IPM Guest lecture

'New thinking in HR development':

The Membership Development Committee of the Institute of Personnel Management (IPM) has organized an evening presentation on October 8 from 6.30 to 8.00 at the IPM Auditorium.

The session will focus mainly on areas such as ways and means to examine new HRD concepts, strategies and tools that are being used successfully by forward thinking enterprises in many countries, said IPM Senior Vice President and Chairman - Membership Development Committee 2009/2010 Ajith R. De Costa. We have invited Dr. Asoka Jinadasa in view of his extensive foreign and local experience and his innovative thinking in the area of HRD," he said.

According to Dr. Asoka Jinadasa, Human Resource Development strategies usually focus on introducing, implementing and improving tools and processes to enhance individual and corporate performance.

In a fiercely competitive and totally unpredictable commercial world battered by global financial turmoil, this conventional approach to HRD can no longer help enterprises achieve sustainable success under difficult conditions.

Recovery from the current recession and future growth depends heavily on how systematically and deeply enterprises have embedded Innovation in their culture and operations.

Company-wide Innovation is the best way to overcome future threats such as exchange rate fluctuations and the loss of GSP+ concessions for our exports.

Organizations have to re recast their HRD strategies to equip their staff with tools, processes, Skills and knowledge, and most importantly, a fearless and creative Mindset to meet this complex challenge.

Training budgets and resources are mostly spent on introducing and improving tools, processes, Skills and knowledge.

This often leads to people learning one tool after another, each promising to be more effective than the last, but quickly going back to their old ways. There is usually nothing wrong with the tool; the problem arises when the new tool is introduced into a rigid corporate culture and environment that hinders change.

"A far more viable approach is to focus on mindset change, which will positively influence the thousands of decisions that are made every day. With positive mindsets, training programs will produce lasting attitudinal and behavioural changes, and people will do extraordinary things with the most basic tools," said Dr. Jinadasa.

"To achieve lasting improvements in people's mindsets, we need to look at new paradigms. We need to deploy a combination of western science and eastern methodologies for empowering people and awakening their full potential. We need to use Human Energy Science to boost their creative abilities and their mental, emotional and physical competencies. We need to help them develop five intelligences to understand and respond to any situation, no matter how complex," he said.