Hiring
Hiring is for Lovers: Designing Organizations for Creativity and Impact
The importance of building an exceptional team is sometimes minimized by creative business owners. It is a “secondary task” unrelated, at least superficially, to the work we deliver to clients, often triggered under duress by an event: a huge new client project to ramp up for, a round of VC funding, the opening of a [...]
Your Mission Statement Doesn’t Have to Suck
It’s true. It’s not set in stone. If it sucks, change it. A poorly crafted mission statement can actually prevent you from reaching people. It means that there’s a fundamental flaw in your ability to communicate just why it is you exist. And since you should be communicating this information with everything you do, it’s [...]
An Ecology of Generosity
The greatest business epiphany I’ve had over the last few years did not come from reading an influential business book, attending a conference, undergoing a marketing campaign or guest blogging. The activity that has had the greatest impact on my business has been purchasing the services and supporting the work of people whose stuff I [...]
How to Foster “Creative Recombination”
There are two unfortunate habits of business owners when building out a team. The first is to look for people with comparable qualities and a similar worldview. The second is to hire whomever is available, typically someone you know. A hard lesson is that strategic team-building is less about relationship, experience or skills (though all [...]
How to Know When It’s Time to Build Your Team
One of the most common questions I get from business owners is this: “How do I know when it’s the right time to add to my team?” The question itself always reminds me of my small collection of kiddie books-on-record which I played on my plastic Fisher Price suitcase record player. When you hear the [...]
Serial Polygamy: Shane Pearlman on Distributed Teams and the Freelance Workforce
A few days before the new year, I had the opportunity to chat with Shane Pearlman (@justlikeair), co-founder of the user interface design firm, Shane and Peter, evangelist for freelancers, expert on distributed teams and surfer. I wanted to speak to him because I admire his work and also because his demeanor is non-threatening, practical [...]
Virtually Attended: Thoughts on the Net:Work Conference
I could not make it out to SF for GigaOm’s Net:Work Conference. I did attend large portions of it virtually and wanted to comment on some of my own takeaways. In GigaOm’s words: Net:Work is “a new conference that highlights the opportunities that broadband and mobility have created for connecting work and workers and the [...]
Give Good Interview: Shotgun Tips
Note: If you like this article, check out Hiring Gold. Interviewing someone for a job is a curious skill. It’s like cleaning a loaded gun. You want to be meticulous about each part or you might accidentally blow your head off. OK, it’s not actually lethal. But it is a multifaceted skill. It’s intuitive in [...]
The best definition of hiring I’ve read (and I’m stealing it)
Hiring: 1. The art of finding the best people to help you push your idea forward. 2. One of the biggest challenges of managing and growing a creative team. (via The 99 Percent) What a great perspective shift from plugging a gap to finding the best advocate for your ideas. It’s much more fun to [...]
Dance Craze or Growth Strategy?: The Wagon Wheel, The All-Day Buffet, The Understudy and The Sherpa
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re amidst a tidal wave of work independence. So many people are defecting and throwing out the rulebook. Just today I read about Marian Schembari, someone I follow on twitter who took out a facebook ad to find a job in publishing. The strategy was so successful that she decided [...]
