Last weekend, I attended my 10th NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four in Houston, TX.  Here are some quick observations:

• Houston is not a great site for the Final Four.  It is very spread out, forcing attendees to rely heavily on cab rides to get around town.   Further, the cab drivers we had were very unfamiliar with the city, and at least 3 times I had to search my smartphone for the address, and even had to enter one address into the cab driver's GPS.  That did not convey a positive view of the city.   Further, the sprawl of Houston made for less of a Final Four feel.  When you are in San Antonio or Indianapolis, the event is much more compact and you see fans everywhere.  Thus, it creates much more buzz and excitement for the event.  Rotate the event in San Antonio, Indianapolis and New Orleans and be done with it.
• The stature of the Final Four attracts a number of current and former athletes.  Until you see professional athletes up close, you never get a sense of how different they are.  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?  Tall.   Really tall.  Really, really tall.  Charles Barkley?  Huge - both vertically and horizontally.  Imagine if you could easily identify talent as easily as you could choose height.  Then again, Doug Flutie looks like a weekend softball player.

With sports on the mind, it is time to hype Thursday's HR Happy Hour at 7p.m. Central:

You can learn all you need to know about recruiting, talent management, effective team dynamics, managing star performers, aligning compensation with performance, and succession planning from studying the history of the National Basketball Association. Don't believe it? Where else but in big-time sports can you see the effects of talent assessment, recruiting, leadership, and employee engagement played out, in public, under the spotlight, every day of the year? What players to draft, which ones to develop, which ones to cut loose, and how to build the right mix of personalities and talent to achieve team goals are the primary concern of all sports franchises, and quite honestly, they are the same concerns of organizations in all types of industries. Sure, you might think this show is an excuse for Steve to assemble a bunch of his friends to talk about sports, and you'd be partially right. But sports offers a lens to most the of most critical issues you deal with every day in HR, Recruiting, and Management, so this week we'll try to make the connection. And we will also talk about the Final Four, the NBA Playoffs, and Moneyball. Joining us on the show will be The 8 Man Rotation dream team - Kris Dunn, Lance Haun, Tim Sackett, and Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak. It should be a great show and I hope you will join us.

This past Monday, I was fortunate to appear on Bryan Wempen's daily blog talk radio show, "Drive Thru HR," to promote the Wisconsin SHRM State Conference, currently going on in Appleton, WI. The conversation turned to the topic of social media.

Of late, social media has become a growing component of the conference experience. The 2010 SHRM Annual Conference had their first annual blog squad to highlight conference activities, and a social media lounge. Illinois SHRM, HRFlorida, and Ohio SHRM had bloggers and heavy activity on the Twitter stream. As expected the HR Technology Conference was rife with social media experience with a number of bloggers and the HR Happy Hour. HR Southwest is starting up soon and it, too, will take a stab at carving up a part of the social media pie. You even see wonderful companies staking out a claim in this area, such as the Stelzner/Ruettimann powerhouse, "Voice of HR."

However, two major state HR conferences are going on this week, with relatively little fanfare: the 2010 Michigan SHRM Conference and the aforementioned 2010 WISHRM conference. While I can't speak for Michigan, WISHRM10 has over 1100 attendees, exhibitors, speakers, and guests....all with limited promotion on social media avenues. No major bloggers....no social media sessions....a relatively quiet Twitter stream.

So, I posed a number of HR bingo-type questions on Bryan's show: What is the return on all this social media activity? Is it creating a buzz? And is this buzz creating increased revenue to the state council? Are more people attending? Is it creating interest for future years of the conference? What is the bottom line of this activity?

Wisconsin SHRM enters its first full day of conference activity today. 1100 individuals will be busy enjoying the activities and learning, oblivious to the social media world's comments.

Tonight, I will be one of the featured guests on the HR Happy Hour. The topic? "Social Recruiting, Sports, and Upside." As avid readers of this blog (all three of you) know, I have made a number of sports-related posts, including one about the research I am doing on team management theory and what happens when key top personnel leave the organization while the CEO remains intact.

With that in mind, here is a far from comprehensive list of interesting and relevant sports-related books and articles that has influenced the HR Happy Hour crew for this evening:

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis: Outlines the story of Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A's, and how he tried to battle the significant disparity in payroll amongst major league baseball teams by looking for new talent metrics that allowed him to gain a competitive advantage over other teams.

The No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis: An interesting article about Shane Battier, a forward for the Houston Rockets, and how his significant contributions to team success can't be measured by current statistics.

Basketball on Paper:Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis by Dean Oliver: "A journey "inside the numbers" for an exceptional set of statistical tools and rules that can help explain the winning, or losing, ways of a basketball team. Basketball on Paper doesn’t diagram plays or explain how players get in shape, but instead demonstrates how to interpret player and team performance."

The New Bill James Historical Abstract by Bill James - As a kid, I looked forward to three things in March - , March Madness, the new season of Topps baseball trading cards and the publication of the Bill James Baseball Abstract. In the historical abstract, Bill James provides his unique perspective on many of baseball's debates, such as who is the greatest baseball player of all time.

The Wages of Wins by Dave Berri, Martin Schmidt, and Stacey Brook, and Stumbling On Wins by Dave Berri and Martin Schmidt: A Freakonomics approach to many sports issues that attempts to challenge many of the preconceptions fans have regarding sports.

Sports and Their Fans by Kevin Quinn: "Though Americans spend more than $25 billion on sports and sporting events, this book argues that the influence of sports on our lives is even more profound than this huge figure would seem to suggest. Exploring such topics as the role of sports in the creation of mass culture, cheating, the abuse of illegal drugs, the strange and fascinating role that numbers play in sporting events, and the future of spectator sport, this book surveys the outsized impact that sports have on American culture."

The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz: A fascinating look at the growth of baseball statistics, from the origin of the box score, to today's box score innovations (BABIP or VORP, anyone?).

Mathletics by Wayne Winston: As the name suggests, a very math-oriented approach to sports (and we know how much HR people love math, right PunkRockHR?).

The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons: Bill Simmons writes the popular ESPN column, The Sports Guy, and if you attended HREvolution, his book was the major point of the session, "The Secret" led by Steve Boese, Tim Sackett, and Lance Haun.

Life on the Run by Bill Bradley: Former Senator and New York Knicks star details 20 days in a basketball season.

The Glory of Their Times by Laurence Ritter: An evocative look at some of baseball's early stars.

Chase the Game by Pat Jordan: This out-of-print classic provides a great story of 3 HS ballers from Connecticut in the 70s and a legendary game. This was 'Hoop Dreams' before Hoop Dreams.

Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam: One of Bill Simmons' favorites details the season of the 1979-1980 Portland Trailblazers.

The Natural by Bernard Malamud: A totally different ending than the movie, which you will either hate or love.

The Smart Money by Michael Konik: A fascinating, inside look at the sports gambling business.

"Federer as Religious Experience" and "The String Theory" by David Foster Wallace: Somehow I doubt that tennis will come up during HR Happy Hour, but the late, lamented author and former tennis player, David Foster Wallace writes two compelling pieces on the stringed sport.

Happy reading

: