AKA: If your head’s comfortably in the sand, just fire yourself.
A finance journalist, and reader of this occasional newsletter,
called last week to ask what I thought about the $700 billion bailout plan. The
conversation quickly expanded into a discussion of, "What happened?" He
was referring to the larger picture, as in “What happened to us (the United States)?”
Basically, he was asking what happened to Chrysler, Wall Street, Main Street, you
and me, etc. In fact, as I write this on Monday the Dow is down 400 (four h-u-n-d-r-e-d)
points.
Well obviously, it's complex. But I think a lot of it stems from
9/11 which was so classic it now seems grimly inevitable. I wrote about the tactic
in a corporate setting in a Corpwar way back in 2003. Al-Zawahiri, one of Osama
bin Laden's key strategists, knew the only way to bring us down, arguably the most
“powerful” civilization in history, was to
help us bring ourselves down. Aside from our spirit, America is also a business
and as such we “behave” like a business. And all businesses have their weaknesses
which are too often discernable to our competition (e.g. al-Zawahiri, or picture
your own competition—there really is no difference). So al-Zawahiri helped come
up with this cheap little plan, pretty crude really, and sent a huge arrow dead
center into our economic heart. And, let's face it, it's been pretty rough sailing
ever since. And if you don't think so, you and I don't live on the same planet.
If you think your business is any different you are part of the
problem. You need to think better. You need to think stronger. We all work for our
stakeholders. We OWE them our best, now more than ever, because things are starting
to fall apart. And if we don't give them our best we should be replaced. Period.
This is no time for dull, obtuse, thinking folks.
I've taken on the role of new business development for a candidate
interviewing company (technically a spin-off) and have noticed a couple of alarming
things. To put this in context the service does screening interviews of a client's
"short list" of an open job's candidates and makes those recordings available
to the hiring group so they can efficiently comment on whether or not they think
a candidate would be a good fit to the position, the team, the company, etc. Pretty
simple.
Now, managers that use the service typically love it because
of the time savings but, conversely, some really hate it (actually loathe everything
about it). When I drill in to understand why, it's usually because "things
work well enough as they are". All I can say is, “Stop right there.” This is the kind of thinking that some clever guy
in a corporate cave somewhere (a.k.a. your competition, some of whom you probably
aren't even aware of) is waiting to exploit. This mindset insists "things are
cool enough now, we'll survive". Really? Think again. If you're sitting around
thinking your business is some sort of invincible fort I GUARANTEE you somebody,
somewhere, is x-raying your walls to find weak spots. They are focusing on YOU,
trying to find YOUR Twin Towers. And we all know the potential result.
Another thing I've noticed because of the interviewing service
is the quality of many of the candidates (the resumes are supplied by the client's
HR department, or retained recruiting companies, and we have no control over what
we get). I do some of the interviews myself and listen to many of the others and
I'm often shocked at what I hear. We typically interview 4-5 candidates per position
and often 1 or 2, sometimes even 3 of these candidates are pretty poorly qualified
for the position (even internal candidates up for internal transfer or a succession
move). Sometimes egregiously so.
It's just so vivid in the recording that they can't
do the job you have to ask yourself, how did these people get on the short list?
Sometimes, of course, our interviewing process lets somebody really shine that looks
weak on paper (that's great when it happens, by the way), but more often we uncover
expensive hiring mistakes waiting to happen. Often their only real skill is knowing
how to game the hiring system. Thank god people like us help weed them out.
Look, you need to impress everybody around you, everybody in
your company, that there are barbarians at the corporate gate, because functionally
there really are. This is no time for lazy, yesterday thinking because competitors
that need to eat are hunkered down trying to figure out how to steal your food.
This is capitalism folks. Your competition doesn't care if you
starve to death.
Think hard about it...
