Greg's Right FIT Newsletter #131

Quick notes to help you get more done in less time. . . next week. 

In this issue: 

- Techniques for FIT
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Techniques for FIT

• Patience. Successful living is produced not so much from lightning bolt moments of luck versus little edges gained every day. 

• You know you can make the law of large numbers work for you by being patient, so use the law of small numbers too. Assume that your short run results will not predict the future. 

• Terrible results this month? Unbelievably great results so far? Don't overreact. Performance tends to ebb and flow but always regresses to the mean. Change takes time.  

• Small, nearly imperceptible changes add up. Take a piece of paper and fold it 50 times. How tall would it be? If I said "to the moon" would you believe it?

Being Human - The future is promised to no one

Predicting the future

When I help a company with hiring, we inevitably will get into an idea that sounds like, "I don't want to go through this process again," and leads to predictive hiring tools. 

Here's the thing, we're terrible at predicting the future. When I say "we" I mean human beings. It's a fools errand to expect it of something as complex as work. I know it's confirmation bias at work, but when this perfecting the hiring process idea was presented to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, he just shook his head and said, "no." 

Here's what I think: Top companies attract top people. One of the ways that happens is by hiring for personality and the new hire’s ability to emulate proper behaviors.

Before you hire the next person, do two things: strip away all the past accomplishments and accolades and ask, will we like working with them? Then put some tasks together that ask them to emulate a behavior.

Hire people you like and make sure they can emulate the behaviors you want in your best employees.

That’s how you attract top people.  

Good stuff.

Random Stuff

Picture show

One of the things I do in my work day is draw pictures. They're not works of art, they are simple visuals to help with processing complex information. 

I am doing this with a market research project and we're exploring the idea that inside of an organization, your product or solution touches multiple roles and it helps to talk to all of the players when working through a new opportunity. Standard stuff. 

This leads one of the participants to hold up their iPad and snap a photo of the board. Not unusual, it happens all the time. 

Later in the conversation, he pulls the image up for the group to review. The snarky teenager in my mind yells, "whoa! who's the fat ass in the tablecloth?" before registering that I'm wearing a red and white plaid shirt and can stand to lose a few pounds. 

It's not a pleasant thing, and I need to take action, so, I'm doing what any red-blooded American would do. 

I put the shirt in the Goodwill pile. 

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