Yeah, but he really knows his stuff...
sethgodin.typepad.com
sethgodin.typepad.com
However, I urge everyone to please remember that stereotypes are templates and nobody fits the stereotype exactly. Everyone has something special about them that is worth considering. Just imagine if you do have a "mr. know-it-all" at your work who gets a bit frustrated when you ask him to do important but "boring" things like documentation or protocol compliance. Advice like this will suddenly put this person in your view as negative, despite the fact that "mr. know-it-all" is a very hardworking employee who is extremely loyal to your company. Nobody is perfect and thanks to this new stereotype that you just read about, you cannot help but compare him to the guy that "one everyone has to tiptoe around." Oh how you hate that stereotype and look, this "mr know-it-all" totally fits the description!
You could solve your documentation problem in some other way but once you fire this guy, you got two problems - you don't have a loyal, hardworking, "mr. know-it-all" anymore and you don't have the documentation on what he did and how he did it I'm no managerial-guru but I sure hope nobody starts firing their top tech people because of random posts on the Internet.
Of course, the hypocrisy here among most of us is that when a large company does fire key tech people from their staff, we all come in rallying for support of the tech folks, arguing "how can a company survive if they fire their lead tech!" Well, companies can survive. And yours could too despite the fact that you fired your key tech person as long as you have a good infrastructure in place. However, that doesn't mean your competition won't welcome them with open arms and now you got a third problem.
At least in startup mode, where you obsess daily, hourly and minutely (?) about everything: should I fire John? Is John the best producer I ever had? But John just did something amazing yesterday, he saved the day. John is being a pain today. Had lunch with John, what a great guy.
You have to constantly look at the trees, look at the forest, and make choices. Tactical and strategic.
It's the same as parenting by the way. It's easy to read a book and see that by age 2, you should treat you kid in such and such fashion. Great, high-level advice. Except you interact with your kid constantly. When you're in a good mood and when you are not. We are back to tactical and strategy.
Bottom line: hire engineers who have great kids :-)
Yes, everybody already knows about exceptions. My kindergarten teach spent a godawful long time on the subject, eh?
Fortunately, this suggestion is made by a marketing guy, and everyone knows they're full of hot air.
"You'll find someone else who really knows this stuff. No doubt about it. And firing one intransigent bully is a lot less painful than shutting down an entire division next year because he paralyzed your decision-making."
I'd rather say technical competency doesn't make up for destroying the team spirit. There are probably several movies, where the coach throws out the star of the team and gets a better overall team afterwards.
On the other hand it is important to know that technical competency is a requirement for excellent decisions.
There are movies where folks believe in Tinkerbelle and that keeps her alive or brings her back to life.
Conversely, if you think your idea is really good and he refuses to come around and is unable to give a logical reason why, then a) he's not really that good or b) he's good but you did not understand what he said.
What's worse is that he thinks he shits gold... I've noticed that certain personalities tend to go this way as they learn something well - they use their knowledge it to feel better about themselves, as if the entire point of learning was to make up for insecurities. Once they know enough to sound knowledgeable, they stop learning.
The worst thing about this is, I think, that it becomes impossible to hire people smarter than them.
Why am I not surprised?
Don't hire him in the first place, maybe. But once he's there, if you don't have a replacement already lined up and combat-tested, firing him can easily shut down your company.
..
> ability to make excellent decisions
Ability to make excellent decisions comes from deep technical competency. Firing the guy who knows something about stuff leaves behind a bunch of guys who are not very likely to make the excellent decisions you are looking forward to. But there are people who _pretend_ to have deep technical competence.
e.g. http://www.bored.com/jokes/0241377.html (Conway's Law #2)
And frankly I do not see the case where one person is worth 100 randomly picked persons in his field.
There's a rather famous list of 5000 German physicists who signed a petition stating that Einstein's theories were junk.
I don't know how many other physicists Germany had at the time but surely that tells us something about the odds of randomly picking 100 German physicists who were collectively "worth" one Einstein.
(Nevertheless, the man was probably worth quite a number of randomly chosen peers indeed :))
> Einstein was attacked by some with anti-Jewish leanings. When a pamphlet was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, Einstein retorted "If I were wrong, one would be enough." http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Einstein.html
"Deep technical competency is overrated compared with the ability to make excellent decisions and to create a culture where forward motion is valued and personal initiative is rewarded."
And, on average, I don't find that deep technical competency is overrated compared to...well, he's talking about social skills here.
At every stage of the hiring and interview and HR process, the deck is stacked in favor of social skills and social advantages. Is it better to be 25% more competent or to be 6 foot 3 inches tall at a job interview? The answer is unfortunately the second a lot of the time.
Yes, there are cases where one bad apple spoils the bunch and you need to get rid of him. In my experience, the bad apples are far more likely to be managers than technical people (think about it: what sort of person wants to boss others around?).
I see a much larger risk, for a medium-sized to large company, of driving out technical expertise by focusing too much on interpersonal skills. In fact, this may be exactly why larger companies tend to stagnate.
Smaller companies that survive more than a year or two already know how to focus on talent.
Modern paraphrase: Even Obama gets to put up with this guy's shit.