I recently had the “Behind the Bastards” podcast recommended to me (well it was recommended in a Reddit group) due to a two-part series on Jack Welch.
Now Jack was a character I was already aware aware of, from business literature, but I did not know anything about his background. Whilst the pod hosts are not for everyone – it is very American, with bad language and at one point a claim that the American capitalist boom in the 50s and 60s was great for Americans but based on mistreatment of people outside of the USA (er…what about racial segregation?) – it does a great job on outlining Welch’s role in helping to create many of the problems in modern business practice and management approaches. It is worth a listen on how the pursuit of money and share value has corrupted so much, essentially in recent times since the 1970s, for the loss of long term sustainability and employee protection. When companies complain employees are no longer loyal it is because people like Welch broke that reciprocal relationship.
Another good recent pod looking at the history of business – the Mindtools pod looked back at 20 years of transition in the training/L&D area. Interesting insights/discussion points in this one – such as the move from “training officer” as the most common job title (although I do not think I had ever made the link that officer went out of fashion as it felt too militaristic), a certain amount of reinventing the wheel even during just 20 years (albeit within the bigger macro shift from f-2-f delivery), the possible impact of AI being bigger for HR than L&D and more.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 