Gig economy

‘Employment is Dead’ – An interview with Deborah Perry Piscione

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Earlier this week, one of the most important business books on the Future of Work was published by Harvard Business Review Press: ‘Employment Is Dead: How Disruptive Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Way We Work’ by Deborah Perry Piscione and Josh Drean.

The central theme of this book is that traditional employment models are becoming outdated due to the evolving needs and expectations of the modern workforce, in combination with, and enabled by, disruptive technologies.

This will lead to the end of the traditional employment model, as well as the traditional form of companies, as we know them today.

Monday, just hours before the book was released, I had the chance to interview Deborah Perry Piscione for my Leadership 2.0 Podcast.

► In our conversation, we touched on the following topics:

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Why we need to have a new discussion about HR

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Why the current debate about the ‘HR’ function is superfluous and why a new one should start to take place

By Dirk Verburg

It seems like the Human Resources function attracts more and more criticism over the years. This criticism was initiated by a few articles in high profile publications. The most important are: ‘Why we hate HR’ by Keith H. Hammonds in Fast company,‘It’s Time to Split HR’ by Ram Charan in the Harvard Business review, ‘Why We Love to Hate HR and What HR Can Do About It’ by Peter Capelli in the Harvard Business Review and ‘Companies Say No to Having an HR Department’ by Lauren Weber and Rachel Feintzeig in the Wall Street Journal.

These articles had a lot of impact and resulted in a great deal of soul-searching by HR leaders and HR practitioners. Although critical self-reflection is usually a good thing, the question is whether this is justified merely on the basis of these articles. The second question is whether or not this is the most important debate to have about the HR function now – or are there more important issues for HR to focus on.

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