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..