A while ago I linklogged the google / hire only good matches meme, from about a month ago. It seemed like such an obvious idea that I was sure I'd heard it before. On reading folklore.org on the early history of the mac, I found a reference to Steve Jobs and how to hire "insanely great staff". So, it has a long history.
Though further reading of the folklore site draws many parallels with now in a different light. The early mac team wished to remain small and build interesting things, resenting the influence of managers and not wanting to loose the intensity of the first phase of development.
I can see this happening around me at the moment, in work, with friends and beyond - the small and light approach of
Steve Jobs seems to have solved the problem for himself, Just say no in Product design (third business week link, hmm). He gets his VPs to do the product management and run the company, whilst he concentrates on making the best new products. Luckily, for him, there seem to be enough good people who like the other roles.
Which leads me to my real point, scaling a product from the launch team to the product management team is difficult, kind of second album territory, so you need to be brave enough to change teams. This process will also show you the weakness of your management process and documentation. The handover will make obvious what is in the heads of your staff.
For the individual, you need to understand what your contribution is and then go and find the right place to make it, rather than sitting in the same team for the life of the product. I suppose it also a realisation that one cannot excel at everything, so go and find a role where you are an A.
These thoughts sprung from a thoughtful summer plus becoming both a mentor and a mentee, as well as watching the last few years worth of projects in multimedia, advertising and online work.
Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell.
It seems that no matter the year, each of us managers have this dream of hiring "insanely great staff." We have to take note of one other thing that's rarely covered during hiring, namely, were any great people rejected prematurely?
Some say hiring is a science. The more I do it, the more I see it's an art. It's especially so when some applicants were rejected by a revered authority, only to become a revered authority themselves.
That's what I worry about when I hire. Will I be so demanding in hiring "insanely great staff" that I turn down someone who's actually fantastic? I pity those Fox executives who said a British show that crowns one young singer would never make it in the U.S. (That's the story behind "American Idol," that Fox originally rejected it, and only reconsidered when Rupert Murdoch's daughter said she liked what she saw in England.)
Moreover, let's pretend we actually discover the magic formula to flawlessly hire a perfect team. How do we then avoid what W. Steven Brown writes about in _13 Fatal Errors Managers Make_? Brown says even if we could amass a team of only the top performers in an industry, we still encounter ranking. There'll only be one #1, everybody else gets called an "also ran." (You see this when a revered CEO leaves a company, a successor is named, and those left leave elsewhere where they can make their mark.) Meanwhile, how do you as a manager then maintain the morale, knowing that input from everybody is vital to your business?
And since I admire Steve Jobs so much for how he is revolutionizing the entertainment industry especially sound via music, I look again how some "insanely great staff" has also made "insanely great mistakes" about sound. Harry Warner in Hollywood in the 1920's said nobody would pay to see actors talk in movies. Hiring mistakes abound, including the one of obsessing to get perfect people. Perfectionism is another name for procrastination, a sin in this time of fast product cycles and beating your competition.