Your ramshackle company may be just fine

Posted by William Gallagher

Harvard Business Review just shook down what it calls the myths of great companies: the things we all think the very best companies to work for do all the time. Curiously, none of the myths it examines include money. Hopefully this means it isn’t a myth that the best companies pay well – and hopefully you and I will find this out through personal experience.

If that’s an odd omission, the five points that are included are interesting. Here’s number 4, which is one I particularly want to talk to you about.

Myth 4: They Hire for Cultural Fit

Organizations no longer select job candidates solely on the basis of their skills or experience. They hire those whose personality and values are consistent with their company culture. Among the more vocal proponents of this approach is Zappos, the online shoe distributor. But lots of other companies have extoled the virtues of hiring for cultural fit.

The idea holds intuitive appeal: When employees share similar attitudes, they’re more likely to get along, and more likely they are to produce. Right?

Not necessarily. There’s a point at which too much similarity can stifle performance. For one, similarity fosters complacency. We get stuck doing things the way we’ve always done them because no one is challenging us to think differently. Similarity also breeds overconfidence. We overestimate the accuracy of our opinions and invest less effort in our decisions, making errors more common.

In a 2009 study teams of three were asked to solve a problem with the help of a new colleague who was either similar or dissimilar to the existing group. While homogenous teams felt more confident in their decisions, it was the diverse teams that performed best. The newcomers pushed veterans to reexamine their assumptions and process data more carefully—the very thing they neglected to do when everyone in their group was similar.

5 Myths of Great Workplaces – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (5 March 2015)

Read the full piece for a little more on that plus the other other apparent myths. But I’ve seen this business of cultural fit and it’s been less about slotting you in to a similar environment than it has been about bosses hiring people who are like themselves.

If they do that and their new recruits also only hire people like them, in ten minutes you’ve got a whole company of boring white middle-aged men.

It’s so easy to break habits

Posted by William Gallagher

Well, I could do with fixing my tea drinking habit. And my Pepsi Max addition. I could lighten up on the curries too, or at least if I stopped having so many I could perhaps lighten up.

But about six months ago I made a plan – and put it in OmniFocus – that every day I would post one article to this Blank Screen news site. Just one. After a while, it became a habit. And there was certainly never a shortage of material.

After a spell, that became frustrating: there was always more that I wanted to say.

So I worked out timings and figured out the average time per article – it’s ridiculously variable – and also reckoned that doing two together would take less time than doing one then coming back later for the next.

In my head I was about to change the repeating daily OmniFocus task to “Post three new articles” and I began typing exactly that. But somehow the word ‘three’ changed itself to ‘five’. A slip of the mind.

But I tried it. And for at least five months, I did five stories a day. It got so doing the five was a normal part of my day. Until the end of September.

Then various events I’ve been producing all year came along and last preparation, new marketing and new research followed by the performance, it clobbered me and I failed.

I failed to post at all one day.

I remember sitting by the bed, iPad in hand, not really able to focus my eyes let alone my head. It was probably a sensible decision to fall asleep, even if my body made that choice for me.

But.

Having broken the chain once, that chain became china: it shattered at the break. It became very easy to not post at all.

Now, I don’t think you were waiting for me every day. But I was. And I’m jolted by how hard it was to break the pattern the first time yet how very, very easy it was to break it the second.

So I’m back. I promise myself and you that I’m back. But do please take a telling from my admitting to having been poor like this. You can do more than you expect with a habit and if you don’t break it, you feel great.

OmniFocus: your life in perspective

Posted by William Gallagher

I love that strap line. It only makes sense if you’ve already used OmniFocus enough so one questions its worth as a general advertising slogan. but to an existing OmniFocus user, it is superb. I am an existing OmniFocus user, it is superb.

I am of course now, immediately, instantly an existing user of the new version of OmniFocus for Mac and I’ll be writing about it again soon. But for now, watch the Omni Group’s videos about OmniFocus on the official set.