GETTING PAST NO: "GO TO THE BALCONY"

http://www.tsne.org/site/c.ghLUK3PCLoF/b.5938253/k.75BE/Consultants_Corner__The_First_Step_in_Resolving_Conflict_Go_to_the_Balcony.htm

STRETCH TO WIN

A major problem with in-house hiring and recruiting, generally? Reverting to a mean. 

We are living in an elastic world: Stretched continually by technology, social disruption and sovereign risk. In countless analyses, thinkers and policy-makers admit this proposition.

When will this zeitgeist transfer, however, to our institutions of learning and business/political activity?


SEE THE WORLD AFRESH: AND LOOK FOR 'NEW'

The best performance, I am convinced, comes from stretching others. Necessarily, one who is stretched is stretched and "stressed" beyond his or her horizon. The outcome is less predictable than a bell curve can distribute, yet the upside is evident. However, our rule-focussed society is still composed atomically, as if we were completely 'efficient' or inefficient autonomous entities. Efficient markets are, well, nonsense. Not completely; just sufficiently discomposed to produce dangerous hiring practices.

Real growth, especially in this 'New Digital Age' (to borrow from Google's Schmidt and Cohen) is organic. Pure and simple. Linear hiring can only fail..

OLD HABITS DIE HARD: SO KILL THEM!!

Something like 70% of the American workforce - once the powerhouse of the modern world - are disengaged. Some 30% actively ~ these souls would happily knife their boss given half the chance.

And performance, over time, is therefore lacklustre; hiring is haphazard.

When will hiring managers, politicians and thought leaders realise? Your best hires don't revert to a mean; they instantiate the 'Flynn Effect' by increasing collective imagination and capacity to deliver lasting success. And in an interconnected globe, success will exist in various dimensions - financial, environmental and socio-political. 

If you don't create a team of Golden Geese, you almost guarantee dislocation.


HIRE PEOPLE TO 'HIRE' LONG-TERM: EAT AND DREAM

We should go beyond the concept of 'inputs'. People are people and great people will drive the future. If they're put to work with other wondrous people. If you hire short-term, you get the mean - an insidious reversion. If you hire short and long, you yourself must work smarter and bolder, you also shift the curve further toward the unbounded-boundary ~ wherever that is.

And you keep other people in a job..





 

WONT TO FORGIVE ~ His Better Angels {"All at once, as with a sudden smile of Heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood"}

“Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at himself. “Methought the germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xqYoz5ioHs

“Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and make it as it had never been!

SOLUTION TO THE 'SUCCESSION CRISIS' AND CANADIAN LITIGATION? ~~~ A REPUBLIC!!!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2266170/A-crisis-leadership-western-world.html

TRUTH IS HARD TO COME BY - Crisis in Leadership and The Social Contract

Throughout the world, we face an absurd situation: In the sense of existential absurdity. As Umair Haque suggests, our "leaders" have failed to perform. They strut, and they strain.. And they produce very little. This is a sad state of affairs - and I think behind the outbreak in social unrest, East and West. The Social Contract is fracturing. After all, highly qualified graduates and post-graduates cannot find jobs; entrepreneurs cannot obtain seed funding. In Australia, moreover, we are burdened by ever increasing regulation, cynicism and business malaise.

The electorate is force fed minimalist sound bites regarding peripheral issues like the Asylum seeker "problem": the problem is lagging productivity and a falling, ageing population in desperate need of diverse skill-holders with a regional outlook. [Tony Abbott's Churchillian appeal to the Anglosphere is quintessential farce].

Under any honest assessment, our political class would not be entitled to hold their jobs. They have reflected precious little in the way of value and integrity, and have delivered very little in terms of taking our societies in the direction they must now take to avoid stagnation. Properly differentiated, they would be branded as "dud" performers and removed from their posts. But, forgiveness extended, governed and governing have to reestablish the social bond.

We in the West, I contest, must reassert the primacy of service, our Western roots indeed being Judeo-Christian reciprocity and humility. For sure Cujus regio eius religio, or non religio as you please, but our governing bodies primarily owe an obligation to those they lead. We can, and MUST do better...

RISK AND REWARD? TELLING IT AS IT (SEEMS TO BE) ~ It Just Ain't That Great

FREE STYLE INTERVIEWING: THE DILEMMA SUBJOINED

I have interviewed for an executive assistant and insitutional banking Middle Office role recently. I must say I have been impressed by the recruiters. They were candid and sympathetic. So why is it so hard out there to be rewarded for taking risks?

AMERICAN 'DREAMTIME': WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DREAM?

HBR published another Niall Ferguson column in its latest edition. And Ferguson lamented the state of the 'land of the free'. According to Ferguson, the only stakeholders celebrating the legal system "are the lawyers". As I have written previously, law practioners' cultural departure from 'strict and complete legalism' has presaged a deterioration in the overall standard of governance. (Some) lawyers are paid too much, for work that is of little real value: Government's institutional footprint has grown, without concomitant expansion in the quality of impartial service provision. What happpened to 'by the people, for the people'????

THE LUMBERING BEHEMOTH?

This link just about says it all ~ candidates are told to brand themselves, to think big and reach out. But is risk rewarded? Really? REALLLY!??? http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130708140616-12571855-get-fired?trk=tod-home-art-large_0 It seems to me candour must be the first and last line of defence when it comes to job creation and sructural change. Innovation cannot occur in a vacuum; especially when our societies still live in a bubble of our own making. Google has taken the lead by critiquing its hiring practices and admitting to the 'seat-of-their-pants' dillemma in hiring and empowering great people to do great things. As Scott C, founding CEO at Startup America quipped, 'Could one person at Kodak have changed the company's fate? Stay nimble in your mindset, and imagine that your actions will make or break the company's chances of staying afloat'. Surely, though, Winning! as a society and a global community should mean more than slumbering survival.. IF THE ENGINE IS SPUTTERING, CAN'T WE RESTART THE ENGINE, OR, EVEN, GET A NEW ENGINE?

TWO IS BETTER THAN ONE ~ You & Life by the Hand

Take Life by Both Hands: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

"People who have stumbled through the experience just described will of course tend to retell it as though they had known the difficulties all along and have bravely gone to meet them - fare bella figura is a strong human propensity. While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian's finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede - in fact we find it intolerable to imagine - that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning, rational behavior, and the successful response to a clearly perceived challenge. Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth"...