Dave Ulrich: HR business partnering twenty years on

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All HR professionals will probably be familiar with Dave Ulrich, author of the initial concept of HR business partnering. However, almost twenty years have passed since Ulrich first described this concept in his book Human Resource Champions (1997). What has changed and where is the further development of HR heading?

Dave Ulrich answered these questions in a series of webinars prepared in cooperation with the British HR Magazine. The webinars are named Ulrich Insights and have the form of four videos in which Ulrich talks to the editor of HR Magazine, Katie Jacobs.

HR Magazine's Ulrich webinars

The first video is called Perspectives and shows Ulrich talking about his concept of HR management from the outside in. He also deals with the question of how to negotiate with several shareholders in companies and how HR can be the best partner for customers of their businesses, investors and the community.

The second video is entitled HR outcomes and focuses on analytical tools in HR. Ulrich stresses the importance of talent, leadership and culture in HR.

The third video, Transforming HR, opens the paradoxical question of why HR people are so afraid of HR analytics. Furthermore, Ulrich talks about what to measure in HR and what HR model is best for the future.

The last video, Speed teaching, returns to last year's debate on how to "blow up with HR", which was provoked by the Harvard Business Review magazine and which Ulrich had previously addressed, saying that we should stop complaining. He also talks about the importance of networking, transactional HR and how to make HR more attractive.

All four webinars are available for viewing online at HR Magazine's website here.

Dave Ulrich

Dave Ulrich is a professor of management at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He is also a partner in the consultancy company RBL Group. He has published over 200 articles or book chapters and himself authored more than 20 books.

As stated above, he devised the initial concept of HR business partnering, which he described in his book Human Resource Champions in 1997. His next book, HR From the Outside In, is considered "the bible of HR business partnering". 

In October 2015 he published his latest book entitled The Leadership Capital Index: Realizing the Market Value of Leadership. This book introduces a metric called the "leadership capital index", which is defined as a way to measure the value of companies from the perspective of leadership. It thus complements such financial confidence indices as Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s.

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Article source HR Magazine - a leading British magazine and website focused on HR
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