May 2nd, 2011
Bombs and friends do not mix…unless they are F bombs.
It has been a great Spring conference season for me. A bit hectic at times, but good. Good events, good people, good conversations…and my conference travel is now winding down for a while. While I have been working to get in front of more non-Human Resource crowds, HR is still in many ways home for me and this whirlwind conference tour started at an HR conference in Cleveland back in early March and it ended in Atlanta this past weekend with HRevolution 2011. Appropriate.
I had some steam to blow off and HRevolution is a good place to do that. I got all of my swearing out of the way on Saturday, so I can go back to those HR conferences and behave myself…kind of.
I do not know if HRevolution needed me, but I needed it. I needed some time to just hang out with really smart, really passionate, really smart people…and HRevolution is crawling with those kind of people…and they are really smart. People that are not looking to be handed answers, but want to be actively involved in the search for answers.
It was good. I have a pretty good life. I got to make the trip their and back with my best friend and spend a couple of days with people that I think very highly of. All under the label of “work.”
I think that HR and OD and the adjacent bodies of work have really good intentions, but despite those intentions are often a part of the problem. I think that we often end up dampening the human spirit in the pursuit of engagement, innovation, productivity, profit, etc.
I do not know how much our conferences push back on that, but this one did. This is a group of people clearly wanting to amplify the human spirit, to put the human spirit on parade in the hallways where we work. And that is a good thing. F bomb worthy even.
Be good to each other.