Crap

I've been working in a variety of functions in Human Resources for the past 4 years and along the way I've picked up a lot of useful information. Unfortunately, in an area like HR you also seem to be subjected to the crap of management-o-rama.

I'm sure lots of you have played board room bingo, or at least kept track of the extreme number of buzzwords that seem to come out an executive's mouth. Most of this I can ignore, because it's all to make them feel important unto themselves anyway. But when I get something in print, and read through it, and see those kind of buzzwords in such a huge quantity, it gets a little harder to swallow. Today I got a book of classes from Cornell, they've got some interesting looking HR seminars coming up so I started to leaf through the pamphlet.

Course HR301
Strategic Human Resources Planning
"Leading organizations use their strategic human resources plan to assure that they will have the "people power" in place to achieve their strategic and business plans. You need a systematic planning approach to assure that your organization will have the right people...with the right skills...at the right time. In this workshop, a human resources leader will learn to..."

Now that we've defined the purpose of Human Resources and managed to put the word "strategic" in as many times as humanly possible in one paragraph, let's look at the class highlights.

- Think strategically about human resources issues
- Link human resources planning to corporate strategic and business planning
- Identify the major human resources strategic issues and analyze their impact on the organization

There's more, but you get the idea. I think if I had to sum it up, I'd guess that this course is about Strategic Human Resources Planning. What do you think?

I personally have lost my impression that Cornell is a school for intellectuals.