Author Archive

Uh-oh. A thirty foot wide sheet of ice suddenly appeared on our farm driveway one frozen morning last week. A previously-innocent-looking black pipe running along the base of the pumphouse wall was obviously the culprit. Following it back to its source required lifting multiple floor boards, and descending with flashlight in hand down ancient steel […]

This is an occasional series of posts on key attributes of successful leaders, gleaned from over a quarter century in executive search. I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many very successful business people, as well as dealing with some whose careers had made detours that did or didn’t get back on the highway later. Some […]

We recently closed two searches for similar roles at similar size coatings manufacturers. In fact the exact same job title. On the surface they looked almost identical, and of course it’s never a matter of only one factor; but the two people hired had radically different priorities and so did the hiring companies. It was […]

2018 marks our 25th year in business. Quite a milestone. Some reflection being in order, I thought back to the inauspicious bootstrap beginnings of the firm – in a one-bedroom apartment with a fax machine – and the extent to which the world has changed since 1993. The funny thing is, while technology has transformed […]

Several past articles have focused on the similarities between hiring and coatings technology. A recent search pointed up another parallel: “good” is a relative term. One of the most fundamental principles in formulation of paints and coatings is an accurate understanding of the environment to which the coating will be subjected and the particular results […]

Rhetorical question: If you had an effective person in a key role one or two quarters sooner, would that make a significant difference to your business? To put the question another way: what is the opportunity cost of falling in love with one candidate? This article focuses on a vitally important principle in the hiring […]

The opposite effects of surfactants and defoamers in paint provide a great analogy for hiring and building successful teams. When you are formulating a coating, you need a surfactant or wetting agent to ensure the coating spreads over the surface. But the nature of how surfactants work, reducing surface tension, tends to create bubbles; hence […]

A client recently asked us to search for someone for a position that was more than the usual “hard to fill” role we typically recruit for. The job responsibilities and requirements made sense to them internally – they had a particular-shaped hole that needed filling – but the problem was that nobody else has a […]

One way in which hiring resembles coatings technology is the often-forgotten principle that candidates and paint both have limited open times. All paint and coatings people I know, and most of the general population as well, recognize that if you take the lid off a can of paint, stick your brush in it and start […]

Following up on my initial post about how hiring is like coatings technology (and thanks to everyone who joined the idea generation with so many excellent examples) – today’s mental protein bar explores the connection between candidates’ experience, jobs, and chemical formulas. What?? But yes, really. So move over #MotivationMonday, today is #FormulaFriday. There are […]