Bohemian Rhapsody

"Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.

Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see.
I'm just a poor boy,
I need no sympathy,

Because I'm easy come, easy go,
Little high, little low,
Any way the wind blows,
doesn't really matter to me."

I would hazard a guess that most of you who have just read the above lyrics will probably have been mentally singing them as well. Maybe as you did, a few of you would have been remembering when it was released in 1975. Some maybe would have remembered the "Live at Wembley '86" tour. Some maybe even from the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992 following Freddie's death from AIDS. Yet I would think a larger number of you would probably remember it best from the movie, "Wayne's World". In case you really have forgotten the song, here it is:

Bohemian Rhapsody is probably Queen's greatest song. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the group's 1975 album, "A Night at the Opera". According to the band's website, at 5 minutes and 55 seconds, it should have been too long for successful radio play but it became one of the greatest singles of all time, staying at No. 1 in the UK chart for nine weeks. The video, directed by Bruce Gowers, is credited with being the first genuine promotional video. The song has regularly featured in all major pop polls and was recently named again as the best single of all time. The amazing thing about this song is the way that it just seems to keep coming back into vogue. Maybe it has never really gone away.

Anyway, I wasn't really intending to run a dissertation on Queen. It was just that as I was listening to the song this morning and thinking about the number of times it has come back to prominence, it occurred to me that it was a little like Organisational Models in Business. Now I know this may be a stretch but bear with me. You don't have to work in a Company for very long nowadays to see the structure change from one model to another to another and then back to the original model. Whether those models be functional, geographic, centralised or decentralised, the fact remains that the Business will change it's structure. In some industries, such as IT, this is a more frequent occurrence. In others, not. The fact remains that structural change occurs, more often than not, either as a reaction to external stimuli, or an internal strategic change in direction often driven by a commensurate change in leadership.

We, as HR practitioners, need to both understand what models are out there as well as what are the commercial drivers for change. If we want to be viewed as true partners to the Business then we cannot wait to be told that "this is the change and fix the people part of it", we need to be proactively engaging with Leadership and discussing, from a point of knowledge, the differing responses that could be adopted to enable the success of the Business. To achieve that point of knowledge, we need to ensure that we don't just read HR magazines and websites. We need to be reading the same books, magazines and websites that the Executive Leadership read. Challenge yourself, step out of the comfort zone and you will find that it does expand to cover you again.

And Finally...

With a wild and windy day happening here in Sydney, I leave you with a surprising quote from Mark Twain:

"By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law."

All the best,

Jim