The Social Organization HR Endorsements

We would like to thank Paul Sparrow, Emeritus Professor of International HRM, Lancaster University Management School; James Cullens, Executive Director, Group HR & Marcomms, W S Atkins plc; Geoff Lloyd, Group Human Resource Director, Serco and James Purvis, HR Department Head, CERN for their endorsements of The Social Organization.

If you are going to take networks seriously – and after reading this book you would understand why you must – then you need to learn how to better manage them. Taking an organization development perspective, The Social Organization shows how social capital helps organizations create value, compete and collaborate.  Having made a persuasive argument, it goes on to explain how HR managers should think about recruitment, develop groups, and hone their social technologies and analytics.  It is replete with useful models and frameworks, and moves our understanding on from an intellectual acceptance of the ideas into practical ways of working.
Paul Sparrow, Emeritus Professor of International HRM, Lancaster University Management School

This book is a must read for anyone responsible for driving the performance and culture of an organization, whether CEO or HR practitioner. Grounded in theory and practice, it takes the reader on a journey of how to evolve their people strategy, with rich, illustrative case studies from a variety of industry sectors. These lead to a diagnostic tool and robust organizational prioritization model, or OPM. A book that unlocks tremendous value for academic, HR practitioner and business leader like.
James Cullens, Executive Director, Group HR & Marcomms, W S Atkins plc

​I found the concepts Jon outlines extremely helpful in bridging the gap between traditional HR models and new ways of thinking about how sustainable value can be created through organisation. The ideas he takes the reader through are both stimulating and challenging, which in turn makes them invaluable to anyone grappling with some of the most pressing issues that confront organisations today.
Geoff Lloyd, Group Human Resource Director, Serco

How can organizations master and harness the power of collaboration? It’s indisputable that we are better as a team than as a collection of individuals. Collaboration is at the heart of most successes. Yet traditional HR has often led to organisations which suppress, or at best ignore, rather than nurture this key asset. Work and the workplace today is dramatically different from the turn of the millennium and in a competitive knowledge-based economy being successful requires an HR agile HR with a new focus. This book offers precisely that.
Don’t get the title wrong – this book is not about socialising, nor the ubiquitous use of  social media, nor about having play-rooms adjacent to the offices (although workplace design can be a key factor). It’s about comprehensively reviewing existing frameworks & theories, analysing case-studies, producing insights and deriving a new model for viewing the Organization.   This book will not present you with a silver bullet nor a ‘best practice’ solution – but it will certainly equip you with the ideas and inspiration for you to develop a ‘best fit’ approach to drive success in your particular organisation.
At CERN collaboration is at the heart of success – many of the insights in the book ring true and offer ways of formalising practices I have observed here. As with physics – theories are better explained when we use a model, and in this book - with OPM -  Jon presents us with such a model.
James Purvis, HR Department Head, CERN