These are the hiring practices I follow:
- Hire someone smarter than you
- Hire someone different than you
- Hire for skill, but also for creativity, humor, and hustle
Then these are the supervisory practices I follow:
- Praise in public, correct in private
- Care about the person, not only the performance
- Develop everyone: go out into the world and learn things
And this is a management book that I love: Ed Catmull’s “Creativity, Inc.” It’s about building and sustaining a creative, effective workforce … and the destructive force of mediocrity. Some favorite lines:
“… My job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for things that undermine it.”
“When faced with a challenge, get smarter.”
“Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.”
“To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by use about ourselves.”