Editorial

Citation

Bajer, J. (2020), "Editorial", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 249-249. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-12-2020-0097

Culture has just Digested Strategy

I am not going to apologise for having to resort to such strong imagery, because that’s actually what has just happened. It is now clear that buildings don’t make our organisations, in the same way as bosses don’t really drive performance.

The past 10 months showed a pretty inconvenient truth: we’ve been chasing our tails for a very long time. It is not true that people just work for money or for a corner office. Almost overnight we had the entire world (and this time it is not an exaggeration) working from home, without being controlled, with very limited tools, surrounded by multiple distractions (including home schooling × 3 for me) and yet, against all odds, people managed, in many cases, to outperform previous years.

The good news? We don’t need to keep what never worked.

The rule is simple: if it doesn’t add value, just stop it. This might be a good time to question whether what we have been routinely implementing as if by allegiance to a secret society of HR professionals, makes any sense at all. I mean the sense that only shows up as real value, not as superfluous conceptual lists of “things” that rarely manage to challenge the status quo.

We now have a choice. Either we use this opportunity to jettison what has been stopping us from making the world a better place, or we simply forget about it all, and go back to the safety of what we used to call “normal”. What are you going to do, then?

Enjoy this very special issue of SHR,

Javier

Dr Javier Bajer

Cultural Architect

Editor-in-Chief, Strategic HR Review

javier@javierbajer.com