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Thought Leaders' Breakfast discussion: HRPS Annual Conference: April 15, 2007.

Article Excerpt
Scenarios for the Future of HR

What happens when 40 senior HR executives, management academics, and leading HR consultants come together to discuss the most likely scenario for the future of the HR profession? The background for this year's HRPS Thought Leaders' Breakfast conversation was the HRPS 2007 conference theme "HR at The Tipping Point." The breakfast discussion traditionally has served as a platform for launching the themes covered throughout the three-day HRPS conference. Multiply the diversity of the opinions in the breakfast meeting by 300 conference attendees, and you find that issues of HR professional identity and functional roles never go away.

The provocative new question presented to the thought leaders was: "Are you the group best positioned to be more visionary about the future of HR than the rest?" Even though most of the participants in the room have been through the evolution of HR over the last 20 plus years, their answer was an unequivocal yet ambivalent "yes" and "no." The bottom line question was: Who is going to define the future of the profession? The veterans might not have all the answers--but who would?

One HR leader participating in the breakfast compared the kick-off visioning exercise to Second Life, an online social network in which community members design and play out multiple scenarios unparalleled in their "real" lives. As the breakfast group agreed to disagree on many issues and approaches, the final outcome on future HR was an unexpectedly contemporary, Wikipedia-like answer, embracing a range of views from the breakfast group. The group agreed that the future of the HR profession will not be the sole domain of a...