Love Your People Podcast

There are a handful of genuinely useful operational concepts - the TEST team structure and the 'manager tax' framing of HCM self-service failures - but they surface slowly amid substantial filler, rapport-building, and recycled leadership platitudes like 'hire people smarter than you' and 'North Star.' The useful-idea-per-minute rate is low for a 33-minute episode.

“we put together an internal consulting team within HR. Small 15 people. Again, back to I mentioned earlier. 15 people with totally different skill sets, totally different tenures, totally different backgrounds that all bring together what I need to solve a problem for the client organization.”

“what I saw was, is what we really did was move that task from an HR employee through an HCM system to the manager”

The 'manager tax' and 'shadow HR organizations' concepts are genuinely fresh framings of a real and underappreciated problem. Everything else - KPI-driven culture, generalist-vs-specialist pendulum, North Star objectives, hiring people smarter than yourself - is well-worn management canon, and the Harvey Mackey quote is standard business-book fare.

“you've now taxed the organization. You've just shifted work and that wasn't what you were trying to accomplish”

“don't, let's don't make the same mistake that we did with the human capital management systems when we're using AI”

Keith Jackson is a genuine senior practitioner - CHRO of AT&T International overseeing 40,000+ employees across 50+ countries - with a legitimately unconventional career path from sales VP to CHRO at scale. He speaks from real operational experience, not as a career podcaster or thought-leader, though the conversation doesn't fully exploit his depth.

“we're in over 50 countries outside the United States and we have approximately 40,000 employees”

“I was like, what did I do wrong to get into hr?”

There are useful specifics - 15-person team size, 50 countries, 40,000 employees, named platforms (ServiceNow, Workday, PeopleSoft, Oracle), a two-year rotation cycle, Israel and India as specific IT hubs - but there are zero outcome metrics: no attrition rates achieved, no cost figures, no before-and-after data, no timelines for results. Concrete nouns without quantified results.

“We were doing the first PeopleSoft, the first Oracle, the first work day.”

“one of the tools that we use, um, a lot of this a technology tool at ServiceNow. So I was looking for Someone that had had an effective implementation of ServiceNow in the marketplace”

The host asks broad, open-ended questions and consistently validates rather than probes - he echoes back Keith's statements, calls obvious points 'really powerful insights,' and never pushes for hard data or challenges any claim. The episode is openly branded for ITA Group, which limits its appetite for friction.

“Yeah, no, this is, that, this is a really, uh, powerful, uh, insight, Keith.”

“I love, uh, the quote that you started with, which is sales and hr, both people, Businesses.”