When we were in Singapore, we were invited to an official ceremony called “A Memorandum of Understanding” between bodies representing two sides of the organization that often don’t really understand each other.

The SHRI (Singapore Human Resource Institute) and the ACCA (largest international accountancy body with 110,000 members and active in more than 170 countries) signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This summit meeting between HR and Accounting was engineered by an ex-head of HR that was trained as an accountant first and understood both sides.

An interesting remark was spoken during the introduction by Allen Blewitt, CEO of ACCA. He said that one of their studies revealed that female entrepreneurs tended to perform better. One explanation he suggested was probably the fact that females in general are better people managers!

Again this is the beginning of a trend that we see appearing. Some universities have started to provide programs to educate people across the board. Take for example the Exeter University program where ACCA played an active role.

We believe that when the finance profession starts to understand the levers of values that HR and specifically talent management are providing, they will only have one option: devote more attention to talent management!