To subscribe to this occasional newsletter go here.     Feel free to forward this note to your team members.

Today is October 22, 2008  The archive for this newsletter is here.
 

A CEO talks about the importance of
"Grokking"

I had lunch last week with an author of two once best-selling business books. I was interviewing him via our ScreeningInterviews.com for a client considering him for a consulting job. We were brought in because the client wanted a good arms length interview they could easily pass around the C-suite. The writer had once run a very large corporation, did so famously and wrote well about it. The recorded interview itself was telling and useful relative to the client's decision about whether or not to consider him further for the assignment. But it was the informal discussion later when he brought up a useful notion that he said I could share with other CorpWar readers.

This notion is his very deep seated belief of something called "grokking". This was what he always looked for in his inner team members. He said it was an even denser form of value, to him, than what I call a "corporate warrior" (a phrase he considers a bit pop and superficial). I had never heard the term grok before so I asked what it meant to him in a functional as well as philosophical sense.

"It means the guy is really inside the skill set of something. It's not an external layer. Most people with good skills wear them like good clothes. But it's still external. A layer on the outside. A guy or gal that groks something knows it so thoroughly it has become part of them. It has become their retina through which they see everything."

"But doesn't that tunneling lead to a form of social dysfunction?" I asked.

"Sometimes. Those guys we just put into a nice corner and gave them clean tools. Everybody adds shareholder value in their own way; if they grok something of value to the organization, and therefore the shareholder, then that value add is pretty high. You need to support it and use it. My goal, perfection really, was having our important critical paths composed of these kinds of people. It's a beautiful thing to watch once the chain is built."

I asked him what he grokked. He smiled and said "Well, that's simple. People."

I left the meeting asking myself what I "grok", if indeed anything. I concluded it would be recruiting in its various flavors, such as doing useful interviews. 

It might be beneficial to ask yourself the same question: "Do I grok anything, and if so what?" After looking at your core team members with the same question in mind, suggest they do the same. And so on.

Think about it...