hiring, meetings, etc

• Can we re-frame this in terms of the customer’s problem?


• What’s the soonest we could get this done?


• What would you need to get this done tomorrow instead of next week?


• What would we need to do to get twice as many customers? Ten times as many customers?


• How does this relate to our goal? Is this the most important thing we can do for our goal?


• What’s mos

... See more

Problems should come from success, or being on the brink of success rather than being invented by some intellectual quest.

I try to conduct references with an eye to quirky forms of excellence.

A scorecard consists of outcomes and personality traits you’re optimizing for when considering opening up a role at your organization.

Before an interview, I sometimes re-read this great passage from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral :

You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wr

... See more

If you don’t learn anything in the interview, that’s bad. If you are bored in the interview, that’s really bad. A good interview should feel like a conversation, not questions and responses.

Questions like “what are you compulsive about?” can sometimes reveal the other person’s elephant. Or: “Where have you experienced a moment of ignition, when you saw some older person doing an activity and you intuited that they were wired the same way you were, and you said to yourself ‘I want to be that’?” Or: “How would your spouse/sibling/parent... See more