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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Reinventing HR
How HR can lead.
If you read nothing else on reinventing human resources, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones on how HR leaders can partner with the C-suite, drive change throughout the organization, and develop the workforce of the future.
This book will inspire you to:
Overhaul performance management practices to jump-start motivation and engagement Use agile processes to transform how you hire, develop, and manage people Establish diversity programs that increase innovation and competitiveness as well as inclusion Use people analytics to bring unprecedented insight to hiring and talent management Prepare your company for the double waves of artificial intelligence and an older workforce Close the gap between HR and strategyThis collection of articles includes: "People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO," by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey; "How Netflix Reinvented HR," by Patty McCord; "HR Goes Agile," by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis; "Reinventing Performance Management," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "Better People Analytics," by Paul Leonardi and Noshir Contractor; "21st-Century Talent Spotting," by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz; "Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Contract," by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh; "Creating the Best Workplace on Earth," by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones; "Why Diversity Programs Fail," by Frank Dobbins and Alexandra Kalev; "When No One Retires," by Paul Irving; and "Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces," by H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty.
208 pages, Paperback
Published June 11, 2019
54 people are currently reading
183 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 16, 2021
Introduction
On Reinventing HR is a collection of ten essays originally published in the Harvard Business Review on you guessed it, transforming HR. Each of these eleven articles have been hand selected to create a collection of impactful readings on transforming and reinventing HR in your businesses.
If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. The problem with HR typically is that most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. On Reinventing HR is the book that will help you avoid this trap.
Why You Should Read This Book?
The changes in HR have been a long time coming. After World War II, when manufacturing dominated the industrial landscape, planning was at the heart of human resources. Simply put, companies recruited lifers, gave them rotational assignments to support their development, groomed them years in advance to take on bigger and bigger roles, and tied their raises directly to each incremental move up the ladder.
But business today is far less predictable, and these “15-year plans” are no longer applicable. HR has to become agile in order to properly support the rest of the organization. The ten articles within this book will help with this transition. The following is a quick summary/overview of the ten articles within this book:
1. People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO
It’s up to the CEO to elevate HR and to bridge any gaps that prevent the CHRO from becoming a strategic partner. Because most problems are people problems, the CHROs who bring dysfunctional relationships to the surface are worth their weight in gold.
2. How Netflix Reinvented HR
Two major tenants of Netflix’s talent philosophy:
(a) The best thing you can do for employees is hire only “A” players to work alongside them because excellent colleagues trump everything else
(b) If you want only “A” players on your team, you have to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, not matter how valuable their contributions had once been.
3. HR Goes Agile
Many HR tasks, such as traditional approaches to recruitment, onboarding, and program coordination, will become obsolete, as will expertise in those areas. Because of these changes, the HR function will require reskilling.
4. Reinventing Performance Management
A lot of companies feel that their current performance management approaches do not drive employee engagement nor high performance. Once-a-year goals are too “batched” for a real-time world and conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance. Consequently, conversations about performance need to switch from a focus on the past to a focus on the future.
5. Better People Analytics
Traditionally people analytics were focused on data only about individual people. Better people analytics encompasses data about the interplay among people.
6. 21st-Century Talent Spotting
Talent spotting in the 21st century is all about finding employees that have real potential: the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments. To find employees with potential you must accurately assess their motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.
7. Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Contract
The new employer-employee contract centers around adaptability and entrepreneurship as the key to achieving and sustaining success. The lack of mutual benefit encourages the most adaptable and entrepreneurial to take their talents elsewhere.
8. Creating the Best Workplace on Earth
Organizations of your dreams in a nutshell are companies where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are not stupid rules.
9. Why Diversity Programs Fail
The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.
10. When No One Retires
In the United States, about 10,000 people turn 65 each day, and one in five Americans will be 65 or older by 2030. The reasons for this shift are many, but the facts remain that populations around the world will look very different in the decades ahead.
11. Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces
Firms achieve the most significant performance improvements when humas and machines work together. Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers through automation will miss the full potential of AI.
You should read this book if you are interested in learning some tactical strategies to build your people focused organization of the present and future. When it comes right down to it, your business is simply a collection of different people. Management and nurturing of people eats business strategies for lunch.
Final Thoughts
The goal of On Reinventing HR is to help people become more adept with HR strategies that will actually move their companies forward. As the book mentions time and again, if you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. This book will help you do exactly that.
Easy to Read: (5/5) 100%
Deep Content: (3/5) 60%
Overall Rating: (5/5) 100%
My Deeper Take
On Reinventing HR is a collection of ten essays originally published in the Harvard Business Review on you guessed it, transforming HR. Each of these eleven articles have been hand selected to create a collection of impactful readings on transforming and reinventing HR in your businesses.
If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. The problem with HR typically is that most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. On Reinventing HR is the book that will help you avoid this trap.
Why You Should Read This Book?
The changes in HR have been a long time coming. After World War II, when manufacturing dominated the industrial landscape, planning was at the heart of human resources. Simply put, companies recruited lifers, gave them rotational assignments to support their development, groomed them years in advance to take on bigger and bigger roles, and tied their raises directly to each incremental move up the ladder.
But business today is far less predictable, and these “15-year plans” are no longer applicable. HR has to become agile in order to properly support the rest of the organization. The ten articles within this book will help with this transition. The following is a quick summary/overview of the ten articles within this book:
1. People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO
It’s up to the CEO to elevate HR and to bridge any gaps that prevent the CHRO from becoming a strategic partner. Because most problems are people problems, the CHROs who bring dysfunctional relationships to the surface are worth their weight in gold.
2. How Netflix Reinvented HR
Two major tenants of Netflix’s talent philosophy:
(a) The best thing you can do for employees is hire only “A” players to work alongside them because excellent colleagues trump everything else
(b) If you want only “A” players on your team, you have to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, not matter how valuable their contributions had once been.
3. HR Goes Agile
Many HR tasks, such as traditional approaches to recruitment, onboarding, and program coordination, will become obsolete, as will expertise in those areas. Because of these changes, the HR function will require reskilling.
4. Reinventing Performance Management
A lot of companies feel that their current performance management approaches do not drive employee engagement nor high performance. Once-a-year goals are too “batched” for a real-time world and conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance. Consequently, conversations about performance need to switch from a focus on the past to a focus on the future.
5. Better People Analytics
Traditionally people analytics were focused on data only about individual people. Better people analytics encompasses data about the interplay among people.
6. 21st-Century Talent Spotting
Talent spotting in the 21st century is all about finding employees that have real potential: the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments. To find employees with potential you must accurately assess their motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.
7. Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Contract
The new employer-employee contract centers around adaptability and entrepreneurship as the key to achieving and sustaining success. The lack of mutual benefit encourages the most adaptable and entrepreneurial to take their talents elsewhere.
8. Creating the Best Workplace on Earth
Organizations of your dreams in a nutshell are companies where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are not stupid rules.
9. Why Diversity Programs Fail
The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.
10. When No One Retires
In the United States, about 10,000 people turn 65 each day, and one in five Americans will be 65 or older by 2030. The reasons for this shift are many, but the facts remain that populations around the world will look very different in the decades ahead.
11. Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces
Firms achieve the most significant performance improvements when humas and machines work together. Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers through automation will miss the full potential of AI.
You should read this book if you are interested in learning some tactical strategies to build your people focused organization of the present and future. When it comes right down to it, your business is simply a collection of different people. Management and nurturing of people eats business strategies for lunch.
Final Thoughts
The goal of On Reinventing HR is to help people become more adept with HR strategies that will actually move their companies forward. As the book mentions time and again, if you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. This book will help you do exactly that.
Easy to Read: (5/5) 100%
Deep Content: (3/5) 60%
Overall Rating: (5/5) 100%
My Deeper Take
October 9, 2021
Идеальный формат бизнес-литературы, без сухости, и один вопрос рассмотрен с нескольких сторон. По сути это инструкция по изменению взглядов на работу руководителя с сотрудниками. Больше всех пригодилась статья Пэтти Маккорд, вот её в первую очередь советую. Полезно и применимо на практике. Сухой остаток: есть много устаревших и неправильных представлений о HR, и в основном мы используем инструменты внедряемые в 60-х годах прошлого века и почти ничего нового не привносим в свою работу. Устаревшие методы не работают, а чтобы применять новые нужно исследовать и внедрять новые подходы и инструменты. Кейсы в тексте помогут улучшить работу в этом направлении. Рекомендую.
June 4, 2022
Culture is every leader’s accountability. This publication specifies “HR”, which made me chuckle because it’s thinking woefully too small. If only HR could drive all of this for others, but that’s super hard for me to imagine. And I wouldn’t want to be part of such a company, regardless, since culture and people development are what get me out of bed each morning. I found this book a helpful reminder for what’s critical to running a successful company.
June 20, 2021
If a CEO takes people a top challenge, then he should take the CHRO role as an important one.
My highlights: https://learning.oreilly.com/u/748020...
My highlights: https://learning.oreilly.com/u/748020...
February 29, 2024
good read to gather insights about improving or adding more to established HR systems and processes within a company.
i wish this had more relevant and more widely applicable ideas but then again, this book is quite dated already by the time of reading.
i wish this had more relevant and more widely applicable ideas but then again, this book is quite dated already by the time of reading.
January 17, 2021
This book was decent, with the articles being 5-7 years old I have seen portions of some online. Some good learnings though
June 29, 2021
Always a good review and loaded with takeaway skills
July 17, 2021
I read this to prepare for HR interviews, very insightful set of articles.
October 15, 2023
Short, sweet and to the point with some fantastic
Tangible bits to take into your day to day operations.
Tangible bits to take into your day to day operations.
June 19, 2024
I particularly enjoyed the articles "How Netflix Reinvented HR," by Patty McCord, and "Reinventing Performance Management," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall.
May 22, 2025
Great articles. Food for thought.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews