Speaking

Current Topics of Research, Executive Education, and Professional Writing

Dr. John Boudreau is an award-winning and globally sought-after speaker, who gets top reviews for stimulating, rigorous, important, mind-stretching and timely topics, delivered with humor, humility and engagement.  He speaks to the timely topics listed below, and more generally about the future of work, teams, organizations, society and human resource management.

If you would like to invite John to deliver a keynote or contribute to a writing project, please review his speaking topics below to identify the topic your interest best fits. Then contact John to discuss your request.

Browse Topics

HR Reporting and Investor Standards: Enhancing Decisions and Constituent Expectations

The call for “enhanced reporting” and standards for human capital measurement and investor reporting is increasing, as our efforts to develop such standards.  Will investor and other constituent decisions be enhanced by these efforts, or will they become just another compliance activity?  What are the characteristics of measurement standards that are truly useful to HR constituents, and that enhance their understanding and expectations of the HR profession and its contributions?

HR as a Leader in Emerging Trends

This keynote draws upon research with over 200 HR leaders in 30 global organizations, and examines HR’s current role, and its future role, in exploiting emerging trends for talent excellence.  The trends include Big Data, Segmentation, Diversity, Sustainability, Gamification and others. The keynote shows practical applications from today’s leading organizations, and also looks beyond today, to show the emerging issues that offer great potential for future HR contributions.  It includes examples from organizations including Starbucks, IBM, McDonald’s in the UK and others, as well as references to classic literature and even mindfulness.

Transformative HR

This keynote draws upon the principles in my book, with Ravin Jesuthasan, published in 2011 by Wiley and Sons. It shows how the HR profession can truly transform organizational effectiveness through evidence-based change based on five principles: Logic-Based Analytics, Segmentation, Risk-Leverage, Synergy, and Optimization. Case studies of a wide variety of organizations across the globe (IBM, Shanda, Deutsche Telekom, Royal Bank of Canada) provide tangible illustrations showing how transformative HR is taking hold.

The Future of Work and HR

This work reflects an investigation, with Ian Ziskin, former CHRO of Northrop Grumman, of the trends shaping the future of HR, and their likely implications for the HR profession, the role of HR professionals, and the issues that will define the HR discipline. In an article published in the journal Organizational Dynamics (part of a special issue on the future of HR co-edited by Boudreau), John and Ian highlight the need to look beyond the HR function to the issues that define effective organizations in a dynamic future environment. Implications include HR’s need to master such things as collective leadership, agile co-creativity, segmentation, redefined professional boundaries, and fatigue versus sustainability.

Retooling HR

This keynote draws upon my 2010 book suggesting that to engage leaders outside of HR, the profession should master the tools those leaders already use, such as supply-chain, inventory optimization, portfolio risk optimization, consumer segmentation and engineering performance analysis. These models are surprisingly well-suited to reframing traditional HR issues in ways that engage non-HR leaders, and lead to new insights. Examples include treating employee turnover like inventory turnover, treating the staffing pipeline like a supply-chain, analyzing leadership as an asset portfolio in an uncertain future, optimizing the employee value proposition using product-design and marketing tools, etc. Examples include IBM, Starbucks and McDonald’s.