Connecting the Dots: Thought Leadership In an Increasingly Complex World

You don’t have to look very far in the human capital space to find mountains of thought leadership.

Every firm has a forum or an institute or a quarterly report. If you’re an HR professional, your inbox is a target for a daily barrage of emails promoting webinars, white papers and blog posts. What most of this content has in common is a broad pledge that if you just open that email or click on that link, you’ll discover the magic bullet that will help your organization shed its old, outdated processes and adopt new, more effective ones.

In my recent travels around the globe to meet clients and visit LHH personnel, I have found that CEOs and CHROs are looking for someone to help them understand the forces at work in the business world. They want true insight. 

That’s why here at LHH, we’re making a renewed commitment to thought leadership that offers true insight.

In Transformation Insights, our new quarterly thought leadership report, LHH will provide companies with a deep and detailed view into how successful organizations function and why poorly performing ones lag behind their competitors.

We’ll also look deep into the practices and performance of the human capital industry and point out instances where we are failing to deliver on the promises we make to our clients.

We’re going to make sure we don’t confuse marketing and buzzwords with true insight. We will explain what the buzzwords really mean and show people not only what they could be doing to improve the overall state of their workforces, but also how they should do it. It’s connecting those dots, identifying both the cause and the effect, that makes for compelling, provocative thought leadership. And that’s the kind of content that makes an impact on the performance of business organizations.

This need to connect the dots became abundantly clear to me on my recent travels to visit LHH offices and clients all over the world. In the course of one week, I had the opportunity to meet with senior executives of automotive companies, followed by high-level meetings with executives at insurance companies.

At first blush, you might not think these two industries have a whole lot in common. One is still involved in heavy manufacturing; the other is in the service industry. But when you stop to think about it for a moment, you quickly realize that in most parts of the world, automobiles and insurance are deeply connected industries that are both undergoing profound transformations. 

The auto industry worldwide is working diligently to marshal the power of Artificial Intelligence to make self-driving vehicles a reality. If driverless vehicles become a reality, it will fundamentally disrupt the insurance industry, which in many countries is heavily dependent upon revenue derived from insuring human beings when they get behind the wheel of a car. When you make this connection, you can see pretty clearly that there is a lot of change coming. 

While nobody knows exactly when change will arrive, we can still be prepared. If we know anything about the relentless pace of business transformation, it is that top-performing businesses are making decisions now that will put them into a constant state of readiness. 

For LHH to live up to our thought leadership aspirations, we’re going to have to recognize the current connections between industries. And we’re going to have to find the synergies, the inflection points and the gaps between current and future state. 

Transformation is another buzzword that is used quite a lot these days. And in the way it used by some human capital firms, it has lost a lot of its meaning.

As I travel the world and visit with people on the front lines of transformation, I have come to think of it as a process of constant reinvention. It’s not just change. It’s adopting a state of readiness to face steady change that involves continually reinventing what you do and the way you do it. 

And because true transformation is a constant process, it’s a journey for which there is no real end point.

The future is indeed brave and will be conquered by the bold. Thought leadership that is too safe, too bland or too vague will not serve the needs of organizations in an era of constant reinvention. 

And LHH is ready to take up the mantle of this bold thought leadership. Our goal is for Transformation Insights to become your leading resource for business insights that move the human capital industry forward.