dangletech

Last week, two seemingly unrelated articles caught my attention. The first was a magazine obituary on C.K. Prahalad, the management thinker best known for his work on core competencies. The article spoke extensively of his ‘big ideas’ and noted his habit of traveling the world “prying useful information out of everyone he met…always looking for connections and patterns, hoping to predict change”. The second article profiled Dr. Henry Jarecki who gave up the practice of psychiatry to establish one of the world’s largest commodities trading houses. When asked to explain his seemingly unlikely career shift Dr. Jarecki said, “Actually, they are actually quite similar. Both psycho-therapy and business are all about identifying patterns, in behavior or in markets. Once you find the pattern, you can transform a modest effort into a grand result”.
Interviewing can also be conceptualized as a search for patterns. It is about looking for themes that have cut across candidates’ decisions and behaviors, their academic and career choices, and the situations and environments in which they have been most and least successful. It is the search for patterns of behavior from which one can infer temperament, personality, values, and motivation and how these have, or have not, changed over time?
At a time when job-specific behavioral interviewing is the predictive instrument of choice, it is useful to remember that the chronological trip down memory lane remains an effective complement in evaluating candidates. And whether it is creative thinking, psycho-therapy, commodities trading or interviewing, mining for patterns and themes is where the golden nuggets are buried.
About the Author:
Robert Hebert is Managing Partner of Toronto-based executive search firm StoneWood Group (http://www.stonewoodgroup.com). He can be reached @ .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or at 416.365.9494x777