A question for the readers

 

OwenBloggers want to find out what YOU, our valued reader, would like to get out of this site.  We've added RSS feeds, Google Searching, Polls, and other features, but we want to know if we've left anything out you would find valuable.

We've kicked around the idea of Podcasts, Skype conference calls and/or IM Chat sessions. We just need to know which ones to implement.

If you are interested any of the above, or if you have new ideas for OwenBloggers, just email us at OwenBloggers@gmail.com, or leave a comment in this blog entry.  If even a handful of people are interested, we WILL add these to the site...

Comments

[Deadhedge]

Sure Skype, polls, and bells and whistles are all nice but with blogs, I would say that content is king. I think that the Owenbloggers should focus first and foremost on content.

With that in mind, some of your blogs verge too close to just being blatent Owen propaganda. There's no need to continually blow sunshine up the web's collective rear ends about how great Owen is. State your experience and let your readers decide. Make your blogs more like blogs and less like marketing vehicles.

[D.F. Junio]

One blog that caught my eye was the one about business schools being "ignorant". Thus far, my perception of Owen is quite positive and although I have no plans of concentrating in Human Resources, I'm concerned about what seems to be "discrimination" against Human Resources people at the school.

I don't have to make the pitch for HR. I think it's obvious that resource acquisition is vital for any organization. Unlike most land, labor and capital, however, the human resource is not fungible. Rather than shoot from the hip and "calibrate" when things go wrong, HR professionals efficiently match the right people with the right positions. This makes the HR job, in my opinion, much tougher than the financial analyst's. Statistics and mathematical models can be learned, then applied again and again and again. The work of the HR professional, by contrast, is rarely so regimented and predictable. The point here is that HR operations are just as essential as other facets of a business.

This is not to say that the CEO is incapable of performing HR functions. However, there are opportunity costs associated with officers doing HR work. Senior officers delegate HR duties for the same reasons that they delegate the financial analyses and the accounting -- because their own time is best spent doing something else.

So long as HR departments are viewed as some fanciful and non-vital luxury, so shall so many companies continue to prod along harboring the deadweight of an obsolete paradigm. Companies neglect HR at their own peril. As supply-chains and manufacturing processes must adhere to more sophisticated principles, so must HR processes. Otherwise, companies shall haphazardly hire and fire employees, just as the novice carpenter inefficiently hacks away at cartloads of wood to make a single chair.