Interviews from HR Innovator magazine

And Miles to Go...

Bruce Ferguson
Vice President, Talent Acquisition
Exult
Irvine, CA

There's not much that's good that anyone can say about the 1970s. Bad politics. Bad economy. Bad music. Bad prospects. It was also during the 1970s that colleges and universities spat out the bulk of 77 million Baby Boomers into a shrinking work world where the phrase, "just be glad you have a job," was heard again and again. One of those universities, University of Wisconsin at Osh Kosh, released Bruce Ferguson, youngest of 10 brothers and sisters, into the world equipped with only a bachelor's in political science and a summer's internship at Arthur Anderson on his sheet. First stop: Selling stock at a Milwaukee brokerage. That didn't last long.

A call from an Arthur Andersen mentor brought him back into the world of consulting ("One word, Benjamin, internships ") where he began building a lifelong career in HR and recruiting. One winter, after 40 days of below-zero weather, he was told that there was an opportunity for him in Los Angeles, and his life changed again and for good.

After 12 years at Arthur Andersen and another tenure at Ernst and Young, a day mountain biking with a friend from Goldman Sachs connected Bruce with Exult, an Irvine, CA, start-up that would offer HR solutions and outsourcing around the world. In the era of dot.com rush, this was one of the rare start-ups that Bruce had considered whose business model actually made sense. And he was soon onboard as the new company's Chief People Officer. But there was one more change in store.

He would eventually step away from the top HR spot and assume a P&L role. At Exult, where people are its business, talent acquisition builds the company's bottom line. And it is from this perspective that Bruce looks back on a career in which people have always made the difference.

When you entered the world of work in 1976, it was such a dreary time to be a young adult starting his career.

It looked disastrous. We had already had the boom years of the 1960s. Now we were dealing with Nixon's resignation, the Arab oil embargo of 1973, interest rates 16, 17, 18 percent. Mortgage rates were through the roof. And on top of all that we had to deal with disco! It seemed like everywhere around us the message was, "You're going to be slogging it out for the rest of your life."

What were you thinking during that time?

First of all, I'm a pretty upbeat, positive person. But it still seemed to me that it was going to be a tough row to hoe. It looked like the glory days were over. But in my relative youth, I didn't have the perspective and the first-hand experience of appreciating how life changes so dramatically in short periods of time. What I have since learned is this: As bad as things may be, wait for another day. They actually get better.

In balance, life is pretty darn good.

How can anyone actually plan their career knowing that these fluxes can change everything in an instant?

I don't know that I have planned a career. I think that what I've done is try to stay focused on a few principles and do the best I can at whatever I'm doing. You have to look around you and take sight of all the different things that are happening. Access all the different ideas and thoughts and good ideas that are going on out there. I've always found myself interested in hearing what other people have to say. They generate new ideas for me and I take advantage of that.

That takes a really creative mind.

It takes an open mind. Had I not gone into HR, I don't think I would have been as understanding and open about human interaction and how tied in we are in so many different facets of our lives. You see how people work in the office and you can probably figure out how their family life is working too. That would have gone right by me if I hadn't been in HR.

If you pull your ideas from all aspects of your life, what has your commitment to fitness challenges taught you? (This was not Bolded so I did it for you)

I have learned that just when you think you might have hit the wall and reached the end of your capacity, if you hang in there just a little while longer, you'll find a whole new source of endurance. Once I was helping some friends train for the American River 50 - which is a 50-mile running race. Then one of the guys didn't show up for the race, and they talked me into taking his race number and do the run myself. The idea was for me to start off and go just as far as I could. If it was 20 miles, great. If it was 30 miles, terrific. I'd already run a marathon in my life, so I knew what that was all about. So with this race it was just a matter of seeing how far I could go, say, "okay, I'm done, and calling it a day." It sounded like a good idea at the time.

When I got to Mile 28, I started to feel really bad. But I remembered there was an aid station coming up in about four miles. So I told myself I could call it a day once I got there. On the way I ate and drank something and by the time I got to the aid station I felt like a new person! By the time I got to the next aid station at Mile 36, I thought to myself, "Well, heck, I've gone 36 miles, I can certainly go another 14." So I just kept moving.

It was a great lesson for me, especially in the context of the economy and the situation we're in now: Things change. And while I felt terrible, after doing things right and staying in the race, I felt terrific. It taught me that any kind of endurance is as much a mental game as it is a physical game. Maintaining your focus, drive and perseverance is oftentimes the difference between winning and losing.

So if your career is a 50-mile run, what marker are you on right now?

Probably around 30.

What's going to keep you going for the next 20 miles?

Staying intellectually motivated and curious. Staying physically fit will certainly keep me young. The fact that I have a strong network of friends that I value more than anything - along with my family.

So now that you're with Exult, you're in outsourcing - which, to listen to Lou Dobbs, is the monster that will devour any hope for American prosperity. Is it because he keeps confusing outsourcing with offshoring?

People should understand the difference between the two. Outsourcing is merely taking a non-core function and having someone else do it. Offshoring is sending work to another country. And, as a nation, we've offshored for years. In the 1980s we made a big deal about offshoring work to Ireland. Everyone embraced that! But now when we move it over to places like India or China, we don't look so favorably on it.

There is tremendous value in tapping into the workforce around the world. If you look at the demographics of the United States and the retirement of the Baby Boom generation over the next 10 to 20 years, we are actually going to have to be prepared to tap into that global network of talent. If we don't start opening those channels today, we won't be prepared when we need them 10 years from now.

But when we do open those channels today, we're seeing headlines of people being laid off here and those jobs leaving the United States. And then you have those awful stories of the current employees being asked to train their replacements.

That's called being competitive. Innovation. Progress. We had to deal with this issue forever and as we become more of a global economy we'll have to deal with it even more.

So it's up to the individual to sustain his or her own relevancy and life planning?

Yes. Not to sound harsh, but we are responsible for our own lives. Governments and unions do people a disservice by luring them into believing that there is some nanny state out there that is going to take care of them. Corporate America use to do it to when they promised lifetime employment and we all found out that was a hollow promise. That being said, it's also essential that corporate America understands it has some social responsibility to provide people with training or the opportunity for training so they don't become irrelevant. Then the question is: Do they take advantage of it?

But it seems that those very skills that people retrain themselves for are the ones that will eventually be offshored.

So that just tells us that we can't retrain ourselves just once. You have to reinvent yourself all the time. Just as business has to reinvent itself all the time or it becomes obsolete and then all the jobs are lost..

It used to be that HR people got their professional start in corporate America by doing transaction work. With outsourcing, a lot of those jobs are going away, so what are they going to do?

Go work for an outsourcer. Go work for a company whose purpose is to deliver this service where people get rewarded for measuring and improving the quality of service they deliver to their clients - where you can have P&L responsibilities. When you work for an outsourcer, you're revenue producing. You're valued. There's a higher level of self-esteem, value and dignity when your job is tied to P&L.

But you're still doing transaction work. If you're pursuing a career in HR, how do you also build the management side of your career so you can then serve higher-level functions?

By doing transactional work in the different areas - training, recruitment, data management or performance management - and delivering those services to your clients, you can eventually be more consultative to your clients because of your across-the-board exposure. The information that we'll be getting to the executives of corporate America will be far richer than they've ever had before. People working in the outsourcing environments will not only have access to that information, they'll also understand how to organize it, present it and drive decisions off of it. Although HR outsourcing is still relatively new field, in the future many HR executives in corporate America will be coming from the outsourcers of the world.

If you spend five years of your career in outsourcing, that strikes me as being a very tall, narrow silo.

No, it's actually exactly the opposite. It's very broad. You have the opportunity to work on many different clients. You may work on a client in the banking industry, paper industry, manufacturing, consumer goods. In a very short period of time, you're getting much more exposure to how companies operate their HR organizations than you could ever get working in a corporation.

What are the cons of choosing a career in HR outsourcing?

The con right now is that it's still a new industry. So while it's being accepted, it's not fully accepted. There are still bumps along the road. But I don't know any industry where there aren't bumps. It's just a different bump.

So what would you say to Lou Dobbs if you had the chance?

We appreciated the impact of how offshoring and outsourcing are changing people's lives here. But you cannot negate the fact that it's helping people in other parts of the world. From a philosophical and political perspective, it's better to give people jobs that they can build their economy and lives on.

And by the way, let's not lose sight of the fact that companies in other countries are offshoring to the United States. Exult's first client as British Petroleum - a British company sending its business to this company in Irvine, California.

In terms of personality and character traits, what would you look for in candidates for HR outsourcing that you wouldn't a few years ago?

I am looking for people who are results-driven, who understand the value of measuring the work they do. People in our business have to be flexible, adaptable to the changing landscape of our business environment, adroit enough to be able to make those moves quickly and effectively. If you're not flexible, you're not going to be open to change. Having the old, "If it's not broken, don't fit it," mentality is not going to make it in today's environment. It's "If it's not broken, how can I make it better" approach, that has to be the new adage.

This article originally appeared in the May 2004 issue of HR Innovator magazine. Reprinted with permission.