If you follow as many culture blogs and newsletters as I do, you've probably noticed a shift in terminology over the last five years. Organizations have started calling their HR departments by a new name: People Operations, People Teams, Talent Team, or some variant of one of those.
Jacob Morgan on Huffington Post recently reported that Human Resources is Dead, and Maia Josebachvili recently wrote on LinkedIn that "Human Resources is reinventing itself. The most progressive companies have replaced HR with new People Teams."
I wondered why this shift happened, and who started it? In 2006, Google was the first company to change its HR department name to People Operations.
Read MoreThe phrase "cult-like cultures" makes me slightly cringe.
I’ve been re-reading the influential book “Built to Last,” by management guru Jim Collins. Even though the book was published in 1994, many of its principles still ring true today. The authors studied the successful habits of visionary companies, and then tried to extract what made them visionary, as compared to average companies.
One principle that made visionary companies different, according to the authors, was that they had "cultlike cultures." In other words, these companies were "great places to work only for those who buy in to the core ideology; those who don't fit the ideology are ejected like a virus (preserves the core)."
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