Moz@Work: Organizations

Four Years at Microsoft

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:35:56 GMT

This week marks my fourth year at Microsoft and time continues to fly by! I saw some big changes in our organization, learned a lot about the broader Microsoft machine, made a move from the consumer to business side of Microsoft and tried to figure out the whole work life balance thing.

At the start of the year, the team was reorganized under Steven Sinofsky heading up the "front end" for Windows and Windows Live; Blake Irving (who left recently) heading up the "back end"; and Steve Berkowitz heading up the "business". We had Martin Taylor, the Corporate Vice President in my reporting line summarily depart at the start of the year, leaving a void for many of us. Mark Young, who had headed up Marketing departed mid year and many in his team were absorbed into ours. Brian Hall took the reigns for Windows Live Consumer business soon after that and continued some minor reorgs to align the team to the evolving strategy. And I dare say it's not over yet. Throughout this, I was fortunate to have had the same manager for the entire year, a first at Microsoft for me! And for the most part, my engineering counterparts have remained the same too.

The organizational changes reinforced two key learnings for me. First, reorgs are a matter of fact at Microsoft. Many always intend to keep things constant so that teams can learn to work together, but it just never happens. To survive, let alone succeed, in Microsoft you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity that reorgs bring. Second, the new people being brought into the leadership of Windows Live are usually "company men" (and an occasional woman) who have largely grown up in the Office, Windows, Server or Sales/Field Marketing org. For most of my time at Windows Live/MSN, we have been pretty isolated from the rest of the broader Microsoft business. That is clearly changing as more and more traditional Microsoft leaders are stepping in. This has some implications on the vibe within Windows Live as well as the ties to the rest of the company. The vibe is much more "productivity" focused and there is less of the opportunistic tapping into consumer trends. We are also much more closely involved with the online services and marketing strategy in other divisions. These aren't necessarily bad things, in fact, the potential for Microsoft when we act in unison is incredible. It's just very very different.

It also emphasizes for me how important it is to get to know the "other side" of Microsoft. If you want to stay in the company I am realizing you have to deeply understand the business strategy and processes for the "core business". Even if you don't stay in Microsoft, it's important to understand the process by which Microsoft goes to market and develops enterprise products, as that is such a key strength for the company. That has been the motivator for my move into the Unified Communications Group, one of the most exciting areas (for me at least) of our core business growth opportunities.

My team changed a lot throughout the year too. I started off with just Ali and Heejin, but added Analisa, Niranjan, Pooja, Joost, Charlotte, Chris, Mary, Marty, Jay and of course Arik, Ashley and Arthur. Heejin, Analisa and Niranjan left the company for various reasons. It was hard to maintain a team environment through these changes but we managed to stick together and have some fun. My new team is smaller and more technical, but very strong in their areas which I am psyched about. I hope through the year I can get to know them as well.

The year started for Spaces with or inclusion in Rockstar SuperNova where Brooke Burke mentioned Windows Live Spaces on several of the shows. But we saw some issues with performance as the scale of Spaces grew. The team has been very focused on making performance better and we have seen substantial improvements around the world. We hit a high of 150M unique monthly visitors which is phenomenal but we fell short of our expectations. I learned a lot about how dependencies are managed by more experienced Microsofties in my leadership chain.

Meanwhile, the company continues to deliver some pretty breathtaking results. Our FY07 revenues were $51 billion, that's 15% growth! We returned some $31 billion in cash (175% of operating cash flow) to shareholders. But our stock price has fallen from around $29.50 to $28.50 in the couple of months since that announcement. It's interesting that share buy backs and dividends are the two big factors that improve our stock price as opposed to the underlying growth story of the business. Steve Ballmer recently talked about our long term investment horizon and I truly applaud that. The tech industry is generating some transformations that could take a decade or more to bear fruit, and the players with the tenacity to see it through will be able to take a slice of that pie. It is shame that the markets don't have ten year DCF forecast models and may never reward us for that thinking. I still wonder if we would be better off with a more leveraged structure or as a private company.

On the personal side, I am loving family life in the Northwest and even Lisa (the die hard New Yorker) is now a Northwest fan. It would take a lot for us to leave the lifestyle we have here. Armaan is now 17 months old and is a bundle of fun, absorbing everything like a sponge. He starts in a new school next month that we are very excited about. Lisa and I have a work schedule that allows us both to spend a good chunk of time with Armaan every day and all weekend and I can honestly say that life feels pretty full. I don't know what the next year will bring, but I am looking forward to it!

Blake Irving Retirement Bash

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:33:34 GMT

One of my favorite leaders at Microsoft, Blake Irving (Corp Vice President for Live Platform), had his retirement bash today. Blake's an avid golf player and holds an annual golf tournament, so it was fitting that his party was at the Newcastle Golf Club (incredible views over Bellevue and Seattle) where we played an 18 hole round of "best ball" in teams. My team score of 18 over par was not one to be proud off, but it was great fun nonetheless. Blake will be leaving officially next month and then set off for a round the world trip with his wife and two sons. One of the reasons Blake says he is leaving is to spend more time with his family who live in California.

I first met Blake when I worked in business development, working on deals ranging from Yahoo/MSN IM interoperability to closure of MSN Adult Groups. When I moved on to Spaces, I got to see more of Blake in strategy and business reviews and as his in house go-to-person for Spaces business and marketing questions. When we re-organized and Blake stopped being in my reporting chain, I kept in touch with Blake as an informal mentor. He really had an impact on me as an employee and I started to think why.

I think it's because Blake is one of those rare leaders that maintains a truly human touch, deeply caring for the people around him, even as he progressed throug the corporate ranks. He is one of those guys that makes you feel like you are important and I appreciated that a lot as someone new starting in MSN. Blake was also able to get much deeper into understanding details of the business and product than many other leaders I have seen. I don't expect senior execs to know every aspect of a product in detail, but generally Blake showed more of an aptitude for understanding the product than most. That made it easier for him to get respect from his organization who saw him as more than just a title. The other and may be most important thing is his desire to maintain work-life balance. Blake commuted from California every week but still managed to run his organization effectively. He struggled to find enough time to give to his kids as they grew older and ultimately, always put his family first. I really respect that and it's a factor that I know is going to be important in my life.

I wish Blake all the best in the future, hope to emulate many of his great traits and to meet other leaders like him that I can work with and learn from.

Executive Compensation

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 04:33:58 GMT

I recently wrote a post about my experience at Microsoft and noted two major concerns I had about the culture at this company: lack of accountability and cronyism. I also wrote one some time back on my compensation philosophy, noting in particular how strongly I feel about companies that reward executives with stock awards. It was therefore kind of interesting to read this article on Microsofts most recent Stock Incentives for our senior management.

No. 1 software maker Microsoft on Thursday awarded restricted stock worth $951 million, based on its current share price, as performance bonuses to some 900 executives and managers.
The shares were given to reward work during the past three years as part of a program Microsoft's board adopted in 2003, when the software giant stopped awarding stock options to employees.
Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, got the biggest award--875,334 shares of restricted stock, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Kevin Johnson, co-president of the platforms and services division, got the second-largest award at 703,259 shares. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer did not receive any restricted shares.
Altogether, the company handed out some 37 million shares of restricted stock--a third of which vested immediately. The rest of the shares will vest in two installments in the next two years. Shares in Microsoft fell 10 cents Thursday to $25.70.
James Cash, a Microsoft director who sits on the board's compensation committee, said in a statement that the awards were set using "measurable criteria" to evaluate job performance and that their size was in line with industry practices.

It was noble of Bill and Steve not to take any of the pie and I respect them for it, I really do. But I can't help but think Jim Cash, who was a smart old HBS professor, is measuring something that I clearly can't see when he awards close to $22M to these other fine gentlemen. I wish someone would tell me. As FYI, below is our stock performance that was used as a benchmark for payouts (NOTE: The most recent uptick was because of the share buy back).

Three Years at Microsoft

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:33:39 GMT

Wow. I can't believe it's been three years at Microsoft for me. When I joined, I had figured this place would be a two year stint but I've been lucky enough to have had some great roles that kept me on. I blogged about some of my experiences along the way as well as how I got to be on Spaces, but thought this would be a good time to reflect on things.

This last year has been a crazy one. We had some lofty business goals to increase the adoption of Spaces around the world. We managed to move from 50M to 120M unique visitors in the year which was fantastic. Our initial monetization methods were not that great, so we worked to introduce new monetization schemes that should see us grow revenues by orders of magnitude this year. We got left behind on the social networking scene but managed to ship a cool and differentiated social networking feature. We launched The Spacecraft team blog which has been a great tool for getting direct user feedback. We changed our architecture and increased the investment in Spaces significantly. And all of this with the massive cross divisional focus on moving our brand from MSN to Windows Live.

The Spaces product team is as always awesome. But on the business side we just had myself and Heejin. Since then we have consolidated the business unit for Spaces adding Pooja, Ali, Charlotte, Niranjan, 2 web design and development resources and we will soon have 2 new hires and hopefully a developer focused on gadgets, all on the product management team. This team with the support of our marketing execution org will allow us to do even more with Spaces next year.

We went through some massive reorgs to create the Platform and Services division, with several management changes along the way for me. I count 4 managers since June 30th 2005. All of this creates chaos and to an extent, the repercussions are ongoing. But overall we managed to get through.

On the personal front, we had a baby who is now a 5 month old bouncing bundle of joy and sold our house to move to the real burbs in Issaquah/Fall City area. For those of you who know Seattle, that is a long way out! But it marks a new stage in life and we are excited by by it.

So all in all, what a year! As I look ahead, I see both opportunities and challenges for me personally and the company.

For me, I would like to become better at managing a business and team. In time, I would also like to learn more about the business-to-business side of Microsoft and the field organizations. One of the best things about Microsoft is that these moves are possible and even encouraged, although I don't expect to leave Spaces too soon :-)

On the company front, I think we have many challenges. I think we have a lot of great people here but have consistently been less than impressed with the direction we get from some of our senior managers.

One example is accountability. We structure the organization in such a way that there is no clear owner for anything. This means that no-one is given an incentive to take risks and do something different. In fact, you will do much better in Microsoft if you simply tow the party line. I sometimes wonder if this is intentional. We organize in such a way that it takes 10 people to sign off on even the simplest things. You have decision making by council and the lowest common denominator wins out. I appreciate the efforts to make this a collaborative environment, but this approach isn't ideal for agility and bold moves. It may be one of our pitfalls in the coming years.

I think there are accountability problems across the company and up/down the company. I still find it amazing that Steve Ballmer has kept his position as CEO. I really don't know that many companies whose stock price has performed as badly as ours where the CEO is still revered. For sure Steve is a great people motivator (and if you are in meetings with him, that motivation can be in the form of a fist on the desk). But what about strategy and telling the growth story in a way that makes sense to investors. I came across someone who owned Microsoft stock at a wedding a few months ago and he started lambasting me about our performance. We can't go on focusing on metrics such as revenue and cash without taking into account market cap. If the revenue and cash doesn't translate into valuation, the CEO must be accountable. It isn't and he isn't. That's not accountability.

Another issue I see is cronyism. There are many people who pride themselves on having been at Microsoft for 20+ years. In a technology company, and especially in an online division, that baffles me. The world is being reinvented by people who grew up in an era that is fundamentally different from the one that our parents grew up in. Not just in technology landscape but also in user behavior trends. Ethnographic studies consistently point out differences between Gen X and Gen Y yet our organizational mix doesn't take this into account. Instead we tend to reward old boys who gained favor in another era with jobs in the new landscape.

As "Breaking Windows", a great book you should read to get the scoop on how internal battles at Microsoft play out, put it: "Something happens to a man when he is worth more than a $100M". Very very very few people stay hungry when they reach that level of wealth. Some do for sure, but I can't believe it would be more than one or two in a company of 60,000+. The rest .... well what's their motivation? Having outsiders come into the company at senior levels will likely help breath a new lease of life into getting the right people in the right jobs and ensuring they are still hungry enough to compete with the best.

In some ways, Microsoft needs a shock to the system that IBM received in the 1980's to really shake up some attitudes. After that, I think we have the talent we need to really move the needle. Until then, the outlook is still foggy for me.

That said, I love what I am doing now and am looking forward to doing more next year.

Steve Berkowitz Joins Microsoft

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 14:48:38 GMT

I'm always a bit of a cynic when it comes to organizational effectiveness at Microsoft. It seems that when our management don't know what to do, we reorganize. The proverb "when the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail" comes to mind.

It is interesting that we have an external hire to head up our Online Business Group from an arguably also ran search player. I am assuming that the management skills are the primary reason for Steve's hire and look forward to some consistent and fresh thinking.

Quote:

Microsoft taps InterActiveCorp exec to head MSN

Microsoft said Friday that it has hired Internet executive Steve Berkowitz to head its MSN and Windows Live efforts as part of the company's continued push to offer more online software and services.

Distributed Decision Making Responsibility

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 04:46:24 GMT

I had an interesting email exchange with one of our execs about the best way to organize multi functional teams. I am a firm believer that you need a single owner for an initiative that is very clearly identified. That person needs to be close enough to the action to have the information to make these decisions. The alternative is to have "distributed leadership", where there are different owners for different decisions, and to get anything major done, everyone has to agree. This model is meant to foster a greater sense of collaboration and not disempower anyone.

I just don't buy that argument. I have never heard or seen distributed decision making work and in fact, when such a system is set up, usually a de facto decision maker emerges. Or key decisions simply get escalated to executives all the time. Simply because that's how human society works. We're wired that way. If you say that business teams, back end teams, front end teams, design teams and program managers all need to agree to do something, you will always end up in stalemate situations with the lowest common denominator being adopted, not the bigger bolder bets. What's worse, you may end up adding a tremendous amount of inefficiency to the organization, simply because so much energy is expended in coordinating and getting buy off on decisions.

Obviously I would prefer the business teams to drive technology bets. But more importantly, I would much rather have one decision maker, even if that is not the business owner. That person should have a holistic view of all the key performance indicators for that initiative and make tradeoffs accordingly.

Motivating Employees and Compensation

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:01:31 GMT

As the job market heats up, there is much talk about compensation and the organizational incentives that keep people going. I loved the classes in business school on organizational behavior and draw from my own experience in large and small firms, and professional services to develop a view point here.

For me, the type of incentive offered should dependent on level. I am a firm believer that anyone with a vice president title should be given every incentive to create shareholder value - let's say measured by the increase in share price. That means they should not be paid cash. They should not be paid stock awards - which are tantamount to deferred cash. The vast majority of their compensation should be in stock options. I don't begrudge an executive making millions by increasing the value of his/her company, provided this is done legitimately. Everyone wins. I do feel thoroughly demoralized when executives are rewarded in cash or stock awards, when they are already millionaires, and the value of the company is stagnant. That sends the wrong message to employees and creates the wrong incentives and old-boy-rewards culture at the top.

For regular salaried employees I think the mix is different. Creating shareholder value is important - but most employees in very large organizations have limited control over that. To impact the value of a $100B+ company you have to be a vice president or above and direct significant investment in resources. So stock options are not the way to go. Regular employees need incentives to encourage them and provide the means to perform in their roles, rewards commensurate with that performance and opportunity to take on bigger challenges or roles. So what does this mean. I think it boils down to four things.

First, cold hard cash. As the job market picks up, people are no doubt chasing the bigger money. I personally would like more cash, if only to pay down MBA debt, but am not driven solely by that. And I think most balanced people take other factors into consideration. Once you have reached a minimum bar, I think cash is a subtle softener for some people. That minimum bar is important. At Lisa's firm, they call it the "market anchor". The price a similar position would command in the market. What's important is that they adjust salaries for both existing employees and new hires to meet the anchor. Many firms are naiive and only adjust the compensation for new hires, leaving existing employees with a greater incentive to leave. Sometimes, companies talk up benefits as a key value proposition to employees. But you have to remember that with the exception of holidays/time off, money can buy benefits. An extra $2000 can pay for that gym membership down the road for example. An extra 30% could pay for your maternity leave. So benefits are a distraction in most cases. It's money that counts.

Second, stock awards. This is great if your executives are able to create value for shareholders. The problem with stock awards though, is that they require vesting. To me, it's the same as cash for a stable company, except you don't get it for 5 years. As a result, it serves a funny role. For those employees that had high potential, but leave early, stock awards are useless. For those employees who could not find other opportunities or wanted to stay, there is a spiralling incentive to sit tight and vest. Many organizations talk up the role of stock awards. I think it has the potential to create a "lemons dilemma" instead of retaining the best people. You have to get the other areas right to make stock awards have the desired effect.

Third, a fulfilling role. This means having a role where you are motivated to come to work every day whistling. You have clear goals, you are learning, you have the resources to do your job, and are part of a well structured organization where decision making is smooth and consistent. Above all this is about the discipline of management and the organizations ability to foster good managers. Not every organization can do this. If they are unable to, this incentive pillar rapidly becomes meaningless.

And finally, career advancement. Is there a clear path where you are rewarded for achievement and have the opportunity to take on more responsibility. Are the people above you there because of merit, and do you feel that if you displayed those merits you could attain their level of responsibility. This calls for a transparent organization where good churn leaves opportunities for people to develop. If there is a perceived ceiling, people will look to jump the ceiling elsewhere.

In thinking about taking a new role or even evaluating your current role, I think it is good to apply the above dimensions as a test. To keep people, organizations must meet a certain minimum bar and balance these levers. As the job market continues to develop steam, I am sure I will be having more of these conversations with friends everywhere. I'll just point them to this blog entry.

Being Donnie Brascoe'd

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 09:21:51 GMT

A couple of weekends ago, Lisa and I were down in Lake Tahoe. We felt lazy one night, so decided to rent a movie. We watched Donnie Brascoe, a great real life story about an undercover FBI agent (Joe Pistone was his real name) who in the 1970's got closer to the top rungs of the mafia than anyone else. To do his job, he almost sacrificed his family and his life many times over, driven by a vision that he was doing the right thing.

While the story was great, the thing that stands out for me is the very last scene. Pistone was eventually taken off the case as things got heated up for his own safety. He was given a new identity and disappeared into nowhere living an anonymous life. He was awarded a medal and a check for $500 by the head of the FBI in a fake ceremony with a photo opportunity and was left standing there contemplating why he had done all this. Why had he risked so much.

I don't think everyone is like Joe Pistone. It takes a certain kind of person to dedicate themselves the way he did. That said, I think the way he was treated was grossly unfair. His reward was token in gesture only and his reward, if it was that, was hollow. His dedication was taken for granted and other FBI agents looking to see how their "heros" are treated would be right to question whether the risk is worth it in their endeavors. Did Joe Pistone actually feel rather stupid having done all he did only to be treated this way. I would have.

I want to coin a new term for all those people who dedicate themselves to a cause they believe in and are inappropriately recognized with hollow gestures. I call it "Being Donnie Brascoe'd". Expect to see it in the Oxford English Dictionary in a year or two.

Two Years at Microsoft!

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 02:52:09 GMT

Wow! Tomorrow marks my second year at Microsoft. This may be a bit long, but for my own record I want to reminisce a little about how I got here.

It's strange to look back and remember how I felt on August 26th 2003. I had just returned from a 7 week honeymoon after two years in business school. Work was the furthest thing from my mind as I settled in to temporary accomodation in a city that I had only visited once before for interviews. We had almost no possessions in the world except for our clothes and wedding gifts and had to start out our life as a married couple.

I joined the Corporate Strategy Group, mainly because I didn't want to be randomly assigned to a product through the normal marketing interview process. I tend to be passionate about things I am interested in and wanted to retain control over where I was allocated. Also, the goal of the Corporate Strategy Group at the time was to act as a "bench" for new hires, to serve for 1-2 years and move on to other roles. This seemed like a great place to explore Microsoft.

I was working for Salman Ullah, a General Manager with a reputation for scaring the bejeesus out of people until they developed a "spine". My first project was for David Vaskevitch, one of our CTO's reporting to Bill Gates, a guy with a reputation for making people feel stupid. All in all, a pretty daunting project. With lots of long hours I somehow pulled through and ended the project well.

The team was great and I was working closely with some senior people (second project was with John Connors CFO, Mich Mathews SVP Marketing and Andrew Lees VP BMO Marketing) and was learning a lot about how Microsoft as an entity thinks. But my heart really wasn't in doing internal strategy consulting, which is what the Corporate Strategy Group does. I had done that before at Accenture and Bain & Co. and knew the tools of the trade. I was also not vested in the projects and didn't feel ownership. With the blessing of Salman, I started looking around for a role in the business groups.

My then project lead, Hardeep Walia, put me in touch with a guy he had interned with, David Do. David was recently made a Director and was building out a team for the Business Development activities within MSN Communications Services (the bit that owns Messenger, Hotmail and Spaces). David struck me as a smart and ambitious guy. Whilst he didn't have the seasoned management experience of my former managers, I felt like I could learn a lot from him. I also liked the concept of spending some time in Business Development working with external partners and a broad range of products so that I could figure out the MSN organization and look for product related roles down the road. So after only 7 months in Corporate Strategy, I moved to MSN.

I did a few good deals while I was in Business Development, including the ones that allowed Messenger to improve audio quality and launch PC-SMS messaging globally in the last release. But as I looked down, with the exception of a few truly industry shattering deals, I felt I was in danger of working on an endless string of smaller deals. I think the role is great once you are more senior, but early on I didn't see my future in Business Development. I already had a few years experience in Business Development from my start up days, and had learnt a bit about how Microsoft did deals. Again, I felt I didn't have a true sense of ownership. The strategy often sat with other teams and the long term satisfaction of execution rested with them too.

At around the same time we had a reorganization in Business Development. I would no longer be reporting to David. This took away one of my main reasons for joining the team. I contacted a friend in product Management, Quin Nikel, and asked if there were any roles open in his extended team. Many of the deals I was working on were product related and I felt that was where my heart was. He put me in touch with Phil Holden who put me in touch with David Rice (at the time, Director of Product Management for Hotmail). David was assigned a product that was perceived as an adjunct of Messenger, MSN foray into blogging called "Spaces". No one was sure what it could do and there were no resources aside from development/PM/test teams behind it.

It was perfect! A greenfield product with below the radar flexibility to do what we wanted. The freedom to form a vision and direction for the product and take it from birth to something great. When I saw the Spaces product (it had been running for a while in beta in Japan), I saw much much more than just blogging. I saw the ability to let people express themselves and form network and communities. I saw the vast potential for user generated content surpassing the world of editorially created content. The possibilities were endless. I was in! So after 8 months in Business Development, I moved over to Product Management.

Colleagues joke that my 8 months is over and I should be looking for another role. But after 9 months on the Spaces team, I feel like we have only just got going. The entire product team is fantastic to work with and equally passionate about what we do and we are beginning to get great recognition across Microsoft for our work. No, I have finally found a home and want to help take Spaces to the next stage. Even better for our users and even more superlatives.

Lisa and I now have a home we love and a great lifestyle out here in the NorthWest. It may be time for us to move to the "next stage" too and this place is one of the better ones in the US for raising a family. Bring on the third year!

Talking about So, what is a typical day like in your job?

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 04:59:57 GMT

Saw this interesting post on Julianas Space about her typical day. Interesting concept, so I thought I would join in. What's really missing is going to the gymn - I used to do it in evenings but have lost it somewhat.

6am - Get up and head to work

7am - Meet with support managers and provide feedback on how MSN Support has been doing and what we could improve

8am - Talk to partner company on user experience and positioning text

9am - Contact lunch vendor for guest speaker event at business school club

9.30am - Work on Spaces global strategy deck and go to market documents

10.30am - Brief vendor that will be building and hosting web pages for some projects

11am - Continue working on Spaces global strategy deck and go to market documents

12pm - Meet intern for lunch. It's amazing how good the interns here are.

1pm - Spaces cross functional team meeting to catch up on progress and issues across program management, planning, pr, product management, legal, support, crm, ads and more.

2pm - Discuss potential for participating in consumer conference happening in New York

3pm - Discuss safety aspects of Spaces and how to track and improve

4pm - Discuss potential business development deals for Spaces

5pm - Weekly status review with Andrea to talk about fun Sponsored Spaces, Spaces Team Blog, and features and benefits documents for next release.

5.30pm - Catch up on email. I tend to check throughout the day between meetings and delete a LOT.

6.30pm - Get home and settle in.

7pm - Begin cooking. I love cooking. I put some music on (usually Indian) and drift away to smells of coriander and cumin.

8pm - Eat with Lisa. I do the cooking but she does the eating!

9pm - Go for walk together and enjoy last of summer nights. I will explain later why we don't go for runs and it's not the age.

10pm - Watch Law & Order. My favorite TV show.

11pm - Sleep

Quote

So, what is a typical day like in your job?

Recruiting Criteria

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 01:44:01 GMT

As we continue to recruit in MSN and I get involved in interviewing, a few words from the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, come to mind. He came to do a speech in my first year at business school. After the speech, someone asked him what he looks for when he is hiring people (student was no doubt kissing up to get a job).

His reply has stuck in my head for three years, and as I look around, it couldn't be truer.

He said first, he looks for intelligence. Not knowledge. But raw ability to use creativity to find solutions to challenges. This can be mathematical, verbal, spatial, emotional ... there are many different forms of intelligence and different types are needed for different types of jobs. Intelligence also means insight. Insight is this ability to "see" things that are beyond the obvious, that other people don't see. And to identify the root issue involved in something rather than layers of complexity.

Second, he says he looks for ambition. Intelligence without ambition is idleness. He looks for people who have struggled against the odds and shown firey determination to succeed. And achieve often for the sake of achieving. Now this scares many people because it may imply a sense of ruthlessness and lack of teamwork. But he sees it more as entrpreneurial spirit.

Finally, he looks for integrity. Has this person been presented with dilemmas, identified them as dilemmas and made an honest decision. Obviously an honest decision is subjective. He mentions the "Wall Street Journal" test (would you make the same decision knowing it would be on front page of Wall Street Journal the next day) as one way to know whether it is the right decision or not. Integrity also means respecting people and promises. You need to maintain your committments to your team mates and protect the integrity of both current and future relationships.

It is really important to stress that all three of these go hand in hand. If you lack one, the other two could make you more of a liability than an asset. Not always a fan of WarrenB, but I think he was on to something here.