Delhi's OD Collective

Apparently some high-powered HR folks in Delhi have launched an OD collective. These include Bhaduri (HR head of Frito Lay India) , Vishwanathan (NIIT), Raja (Varadarajan, HR head of Quatrro), Sanjay Singh (Whirlpool), RV Ramanan (Metlife) Piyush Mehta (HR head of Genpact), Pavan Bhatia, (HR head of Pepsi), RV Iyer aka Venky, Gagan Adlakha Ashraf, Arjun Shekhar (all from HR consulting firm Vyaktitva).

In a very web 2.0 way they even have a blog :-) Abhijit with his post People Are Our Greatest Asses (oops ...Assets) takes a scathing look on the HR function and I hope the rest of the group also takes to blogging. This should be a fascinating conversation if it picks up.

Some snippets:

"People are our greatest assets" - usually put on posters all over the organizations that least believe in that philosophy. Ask anyone why they wanted to choose HR as their major in Business School or as a career and you get another cliche that makes me groan.

I guess those days we had to handle the animals in the zoo ourselves, unlike the new kids who get computers to do it all. No more human contact. We can now outsource the contact part of it. Someone told me that anything that can be templated can be outsourced. So I guess human contacts have just been so classified.

I am just curious. Do all functions manufacture cliches like HR does or is it just us? Do all other blokes have self doubt like we do? Well you know every now and then we will hear seminars where people ask "Is HR a Business Partner?" The answer is obviously expected to be yes if you are to be let in to join the party. But truthfully speaking the jury is still out on that one.