I’ve been thinking about how to innovate in the world of HR blogging, which is a ridiculous thing to write.
When you’ve been on the internet for over ten years, and everybody around you is an expert in the future of work, it’s not easy to stay fresh and relevant. While it’s true that I was early to the HR blogging and the careerist world, it’s undoubtedly true that I’m no longer the best. Legacy is not enough.
So there are a couple of options when it comes to creating new and differentiated content. First, you can go and study what the kids-these-days are doing and try to replicate those efforts, which is something that U2 has done with their most recent album. There’s no new art, and by incorporating fresh concepts into your body of work, you are actually just riffing on people riffing on your inspirational work of years past.
It’s narcissistically meta and very U2. I don’t entirely hate it.
Or you can take a timeout, watch the market, and work hard to avoid undermining your archive of work. I think about the 90s band A Tribe Called Quest who went on hiatus and waited several years to reunite and several more years after that before releasing new material. My summary of that influential band doesn’t do them justice, but the point is that they didn’t sacrifice their values to jump on the bandwagon and seem relevant.
They were the bandwagon. And they waited.
I’m not itching to write a new blog post or produce a podcast or do a video series unless there’s a real reason to do it. Right now, my target market is focused on workplace harassment. I’m happy to oblige the market, but I’m not sure if this is anything more than a trend. When the economy tanks from the Trump Tax Scam, what then? Do we care that women and protected minorities are finally starting to gain a voice, or do we care that medical bankruptcies and foreclosures go back on the rise?
When unemployment hits our cities, and we’re fighting the same fights we fought in It’s a Wonderful Life, do we care about the future of work? Or are we distracted by the urgency of now?
I’m thinking about all of this, right now, to have something interesting to say when it happens. That’s how I am trying to stay relevant. Which means, at this moment, I’m sorta quiet on the blog.
Thanks for sticking around and waiting.