Author: Isaac Cheifetz

In the NFL, certain positions display more arrogance than others. The “skill” positions on offense seem to dominate, possibly because they score the touchdowns and are therefore most obvious to fans. Quarterbacks are less likely to be obnoxiously arrogant, as they are only effective if they possess strong leadership skills as well as a powerful arm.

But it is the wide receiver position where outlandish behavior is tolerated, even expected. Why wide receivers? Being on the receiving end of the most spectacular plays feeds their ego (like salesmen), and their distance downfield from the bulk of the violence gives them a distorted sense of the realities of the game (like software gurus).

Though teams routinely win Superbowls with good–rather than great–wide receivers, mature superstar wide receivers are rare treasures. Interestingly, they are often good rather than great athletes who excel due to intangibles, rather than the athletic wonders.

Successful organizations, like winning teams, require emotional maturity from all employees, but the standards for various roles differ. Emotional balance and decorum should be benchmarked relative to the standards of high performers in their function, not a middle-of-the-road or wishful standard.

Sales people will be rambunctious; equity analysts will be arrogant. To some extent, these characteristics are inherent in the nature of their jobs, and are sometimes what you pay them to project to the market. Moreover, high performers are of their nature somewhat insecure, and prone to acting out.

Certain roles, even entire industries, are more likely to attract individuals confident to the point of egotism. After a meeting between a software executive and an industry analyst, the executive observed pensively: “You know, he’s not very arrogant for an analyst.”

Winning NFL teams seek high performers who are grown up by NFL standards, and successful corporations should hire executives who are well adjusted by the standard of fast track executives. Both groups are substantially different from society’s average.

In the corporate world, talented individuals in traditionally lower key roles like logistics or accounting may sometime seem “too loud” compared to their peers. Their emotional makeup often makes them more appropriate for a sales role which, combined with their specialist experience, can turn them into superstar salesmen. These are hidden treasures, potentially the leaders of tomorrow.

As a team executive famously said to the star of an abysmal team who was demanding more money: “We lost with you, we can lose without you.” If we have proven conclusively that an organization composed of drainos won’t win, why do NFL General Managers and business executives continue to hire them?

Optimism

Optimism can give the hiring team or firm the arrogant or naïve belief that they will be able to manage the draino productively where others could not. When they discover that they are not able to, the relationship often develops a powerful codependent dynamic.

Coaches are unrealistic and arrogant in believing they can motivate underachievers where others have failed. They often become co-dependent with “coach killers”, players whose potential tempts coaches to invest excessive time, resources and energy, and whose dysfunction leads to the team’s under-performing, and the coach’s ultimate firing.

Ignorance

Some General Managers seem genuinely clueless of the critical role that team chemistry plays, and assemble a cast of star talent without regard to synergy.

Insecurity

Sometimes the retention of drainos indicates a lack of confidence. The General Manager knows that chemistry matters, and has no illusions about his ability to change the player, but is desperate to entertain the fans, and does not think a dysfunctional talented player can make things worse. The Green Bay Packers signing wide receiver Koren Robinson after the Vikings waived him for his latest drunken driving escapade may be viewed in this light.

This grasping for straws is a sign that not only is the current prospect of the team poor, but the longer term plan is not well-defined, or supported by ownership. It also presumes that fans are stupid. In fact, fans prefer to root for overachievers over talented underachievers. A .500 team comprised of ordinary talents who play hard and smart is a heartwarming morality play; a team of championship-caliber talent that wins half its games is frustrating.

In the business world, a touch of emotional dysfunction often correlates positively with high achievement. A truly emotionally content person is more likely to find Zen-like satisfaction in the status quo than to fight to improve it

But if ankle deep emotional unrest can spur an athlete or executive to overachieve, knee deep dysfunction will slow them down, waist deep will bring them to a standstill, and neck deep will make them likely to pull beneath the water their coaches and teammates, or managers and co-workers.

Talented people who are self indulgent and resist dedicating their abilities to the organization’s goal are like a cannon aimed into the fort rather than outside of it. You’re better off taking your chances without them.

“[I’d like to play] Robin Hood…I’ve always wanted to wear a pointed green hat with a long feather in it. – Alex Karras

The frustration of managing difficult personalities, in sports or business, often leads to fantasies of winning with a team of hard workers with above average talent and avoiding quirky personalities altogether. The danger in this is consistent mediocrity.

Knowledge workers who create, analyze and synthesize information are central to today’s global economy, and unusual creative ability is a powerful competitive advantage.

Great talents and high achievers often are eccentric –people with outsized abilities usually have outsized quirks and imperfections. They resemble a high-powered but badly wired sports car, like a 1970s Jaguar, whose electrical system was so unreliable it was nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness.”

Elite talent will usually beat ordinary talent if it can stay on the racetrack. It is pointless for the Jag (or the Jag’s supervisor) to envy the Toyota family sedan for its reliability. The race car doesn’t have to be as reliable as the family sedan; it will win races if it is more reliable than other race cars.

In the NFL, team wreckers may not be worth the trouble, but talented nonconformists are. The Oakland Raiders of the 70’s and 80’s won multiple Super Bowls by collecting talented oddballs with a deep desire to win, after they were discarded by other teams.

Two of the greatest defensive tackles in NFL history, Warren Sapp and Alex Karras, were deeply eccentric, brash, and anti-authoritarian, while leading dominating defenses. Andy Groves makes a counterpart to them in business. Here’s evidence for all three.

Warren Sapp

A 6’2, 300 pound defensive tackle, Warren Sapp was an All-American at the University of Miami, with an unusual combination of power and speed. He was the top rated defensive tackle in the 1995 draft, but a positive test for marijuana and a reputation for wildness gave him a reputation as a potential draft bust.

The Buccaneers selected Sapp with the 12th pick in the draft, based on extensive research which convinced them that he was in fact deeply dedicated to the game, and to winning. Sapp quickly became the anchor of the great Tampa Bay defense which dominated the NFL for the next decade, and won the Superbowl in 2003.

Alex Karras

Karras was one of the dominant defensive players of the 1960’s. He was a squat, powerful and absurdly fast defensive tackle, nicknamed the Mad Duck for his devastating quarterback rushes. He was thoughtful, eloquent, and funny, with the timing of a stand-up comic, yet unapologetic about occasionally cheap-shotting opponents.

Karras was a disciplined player on the field, but went out of his way to play the role of rebel in public, achieving off-field notoriety when he was suspended by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle for the 1964 season for gambling on football games (he spent the year moonlighting as a professional wrestler). Later, as an actor, he achieved fame for his role as Mongo in the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles, in which he knocked out a horse with one punch.

Andy Groves

Andy Groves is considered one of the great modern CEO’s for his leadership of Intel Corp in the 1980’s and 90’s. But Groves spent much of his career considered an eccentric by corporate standards. In his 1983 essay on Intel founder Robert Noyce, writer Tom Wolfe described how unusual the laid back corporate culture at Intel seemed to East Coast businessmen, and how Groves dressed more like a disco dancer than Noyce’s lieutenant responsible for Intel’s operations.

“Music is the space between the notes. It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.” Miles Davis

There are numerous books, articles and consultants to assist executives in writing superior resumes. Yet, as an executive recruiter for digital and technology business executives, I find that about half the resumes I receive from candidates require revision.

Most often, the resumes are professionally written and formatted. They tend to be lacking in one key area -they don’t connect the story of your career with the corroborating accomplishments. They may be too complicated, too long or short, too vague or too detailed. Bottom line, they confuse the decision maker reading the resume.

What is the purpose of a resume? The goal of a resume is to get a hiring manager interested enough to interview you. In other words, you are marketing a product (you) to a customer (the hiring manager). Don’t despair – later in the process, if you do your job right, the roles will be reversed, and you will become a buyer to the companies’ seller.

But if you are marketing yourself, then your resume ought to be marketing collateral. Yet many, if not most resumes read like documentation of your job history, rather than telling a holistic story of what you have accomplished and what you want to do in the future.

The following are guidelines for writing a great resume that reads like marketing material:

1.     Assume Your Resume Will be Given an Initial Ninety Seconds of Attention – Your goal is to gain the readers interest as quickly as possible, so as to decide to devote five minutes reading the resume in detail.

2.     Announce the Theme of Your Resume; Don’t Make the Reader Guess it – A short summary paragraph outlining the “elevator speech” of your experience and objective sets the stage for the details to follow. This paragraph should not be full of generic qualities any good employee might possess.

3.     Tell a Strategic Story, Concisely -Again, a resume is NOT a synopsis of your work history. It is marketing collateral, written with the goal of getting an interview. Tell a thematic story with nuggets of content embedded in it. It needs to be accurate, but it does not need to describe every responsibility or accomplishment – that’s what the interview is for.

4.     Don’t Split Your Job History and Accomplishments into Separate Sections -The context of specific accomplishments is critical. For example, did you “manage the corporate Marketing campaign” while you were at Oracle or at that thirty-person startup? Did you “manage the 100-person sales department” last year or ten years ago? Convey your experience sequentially and clearly so that the reader can use those ninety seconds to think about how you might fit into the organization, rather than mentally reformatting your resume.

5.     Don’t Assume Context: Describe it – Briefly describe the company and your role in the first paragraph of each position in your experience section. Example: “For this Fortune 1000 manufacturer of networking peripherals, responsibilities included…” Don’t take the jargon of your industry for granted. Assume your resume is being read by a person who is not expert in what you do. For practice, imagine explaining your work to a bright teenager.

6.     It’s a Resume, Not a Job Description – Avoid elaborating in detail on obvious responsibilities that are inherent to the job. Summarize those quickly and go into more detail on the most impressive of your accomplishments.

7.     Start with Your Best Pitch -Always start your resume with a Summary or Objective section. It should be your “elevator pitch” – pretend you have 20 seconds between floors with a decision maker to convey the core of your personal value proposition. Don’t make it a laundry list of your skills. It is critical that you tell the reader what the theme of your background is – don’t leave it to her or him to guess.

8.     Use Active, Direct Verbs -Use specific terms, not vague ones, in describing your accomplishments. Don’t take credit for things you were only tangentially involved in, but don’t be modest either. Words like “involved” and “participated” dampen a resume like rain on a campfire. If you say you were “involved” in integrating an acquisition when you led the M&A Integration team, a reader will assume you were a minor contributor to the end result.

9.     Beware Resume Creep -A resume should resemble a narrow upside down pyramid in its level of detail. You are getting hired for what you have done the past five years. If a job is more than ten years ago, a concise summary is better than an elaborate description. Also, detailed school accomplishments, internships, and descriptions of corporate training programs will not be the basis of hiring decisions for an executive role.

10. Bullet with Care -Don’t overuse bullets. Bullets are meant to highlight your most important accomplishments, not as a substitute for clear writing. Excess bullets on a resume are the equivalent of “crying wolf”, calling attention to the ordinary. Never use more than six bullets in any one section of your resume, and summarize your core responsibilities clearly before you start using bullets.

11. Don’t Have 3-4 Sections of Attributes or Skills Before Your Job Experience Begins – Again, the organizational, industry and timeframe of specific skills and accomplishments matter. Have a summary section and no more than one skills section and get to your work history before you have used half a page, or less.

12. Change Titles as Needed For Clarity – Many organizations have internal titles that are not standard to their industry. There is nothing wrong with converting your title to a more standard one, as long as you are doing so for the purpose of clarity, not exaggeration.

13. Know Your Audience – Don’t assume the person reading your resume understands what you do. They might be an HR generalist, or even a hiring manager who only partially understands the function being hired for (Data Science, for example).

14. Don’t repeat the Same Secondary Accomplishments Job After Job – List them once or twice and cut the rest out. Less is more when it comes to tactical details that are inherently part of a job.

15. Eliminate Jargon Specific to Your Company and Industry – Don’t force the reader to guess what terms you are used to using among your co-workers mean – they probably won’t take the time.

16. Explain Terms and Abbreviations Specific to Your Industry and Function – A resume should be comprehensible to a smart person who is not experienced in your field or industry.

17. Don’t Obsess About It – Writing a resume is a craft, not a science. The goal is for your experience to speak for itself. Tell your story, back it up with facts, and let the caliber of your accomplishments speak for themselves.

What factors matter in building a regional technology economy? Two main factors are a critical mass of related businesses and world-class research universities. But just as important are informal networks composed of peers that support learning and entrepreneurship.

One prominent example of such an informal network is MinneAnalytics, a Minnesota-based nonprofit focused on analytics conferences and smaller events. Founded by several midlevel corporate executives, MinneAnalytics puts on four to six major conferences a year, and many smaller events (directly or in partnership with other community organizations).

Examples of the larger conferences, routinely drawing over 1,000 attendants, are:

• Halicon (Healthcare Data Science & Emerging Tech Conference), focused on a particular strength of the Minnesota economy: health care.

• FarCon (Financial, Retail and Marketing Analytics Conference), focused on three of the major industry verticals and how analytics is being leveraged.

• Data Tech, focused across industries on artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, neuro-linguistic programming, robotic process automation and other advanced analytic disciplines.

• SportCon, which explores the many ways in which data-driven decisionmaking is playing a major role in sports.

Several attributes make MinneAnalytics unusual — it is free to all attendants (costs are covered by corporate sponsors) and the speakers are national in caliber. Attending an event feels more like going to a conference in Orlando or Las Vegas than a local get-together. (Full disclosure: I have spoken several times at MinneAnalytics events and played an informal role in planning others.)

The caliber of MinneAnalytics events are such that the organization is expanding its conferences nationally, initially in Boston.

Another recent example of MinneAnalytics’ influence was its sponsorship of a student analytics coding competition at Minnesota State University, Mankato, now in its second year offering a master’s of analytics program.

As in many states, many of Minnesota’s academic resources are clustered in a single huge campus, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. But it still serves any state to have additional quality graduate programs. The MSU program, now in its second year, will be moving to a Twin Cities location next year to better serve the numerous corporate professionals in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Dan Atkins, a local analytics executive who founded and runs MinneAnalytics, nods to the power of physical community, even in this virtual age, as key to his organization’s future.

“We’ll continue to evolve organically the way we always have while always being three things: accessible, authentic and engaging,” he said. He points to an upcoming conference, FASTCon (Food, Ag, Sustainability & Supply Chain in Tech Conference) as an example of the organic growth that reflects the Twin Cities.

“We [also] will continue to export our culture of community in seeding communities in other markets,” Atkins said. “We could be a destination conference and upsize our DataTech conference, but that doesn’t build local community. So we have chosen to continue to build our local community and rather than bring other people here for a conference, we will bring conferences, and more importantly, community, to people in other markets.”

By Isaac Cheifetz, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 17, 2020

The past two months have seen a majority of knowledge workers working from home, on Zoom or similar technologies. Many commentators suggest this will be the new normal — now that people have a (forced) experience of telecommuting, they will no longer want to go into an office.

But widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that “Zooming” most of the day for work, and in the evening socially, is taking a subtle toll on people. Are Zoom and other virtual collaborative tools tiring us out?

BBC Worklife last month spoke to Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor at Insead who explores sustainable learning and development in the workplace, and Marissa Shuffler, an associate professor at Clemson University who studies workplace well-being and teamwork effectiveness.

The interview outlines several reasons video calls are inherently more stressful than personal interactions:

1. Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat. We need to work harder to process cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice and body language. Paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy.

2. Technical issues, minor or major, create stress in the users, anything from a person talking while muted to a weak Wi-Fi signal.

3. While silence creates a natural rhythm in real-life conversation, it can make people anxious or uncomfortable on a video call.

One 2014 study by German academics showed that delays on phone or conferencing systems shaped our views of people negatively. Even a delay of 1.2 seconds made people perceive the responder as less friendly or focused.

4. You know everyone is looking at you during a video conference, making you feel like you are on stage and adding the social pressure to perform. That can be nerve-racking and adds more stress.

The Zoom workplace is ultimately a positive, not a negative, enabling productivity from home unimaginable in previous generations.

However, the idea that people will prefer working on it in the longer term — when they have the choice of interacting in person — is questionable

The past 30 years have seen waves of information technology revolution. Web browsers, texting, smartphones and, most importantly, social media. Having digital connectivity to everyone seems as basic as the telephone, and has in fact replaced the telephone to a substantial extent.

It is difficult to judge what the implications of these changes are for society, but a book published last year did so with much success. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” by longtime Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, focuses on the new business model digital technologies enable — surveillance capitalism.

“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behavior.”

Aggregating our online communications, shopping and browsing, using it to predict what we might buy, and then selling that information to vendors who advertise and attempt to change our buying behavior is the stuff of dystopian novels.

To Zuboff, this represents the threat of soft totalitarianism. As she said in a 2019 interview, “It’s clear that surveillance capitalists have discovered that the most predictive sources of data are when they come in and intervene in our lives … in our real-time actions, to shape our action in a certain direction that aligns with the kind of outcomes they want to guarantee to their customers. That’s where they’re making their money. These are baldfaced interventions in the exercise of human autonomy, what I call the right to the future tense.”

This divides society into the watchers and the watched. The battle over who owns personal data will be a central one in the years and decades ahead.

by Isaac Cheifetz, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 8/23/20

How can a business to business salesperson avoid being treated as a commodity vendor, having trouble standing out from the crowd and competing on price? After all, the ability to research on the web has made selling value still more difficult. For the most obvious example, a car buying prospect today walks into a dealership with extensive data about which cars are best reviewed and what the true pricing is, based on internet research.

I recently read a book which shines a light on question and gives a structured, intuitive plan for differentiating oneself from your competition. Sales Differentiation: 19 Powerful Strategies to Win More Deals at the Prices You Want, by Lee Salz, a Twin Cities based consultant and author, starts with the question “who owns sales differentiation”. Who is responsible for making clear to the prospect why your product deserves their attention and the higher margins you desire?

The obvious answer is the marketing function, but author explains that sales actually has much value to add in sales differentiation, both in what they sell and how they sell. In fact, Salz maintains, it is critical that the salesperson take control of differentiation if they wish to avoid being treated as a commodity vendor who will be forced to compete on price.

What are some of the key elements of a sales differentiation strategy, according to author? Here are several key ones

1.      Unique vs Different – Salespeople will often claim their product or service is unique. In point of fact, it almost never is. Any established market will have numerous quality vendors in it. So, claiming to be unique is a weak strategy. Much more powerful is to analyze your offerings and show how you are different from the competition, a more substantive, though subtle claim.

2.      Buyers will pay more for differentiated solutions that they perceive offer meaningful value – It is rare for people to buy the truly lowest priced item. The winner will have found a way to align their solution with the buyer’s mental framework of value.

3.      The Six Components of the Sales Differentiation Universe – Much of WHAT you sell probably can’t be changed. However, if you take a step back from the core, you can differentiate WHAT you sell in a way that matters to Decision Influencers.

I found Sales Differentiation to be a powerful and intuitive guide, and plan to use the principles in this book in my own recruiting practice.

My column in the June 26th Minneapolis Star Tribune

A NY Times article of June 10th investigates the lessons of Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor company over a century ago, and one of the key innovators of Mass Production, Vertical Integration and global supply chains.

The article describes Henry Ford’s focus on building a long term resilient business by controlling every aspect of the supply chain (Vertical Integration) and on building new markets, versus the classic capitalist goal of rewarding shareholders with profits through dividends (or higher stock prices).

In a fundamental sense, Henry Ford lost that battle a long time ago, on three fronts. First, shareholder value is accepted as the principal value of publicly owned markets. Second, Just In Time manufacturing, with its focus on leveraging efficiency to perpetually reduce the “buffer” in a companies supply chain, has dominated industry for decades. Lastly, vertical integration ala Henry Ford, where a giant company owns the production of all the materials in its supply chain to ensure availability and reliability, has long dissipated in favor of a focus on corporate core competencies, where companies outsource everything else to global business partners.

And yet, current events force us to revisit the balance between long term resiliency and short term profitability. In the example of Ford Motor Company, thousands of cars currently sit unfinished at manufacturing plants in Detroit because of a supply chain crunch for semiconductor chips manufactured by a single company in Taiwan. 

Interestingly, as described in The NY Times article, “Compared with other publicly traded companies, Ford has shown greater inclination to limit dividends and preserve capital in the face of challenges… but chip companies have catered heavily to their investors by limiting their capacity — a strategy to maintain high prices.”

So what’s the bottom line? Shareholder value, JIT and outsourcing are not going to go away – they have been proven over time to be the most efficient way to manage large corporations. 

But the lessons of Warren Buffet (a financier, not a builder of new businesses), have value here. Buffet long ago posed the following hypothetical to goad businesses to focus on long term resiliency to ensure long term profitability: if you owned 100% of a company, as opposed to a massively diversified portfolio, what decisions would you make to increase the chances of its long term survival and success?

Applying Buffet’s question to Ford’s current chip gap, you would almost certainly choose to diversify your sources of key semiconductors, rather than the short term lowest cost option of having a single provider in a location as fraught with uncertainties as Taiwan.

My Minneapolis Star Tribune article from June 5th, 2022

Hiring Lessons From the NBA Finals

The Golden State Warriors are in the NBA Finals again, for the sixth time in the last eight years, and one of the surprise contributors is All Star Forward Andrew Wiggins. Wiggins had spent the first five years of his career playing for the Minnesota Timberwolves, before being traded to Golden State in 2020. Though he was a first pick in the 2014 draft and averaged nearly 20 points per game as a Timberwolf, Wiggins was widely considered a disappointment in Minnesota.

Whether the Wiggins trade was a net gain for the Wolves is a question best saved for the Sports section. But what lessons can the business world learn from this episode about what is takes to makes stars successful? 

The topic is addressed in a seminal paper by Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg in 2004, titled “The Risky Business of Hiring Stars”. In it, Groysberg and his team of researchers analyzed the movement of over 1000 star Wall Street analysts, and determined that “ After a star moves, not only does her performance plunge, but so does the effectiveness of the group”. 

Why would this be? This is due, ultimately, to performance being contextual to an organizational setting. It’s not that superstars aren’t outliers in ability – they are almost always elite. But an organizations output is dependent on its systemic quality, not individuals raw talent.

This explains Wiggins success in Golden State after underachieving in Minnesota. A low key individual with enormous talents, he was asked to play the role of leader and culture changer for the Wolves. But the Wolves culture at the time was a losing one, with major gaps on offense and defense, and Wiggins was not the person to change that.

In contrast, on the Warriors, Wiggins is surrounded by Hall of Famers. He can focuses on using his talents to be part of a great defense led by Dreymond Green, and to be a productive part of the offense led by Steph Curry. He is not asked to be a change agent, as he was in Minnesota.

The lesson here is not to expect individuals to change your culture. Superstars, in sports or in business, are talented individuals who are part of successful organization, and “your mileage may vary”.