A lot of the work I have done for startups has been directly related to hiring and I constantly go back to a quadrant that I learned about from a former boss of my wife’s at Coach. It divides potential hires/employees into four quadrants. I’ve listed them here in order of hiring preference:
1. Intelligent and hard working. Very, very rare. Think Michael Jordan. Steve Jobs. (and you of course).
2. Intelligent and lazy. They don’t always work, but when they do, the produce quality.
3. Dumb and lazy. They don’t always work, but when they do, it sucks.
4. Dumb and hardworking. Uh-Oh. Bad work and lots of it.
My goal in both hiring and evaluation is to determine the quality of the work the potential hire/current employee is capable of producing- then I can worry about how to motivate them to produce maximum output.
