Alternately, this is the story of a man who hired based on word of mouth, then when that didn't work out, learned the wrong lesson.
That said, there's a good lesson - if you hire sales people, their most attractive target will always be selling themselves to the guy who's writing their paycheck. It will not automatically be the actual customers or whatever you think their incentives are "supposed" to be.
And it's a parable, not a true story. The timing was 1924 - the roaring 20s. It's a commentary against the flashy types, in defense of the folks who put their heads down and work.
This is "I got fucked up and crashed my Ford into a tree, so I'm never buying a Ford again."
If I repeatedly get fucked up and crash Fords over the course of my life while having much better luck with other cars, I might start looking for a causal relationship.
An insightful business owner will review their own psychology first and ask others for their impression in a way that doesn't reveal their bias.
Risk reductions can be:
- invite people over to hang out, hack on something, or work on whatever they're working on
- start people on a contract gig
- maybe another contract or what works for them
- have an extremely informal non-interview, interview process
- trial period
- eventually FTE status in a set time-frame if both sides want it"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."
"These are quite simple rules...No Edison could ever qualify."
He was good at sales and marketing, however.
What Edison did possess was a remarkable capacity for what he called "hard work". Making the light bulb practical was something anybody could have done, if they'd had the willingness to burn through months of time and money performing dull experiments over and over and over again.
There was still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in Edison's day, but 'low-hanging' didn't mean 'easy'. He made a business out of working harder than anyone else did to make contraptions practical.
People pooh-pooh him as unoriginal, dull, but that's the sort of man his work needed. He was also smarter than people gave him credit for, though he didn't match the sheer brilliance of Tesla. His industrial research facility at Menlo Park was the first of its kind, he set a lot of standards in the field and had a lot of influence. It's considered by many to be his most important innovation.
One thing is a little misleading though: he established a laboratory, with a group of inventors. I believe this was the first industrial-scale research laboratory in the world - like PARC. So much of the "hard work" is the hard work of all these other men - and they happily welcomed his name on their invention, even in cases where he didn't do much, they wanted his name there.
So although he did invent a lot personally, perhaps his greatest achievement was being able to lead and inspire intelligent and hard-working men to do what he did (as you say). Jobs and Wozniak rolled into one.
You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)
Additionally, employees optimizing for pay/effort instead of max pay is still a win for the company so long as the employee brings in marginally more than they cost.
It's been written on HN many times that work sample tests are very important in hiring decisions. Perhaps this is just more evidence of that. The good news is that it's much more practical to give such tests in software development than in sales (to my knowledge).
But let's not forget that he lived in different circumstances than today.