alan's blog

The Need to Accurately Understand the PEOPLE in a Process

Contributed by alan on Friday, April 1, 2011

In many, if not most knowledge/office worker processes, the people are analogous to the machines in a manufacturing or physical process.

I've seen a lot of talk recently about the importance of attitude over other factors in employees and of course, this is nothing new. When it comes to performance of people in the different processes that occur in business, a better more accurate and powerful way to look at it is suitability. Suitability, typically encompasses the traits that underlie most of what determines a person's level of performance in a job or task. These include a person's key personality traits and natural tendencies, work and task preferences, motivations, decision styles and attitudes.

Entrepreneurial and other Misgivings

Contributed by alan on Thursday, March 31, 2011

Keywords: building a team, Entrepreneur, Hiring, team building

Today, I attended the Wall Street Journal series of events entitled How I Built It. As a follow-on to their ongoing column where they profile entrepreneurs who have built successful enterprises, they are doing a small "nationwide" tour where their small business editor (and the audience) interviews a group of 6 of these folks in an attempt to better understand their experiences, success models etc…

At today's even t(3/31/11), attendees included the founders/co-founders from the following firms: Popchips, One Kings Lane, Thrillist.com, Ouidad and Reef.