Finance has net present value. Operations has bottleneck theory. What does HR have?

In this episode, Ben sits down with John Boudreau, professor emeritus at USC and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of human resource management, to explore a question he has spent 40 years trying to answer: why do leaders who make rigorous, model-driven decisions about financial and operational assets continue to rely on gut instinct when it comes to people?

Topics covered:

• Why leaders who would never make a capital investment without a discounted cash flow model routinely make multi-million dollar talent decisions on instinct
• The bottleneck problem: why investing equally in every role is as irrational as improving every stage of a production line simultaneously
• Why economists were studying tasks long before HR was
• Why AI pilots aren't experiments: the difference between watching what happens and actually measuring it
• What it would take to create generally accepted principles for people decisions, and why codified principles matter more than codified measures
• Why the word "job" may be the single biggest obstacle to clear thinking about the future of work

About John Boudreau: John Boudreau is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. He is the author of more than 200 articles and ten books, including Beyond HR, Retooling HR, and Reinventing Jobs, and is widely regarded as one of the founding thinkers of the people analytics movement.

Follow John on LinkedIn

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow Ben on LinkedIn

Sign up for our Newsletter

Visit our website for more information

Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com