One of the challenges faced in writing about management is that it can be difficult to differentiate between what might seem like platitudes and genuine advice. For example in terms of managing one’s human resources the idea of succession planning seems like a great idea, but what does it actually mean? It is like advising a sick person to just get better. Great advice, but useless in terms of actionable information.
How comfortable are managers with their HR skills? A simple, but valuable, proxy for an answer is the number of results for books matching the keyword “human resources” on Amazon: 209,344. Assuming a lack of authors and publishers with a fetish for publishing human resources books in the absence of any demand, it would appear that managers have an unslaked thirst for solutions to their HR challenges. So how to solve this epidemic? Perhaps the answer lies not so much in generating new concepts or recycling old concepts but in explaining in better detail well established concepts.