David Kelley: Hire Great People

The next thing I want to say is about hiring great people. It seems like this is pretty obvious, but many people don't spend a lot of time on it. They kind of have a conventional HR department or a conventional way of choosing who works in their company. I think you have to spend much more energy on it and be much more creative about deciding who it is that you hire. You can hire individuals important, you certainly have to hire people who don't fit into your organization or who can stimulate the organization and don't kind of have the kind of corporate code involved in them. This is kind of a Bob Sutton kind of point of view. But more and more it's about the team building hot teams. And that involves having people with many different disciplines, people who are generalists, but also have empathy for people who are experts at different areas. Hal Levitt's book about you can read that and find all the things that are necessary to make a hot group. It's very important that the groups be of a size. Many of the groups that I belong to, like the mechanical engineering faculty, are too large to actually be a hot group. And so you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make the group small enough, you know, eight to 12 people so that they can function by breaking the group down into those sizes. But one of the main things is just to have an unfair advantage in doing your hiring. IDEO has this unfair advantage called Stanford University, which we've snuggled up next to and have a strong program with. Many companies should have closer relationships with their local universities. And we also. I've been quoted lots of times in places like Fortune. There's an article about how I'm basically saying if hire the right people and everything else will work out. I mean, that's not exactly true, but in makes for good journalism or not good journalism. But the main thing about hiring people is you have to have a point of view about who you want in your company. And I don't mean that you want people who have four O's from a certain school in their circuits courses. And Bob Sutton, who studied audio for a long time, who's a professor here, has this point of view that he calls attitude of wisdom. And so I IDEO goes about hiring. We make sure that every single person who's hired by the company has been what we call lunched by 10 other people, meaning that you've been taken to lunch by that person. That person gives you a 9 to 10 on the scale of is this a good fit for ideo? The major thing One of the major fits is what we call the attitude of wisdom, which is, is this person, the kind of person who has the force of personality to really get their ideas out there? Because we really want somebody who's not shy about getting their ideas out and vocal about it and works hard at trying to win everybody over that theirs has a good idea and did they have the balance with that to actually consider that their idea might be improved upon by others? You know, the kind of people who have one side or the other. Right. Too shy to kind of get involved or too arrogant to not see that their idea can be improved upon and built upon by others. And. And so looking for that balance, it's really easy to see who has that characteristic. And it turns out that kind of technical competence around here and so forth is easier to find. And this kind of fit is hard. And this is where I talked about limits to growth. Ideal has not grown at all based on financial reasons or how much money we want to make or what the numbers want to be. We grow because we find another one of these people. So we started with two. We're at about 430. And it's just from one at a time picking off these people. When the dot coms were going really good, and I was on the board of a few of them and they were like hiring and stuff, and they kept saying what great people they had. And I thought to myself that as they approached the total population of the United States, like 250 million people in their company, by definition, they would have average people in their company. One thing about if you know about having a good group, if you don't have a T shirt, if your group is not represented by a T shirt, then you're not a part of a really good group. So just an indication of that.