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The future of HR
Richard Donkin is an award-winning author and columnist based in Woking, UK. He wrote a popular column around the topic of work for the Financial Times from 1994 to 2008. His latest book, The Future of Work , won the inaugural Chartered Management Institute's management book of the year award in the digital books category (2011), and has met critical acclaim both in the USA and the UK.
Richard was a panelist at the Guardian newspaper's Future of HR Summit, London, in December 2011, where he spoke insightfully about the ways in which the HR function must adapt in order to keep pace with the ever-evolving world of work. In this interview he expands on those issues, and some of the points raised in his book, The Future of Work .
Would you mind telling me a bit about your background, how you came to write The Future of Work, and your current pursuit of free agency?
For most of my career I was a full-time journalist, joining the Financial Times in 1987, working initially on financial investigations before I joined the employment reporting team and began to write the FT employment column. From the off I expanded it to include all aspects of work from psychometrics to management. In 1994 when I took over the column HR was still more readily identified as Personnel Management in the UK.
I became interested in concepts such as Portfolio Working (as described by Charles Handy), tele-working and free agency but what really led me to pursue this lifestyle was my first book, The History of Work (first published as Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Evolution of Work ). I thought that work was so central to the human condition that it demanded its own history and I couldn't find one anywhere. It seemed that the time was ripe to undertake such a book since work seemed to be undergoing another great sea-change as significant as the industrial revolution. I asked the editor of the FT if I could take a year of unpaid leave to research and write the book and he agreed.
Researching and writing that book was probably the best year of my life, exploring the realities of self-management. Some people...