I was very much taken recently with a comment made by Charles Elvin of the Open University at a PM-organised round table, subsequently quoted in the magazine: “I am a business person who uses learning for business transformation, and not a learning person who hopes the business listens to me.”

Regular readers will know why this view would resonate with me. I feel passionately that HR professionals need to put their organisation first and HR second, in thought, word and deed. Those who ask how they can make the case for HR are posing completely the wrong question, acting like a workman armed with a hammer looking for a nail to hit.

Rather we need to recognise that HR is a means to a business end. In this post-recession world, where concepts such as “trust” are examined with a jaundiced eye, we need to pass the “well, you would say that, wouldn’t you” test. So don’t seek to make the case for HR, but rather prove the value to your organisation of investing in people.

Throughout history, the most high-minded, garret-dwelling artists have accepted that, if they are to survive, someone must buy their wares. Think of Rembrandt painting extra faces into his masterpiece The Nightwatch simply because he was paid 30 guilders per portrait. Indeed, it’s alleged that he replaced the face of one merchant with another simply because the second customer offered to gazump the first. Michelangelo downed tools at least twice mid-Sistine Chapel, refusing to work until his outstanding invoices were met, and US songwriter Johnny Mercer, when asked which came first of the words or the music, bluntly replied: “The phone call.”

Hopefully what we do helps the greater good, but we have to persuade others of that fact. All effective salespeople know to sell the benefits of their product rather than its features: the “so what” rather than the “what”. In commerce, a solution only has value if someone is willing to exchange something else of value, such as money, for it. Therefore all HR processes, policies, protocols and procedures must have a business purpose. All HR professionals must show business-savvy, hard-wiring what we do to the wider organisational context. Here I must declare myself a fully-paid-up member of the Best Fit Club, in both argument and implementation. You’ll find printer-jamming reams of “best practice” on the web – including the CIPD’s very comprehensive site. Yet simply importing wholesale a standardised set of initiatives often proves, in my humble experience, unhelpful, unwieldy and unnecessary.

Moreover, it’s impractical where time and resources are limited, and surely a unique organisation with unique issues requires a unique HR solution. An ever-changing environment demands absolute pragmatism and flexibility. Twenty years ago, Michael Porter, the strategy guru, showed that simply aping the skills of others doesn’t create competitive advantage.

Fortunately, for those in HR required to navigate uncharted waters, the words of Jaws author Peter Benchley offer a guide: “You don’t have to swim faster than the shark, just faster than the guy next to you.”