Insight for Current and Future Business Leaders
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I’ve hired hundreds of people during my career, and my process has been pretty consistent for all of those hires: 1. Decide on the need for a person in a job. Maybe it’s a replacement for someone who left, or maybe it’s a new position that I need for a project or for an expansion [...]
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In my previous post I defined the term “Portable Expert” and I described the two secrets that make portable expertise possible. In this post I’ll give you some examples of portable expertise from my own experience, I’ll list four advantages of hiring a portable expert, and I’ll give you some tips on how to create [...]
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The traditional view of expertise is that you become an expert by spending many years working in a broad area. In gardening, for example, you gain expertise by working with different plants, experimenting with different nutrients and soils, and by making mistakes and then learning from your mistakes. Under this traditional view you are then [...]
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When I interview prospective candidates, I look for four key attributes: enthusiasm, curiosity, insight, and perspective. Here’s why: Enthusiasm Motivation is probably one of the most important attributes of a good employee, and the best kind of motivation comes from enthusiasm. Enthusiastic employees are eager to work. They volunteer for assignments. They work longer hours [...]
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There’s a certain age that kids go through when they seem to have an endless supply of questions: “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do cows make a moo sound?” “Why don’t planes fall out of the sky?” “Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green and not purple, orange and pink?” And then, as [...]
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I never hire the best person for the job, but I always try to hire the best person for my company’s future. Here’s my reasoning: A job is a task-oriented view of the business. Jobs are constantly changing because business needs are constantly changing. The best person for a job is the person who can [...]
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Someone tweeted me a question yesterday, “Is GPA [Grade Point Average] an accurate summary of how someone will be as an employee?” I checked the source of the tweet and — no surprise — it seems to be coming from a student. I don’t know the person but my guess is that he is either [...]
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Back in 1979 I put together a model of job performance to help with some process improvements we were doing at Digital Equipment Corporation. Here’s the model: I ran across the model when was going through some old papers, and I thought you’d like to see it. Here’s the explanation of the model that accompanied [...]
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I was asked this question at a recent speaking engagement in Utah, and I’ve thought about it a bit more since then. “Digital natives” are people who grew up using digital technology; they used computers as children and so they never lived in a non-computer world. “Digital immigrants” grew up in a world that didn’t [...]
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I’ve promoted scores of people into first-time manager positions. Some did well and some didn’t. Here are a few of their stories, with names changed and a few relevant facts altered to protect the individuals involved. Fred This was early in my career, and I didn’t have any experience in promoting people into management. But [...]
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Last month I did some work for a company that has manufacturing plants in a number of rural locations. The IT managers who work in those locations complained about how difficult it is to hire IT people, partly because of the locations and partly because of the image of manufacturing being a dirty industry. Here [...]
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I don’t do job interviews well, at least not as an interviewee. But I do a great job when I’m on the interviewer side of the desk. And it’s partly because I’ve learned from my mistakes as an interviewee. What a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that interviewee performance is not at [...]
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There are two basic approaches to hiring: Hiring like a jigsaw puzzle, and Hiring like an assembly line. Hiring like an assembly line is more common. When you work on an assembly line you have very little variation in what you do. One particular task might be to put a bolt into a hole and [...]
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