and our reward systems really go back to this idea that if we cluster specialized skills in some area, they will be deeper and more useful to the rest of the company. Like in hr, you could argue that everything HR people do should be done by managers.
Speaker 1 00:03:45 There's no reason for HR people to decide on pay or who to recruit or how to develop people, or who should be the next boss. You know, the managers should do that, right? Well actually no, the managers have other things to do. And so somewhere along the line, somebody decided let's create this specialized role called HR that worries about this people stuff so that the managers can worry about other things, maybe what products to build or how to price things. And so this idea of specialized functions grew up totally around the need for clusters of skills. So clusters of skills isn't a new idea. It goes way, way, way back to the beginning of organization design in the slave labor. And again, I'll put a link into slave labor reading if you wanna read on it, but it's a very interesting history. Now that does lead you to ask a question.
Speaker 1 00:04:34 For example, why do we have these organizational groups? If you look at the Workday system, it's built around job families. I mean, so is success factors in Oracle and all the payroll systems, the idea that you have a job family, you have a job hierarchy, and then you have job roles and families of jobs with subfamilies within the family. And what that did is that forced us to create this highly granular, very brittle model of job level, job title, job description, job, family, et cetera, which led us to where we are. Because in most cases, your job is not what's written on your job description. Some of it is, but usually you do a lot of things that aren't written down and you work with a lot of people. And the most successful companies have very hybrid jobs where you as a designer also talk to customers, you as a customer service person talk to engineering, you as an engineer, talk to the support organization, you as a support group, talk to the consulting group.
Speaker 1 00:05:32 You want these groups to talk to each other so that over time more and more of the individuals in your company are what we call full stack professionals. I remember one of the stories that I've never forgot was how one of the most successful hotel chains, I think it was the Four Seasons, or said to their customer service people in the hotels, you can do whatever you want. You can decide to give somebody a free room, you can decide to give somebody an extra night, you can give them better pillows, just use good judgment. And what they were basically saying is, you've got a hybrid job, you are empowered so you better know what to do and take responsibility for your actions. And that's what's going on in every part of business. The best engineers know what customers doing the best. HR people know what the product strategy is, the best finance people know what the sales people are doing and so forth.
Speaker 1 00:06:21 So organizational design is an artifact of the past. And I think more and more of the organizational designs of the future will be hybrid. And we're building a whole course on this and we're interviewing companies about it. And the example I would give you on that is two. The first is customer service. I've worked in a lot of software companies and in software there are really four levels of customer service. There's technical support, this thing's broken, I don't know how to use it, it's not doing what I want. There's customer service where I want a new version or I want some hand holding or I want some help. There's consulting, which is, would you please come to my office and help me get this thing working? And then there's professional services, which means all of that. Plus teach me how to use the software and give me better skills so that I can take advantage of it.
Speaker 1 00:07:10 Now, all four of those things from technical support to professional services and education probably belong in one group to be honest. But they don't necessarily belong in one group. In a bank. In a bank, you don't really wanna be consulting with people on what stocks to buy in the same group. That's helping people open checking accounts. So the fact that we have these common organizational models across different industries is history. And you don't have to do that. You can do it however you want. And a good example of that is the Apple Genius Bar. Now, I don't know who thought this up, but whoever thought it up was a genius. Apple sells a lot of stuff and each one of their products is very complex and they're not exactly easy to use. I mean they're easy to use upfront, but as soon as you start using it, there's all sorts of things that are hidden and lost and hard to find and there's all sorts of tricks on how to get it to work correctly that change in every version.
Speaker 1 00:08:05 So they were probably getting millions of inquiries on the customer support lines, emails, cases being opened in websites, people complaining about understanding features. And I'm sure Apple built all sorts of education and self-development and constant improvement in the product to make it easier and easier to use. But they realized this was, this was just too complicated. And most of the Apple products are designed to work with each other. So even if you're an expert on the phone, you may not know how the phone works with the iPad or the iPad works with the iWatch or whatever else you might have from Apple. So someone came up with the idea of let's create a full stack support job and let's call it a genius. And that was a genius idea cuz you can go into an Apple store and there will be 30 people that know everything about this stuff.
Speaker 1 00:08:55 Now they didn't design it, they're not engineers, but they probably know who the engineers are and they know what the engineers are working on. They're not doing technical support, they're probably not fixing down and dirty integrated things inside the machines, but they know what the fixes are and they know where to find them and they really understand how the pieces work. And I would anticipate from my experience with Apple, that the geniuses love their jobs cuz they're always learning and they're talking to each other and they're sharing best practices. And that body of knowledge in Apple is probably one of the most valuable things they have. And that was a deliberate crushing of the traditional organization design around the problem. And that's what you need to do in your company. You need to think about the business you're in, the customers you serve, the products you sell, and organize around the best possible way to cluster your skills to meet that need.
Speaker 1 00:09:47 In hr, I firmly believe we're reaching the same state where every HR professional, certainly every business partner and administrator working with end users directly needs to be a genius. And that's why we're spending so much time on our academy on cross-training. We found for example in HR that the lowest rated skill in HR is diversity and inclusion. And guess what? Diversity and inclusion touches every single thing you do, who you hire, who you pay, how you coach people, how you develop people, how you move people, what kinds of communications people have. So it's sort of insane that that little group is a little specialist group and everybody else in it's in HR doesn't know about it. It would be as if the genius bar said, oh, you need to open the settings button. Well we need to take you to the settings geniuses because they're a different group from everybody else.
Speaker 1 00:10:38 The settings group is core. Okay, so that's a little bit about org designing. Now, job architecture, as I mentioned in every company I've ever run into is hierarchical. But it's too complex because what happens is if you have an individual job family for every function and sub-function in the company, you can't do a reorg. You can't move people from place to place. You can't do hybrid skills development. Career management is very, very complex. And so what we've found from the work we're doing with a lot of companies right now, by the way, you know this is all based on real work we're doing with companies. This isn't just theoretical, is that we need to simplify this. We need to have fewer job families, fewer levels, and far less detail in the job descriptions. Now we just went through this in great detail. We have a whole video on how to do it, and if you're in the middle of redesigning a job architecture, give us a call and we will be happy to help you.
Speaker 1 00:11:31 But to give you an example of how this works, one of the companies I interviewed last year is Epic, E P I c. Epic is one of the most successful companies in the world. They essentially dominate the business of online medical health records and all of the interactions you have throughout your entire life with your healthcare provider. And they're located in Wisconsin, very pioneering, innovative company, very creative. And I talked to their head of HR about how they do recruiting and onboarding and introduction to the organization. And she said, one of the things we decided sometime in the past, I don't know who decided this is we only have seven jobs in the company. That sounds ridiculous, but I understand where they're coming from. There's sales jobs, there's consulting jobs, there's engineering jobs, there's finance and operations jobs. I don't know where marketing fits, I don't know where customer sport fits, but there's only seven, there's not 50.
Speaker 1 00:12:29 And she said, when we go out and we interview candidates, we explain to them the seven job families we have. And we try to get prospects, usually people in college candidates to decide or assess which of these seven areas they wanna work in. And based on those seven areas, they get recruited, they get assessed. If they decide to be hired, they come into the company and the first thing they do is they go through four to six weeks of onboarding. It starts before they join and they learn everything about Epic. They learn about the history of the company, they learn about the customers, they learn about the market, they learn about the industry. By the way, this is an example of hybrid work development, teaching people everything they need to know before they get started. And that goes on for six or eight weeks. So it's a very significant amount of common education and training and consensus building that goes on for everybody.
Speaker 1 00:13:19 Then she said, we turn them over to their functional area in each of the seven functional areas as a team of people that teach and assess people on the specifics of their jobs and their roles in that area. And we didn't get into the details of how that all works, but she said that goes on for another four to six weeks. And so what they end up with is a huge company of tens of thousands of people now all of whom have a very, very common understanding of the entire system of Epic and the marketplace and the customers and the business that they're in. And then a set of very cross-trained domain specialists in each of these seven areas. And you know what? That is a really, really innovative idea. I mean, most of you have dozens and dozens of job families, you have different business units in different countries, each of which are organized in different ways, even in hr.
Speaker 1 00:14:12 It's very common for us to find companies that have one C H R O and then lots of VPs of HR that run their HR departments differently. And then the local HR teams in each country run differently from that. That just makes it harder and harder to share information and to grow as a company. So this issue of org design and job at architecture is number one. And we're gonna be introducing a whole J B A program on this and I encourage you to call us or join our membership program if you'd like more information. The third thing that's going on in companies is skills. And I would guess that everybody listening to this podcast, whether you're a HR person, a training person or a vendor or consultant is worrying about this. And the big project companies are trying to do is build a skills taxonomy.
Speaker 1 00:14:59 Now, we've done a lot of work on this, we've worked with mz, we've looked at great detail, and I want to give you two industry examples. I'm gonna talk about HR and then I'm gonna talk about telcos. The problem with skills is the word skill is a very vague word. There are tens of thousands of skills as I talked about in the prior podcast, learning how to run a pivot table in Excel as a skill. But closing the books is also a skill. One skill requires hundreds of other skills. So the way we like to help people figure this out is the first thing you need to think about or what we call capabilities, the business capabilities. And most companies have some limited number of these that are important in some companies, and we're doing a lot of consulting on this, the capabilities are very big.
Speaker 1 00:15:46 Change readiness might be a corporate capability that you wanna drive into your company that requires many, many skills. Digital fluency is big at Allstate Insurance, for example, and that requires many, many skills depending on your job. So what we did in the HR case is we looked at all the work we've done over the years, talked to a lot of you and came up with 94 very specific business capabilities in HR that define your success. And they're each complex. I mean, building an employment brand for example, is one of the 94 capabilities, and that requires skills in SEO and marketing and communications and all sorts of other things. So business capabilities are an abstraction that you should be building on a regular basis from which your skills taxonomy will derive and contribute. And what I really think companies should do, and this is what we're working on right now with quite a few companies, is putting in place a regular governance process for discussing business capabilities and deciding what are the really big ones each year.
Speaker 1 00:16:50 One of the companies I did some interviews with is a large defense contractor. And they said about five or six years ago, a lot of the procurement people were getting requests from the federal government for work on drones. And they said, we don't know very much about drones. In fact, there's a lot of stuff inside of drones we don't know about maybe drones and drone technology and drone design and drone operations ought to be one of our business capabilities. So they created a business capability. I had a really interesting conversation with the head of capability development at nasa. You know, NASA has a mission of going to Mars and there's thousands of people at NASA that know all sorts of things, all sorts of science and propulsion and physics and engineering. And he said, once we decided we were gonna go to Mars, we realized there's a lot of things we didn't know how to do.
Speaker 1 00:17:35 We don't know how to put somebody in space for a year at a time, we don't know how to go that far away. We don't know how to deal with certain types of radiation out there, we don't have propulsion systems for that. So they sat down and said, we need some business capabilities in this area, which then led them to looking at the skills. So that's number one in terms of skills. The second thing we've learned about skills is once you've come up with your business capabilities, you can figure out what skills you have and what skills you need through some pretty interesting analysis of data. Now, one of the innovations going on in HR right now is the introduction of skills clouds. These systems like Workday, EdCast, gloat, all of which have essentially indexing tools to try to identify skills. It turns out most of them are not very useful for this problem.
Speaker 1 00:18:25 They're kind of naked technology that will index data and find things like what words are being used in resumes, what people are searching for, what courses we have, but they won't really teach you what the skills you need are for the future. You need to get that from external data. So one of the things that's really important in building your skilled strategy, and by the way, this is not a project, this is a muscle, this is a ongoing expertise and business practice that you're gonna have to do over time is to look at the outside market and you can get external skills data from mz, from nasscom, from industry groups, from eightfold, from all sorts of different vendors, sensia that are clustering and curating the skills data so you can bring it in. A good example of this is, I talked to the head of recruiting at a large pharma company a couple months ago and she said, look, the pharmaceutical industry is changing so fast and there's so much new biological science and mRNA.
Speaker 1 00:19:20 We cannot recruit scientists based on jobs, we can't look for somebody who's had this job before because we don't even know what the job is. But we do know we need certain scientific domains. So we're scanning research papers and work that's being published in our universities in funding by the federal government to see what the new scientific disciplines are in getting to know who the experts are and therefore what the scientific domains are that we need to grow. And that is how we're using the skills data to find what we need. And so this idea of building your skills taxonomy has to involve a sober look at what you have in the company, but also what's going on in the outside market. I have a whole paper on this which I will eventually get around to publishing. It shows you how you can bring this data together.
Speaker 1 00:20:09 And by the way, the data on emerging and trending skills is hard to find. It comes out of new jobs being posted, it comes out of new science being researched, it comes out of GitHub, it comes out of industry groups. I mean that's a pretty significant effort and that's why I think this is a muscle or a capability you need to build in your company. One of our science is a large semiconductor company and uh, they're great at manufacturing but they're not as strong at AI and software. And so they decided they're gonna build a capability academy around AI and software. And so they're doing a significant amount of work of understanding all of the domains of AI and software development so that they can build a skills academy or a capability academy in this area. And of course there's lots of engineers in that company and so they're having a really good time doing that.
Speaker 1 00:20:57 Years ago I visited a bank in the east coast when I first came up with a concept of a capability academy and they told me they were intensely focused on cloud engineering because they knew that they had to move all their mainframe and traditional transaction systems into the cloud and they needed to understand Kubernetes and packaging and data security and cyber and all that stuff. So they build a cloud engineering academy and they brought in people from Google and they brought in external speakers and they really, really treated it almost like a semi-academic project to figure out what skills they needed. And so this is a combination of using the tools you have, looking at the content providers, but really doing your own work to continuously identify the skills you need. And some of these new talent intelligence platforms are getting smarter and smarter and they're gonna be able to give you the information you need.
Speaker 1 00:21:47 Unfortunately, the raw naked tools like the Workday, Oracle, sap, degreed, EdCast, they really aren't content companies. They're really technology companies. So whichever of those you use, they will help you manage the data, but they won't help you understand what the skills of the future are or the skills are you're needed. The third area I want to talk about that we've been learning about is clusters, skills, clusters and skills trends. Now there's essentially three reasons for you to build a skills taxonomy. There're really four, but let me go through the three of them. The first is an underperforming part of the company. Our sales organization sucks. We have poor customer service, our engineering is behind our product management, doesn't know what they're doing, whatever it may be. So you dig in and you find out, wow, we got a bunch of smart people, but they don't know enough about their jobs.
Speaker 1 00:22:38 Or maybe they came from the wrong history or there's some disciplines missing in our expertise and maybe we don't know what we don't know. So that's one reason to do a skills project and and I would suggest you do that first because these are complicated projects and you want to get your wagon hitch to a real significant problem so that the business gives you the money you need. The second reason people do skills taxonomies is for talent reasons. We need better careers, we need better mobility, we need more internal mobility. We wanna do a talent marketplace, we wanna have more career progression. We wanna understand why young people are leaving. So we need a taxonomy so people can develop themselves by themselves or with their managers or with a coach and move into new roles inside of the company to improve retention. Oh, and we need that for recruiting too because we need to make sure we're not just recruiting based on the job title that some manager thought up, but based on the skills we need for the future.
Speaker 1 00:23:30 So that's the second category and that's a bigger problem, but it's a, it's a significantly definable problem. The third reason to build a skills taxonomy is for a business transformation. And I would suggest to you that this actually is true in every single company at Chevron. They wanna know what's going on in solar energy and electrical power. And I would guess that Shell and Exxon and BP, and they all wanna know that stuff too. U s, AA and Allstate want to know what's going on in risk management and they wanna know what the risks of the future are and they wanna know about global climate change and they wanna know about cybersecurity and whether we should be ensuring people for identity theft, that's a very disruptive nature of their business because if they're selling you life insurance and somebody else comes along and sells you a better insurance on a risk that they're not aware of, they're gonna fall behind.
Speaker 1 00:24:19 And obviously they need to know about AI and chatbots and all that stuff too. If you are a manufacturer of automobiles like Ford, you need to understand about electric cars. And I remember interviewing Ford five or six years ago when they were first getting the electric car program off the ground and they were scrambling around internally trying to find people that understood batteries and motors and transmission systems and all those technologies. And of course they did figure it out, but I'm sure they used a lot of external people and a lot of good ideas from others. So those are the three domains. There's the problem solving domain, there's the talent recruiting, internal mobility domain, and then there's a transformation domain and what you learn, and by the way, and then there's the fourth reason to do this, which is the CEO said, just do it and give us an architecture.
Speaker 1 00:25:05 And I don't think you should do this just for architectural reasons by the way. It's too big of a project. You have to have a goal in mind. So as you get into these three domains, what you quickly understand and find out is that all of the skills needed in any of those domains cluster together. They're almost like they're magnetic groups. Now, when we went through our HR capability model, which we call the Global HR Capability Project, we found out after looking at the data carefully and going through three or 400,000 jobs in hr, that there were 14 clusters of these skills. And I call them tribes. And my paper really uses the idea that HR is like an anthropology. There are tribes of skills in hr, there are people that do payroll processing and data processing and compliance. And there are people that do recruiting.
Speaker 1 00:25:58 There are people that do learning, there are people that understand compensation. There are people that understand diversity. There are people that understand workplace safety and health and workplace design. And those skills cluster together. If you look at both the people and the jobs, cuz they come from different domains. A lot of the people in the OD part of HR came out of training and development and education backgrounds. A lot of people in the analytics and tech part of HR came out of science and math backgrounds or maybe IO psychology backgrounds. A lot of people in the customer service and multi-functional leadership jobs of HR came out of consulting firms or senior leadership roles in other part of the company. And so one of the things that's kind of exciting about doing the skills work is you're gonna see where they cluster. And what that does for you is it allows you to decide what capability academies to build.
Speaker 1 00:26:52 You can't train everybody on everything, but you can train people on adjacent domains. And the more you understand these adjacent domains, the better your company's gonna be. And the example that I like to use is one that's kind of counterintuitive, but if you look at adjacent skills, one of the things you find is that cybersecurity, which is one of the hottest jobs in the job market, is not an IT skill. It may be located in the IT department and you do need some IT awareness and IT fluency, but it is mostly related to the skills of a financial auditor because financial auditors are really good at seeing patterns of data, identifying things that people are hiding, looking under the covers. And it turned out when you actually looked at the skills clusters, those two clusters were very close. And we did this in HR by the way, and this is available to you if you joined the capability project.
Speaker 1 00:27:46 Another example of what happens in skills is they evolve. So one of the projects we've been working on for years and we're participating in another group that's working on this is 5g. Now the telecommunications industry, for those of you that aren't in it is a tech industry. IT has been doing tech for years. My wife worked in Telco, I have lots of friends that worked in telco. What was invented by at and t and Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s was very, very advanced technology. They understood digital signal processing, they had to understand wires and losses and how to build transformers and switching systems. I mean there's a lot of technology in the phone system. And from two G to 3g, to 4G to 5g, every generation of technology, which LTE was a generation, is essentially a five to 10 year new decade of technology that builds upon the technology of the past.
Speaker 1 00:28:41 Now in the case of 5g, there are some really new things. There's micro antennas, there's new clusters of transmission systems, there's real-time processing, but some of the core technology is still needed. And so if you're trying to build expertise in 5g, it helps you to know that skill A that's needed in 5G is actually an offshoot of Skill G that existed in 3g. And so the people that have been working on 3G are actually some of the best people to work on this new skill you need in 5g. And we know we've seen some of this data and and this is something you need to understand that'll make you better at your job as a talent developer or as a an organizational designer. When you do that, what you'll find out is that many of the new skills you need are in very short supply.
Speaker 1 00:29:29 I mean, if there's anything I've learned over the years in tech is every year or two there's some new incredibly interesting technology that nobody knows how to do. And it usually comes out of a university or an entrepreneur or some startup and everybody flocks to it. You know, Python was this for a while, that's a, you know, sort of a language and then people become good at it and it becomes commoditized. So part of your skills architecture is realizing and reflecting and understanding that the skills model you have today will constantly be updated and that some of these skills will be emerging, some will be accelerating, some will be decelerating, and some will be more or less going away. Even Cobalt, by the way, which IBM was complaining to me about a few years ago, isn't obsolete. There's still people doing cobalt. However, in case any of you know this COBAL was the first object-oriented program.
Speaker 1 00:30:22 So people that knew Cobalt picked up object-oriented programming immediately in other languages. If you didn't know that, you might lay off all your pro Cobalt programmers and miss the fact that you actually have experts in object orientation already in the company. The final thing I think it's worth talking about is the skills org design taxonomy work that you do in the company probably doesn't belong in l and d. There is a lot of need for this in L and d and there's no question that l and d is the home of many of the solutions, but this is a cross-disciplinary problem. Obviously the job architecture is used by every manager and in compensation and promotion and job mobility. But think about recruiting. The recruiting function is desperately dependent on knowing the skills that the job requires, the skills in the market and the skills that are needed.
Speaker 1 00:31:16 And by the way, the recruiting function in a large company probably has a lot of insights into the availability of skills and whether we should be building or buying these skills internally. In the 5G example, some of the new advanced technologies that are needed in 5G have fewer than a thousand people in the world that even know them. And they're only located in three states in the United States, New Jersey, Texas, and California because that's where a lot of the r and d people were. So, so the recruiting people fit into this, the D E I people fit into this. So this is a, a really big cross-disciplinary area of business. I know this has been a long podcast, but let me just conclude with one final thought. The first of all, there's no magic bullet. None of the vendors, with the exception of a few that I'm very fond of, have an out-of-the-box solution that'll do all this for you.
Speaker 1 00:32:03 It's going to take consulting and effort and consensus building inside of your company. You are going to have to get smarter about the jobs and the expertise that you need to be successful and what's going on in the outside market. It's going to involve analytics and the analytics of data inside the company and outside the company. And it has to be focused on the business purpose. And if you go back to one of the comments I made earlier in the podcast, if you don't start at it with a business purpose, I get a little bit worried that these projects are just gonna be big architectural projects that that will collapse under their own weight. But if you focus on one of those three scenarios, number one, an underperforming business area or function. Number two, a talent issue of recruiting talent, mobility, or career management or number three, a very specific transformation to understand an adjacent market that your company needs to get into.
Speaker 1 00:33:01 If you focus on one of those things first and get comfortable with the process of building an org design, job architecture, and skills model and taxonomy, then you'll be going down the right track. I've talked to a lot of companies about this, and this is not a project to be outsourced to a consulting firm. This is something you should do. You should dedicate resources, you should get your business people involved. Don't assume you can buy this off the shelf. This is a very strategic initiative you'll do in your company and the better you get at it, the better your company will operate in the future. One of the companies I interviewed around this area is one of the largest healthcare providers in the world, and the guys in charge of this work told me the first couple of years we did this, it was just chaos.
Speaker 1 00:33:48 Everybody wanted to be part of it. And we had all these opinions and all these different ideas, but now that we've done it for three or four years, we go through it on an annual basis and our CEO is involved and we can very deterministically strategically plan the areas we want to grow and the capabilities we want to grow and where we want to go with our hiring and our mobility and our business strategy using skills and capabilities as a model. And obviously the development of skills and capability is part of this. So I hope this has been helpful. A couple of resources for you. Number one, join the Global HR Capability Project and join the Josh Bur Academy. It's very, very inexpensive and you'll get exposed to this whole methodology there. Number two, our new research program, the Josh Person corporate research program will give you access to all of this IP and a lot of these models we've developed. And the third is we're obviously here to help you one-on-one for a phone call or a workshop or whatever you would like. And I absolutely welcome your feedback on this in anything in this area. Thank you very much and I look forward to talking to you about this really exciting area of business.
