HOW SOME GREAT ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDS RESPOND TO THE ''WHO'' QUESTION

In the book GOOD To GREAT, one that took a 21-member research team five years of serious work to reach its conclusions (described by the greatest management guru that lived, the late Peter Drucker, as disproving extant ‘’management hype’’), the team leader (the book’s author), the retired Stanford Business School professor, Jim Collins literarily summed up the reasons for the existence of great organisations, as opposed to good organisations. To Jim Collins, great organisations primarily dealt with the “First Who ……Then What’’ questions.

On how they responded to this question, Jim Collins wrote, ‘’the good-to-great leaders began the transformation by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it’’. As to what defines the ‘’rightness’’ of a person or people, great Jim wrote, ‘’whether someone is the ‘right person’ has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge background, or skills’’.

Consistent with Jim’s observation, I have, here, compiled some of the very stellar tips that have driven the successes of some of earth’s most competitive organisations. Can your organisation rock like these ones? If not, you possibly can understand why, and it won’t hurt to learn from the under-listed tips.

1. ‘’The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world’’ ---- Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO, Salesforce

2. ‘’Don’t hire the most qualified. Hire the craziest’’ ---- Jack Ma, cofounder and executive chairman, Alibaba

3. ‘’As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies’’---- Elon Musk, cofounder and CEO,Tesla, founder and CEO, Spacex, cofounder PayPal

4. ‘’Success has many parents so we look to find out who really did it. I don’t care if they graduated from University or even high school’’----- Elon Musk

5. ‘’I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person’’---- Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon

6. ‘’Facebook is not a company for everyone in the world…. I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person’’---- Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO, Facebook

7. ‘’The focus should be on bringing super-talented people into the company, even if their experience doesn’t perfectly line up with any job description posted….The smart creatives matter more than the role; the company matters more than the manager’’----Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, former Google CEO, and SVP of Product respectively

8. ‘’it’s very difficult to reduce it to any single traits….You want people who are both really stubborn and really open-minded….you want people who are idiosyncratic and really different, but then who can work well together in teams…’’

----Peter Thiel, cofounder and former CEO PayPal, cofounder Palantir Technologies, cofounder Founders Fund, Founder Thiel Foundation, Facebook board member, Partner YC, and Venture Capitalist

9. ‘’I have a list of the hardest most challenging problems our company needs to solve, and I start at the top and work my way down. And I have a list of the coolest things we can invent….so it is finding the people that are creative problem solvers and who can invent, scale, and work together…’’ Travis Kalanick, Uber cofounder and CEO

10. Those ‘’who see the world as it could be rather than as it is ….. generally trusting----they’re not cynical, although they are very contrarian and they are willing to challenge the status quo. They are kids at heart---not in terms of maturity, but in terms of curiosity’’ ----Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO, Airbnb.