Returning to my Blogger Roots

That picture is how ChatGPT imagines I looked back in 2007.  That's not me, but I'm going with it....

I posted my first blog on this website on July 14, 2007 - a surprising 17 years ago. That first post told how I came up with the name for this blog, which was funny and corny. It eventually turned into a funny anecdote to open up speaking engagements when I used to speak a lot about social media and blogging. It goes like this:

What does HR have to do with Race Horses?

Nothing on one level except a story to open my blog, and a lot at another level altogether. The story: When I was working with Texas Instruments, our Vice President of Human Resources at the time told a story about how much he enjoyed calling from Dallas Texas to Versailles....no, not the palace in France, but Versailles, Kentucky, which is pronounced phonetically....Vur Sales.

TI owned a facility there at the time, and there was a woman who worked in the HR department whose name has faded into my past, but whom Chuck the HR VP loved to hear answer the phone, because he said it always sounded to him like she was saying: "Hello, Human Race Horses, may I help you?" He was sorely disappointed that he never got to see those special race horses run around the track, although he did say that Versailles, like the rest of TI had excellent human workers, and he made do with visiting them.

In the years since I first heard that story, I don't think the race run by humans at work has slowed down, and in fact, while Chuck the VP is no longer with TI, and the Texas Instruments business I worked for has been transformed fantastically, some things do remain constant. The pace of the race for human capital has increased at just as fast a pace as the levels of technology have within business, and we are at the beginning of another fantastic leap into the future. It may be HR 2.0 or HR 3.0 or just ongoing process of change that drives business today. Still, many techniques and tools we utilize today to hire, train, develop, and retain talent are changing faster than the employees or the HR professionals who support them can assimilate.

Since I started here on Blogger, I've had two other blogs, both of which I kind of stupidly allowed to lapse over the years. I lost over a thousand pieces of content, most of which were far better than the stuff I posted here.

When blogging regularly, I was prolific, often posting 4 to 5 times a week. That came to a screeching halt sometime in 2016 when my second marriage started falling apart, and my inner muse died a quick screaming death with the little voice in my head that wouldn't let me shut up about HR stuff stopped speaking to me. He/She/They have been gone for the better part of the last decade, although I have continued to create content in the HR space via the long-running DriveThruHR podcast. 

.I've continued to write continuously throughout the decade. Still, only in a professional capacity, and in a surprising turn, the podcast stuff with DriveThruHR has led me to do podcasting for my current employer, Labor Relations Institute, co-hosting the Left of Boom Show with Phil Wilson.

Why bring all this up? Because I have been feeling a tickle of that voice in the back of my mind lately, I might have a few things to say about HR again. Hence, a random post on my first ever  (and only surviving) blog site saying that I might start blogging again. I decided to return to my roots and post new stuff here. If it's good enough for Matt Stollak, it's good enough for me.

 

See you again soon, hopefully.