[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now for Kindle and itrade paperback.]

Anyone who has written a book even mildly critical of the Progressive Conventional Wisdom has experienced getting negative reviews attacking the book to shore up the political beliefs of the reviewer. So here’s the first negative review at Amazon for Death by HR:

1.0 out of 5 stars
Nonsense
By Bryce on December 17, 2016

The argument that HR departments consist of women and minorities and for that reason force companies to hire women and minorities is unsupportable, as is the view that there’s something wrong with integrating a business. Forbes, McKinsey, and the Harvard Business School all agree that diversity is a key driver of internal innovation and business growth.

The argument that hiring women and minorities is problematic is based entirely on the premise that white males are better workers than women and minorities. Only insecure white males believe that.

The author’s ideas for avoiding the perceived “problems” of HR are laughable. The top business websites advise against relying on LinkedIn, where people blatantly falsify their qualifications. Following the advice in this book would probably lead to discrimination lawsuits if the business didn’t self-destruct before reaching that point.

I read an advance copy of this rant and I’m sorry I wasted my time.

I don’t know who this person is, but I did send out some advance copies to people writing on HR topics, and I knew there’d be some hostility from them since the book questions most of the bedrock beliefs of “HR people” about the value of diversity and the goals of most HR types.

Taking the statements made one by one:

“The argument that HR departments consist of women and minorities and for that reason force companies to hire women and minorities is unsupportable…” This argument was never made; apparently too subtle for the reviewer, the book suggests companies respond to labor regulation and threat of lawsuits by hiring HR staff as buffers and compliance officers, and that because they can make their EEOC numbers look better by doing so, tend to hire more women and minorities in HR where their role in production is seen as less critical. Over time that led to a prevailing HR culture that identifies as much with the progressive overseers as with company management, harming the business by replacing its goals with those of a social welfare organization.

“…[also unsupportable is] the view that there’s something wrong with integrating a business.” The book suggests there’s something wrong with the view that integration is necessarily important or a worthy goal to be prioritized ahead of productivity, efficiency, and creative accomplishment. Enlightened management will manage the business in whatever way is necessary to survive and grow. Sometimes this will mean creating a highly-diverse, integrated team, and sometimes it will require a monoculture of staffers who act and think largely alike for a specific purpose. The point is not to defend discriminatory practices, but to refrain from pressuring businesses to jump through hoops of political approval to escape government punishments.

The reviewer is steeped in the conventional wisdom, and goes on to appeal to authority to avoid dealing with the arguments and studies cited in the book: “Forbes, McKinsey, and the Harvard Business School all agree that diversity is a key driver of internal innovation and business growth.” The book cites a number of Harvard Business Review articles debunking the faith-based belief that diversity is necessarily a plus for businesses. One chapter traces the few unscientific studies that support this belief and how they were amplified and cited over and over again to confirm what the promoters wanted to believe. “Diversity” in the form of a variety of races, colors, and beliefs in an organization can help, hinder, or more typically be irrelevant to organizational performance. But since many HR staffers now believe that promoting diversity is their job, no amount of citations or logic will ever dent their belief.

The individual worker’s attitudes and aptitudes, knowledge and skills, and ability to communicate and work with others are vastly more important than any superficial classifications of race, sex, religion, or national origin. Martin Luther King had this right, and the progressive HR religion is simply wrong and damaging the quest for true equality of opportunity.

“The argument that hiring women and minorities is problematic is based entirely on the premise that white males are better workers than women and minorities. Only insecure white males believe that.” The reviewer demonstrates the anti-white-male prejudice so common in these types. The book makes no such sexist or racist argument — it does argue that hiring preferences that result in hiring women and minorities who are demonstrably less able or less productive in a job is damaging, both to the organization and to its workers, both those given preference and elevated beyond their ability to succeed and those not given preference and thus denied an opportunity to succeed by affirmative action practices.

I’m told it’s valuable to have reviews from obviously biased partisan types to confirm that one’s book has touched a nerve. So perhaps this review helps sell the book to those who have stopped buying the progressive party line on enforced discriminatory hiring policies and political use of HR as the state’s internal enforcement apparatus.

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[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

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