I have a guest post up on Know HR this morning – Seven things marketing can teach you about HR. Here’s a quick teaser:

1. It’s a lot easier to market a great product. Rather than pushing a crappy HR program on people, make the program so awesome, so helpful to people, that they not only want to use it – they even tell a friend!

Check out the other six (and subscribe, if you’re not already) at KnowHR. Special thanks to Frank Roche for letting me post on his site!

This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

It was 1961, and the United States was in the middle of the cold war. For years, the US had prided itself on being the most technically advanced nation in the world. But at that moment, Russia was beating them in the race to space.

In May of that year, President John F. Kennedy gave an address to congress, outlining how he felt America could maintain its leadership during the cold war. He requested funds for various strategic goals – everything from international aid to civil defense.

But he ended his address with a very unexpected statement:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

JFK’s idea – send a man to the moon and back in less than a decade – unified a nation and helped drive ten years of incredible scientific achievement.

Made to Stick

Why do some ideas stick while others refuse to catch on. That’s the subject of brothers Dan and Chip Heath’s book, Made to Stick.

Keep reading…

If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ll notice that many of them have what’s called a blog-roll in their sidebar. This is basically a list of other blogs that the writer of another blog finds interesting.

Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has turned me into a bit of a simplicity nut, so I don’t have a blog-roll on my site. I hate having too much crap cluttering up my sidebar.

That said, I thought you still might be interested in what’s in my RSS reader, so today, I wanted to share with you the list of blogs that make my short list.

Many of them are less about technical HR skills, and more about how to market and spread ideas. Since Renegade HR is about transforming our profession into something way awesomer, I think those are pretty important skills to have.

Keep reading…