Comcast’s Big Bet on the Future

How can you lure top talent away from Silicon Valley and other tech centers? Offer them things they can't get there, such as the ability to walk to work, own a house and be part of an affordable, urban community.

Comcast is placing a huge bet on the future of its business—and it rests on an innovative plan for human resources.

The idea is that the business around television and all the entertainment that uses video is going to be less about actors and crazy producers and more about software and technology that manipulates content and moves it around. How can we interact with TV shows, for example, or use computer-based games for tasks other than entertainment? 

In order to get the competency it needs in technology and software, Comcast is already placing a big real-estate bet on the future by building a 59-story technology center in downtown Philadelphia. That building will house the really big bet, which is a workforce that can drive that high-tech competency. And this is where HR comes in: How does it create such a workforce, which hasn’t historically been part of the cable business?

The people who have those skills typically live right now in Silicon Valley or its smaller clones such as Austin, Texas. That’s 3,000 miles from Philadelphia and a world away on other dimensions. How does Comcast get them, and others like them, to move to Philadelphia? And how does it get a competency like that to reside long-term in a single company? In Silicon Valley, products and ideas usually come together by hiring a new team of people from across existing companies, using joint ventures, outsourcing and so forth in more of a constantly changing virtual model. That doesn’t sound like anything in Philadelphia.

Bill Strahan, Comcast’s executive vice president for HR, gave a presentation about the company's plan at Wharton this month. It rests on a bet that there are enough talented information-technology experts who are tired of the Silicon Valley model to make this project a success. Instead of the Google “live at your office” model, the Cisco “work any 80 hours a week you want” mantra and the high risk of working for a start-up, Comcast is going to offer a traditional job. That’s right, regular hours in a real office with vacations and a bunch of other “life” things you can’t get in Silicon Valley, such as the ability to walk to work, own a house, and be part of an affordable, urban community.

A related part of the bet involves doing what is necessary to avoid that new tech workforce becoming a clock-punching, plodding bureaucracy. That involves creating a culture and environment for the new organization that is anything but traditional.

Part of the plan for doing that is to bring start-ups into the same building, to create a tech community around Comcast that is a source of new ideas and also of energy.

Here’s another creative idea: Comcast identified high-school students from the region who left to pursue IT degrees elsewhere and started to invite them back to Philadelphia for summer internships. Most of the internship is with Comcast, but they farm the interns out to local start-up companies for part of the time as well, hoping to sell them on the technology community Comcast hopes to create. The idea is to hire some of them when they graduate, others later on and maybe just change the image that the remainder probably have of IT in Philadelphia.  

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We often hear how HR ought to support and enable business strategy. That idea came out of the 1980s, when we thought business strategy was a straightforward concept that included a small set of generic options, such as cost leadership or innovation. Few, if any, companies have generic strategies. What they do have are projects. Often, the people-management issues are at the heart of those projects.

At Comcast, but increasingly at other companies, human resources is not just enabling a new model of business. It is the heart of the big bet on whether that model succeeds.

Source: Human Resource Executive Online