David Ulrich

HR, love'm or leave them? Early in my career at IBM I was taught that HR were people to be avoided, they generally got in the way and were mainly paper pushers. That was a long time ago. However, closer to today, in 2005, Fast Company's Keith Hammond had a scathing article, Why We Hate HR. Hammond argued, "HR is the corporate function with the greatest potential -- the key driver, in theory, of business performance -- and also the one that most consistently underdelivers." Today HR still has mixed rep but Dave Ulrich, a great HR thinker is pretty convincing on how we should rethink our view of HR. Though it may be HR themselves that need to grasp the nettle...

Don’t be offended if Dave Ulrich compares you and your company to elephants grazing grass on the savannah. He doesn’t think HR professionals are like pachyderms. It’s that he believes those in human resources are in a key position to seed their companies with the ideas and procedures that will sustain them in the future...

Dan Schawbel , CONTRIBUTOR I interview business leaders, celebrities and authors. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Dave Ulrich Today, I spoke to Dave Ulrich, who is a Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, a partner at the RBL Group, and Executive Director of the RBL Institute. His latest book is called HR from the Outside In: Six Competencies for the Future of Human Resources. He studies how organizations build capabilities of leadership, speed, learning, accountability, and talent through leveraging human resources...

I spoke to David Ulrich, the author of Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It, about the shift from individual development to organizational needs, which HR competencies impact key outcomes, the HR jobs that will be eliminated, the employee experience and the most interested results from a major survey he is releasing with the book...