Books

Over the twentieth century, the roles and function of HR expanded, and shifted in remit and influence. In medium and large organisations has been a slow-building pressure; it didn’t immediately cripple, but over time it has weakened their heart, making them sluggish and prone to failure.

Senior leaders no longer consider the basics of management — hiring, training, rewarding, firing — to be their responsibility. Where twentieth-century business would spend the majority of the week thinking about their employees — what they did, and how they did it — their successors have mostly outsourced this to their HR teams.

One part of the book will be to investigate and illustrate the causal relationship between the growth of HR and Britain’s economic stagnation and low productivity, and certainly between HR in the public sector and declining state capacity. Another will be to show the damage done by an ideology of equity and culture of compliance, which both feed and emanate from HR, undermining excellence, responsibility, and solidarity in the workplace.

The market will not correct this. Only decisive and deliberate leadership can change strongly held beliefs, culture and practice.