If you’re talking with cofounders about launching a new business, you’re fundamentally recruiting someone to take the job of partnering with you for the next decade. I see a lot of founders who do less due diligence than I think ideal before making that long-term commitment. Just knowing one another for a long time is...
[Continue Reading]Are you hiring a cultural fit? Do you actually want to?
Who should you hire: the superstar with great skills who feels like a poor fit with the culture, or the person with weaker skills but who fits in culturally? Even though I believe in hiring the stranger, cultural fit really matters. I once had an interview set up with a candidate who looked strong on...
[Continue Reading]Partnering Strategy, Subcontractors, and Uber
You can’t hire in courtesy and managerial competence; it has to flow from company management outwards. I’m traveling to Atlanta and Boston this month, so starting to plan my logistics. Part of what Uber’s customers pay for is an easy-to-use layer across multiple cab services in multiple cities. I don’t mind too much paying them...
[Continue Reading]The Speed of Trust Review
A while ago I read Stephen M.R. Covey’s book, The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything . As you would guess, Stephen M.R. is the son of Dr. Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the extremely influential book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The heritage shows. Speed of Trust is written...
[Continue Reading]United 93 and Kitty Genovese: Courage in the Workplace
The courageous actions of passengers on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11 flew in the face of a long-standing contention in social science circles that people won’t put themselves in danger to right a wrong, e.g., the famous Kitty Genovese case. This fact prompted Monica Worline, a professor of organizational behavior at Emory...
[Continue Reading]Connecting the Corporate Dots: Social Networks Reveal How Employees and Companies Operate
The Wharton newsletter reports: “With the recent disclosure of wiretapping by the National Security Agency and the booming success of sites like MySpace and Friendster, social networking is much in the news today.But serious interest in social networks can also be found among academics, consultants and corporations seeking to deepen their knowledge of how companies...
[Continue Reading]Book Summary: The Six Sigma Way
(book summary written by Scott Lichtman): I recently borrowed a copy of The Six Sigma Way, a book by Pande, Neuman and Cavanagh (consultants to GE, Allied Signal and other corporations). While the book and concept have been around several years, the steps it recommends for services firms are fresh and valuable today. Six Sigma...
[Continue Reading]New Age Project Management: Making It Happen
I just read and enjoyed Mackenzie Kyle’s Making It Happen, a simple (but not simplistic) overview of basic project management, in the form of a fable. James Warren has posted what is essentially a summary of this school of project management philosophy: New Age Project Management....
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