From our preceding post, Financial Literacy (Part 1): The Income Statement, we discussed how to avoid HR malpractice by developing HR solutions aligned with the financial conditions of the company.
Just as a medical doctor requires checkups prior to handing out Rx slips, the conscientious HR practitioner will gauge the strength of the company – measured as financial health by investors and executives alike – through a financial check prior to recommending the best course of human capital intervention.
In the next 18 minutes, take another important step toward financial literacy by understanding the balance sheet and cash flow statement while also learning to create additional financial ratios that will make you a conscientious HR practitioner.
Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is[email protected].
You may be able to work in Italy without speaking Italian. Perhaps you can find a career in Thailand without speaking Thai. There are even people who hold jobs without speaking the language of business. But in each case, it’s much better if you do speak the language.
While we know what languages are spoken in France and China, what is the language of business? The language of business is finance — and few ever make it to the executive level without speaking it. It’s how businesses measure success versus failure. Even nonprofit organizations must have their revenues exceed their costs to continue their work.
For our HR professionals, let’s talk about HR malpractice. Imagine a doctor giving you a checkup before prescribing you medicine. Now imagine that same doctor giving you a prescription without taking the time to examine you. Well, HR people do the equivalent of that all the time.
The only way to gauge the health of a company is to review its finances. When HR professionals, however, don’t speak the language of finance, they are forced to prescribe solutions without ever examining the health of the company. Imagine a long-term HR solution for a company whose liquidity ratios or burn rates reveal what is really needed is immediate relief.
The HR professional who can read an income statement knows — long before being told by the CEO — that their product is becoming commoditized, and either a new recruitment strategy or L&D initiative can restore margins.
In 18 minutes, take the first step toward financial literacy by understanding the income statement and some of the most fundamental financial ratios that serve as leading indicators to making the business decisions that help companies thrive.
Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is[email protected].
You viewed our last webinar and now you know exactly what Big Data and datafication are. But how would you apply it in your day-to-day business? What important Big Data role could you play tomorrow at the office, even with the soft skills you already bring to the table?
In 18 minutes, learn how intuition is being replaced with data-driven decisions and what skills you should develop to stay relevant. We will cover specific examples of how big data solves real business problems and how deciding upon dependent and independent variables on your way to setting up a hypothesis is your first step before bringing in a data scientist.
Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is[email protected].
Your company loses its competitive differentiator when HR functions as admin.
Look at any organizational chart. Administration is still necessary, and yet you’d be hard pressed to find an admin department.
Decades ago, companies had admin departments with many administrative employees. Today, firms have fewer administrators against more regulation and increasing bureaucracy!
In our knowledge economy, people remain the differentiating competitive advantage as companies require fewer operating assets, with even those assets – computers and software – now commoditized. Since regulation tends to center on differentiators, government compliance focuses increasingly on employees.
Admin deserves its own department as does HR.
But does filing more electronic forms and enforcing compliance make it less of an admin function because it involves humans? The answer is in the Shakespearean quip, “A rose by any other name…”
If administration is being performed by companies bereft of admin departments, then who performs admin? Admin departments, of course. Only they are now called HR departments.
When companies misclassify administrative employees as HR, they do so to the detriment of both professions. We recognize administrators’ unique skillsets distinguishing them from HR. Unfortunately, HR departments now absorb admin to the dilution of HR.
By confusing the two roles but only giving one its own department, we undervalue the importance administrators provide while denying them their own career path.
We also cloud the career paths of HR professionals. Once their jobs get outsourced to vendors efficiently handling payroll, compliance and other benefit administrative work, they realize all too late they actually worked in admin despite their HR title.
We make this claim because companies only outsource functions on which they don’t compete. For those functions, they accept industry standards vendors provide equally to all clients, including competitors.
True HR cannot be executed by vendors since employees are the great differentiator. And firms never outsource what they compete on. (For more on this, watch the video below and read “Why Your Company is an HR Company.“)
Merely giving administrators HR titles offers little security when algorithms are able to perform the same functions more efficiently against newer technologies.
Sadly, administrators with HR titles realize their admin role only after their companies decide to cut checks to vendors instead of them.
What can both administrators and HR professionals do to protect their own unique careers? We have ideas on that too!
Vincent Suppa works with startups and investors and teaches graduate courses at New York University. His email is [email protected].
Twenty five years ago, to ask a company if they were on the internet was a legitimate question. Today, even the most Luddite companies have a web presence.
Ten years ago, to ask a company if they deploy BIG DATA to drive their decisions was also a legitimate question. But today, BIG DATA is as ubiquitous as the internet, and while people today would not ask if a company uses either the internet or BIG DATA – of course they do! – investors and employers alike are asking how well they are using BIG DATA.
But when asked what BIG DATA is, all too often we hear how it must be about lots of data. We have always been surrounded by data, so there must be something more to it, no?
In eighteen minutes, learn the least you need to know about datafication – a word so new that most spell checks still deem it a misspelled word. In a few minutes, understand enough about BIG DATA to explain it to others, including the three most fundamental shifts manifested by BIG DATA:
