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| Your Competitive Advantages: |
| Success = 2 parts DNA + 1 part MBA |
| Business people are far more born than made. |
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| 1. Your DNA influences your
strong interests. You will excel by working where your strong
interests and aptitudes are constantly and deeply involved. It is your
responsibility to seek work that best suits you. You have an innate
advantage doing such work. It's in your DNA. |
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| 2. A characteristic of many very
successful entrepreneurs is their natural talent for judging people.
Put them together with another person and after a short conversation
they will simply know whether that other person is right for the job
or if s/he is a 'wrong one.' Subsequent experience almost invariably
bears them out. Does their DNA 'read' that of the other person? Very
often this inherent competitive advantage is a foundation of their
thriving business. Theirs is an inspired instinct. They are the gifted
few. |
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| 3. Your firm should employ only
those whose strong interests are in the positions being filled. But no
typical employer can get to know any prospective employee on the basis
of one or two interviews and some personality tests as well as that
employee should know him/herself. Until such time as reverse
engineering enables us to read genetic source code we must -- and we
should-- continue to use the best personality tests that industrial
psychologists can make available to us to find out in advance if we
are hiring 'the right DNA' for the job. It is no longer enough to hire
primarily on the basis of experience and skills. The competitive
advantage lies with those who know that business people are far more
born than made. Believe it. We have expressed this concept elsewhere,
and again above, as: Success = 2 parts DNA + 1 part MBA. Hiring the
personality profile that the job requires is more important than the
resume. |
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| Contrast that perspective on people with
many of today's hiring practices where resumes are scanned by machine
to search out key words, the resulting selection if prioritized by a
(junior?) Human Resources administrator and these people at the top of
this list are interviewed by a hiring manager who is often trying to
'hire her/himself' i.e. to hire that person who most closely resembles
her/himself. That should certainly find people who resemble the hiring
manager and are good at key word selection. |
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| If close attention is not paid to the
personality and attitudes profile of potential employees then, since
such attributes are, like IQ, distributed within the population along
the famous Bell Curve, in a large group half the applicants must, by
definition, be below average. Within any large workforce so hired half
the employees will be tend to cause turbulence and cross-currents.
That way does not lead to competitive advantage. |
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| 4. Promotion decisions too should
be 'DNA-based.' For the same reasons. Those who do the job must always
have innate interests that match that job. Experience of being led,
managed, supervised does not necessarily qualify any person for
promotion to such a position which clearly needs different aptitudes,
traits, temperament and behaviors -- a job-specific DNA? Leaders,
managers, supervisors are born not made. |
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| 5. Teams, to be successful, must
also be 'DNA-based.' In selecting team-members ensure that not only
are the skills required to do the job present, but that the
individuals have, in the aggregate, all the personality traits needed
to work together as a team without conflict. Teams should rarely, if
ever, exceed five people, if you want to get things done effectively. |
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