Elliott Jaques\' Contribution to a New Way of Organizing Human Resources in a Global Company

Speaker A Very good question about what's different about human resources in a group like ours compared to say, 30 years ago. Firstly, I think we separated the notion of human resource management from industrial relations, and that was a bit of a move. And industrial relations is really about employee relations and is a responsibility of line management. It's the responsibility of the line. Human resource management is a different activity, well, different at each level in the organization. And we've started to think, and I'd say we used quite a bit of Elliot's thinking in terms of human resource management. What we've recognized is that higher up in the organization, we've got to be thinking about the development longer term. So we're focused on, in our group, the top 400. I spend my time thinking about the top 400, our head of human resources, and she would be better able to comment on some of this. Our head of human resources is thinking about ensuring we got the systems in place, that if you like those Nestling Russian dolls, we go down. So that in a particular division, they're thinking about their top 50 or 100, or whatever it is. And I think that some of Elliot's ideas about people one step removed, one step removed, judging potential, immediate manager, judging performance, and that's the accountability of line management. And I think that we've all seen examples when you get your immediate manager judging potential doesn't work. Doesn't work. But when one step removed, you can see the whole world differently. I've had examples of people telling me, one of their subordinates, he'll be ready for the next level. All he needs another 15 years doing x, Y and Z, and he's ready for retirement. So we've had those sort of examples. And I suppose if I look through my career and I say, how many management books have influenced me? There aren't many. I read up the organization in a trip to Canada in the early seventy s on a bus. And I think it epitomized so much of what I saw in our group. And I'd say, Elliot's work I found very interesting. It's quite intellectual, and you have to really be given time to absorb it. I'm not sure I agree with every single thing in there, or maybe it's just so difficult to implement. But it certainly awakened me to thinking about organization very differently. And I'd have to say, where I sit now, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about that, and I've found it pretty interesting. You, Sam?