One of the downsides of scheduling shoulder surgery for this Friday, (Happy Valentine’s Day to me!) is that the recovery time will mean no plane travel for quite a bit afterwards. That’s why these past six weeks have had triple as much travel as usual, and I can announce with confidence that I have found my limit! Traveling during winter is always the roughest, but this pace would be killer anytime during the year: San Diego, Louisville, St. Louis, Hartford, Dallas, Orlando, Indianapolis and Batesville, Indiana.

I log the above excuse to throw myself in front of this blog’s jury as to why the missives have trailed off as of late. There are so many great stories to tell, but I’m struggling to get them all written for you quickly. There’s a pork chop in Louisville (Village Anchor) that I’m still thinking about weeks later. There’s an HR leader in San Diego concerned with Change Management. There are changes happening daily in the private exchange space and we will get all those stories told soon.

Today, as I head to 70-degree Florida (a trip I could not safely tell anyone about in snow and ice encrusted Kansas City), I’m sharing my 14” wide seat with a brand-new retiree who’s excited to have worked his last day. Needless to say, he is not travel weary! He is headed to Florida for fun and sun, not work like yours truly. He’s retiring a little early and looking ahead to a downshifted life. He used to work in marketing for Blockbuster Video so his last several years have not been the best, but it was just enough with some consulting work to get him to this figurative (and literal?) line in the sand.

We had an interesting discussion about his former employer sparked by an editorial he was reading on the plane and I thought you’d be interested in our conclusions. After all, Blockbuster was a fascinating employer to watch in both success and failure. It was launched in this generation’s lifetime but didn’t survive to see the next. What was most interesting to us is that there seems to be a “downsizing” of employers as well as the rough stuff going on with their employees. Think of it: what was Blockbuster replaced by? Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Streaming replaced renting (and most of us who faced $14 late fees were happy to see the transition).

But the new employers don’t employ as many people as the companies they’re replacing. Netflix has only about 2,000 employees, which puts them right in the mid-market. Blockbuster, at its heyday, was an enterprise-level operation with over 60,000 folks. That’s a huge difference in workforce. Certainly, the efficiencies of streaming over brick and mortar businesses are well documented, but does this example of market destruction and replacement mean that HR is going to be supporting very different employers on average in the future? Are large enterprise employers going to become rarer as the employment agreement in America has seemed to shift away from job security? And from an HR Tech perspective, are the ERP systems (Workday, Oracle, etc.) going to have to move down market to simply find the same number of customers?

It seems that we are under a macro-level transition of the workforce that all of us in the HR and HR Tech world are going to have to support. A recent headline has Google becoming the #2 employer in the United States by market capitalization. What’s most interesting to me is that they have only 45,000 employees compared to the more traditional employers who have held this spot before (think Exxon’s 79,900 employees Google just knocked out of the #2 spot or General Electric’s 300,000 strong workforce!) If the largest employers are replaced by smaller and more nimble workforces, we’re going to have a very different HR marketplace. Shouldn’t we see fewer of the multi-year, million-dollar, ERP odysseys and more of the best-of-breed, Just-in-Time type procurement? Will this be the rise of the “plug-in” systems who dominate a specific functional area and interface well to other systems? This will enable a more efficient response by employers, but will create more demand for data integration specialists at the expense of PeopleSoft consultants!

I know my crystal ball is fuzzy at best. In fact, with sun and sand nearby, I’m lucky I’m able to think at all! However, this vivid example of change in employer size drives home to me that we are in the midst of a dynamic economy and that nothing stands still. We must be ready to help!