One of the chapters of Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, is the chapter First Who… Then What? It’s all about the concept of hiring. Jim Collins uses an incredible metaphor of when you live your life and run your businesses, if you spot talent coming through your door, you grab the talent. You find a position for that incredibly talented person so that in six months to a year to five years, the perfect position can then eventually open up for that person. Take some time off of your life and read through the book what many consider to be the greatest business accelerator book of all time, Good to Great.
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Get On The Bus
On the last episode, I did a mini book report on one of the first two chapters of Jim Collins’ incredible book, Good to Great. A lot of debate going on about, “Is that book still the greatest business book ever written? Is it the best business accelerating book? Is it the best literature ever created, ever cut?” There was a debate for a long time that maybe it wasn’t. Some of those companies he was writing about went out of business because of the tech bubble and the recession. As time is going by, he’s getting proven right once again. I have long since taught, coached, and run my companies from the book. It’s time I start talking about a couple of things.
Do not ever hire for position. Hire for talent. Click To TweetThis is episode number two of three, episode 242, is simply on the chapter First Who, Then What? This is all about the concept of hiring. A lot of people look at a company and they might take a book like The E-Myth of Michael Gerber. It says, “You create an organizational chart before you begin and then you plug in the puzzle pieces of that organizational chart and you hire for the position and away you go.” Although I recommend The E-Myth many times as a great resource, I don’t recommend it for that piece because that couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re in year 25 and we found we hit the Inc. 5000 list for the fourth time. We grew like a weed last year. We hired more people last year than any year or any time in our life. We do not ever and never have hired for position. We hire for talent.
The concept of one of Jim Collins’ chapters is First Who, Then What? In the concept, he uses an incredible metaphor of “When you live your life and run your businesses, if you spot talent coming through your door, you grab the talent. You find a position for that incredibly talented person, so that in six months to a year to five years, the perfect position can then eventually open up for that person.” I teach this point a lot and lot of people say, “That’s crazy. That’s ridiculous. What if you only have a specific hiring budget of $65,000 a year and you need a computer programmer and you find the perfect maintenance person that come in?” You’ve got to take this with a little bit of realism. I’m talking about real-world situations. I’m not talking about a one-off situation where you’ve got three weeks to replace a very specific niche employee.
What I’m saying is as business owners, we need to live our life, whether we are in a hiring mode or not and recognize opportunity when we see it. I can name seven people right now on our team that we hired that did not send us a resume or we were not hiring for a position. I remember vividly one of our main people walked into an optometry store to buy glasses and ended up hiring the person behind the counter. I remember another individual walk into an Apple Store, overheard someone handle a conversation incredibly intelligently, that person then came to work for us. We weren’t in a hiring mode then. We saw talent and grabbed it.
When you see talent, grab it. Click To TweetThe concept of this chapter, imagine you are the bus driver, you’re the business owner and you spot talent sitting on the side of the road. You say, “Here, buddy, get on. I’ll find a position for you, temporarily sit in this front seat, but over time you’re going to be better suited maybe in the back, left seat, running a different division.” You’ve got to hear Episode 241 to understand where I’m coming from. In my opinion if you’re a business owner and you have not at least read the summary that I discussed in the last episode, you owe it to yourself as a business owner to listen to episode 241. Get the summaries, get the resources, and then determine should you take some time off of your life, an hour, an evening, a couple of Saturdays. Read through the book what many considered to be the greatest business accelerator book of all time, Good to Great. It’s first who gets on the bus, then what position. I hope this helps. Take care.
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