Tag Archives: skills

Is it true that to do the best work, you need to hire the best people?

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I’ve read a few posts by prominent Silicon Valley people that say this.

Here’s a quote about hiring from Slava Akhmechet at RethinkDB:

I look to Bell Labs for inspiration. At its peak, the folks at Bell Labs developed radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the C programming language, and the UNIX operating system. These are the kinds of people you should be trying to hire. Think Dennis Ritchie before he developed the C language. Think Claude Shannon before he invented information theory. When in doubt, ask yourself: “would this person have been good enough to be hired for a junior position at Bell Labs during its peak?” If the answer isn’t a resounding yes, it’s a No Hire.

Joel Spolsky also stresses the importance of hiring good people. Similarly, HR consultants often stress the importance of hiring only the best. As the Boston Consulting Group puts it, A players hire other A players, B players hire C players and C players hire F’s. Are they right to focus so much attention on hiring only outstanding people?

It’s clear that if you are trying to sort through an applicant pool, you need to get the best possible sense of what an applicant will look like once they’re hired. It’s not good to make mistakes in your interviews, or fail to interview candidates thoroughly enough. Two, it’s possible that people will be biased toward hiring too low quality employees, and emphasizing hiring good people will help HR raise hiring standards.

It’s also true that in a startup, any one individual has a much greater effect on the final shape of the company than at Wells Fargo. So startups and small firms might be right to exercise lots of caution in hiring. Furthermore, the best programmers can be five times as productive as average programmers.

But as Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer point out, it’s a myth that the best companies are best because they have the best people. Usually the best companies have great systems that bring out the best in people.

Take a look at urban poor schools that dramatically outperform their peers and even richer schools, like the KIPP schools, or Jaime Escalante’s calculus program, which brought a bunch of kids from inner city LA through Calc BC and sent many onto the nation’s most prestigious colleges. Where so many others have seen kids who were unwilling to learn, they have succeeded and turned ordinary street kids into superstars. Escalante and KIPP don’t have the luxury of hiring the best people, like Philips Exeter, Wharton, or RethinkDB. Instead they built a great system that brings out the best in their students, which is far more impressive than doing great things with people who are already great.

Another example is Toyota, which has such a great production system that the upper management’s role is largely to simply support the system. Sutton and Pfeffer write, “One study showed that Toyota was the only major automobile company where a change in CEO had no effect on performance. The system is so robust that changing CEOs at Toyota is a lot like changing lightbulbs; there is little noticeable effect between the old one and the new one.

The supply of talented people isn’t fixed. Furthermore, our ability to measure talent is limited at best; people have off days, or bloom late, like Kurt Warner, for example.

Furthermore, if you’re a firm that can’t afford to hire the top 10%, implying to your staff that their ability level is fixed would be disastrous. As Columbia University researcher Carol Dweck has shown, mindset is extremely important; people who believe intelligence is fixed become worried about hiding their true level of cleverness, where those who believe it’s malleable work on their skills and continuously improve. If your staff became too enamored of the first mindset, they wouldn’t be doing their best work.

In summary, bad systems are more damaging than bad people, and good systems can turn average workers into stars. Like anything else, hiring workers has tradeoffs; with the best staff come long periods of unfilled positions, increased search costs, and high salary, etc. The importance of hiring “only the best” is probably overstated; clearly hiring good staff is important but it may not be crucial.

If you want to be a consultant, what skills should you learn?

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Ideally, consulting is about giving firms better strategies, and to some degree consultants have to provide useful information and strategies to companies to stay in business. So you’re going to need a basic level of intelligence and analytical skill. Microeconomics is a useful framework for understanding how people make decisions, thinking about things in terms of cost-benefit analysis, thinking at the margin, etc. Accounting is also important, because you need to be able to look at a firm’s books and get an idea of what’s going on at the firm. Also I’m guessing that being knowledgeable about the world, having some idea of what strategies are good, is helpful.

Additionally, a lot of your job as a consultant is selling your services and acting knowledgeable. Many people are stuck in Dilbert-like situations and will look at you as a knight in shining armor. For this you’re going to need to be friendly, personable, and high status; you’re going to need to sell yourself as an Answer Guy, that will come in when everything else has failed, increase profits and make everyone happy. People don’t really practice these skills very much, but you can learn more about them by filming yourself, reading Dale Carnegie or Neil Strauss’s The Game, practicing conversational skills, or practicing conversation in front of a mirror.

From a hiring perspective, Bain and McKinsey and Deloitte and BCG and the other consulting firms are going to get a lot of applicants that sound exactly the same; you have to have something that lets you stand out from the crowd. You can only do this with your GPA to a limited degree; to score a home run, you should work on your impressiveness; on doing things so unique and cool that other people find it hard to imagine that they could have done the same if only they’d put in enough time. The only person I know who talks about this regularly is Cal Newport, so start there if you’re clueless. Maybe impressiveness predicts how people will eventually do in a job and maybe it doesn’t, but it definitely will help you get through the gate.

Note that it doesn’t take much money to learn most of these skills. There are tons of courses online, and there’s the library, of course. There’s also probably a big gap between the skills you need to have to get in the door and the skills most relevant to consultants on a daily basis.

I’m not a consultant so these are just my best guesses. If you are a consultant, which skills have come in the most handy? Which skills were most important for you to get your foot in the door?

Fall 2008 Semester Review

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I’m back home after ending my first semester at Claremont McKenna College. I was pretty unhappy on the drive home, but when I put the whole thing in perspective I think I had a great semester. You wish you could have had it.

Positives: Social scientists and economists recently have made breakthroughs into learning what makes us happy, what makes us productive, and what attracts people to each other. Learning to use time efficiently, to avoid emotional rollercoasters, and to deal with people are probably more important than the academic material. In no particular order:

I learned how to brew beer and started learning the tango, waltz and polka in two hours a week of dance instruction. We brewed three batches and I finished 5th place in an open tango competition. I learned how to use the weight room to become stronger and put on weight. I gained eleven pounds but stopped working out when finals approached and lost five.

Good grades are the result of a good process, not any inherent measure of intelligence. Some things that helped me get good grades:

  • I kept organized for the whole semester. I wrote down due dates and appointments in a planner, and used it to plan out schedules of when I would get things done. I kept a binder for every class, with dividers for lecture notes, homework, handouts, and tests and essays.
  • With a few exceptions I didn’t work for more than 2 hours at a time; when I wasn’t getting work done I went to bed or did other things. I studied no more than 4 hours a day as finals approached, and scored above 95% on every exam, just by starting studying earlier and working efficiently.
  • I sat in the front row for every class. I would estimate staying organized is worth half a letter grade, and sitting in the front row is worth a quarter of a letter grade.

I aligned my desire to earn money with my desire for good work habits. When I wanted to ensure I got something done I would tell a friend I owed them a donation or a sandwich if I didn’t finish an essay on time, or go to the gym. I also bet my parents that I would wear my retainer for 18 hours a day. The retainer makes me look and sound a little childish but it’s straightening my teeth and I only have to wear it for half a year. These sort of bets are extremely cheap arbitrage – good grades and straight teeth are worth more later (in the job/marriage market) than they are now, so a small incentive now can pay big dividends later. Often these bets were win-win propositions – if I won I got my essay done on time, but if I lost I created a social opportunity, having to buy someone a sandwich.

I tried out for, and failed to make, the varsity basketball team. I was in the gym for nearly three hours a day for the first six weeks of the semester, lifting, shooting, running sprints, and playing pickup against the other varsity players. I wanted to make the team so that I could have a group of friends, signal quality to others, compete every day, and improve my basketball skill. My fitness was excellent and I improved at defense, dribbling, and driving. Fortunately, by the time the tryout came around I had enough other things going on around campus that I was (I told myself, anyway) indifferent between making the team and getting cut. The coach wanted me to become a student manager but I refused – I am slowly learning that just because someone wants me to do something doesn’t mean I have an obligation to do it. I would have probably accepted the offer a year ago.

While I was trying out for the basketball team I was sober for six weeks. My mantra was constant competition; every time I saw a player drink I was winning. I learned for myself that the social benefit from alcohol is imaginary, and that having a good time is based more on your attitude than your state of inebriation.

I maintained good spirits and a social attitude well into December, which I hadn’t done in my previous semesters at college. I learned to be more careful about the signals I sent to others. Claremont McKenna’s small campus was a big help. I couldn’t help running into people that I knew. I tried to call friends ahead of time to get meals so I wouldn’t eat alone, which worked when I remembered to do it.

I did not waste too much time. I had a rule not to check my email or RSS before noon. I let feeds, emails, texts and friend requests accumulate, dealing with them in my own time, rather than read and respond instantly to everything.

I started writing againafter two years of Penn lecture classes (Total writing output between May ’07 and October ’08: 2 crappy application essays). The only way to become good at something is to practice (with feedback) as much as you can. Writing is no exception; the more I write the easier it becomes to write. I blogged for my Gov 20 Honors class nearly every day, and when I started to get a “You should write about this!” thought bubble for non-political topics I revived my own blog. Every essay or short paper I write starts from an outline, which helped me stay focused and get work done.

Negatives: The negatives are of the “idle Tuesday” variety and don’t merit mention, which is something I’ve learned this semester too.