Guru

Guru is pleased to see that the slovenly souls that inhabit the non-British land that is Peru, have finally seen sense and are attempting to emulate us Brits - albeit a couple of hundred years or so late.

For despite having been given the gift of the timepiece centuries ago, it seems our cousins in the Northern Andes have not yet got to grips with the idea of work-life balance, doggedly sticking to a life-life balance wherever possible.

Guru well remembers his student days, even if the memories have a slightly hazy edge. All those extra-curricular activities took their toll on the mind, the body and the studying.

Many a time, Guru (though strictly speaking, he was still an under-Guru at this stage) found himself sneaking into the faculty at 8.59am to deliver the essay that was technically due the previous day, safe in the knowledge that his tutor would assume it had been popped into the pigeon hole before the midnight deadline.

And Guru is glad to see that little has changed - that the last minute is still the most productive 60 seconds.

As avid Personnel Today readers will know, the publication has teamed up with Henley Management College to offer an £18,000 bursary to study for the newly launched MSc in Advanced HR Management.

Applicants were asked to submit a 1,000-word essay on the following topic:

Based on your own experience and wider reading, what are the key skills for the HR practitioner of the future?

The swots' entries arrived well in advance of deadline day, including a thought piece from the Financial Times' own Richard Donkin. But the bulk of the dissertations arrived at the 11th hour - quite literally.

The final one was attached to an e-mail with the time stamp: 11.34pm. Now that's a proper student.

While Guru is on the subject of all things scholarly, he feels he must get something off his chest (and not just the egg-yolk stain from breakfast).

Students these days have got it easy, and it's all thanks to the internet. In Guru's university days, the delivery of an essay involved the three Rs - research, reading and riting (though obviously not spelling, Ed).

But now, it just requires the three Cs - copying, cheating and (downright) criminality. Undergraduates can simply log on to the world wide web and download their dissertation of choice, cut and paste the relevant tracts, change a few adjectives here and there to foil the anti-plagiarism software, tidy, submit and head down to the student union bar for a subsidised 99p pint of beer.

If you need proof, type "human resources dissertation" into eBay... Yours for under a fiver.

Having some time to kill in town this morning between breakfast and the pubs opening, Guru popped in to see an old friend at Number 10.

After exchanging pleasantries and secret handshakes with the sentries on duty, Yours Truly wandered up Downing Street, knocked on the front door and was delilghted to see his old buddy. Yep, there he was, lying on the floor as always when visitors arrived - the prime ministerial entrance rug.

News reaches Gurus slender lugholes that the fat people of the world can't help it.

Apparently, the morbidly obese are the huge beasts that they are because their brains aren't alerting them to the fact that they are fat.

According to a report in London's Metro daily newspaper, a US researcher claims that "Obesity is not a failure of will power, it is a biological failure'. Fat chance.

Guru has always been interested in pointless jobs and useless speculation, but the latest 'news' from Nasa takes the absurd to ridiculous new levels.

The space agency claims that it cannot afford to find all the potentially dangerous asteroids that might be coming towards earth at some point in the near future... or not... and then send a rocket up to blast them into infinity.

Guru's immersion into all things online continues apace. His latest e-venture is a page on MySpace, the social networking phenomenon recently bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m (or £300m in real money).

MySpace, for those of you who aren't 15 years old, is a website that allows users to communicate with each other for the purpose of dating, making friends, professional networking and sharing interests.

Users post flattering pictures of themselves, and lie about their age, height, weight and hobbies to make themselves appear more attractive than they do in real life to attract "friends".

It is almost impossible for Guru to make himself seem more attractive than he is in real life, so he's stuck to the truth (180cm tall, athletic, 40 years old etc). See for yourself at http://www.myspace.com/human_resources_guru

At the time of writing, Guru has already made 33 friends - most of whom are thrusting HR professionals keen to tap into his wisdom.

Some are particularly worthy of mention. Check out pepsigirl81, a young lady who claims to "currently work for a European company as their Human Resources Manager whilst studying to qualify/obtain graduate CIPD membership".

She also claims to be Britain's Fittest Babe 2007 as voted by readers of Fit for Men magazine, and thoughtfully shares her photographic portfolio with MySpace users.

Guru note to self - pepsigirl81 is in need of a mentor.

And then there's Noelia and her diamante-studded underwear. Guru's not entirely sure she works in HR, but she'd certainly liven up the profession!

Guru's blog exploits in the online space are not his first dalliance in the digital world.

Oh no, almost 30 years ago he pioneered the use of the watch-cum-calculator. For a while he thought "digital" referred somehow to the care needed to make your finger press the buttons independently of each other.

Whenever technology moves on yours truly is often leading the way, keeping a keen eye on developments; waiting for the price to fall below a certain affordability threshold.

And so earlier this week, having hooked up the £19.95 set top box to the TV, he forged ahead in the digital revolution and thoroughly recommends disciples to follow suit.

Two beauties this morning from fellow bloggers.

West End Whingers reports from Theatreland, where the recently appointed artistic director at the Royal Court appears to be unsure about the very nature of his new job...

And TechCrunch comes live from the City with the cautionary tale of a trader being warned by his employer for spending up to 4 hours a day on social networking site Facebook. His response to this warning? - to post it wholesale on the Facebook site!

This week officially marks the "hard launch" of the Guru blog.

That little bit of jargon simply means that up until now, the blog has been running without promotion - available only to those in the know, or those who have stumbled across it.

Now the full might of Personnel Today's PR machine has swung into action to plug this excellent blog, Guru expects his visitor numbers to swell exponentially.

The "soft launch" of the Guru blog actually took place on 18 February, which means that there are nearly four weeks' worth of insightful musings for you to catch up on.

So, what are you waiting for? Guru encourages you to visit this archive immediately...

February
March

...and do what all good bloggers do - respond, comment and link through to other interesting HR stuff. Let's get this blog show on the road.

To Guru, 'dressing down day' was always a really bad day at the office, where the person getting it in the ear, got it in the ear all day long.

However, it appears that in today's office environment dressing down day is a period of hours in the day during which office workers can dress badly. Very badly indeed.

As well MySpace, Guru has discovered a clever site with lots of videos. And look, Yours Tubely has even worked out how to show a video on this here web blog. Fairly self explanatory - just press play.

It's an old ad for BT, whose creative talent is rewarded herewith, with an airing on Guru Blog.

Guru has unwittingly made his first cyberspace enemy (a bit like Doctor Who).

His nemesis is fellow blogger and HR commentator Peter Gold of Hire Strategies.

Gold posted a blog message about Guru's online activities in which he had the gall to suggest that Guru's own award winning [it's only a matter of time] blog was a figment of his imagination.

Guru tried to post a comment on this near-libellous blog, but found the Hire Strategies blog platform rather slow and cumbersome, so resorted to e-mail to deliver his riposte.

Gold parried by posting Guru's e-mail in full, adding further scurrilous remarks about Guru's technical capabilities and a sideswipe at Personnel Today's advertising pricing.

This is just the kind of duel that Guru relishes. It'll be ray-guns at dawn before you know it.

Guru's immersion into all things web 2.0 continues apace with quite unexpected and delightful consequences.

Disciples will be familiar with Guru's new MySpace page, and that it is attracting dozens of "friends" from the world of global HR. There are, among others: Jannette, a Puerto Rican HR specialist; Nikos, the HR manager for McDonalds in Amsterdam; Midnight, an HR consultant from New Jersey, US; and Margarita, an HR manager from Lithuania.

But Guru's favourite international "friend" to date is Letwin Berebende, a CIPD-qualified (Salford University) Zimbabwean gospel singer.

According to Letwin's MySpace page, she is "friends" with rappers Snoop Dog, Missy Elliot and Dr Dre. Snoop himself lists Eminem and Beyonce Knowles as his "friends".

So Guru is only two degrees separated from one of the sexiest singers in the world (and Guru is not talking about Eminem).

Letwin has kindly invited Guru to join her on her forthcoming concert tour of Zimbabwe. Unfortunately as a press-pass carrying journalist and independently minded free-thinker, Guru fears that Robert Mugabe might object to his presence and do mischief upon his body.

But fear not, because Letwin and her band are back in the UK this summer: London (26 May); Luton (1 June); and Nottingham (15 June). Guru awaits his VIP back stage pass with eager anticipation.

Continuing on the musical theme, it is a cause of considerable inconvenience for Guru that he is often mistaken for a member of The Blue Man Group.

They describe themselves thus:

Blue Man Group is best known for their wildly popular theatrical shows and concerts which combine music, comedy and multimedia theatrics to produce a totally unique form of entertainment. The blissful party atmosphere created at their live events has become the trademark of a Blue Man Group experience. Currently, their live stage shows can be seen in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, London, Berlin, Amsterdam and upcoming productions in Oberhausen and Orlando.

A good friend of Guru's, Brian McGinn, had the pleasure of a business trip to Japan last week. Brian designs sunglasses for the excellent Oliver Goldsmith range.

Admittedly Brian's legs and body are rather lengthy, the accumulative effect of which is his 6'7" frame. At that height he is used to the occasional bump on the head from ill-designed workplaces, but nothing had quite prepared him for the discriminatory doorways of Tokyo.

Guru has just returned from an extremely post-modern weekend celebrating St Patrick's Day with Irish businesses in the Czech Republic. Swigging back strong Czech lager while watching the Irish cricket team triumph over Pakistan in the West Indies and discussing employee migration from Lithuania to England, Yours Truly felt extremely international and sophisticated.

A few Czech beers and Irish dancers later, Guru was having very different feelings, but what happens on tour stays on tour, and the fact remains that the world has shrunk beyond recognition in the last decade or so.

Yours Truly has done it again and stumbled upon another excellent video on YouTube.

This one looks at safe viewing distances from your computer screen - something tells me that Municipal Waste Industries' occupational health department might have bit too much budget on their hands.

Open this up in full and then click play - Guru finds that sometimes you have to do it twice.

When Guru inadvertently committed his chums at Personnel Today to running the Asics Reading Half Marathon, little did he expect the deluge of responses to his request for running songs to put on the teams' iPods while they stagger around the course.

The top 10 has been selected by Yours Truly and the aforementioned music-playing device is being dispatched to the winner, Pam Cooper, for suggesting the marching song from the Jungle Book.

However, having heaved his bulging sack onto the table to wade through the entries, Guru was struck by the HR profession's loyalty to the boyband legends that are Take That. He was then struck by the uncanny resemblance one of the Personnel Today running teams bears to the music legends (see pic below).

Guru is firmly establishing himself in the 'blogosphere' and attracting learned interest from far and wide.

Only this afternoon he was paid a visit by the highly respected author of the leading trucking blog, who begged him to link the Guru Blog through to his own quaint HGV-inspired meanderings.

Big Lorry Blog is described thus:

Daily deliberations on the road haulage industry with a delightful drizzle of diesel from Commercial Motor's editor-in-chief Brian Weatherley

If Guru is the, er... guru of the HR sector, then Weatherley can surely lay claim to an equal amount of guru-ness in the field of road transport. Look at the experience etched deep in that wise old face, the knowledge running through every short, grey, heroic, endangered hair.

What he doesn't know about sliding fifth wheels and suzie couplings just isn't worth knowing.

Big Lorry Blog has recently been commenting on the latest road safety breakthrough - vibrating seatbelts. According to Oxford University, they could reduce "rear-end shunts" by 60%.

Guru hasn't had a rear-end shunt since he was a mere undergraduate, though he concedes that a vibrating belt could have been a useful accessory at the time.

Guru received a message from Disciple Kat (who is also one of Guru's cherished MySpace friends).

She's a human resources professional and Blackpool lass who obviously likes her beer, and she has come up with an excellent idea. Kat writes:

After the success of Guru's Day of Grace campaign, how about a national holiday for underappreciated HR professionals? Clearly this would be solely for HR as we administrate the holidays anyway... mwahahahahahaaaa!

Guru particularly likes the sinister laugh and thinks that Kat's idea has great promise. Not only could HR professionals abuse the holiday systems that they manage, they could also manipulate payroll to their advantage, adjust appraisal systems in their favour and implant themselves foremost in the talent management and succession planning processes.

Before you know it, HR professionals would be running British business and the entire Civil Service on giant 'fat Kat' salaries (renamed in your honour).

Nice work disciple Kat - Guru salutes your evil genius.

Guru stumbled across this excellent website: Working Life Celebrated in Photographs and took a trip down memory lane.

The Working Life site is the brain child of documentary photographer Nick Hedges and graphic designer Alan Hughes and contains "photographs [that] bear testimony to the millions of workers who laboured in Britain's factories, mines and shipyards, on its railways, fishing boats and farms", and is endorsed with a suitably left-wing quote from "socialist and activist" Tony Benn:

Without these pictures the men and women, who created the wealth of the nation, would have been overlooked by the establishment and those who control the media.

Guru's favourite picture from the site is this shot, entitled 'The false teeth joke, lock factory, Josiah Parkes, Willenhall, 1977', which is taken from the Humour at Work section. (Click through to the site to see it in high-res glory.)

It is accompanied by the philosophical statement: "The visual wit and the qualities of satire, parody and banter are immediately obvious in the workplace. When absent it usually denotes an unhappy environment, or is a signal of an overbearing management. Most often, humour at work is an expression of fondness and subversion."

Guru couldn't agree more.

It's the news you've all been waiting for. Who won Personnel Today's battle of the sexes in the Osborne Clarke Business Challenge at the Asics Reading Half Marathon on Sunday?

Well Guru can reveal that bragging rights go to... the boys! Their 'This Time it's Personnel' team crossed the line in 2 hours and 2 minutes, beating the girls' team 'HR Cheetahs' by 21 minutes (though both teams have asked Guru to point out that it took them at least 10 minutes to cross the start line as the marshals got 14,000 runners underway).

So here are our heros, pictured at the finish in Reading Football Club's Madejski Stadium...

Boys' team (left to right): business development manager Darren Ward, group editor Rob Willock, news editor Mike Berry and head of sales Richard Bennett.

Girls' team (left to right): staff writer Natalie Cooper, legal editor Dawn Spalding, editor Karen Dempsey, and web manager Natasha Leontieff.

Thanks again to all the teams' corporate sponsors: Orion Partners, Vets Now, Osborne Clarke, Piazzamore, Proactive HR, TCS, Nordic Staff and Reed Business Information.

Thanks to their support, and that of many individual sponsors, Guru reached his £1,000 fundraising target for The Children's Trust.

Fellow business blogger Flip Chart Fairy Tales reports on a recent event at which Asda's people director David Smith argued that HR needs to remove poor performing staff - a process he refers to as "removing the red" - and hire on attitude rather than skill.

Guru had his own spies at this 'seminar', and can reveal that it was actually a swanky lunch at celebrity hang-out The Ivy , hosted by HR and payroll service provider Ceridian.

Personnel Today takes the story further, with Smith's revelations that no senior Asda execs are permitted any trappings of power in order to keep them humble - no oak-panelled office, no premium parking space, no first-class travel...

Guru thrives on perks, and doesn't get out of bed for anything less than peeled grapes, supermodel PAs and a kitten-fur trimmed La-z-Boy recliner, so Yours Truly is immediately ruling himself out of the running for any future non-executive directorship opportunities at Asda House. It's your loss, Smith!

Guru headed south to Brighton for this year's Public Sector People Managers (PPMA) annual conference to hob nob with the high powered and highly paid chiefs of public sector personnel.

The programme promised a surprise opening to the conference, and didn't disappoint. As delegates filtered into the conference hall they found a bongo drum and a Boomwhacker on each seat.

There followed a full hour(!) participative session with percussionists from the Drum Cafe, who told delegates that "if you establish a good base rhythym, then anything is possible".

Guru loves this kind of vaguely nonsensical motivation speak (after all, it's how he earns his not unimpressive living), and got lost in the jungle beat.

However, his unblinking eye did notice several dour types steadfastly refusing to slap the old goatskin - and one even walking out as if the whole thing was beneath her (though she was something of an old goatskin herself).

Louise Triance, author of Louise's UK Recruiter Blog, references new research from Viadeo about "internet reputation" or Net Rep (about which see more in next week's Personnel Today).

It seems recruiters are "Googling" potential candidates by putting their name into internet search engines such as Google.

This can give them unexpected insights into an individual, such as: compromising photographs of their stag do in Ireland on photo sharing site Flickr; the highly amusing, but illegal video of their train-surfing exploits on video sharing site YouTube; or revelations on MySpace that they have posed semi-naked for a men's magazine (why won't pepsigirl81 be Guru's 'friend'?).

Guru decided to Google himself, and typed "Human Resources Guru" into the search box. This very blog was returned as the second entry (after a very interesting Personnel Today article).

And where do you think self-styled US HR guru Dave Ulrich came - nowhere, that's where.

There is only one HR Guru, and you're looking at him!

PS. Note to Guru's blogging nemesis, Peter Gold at Hire Strategies, who mocked Guru's "SEO-friendly URL". My search engine optimisation is working very nicely thank you (or so my web developer tells me!).