What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Key takeaways:

- First impressions matter, a lot!
- I really liked the chapter on Nassim Taleb's investment strategy. (Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb)
- Typical interviewing questions don't work well. People prepare their answers, based on what they think you want. “When you have an interview with someone and have an hour with them, you don't conceptualize that as taking a sample of a person's behavior, let alone a possibly biased sample, which is what it is. What you think is that you are seeing a hologram, a small and fuzzy image but still the whole person.” Give them a hypothetical: “At your weekly team meetings, your boss unexpectedly begins aggressively critiquing your performance on a current project. What do you do?” or, “You're
in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation?” These will tell you much more about a person.
- “If everyone needs to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.”
- It takes more than a smart group of people, you need a smart organization.