Teams
Hiring for Creativity: The Truth About Job Boards
Note: The “Hiring for Creativity” series of posts is leading up to the launch of Hiring Gold, the 8-week plan for hiring awesome people. Sign up to be notified when it’s ready here. Job boards are every hiring manager’s friend, until they’re your worst enemy. When you post a job online it’s a crapshoot. You’re [...]
Hiring for Creativity: The 5 Best Hiring Articles on the Web
Note: The “Hiring for Creativity” series of posts is leading up to the launch of Hiring Gold, the 8-week plan for hiring awesome people. Sign up to be notified when it’s ready here. I read a lot. I like good writing and I like to bookmark. Every day I see a new article on the [...]
Hiring for Creativity: What Kind of Person Do I Need Anyway?
Note: The “Hiring for Creativity” series of posts is leading up to the launch of Hiring Gold, the 8-week plan for hiring awesome people. Sign up to be notified when it’s ready here. “What kind of person do I need anyway?” It’s an important question because many times business owners simply hire wrong. It’s not [...]
‘Organization Design is for Lovers’ was Accepted to Future15 for SXSWi 2012
Coming to Austin in March is my talk ‘Organization Design is for Lovers.’ It was accepted for Future15, SXSW Interactive’s TED-style short-form solo presentation format. Below is the proposal that I submitted to SXSW. I’m going to have to pare it down quite a bit to fit into 15 minutes! What would you like to [...]
Hiring for Creativity: The Value of Hiring
Note: The “Hiring for Creativity” series of posts is leading up to the launch of Hiring Gold, the 8-week plan for hiring awesome people. Sign up to be notified when it’s ready here. Why hire? It’s a common question, especially from solopreneurs. There’s a resistance. You could be perfectly fine on your own or with [...]
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 [...]
Colbert on How Life is like Improv. Conan on How Improv is Like Surfing.
In Stephen Colbert’s 2011 Northwestern commencement speech, he talks about how life is like improv (starts around 16:40 in the video) (Thanks, Deb.): There are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. [...]
A Very Simple Method for Improving Your Team’s Operability
If a team is stocked with great people, has a clear understanding of individual roles, follows consistent operating procedures and still isn’t clicking, there’s a simple way to increase communication and operability practically over night. Personality evaluation. I know there are waves of hardcore business operators cringing. Personality tests are often reviled as a woowoo [...]
It’s the End of Planning as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
The death of strategic planning has been greatly exaggerated. But it’s true that we’re at a moment in time where top-down planning is less and less effective. Rather than set a plan and rigid parts to have others deliver on it, as a leader it’s more efficient to set strategic direction and then hand over [...]
Interview: charity: water’s Paull Young Talking Strategy and Teams
I met Paull Young when I had the opportunity to visit charity: water‘s offices for a studio talk during The 99% Conference. I was immediately taken with the power of the organization’s brand and depth of their commitment to solving the world’s water crisis, and also with Paull’s affable style and considerable expertise. I knew [...]
