Dave Ulrich

Let's just say it.

The Ulrich model's dead.

Like, it just is.

And it's been dead.

Dave Ulrich says the Dave Ulrich model is dead.

Yeah, but it still exists though.

Yeah, it still exists, but it's like in stages of dying.

And And the questions there were about the labor force as a whole and skill issues and skill requirements and things.

And after that, I ran a research center with a colleague here at Wharton for the U.S. Department of Education on skill issues in the economy.

And it occurred to us, I think early on, that what happens to the workforce in the U.S. is almost entirely driven by what employers decide to do.

Are they going to train people? Who do they hire and why? Do they give them opportunities? All that stuff.

So we have to start thinking about managing uncertainty rather than assuming it away.

And what you hear with workforce planning, and David, I wonder whether you hear the same thing we hear here, is give us your best guess.

Well, what if your best guess is really terrible and you know it's terrible, right? So our colleague here, Paul Schumacher, who you may have known, created scenario planning for Royal Dutch Shell.

And that at least is a better start to say, okay, if you're going to have a guess, this is my best guess, but what's my second best guess and my third best guess? And sometimes the second and third best guess imply very similar things.

So I think you did a brilliant, brilliant view of that.

Maybe taking it down a little bit to the HR standpoint, and maybe this is a little bit off-script, thinking about the HR organization, and as things get more automated potentially with AI, how do you think we should be thinking about the org structure of HR? We have the three-legged stool that Ulrich has put out there that most organizations have with centers of excellence, shared services, and HR business partners, but now you've got AI coming in that is gonna break down some of those silos.

Allows maybe some people to have more expertise than they would've had before because AI can help them build prototype, whatever that might be.

How do you think about HR and how we should be adopting AI or rethinking about our model?

But I really wanna say that I think this is a process that's been going on for a very long time, and AI is different, but the automation and the outsourcing of HR work started for real more than forty years ago.

Sorry, but that's just true.

I recall vividly when I was at Ingersoll Rand, about twenty or twenty-nine years old in the early '80s, an internal HR conference titled something like HR of the Future that the GE executives that were now running HR to, at IR started that featured speakers like Noel Tichy and Fred Foulkes and a very young Dave Ulrich, and it was a very inspirational three days.

We were reinventing the function.

We are recording this in August, and guess what? The title of my book is Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance.

And in the book, I talk about, you know, artificial intelligence and human ingenuity, which is, you know, speaks for conversation I had with Dave Ulrich, you know, on the podcast.

And interestingly, Dave Ulrich, you know, the father of modern HR, wrote the forward of my book.

So-

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