Friday, June 1, 2012

Legislators need to follow the NASCAR Lead

The Illinois Capitol
I live in Springfield, the Capitol of Illinois.  As such, I have a birds eye view to the legislative process  that takes place here.  For more years than I care to remember, state government has been outrageously dysfunctional.  Compromise does not seem to exist at the Illinois State House.  Now Illinois is not alone on that matter, we see that in Washington DC as well. The Art of the Deal is gone.

The Illinois General Assembly winds down in its' final hours as I an writing this. As a taxpayer and resident of the state I always cringe when we get near the close of a legislative session.  History has taught us this is where we get some really bad legislation.  Then we wonder how that could have happened.  How could this body of well educated, articulate, public-minded individuals have ever passed a law like this?  I am always curious as to what motivated elected officials to vote one way or another.

Me being the cynic that I am, and what I have learned from my years in HR is this.  It's about the money, if not completely at least partly. So where do politicians get money? They are paid, but we all know too well that every politician has a campaign fund.  Additionally, every politician is running for re-election as soon as they are elected, so for them it too, is about the money.  So where does a politician get their money, in particular their campaign contributions?  For the most part none of us know.  We could, if we wanted to work at it and find out.  If we went to the State Board of Elections and filed all of the necessary FOIA requests you would get the documents that would reveal, who each politician is financially beholden to.  That is a lot of work and with the exception of a few journalist no one does that.

Were this a legislator, we might think he would
support legislation friendly to the tool industry.
So here is what I propose.  Every elected official should have to wear a brightly colored jump suit.  On this suit they would be required to display the logos of all of the Companies or interest that donate to their campaign.  The logos would have to be proportional to the size of the campaign contribution.  For example, let's say that legislator X raised $100,000 in campaign funds and $10,000 of that came from the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association,  the Logo from the Trial Lawyers Association would have to cover 10% of the jumpsuit.  This way you could see who all owned a piece of the legislator but also who owned the biggest piece, without having to research the matter.We could apply this concept to all levels of elected officials from city councils to the U.S. Senate.  

But how would we ever get a law like this passed?  Maybe we could get it pushed through in the 11th hour, right before the end of a legislative session and attach it to some obscure bill already dealing with the racing and apparel industries.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

2012 Illinois SHRM State Conference

We are now inside of 70 before our big event at the Drury Lane in Oak Brook. Today's post is just a reminder of the things that we will be serving up at the 2012 event.

First I would ask you to check out our tabs.  The tab in the upper left is The ILSHRM 2012 Social Media Team.  The team is...

  • Meghan M Biro
  • Chris Fields
  • Kevin Grossman
  • Dwane Lay
  • Victorio Milian
  • Buzz Rooney
  • Matt Stollack
  • Mike VanDervort


Check out the page and see their bios.  Also know that if you come to the event you can chat and visit with these folks. They will be in attendance and they all enjoy meeting people - trust me.

We also are going to hosting a special edition live #Tchat which will we are going to stream with live video.

We have be creating another pre-conference resources with some a collection of videos from our presenters and some of our social media folks.  You can get there directly by clicking the YouTube TAB on top. It is a collection we call ILSHRM12 Speaker and Social Media Team - and it is on our YouTube page. 

We are continuing to work on developing more pre-conference resources which we will let loose in the next 70 days.

We have created a twitter list, of all of the active tweeters that we know will be in attendance - https://twitter.com/#!/DaveTheHRCzar/ilshrm12

Here is the matrix of sessions which includes 4 Keynote address and 30 different break out session.

Hope to see you there!

-Dave Ryan Director of Social Media ISC SHRM