I’m leery of any profession in which there are more people making big money by giving advice than there are professionals making big money heeding that advice. Human Resources falls into that category.

As a consultant who is often called in at high fees to do things that internal people could be doing for next to nothing, I constantly see HR professionals sacrificing their credibility by advocating the latest dizziness from assorted academics and gurus who never have to worry about being accountable for their loopy ideas.

Let’s get something straight: Line managers and executives do not find ideas like "open meetings," "future search," and "empowerment" especially enticing unless they can be linked to pragmatic business results. There shouldn’t be any surprises there. Yet it seems as if these flavor-of-the-month approaches draw human resource support because they’re easier to espouse than it is to engage in the tough trench work, such as determining how to improve attrition, accelerate sales velocity, or improve cross-functional collaboration.

Human resource professionalism should be about intellectual depth, not personality profiling or empty-headed "games that trainers play." It is relatively rare to see the HR function proactively approach line managers to suggest interventions that will pragmatically improve business results. (And the old bromide that there are four levels of measurement ought to receive a mercy killing. The only thing to measure that matters at all are results in the workplace which impact products, services, and customer relationships.)

There is no discipline or state-of-the-art standards permeating HR that I know of. There are a great many good people, however, struggling to find better ways to do their job. It’s best that they look to internal sources—their own executives, their organization’s strategy, their business colleagues—rather than the lofty experts who espouse the impossible and preach the ridiculous.

Tomorrow morning when you get to work ask yourself: "What am I going to do today that will improve this business?" The odds are, it won’t be running an "open meeting."