Thedwick

Since entering managerdom, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people make decisions and how to figure out the value of those decisions. The way I figure it, any given decision you have to make has a theoretical maximum value. No matter how good a job you do picking the right long distance carrier, for example, that choice alone isn’t going to propel you to the cover of Fortune magazine.

So from that theoretical maximum value there are two ways you can subtract value: get it wrong, or take a long time making up your mind.

The real challenge in making decisions is that time and correctness are fundamentally opposed forces. And not only that, but different kinds of decisions value time and correctness in sometimes drastically different ways.

For example. You’re an engineer designing a nuclear power plant. You’re (hopefully) going to take as much time as you need to make sure you get the design right because if you don’t you personally could be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Yes, taking that time isn’t free and will upset people, but not nearly as much as a mushroom cloud.

An example on the other end of the spectrum. You’re a burger cook at McDonalds. You could take a long time carefully cooking each burger to a tender, juicy picture of perfection, but then you’d have a line of people out the door and angry because you’re wasting their limited lunch hour and you’d have an angry boss because his business has razor-thin margins and depends on volume to survive. All of those people would rather have timely, but imperfect burgers.

So if you had to distill it down to a formula, it might look something like this:

Value = MaxValue – ( f(wrongness) + g(time) )

In the nuclear plant example, the slope of f() is very, very steep, to a point where the slope of g() is almost irrelevant, even if it is also somewhat steep. In the McDonalds example, the slope of g() is the steep one. Some kinds of decisions have very steep slopes for both (like, say, decisions fighter pilots make), and people who make those kinds of decisions for a living make a lot of money, or get a lot of glory, or simply end up with high blood pressure and ulcers.

I think really talented and successful people are very good at optimizing that equation. They realize they’ll never reach the maximum value because it’s impossible to make a perfect decision instantly. But they have a good instinctive feel for what f() and g() look like in any particular situation and they are good at articulating what they feel to others. In words, though, not an equation. And they are also good at defending their choices when it becomes apparent later they didn’t make the perfectly correct choice.

I interviewed someone recently fresh out of college. I love interviewing people like that because they’re so full of boundless optimism and think they can do anything and that attitude is kind of infectious. A colleague of mine from the UK told me a story last year of a trip he took to the US many years ago. He’d spent many months just traveling around the US and said it was a life-changing experience having so much American optimism rub off on him (quite in contrast to the mood in the UK at the time). It made me feel so proud and ashamed at the time. Proud, obviously, of my own country. Ashamed of the general pessimism (or maybe more accurately, cynicism) I was personally feeling at the time.

So anyway, I was happy to have this candidate’s optimism rub off on me and was generally impressed with his maturity and drive and apparent intelligence. I’d even written in my notes early in the interview “polished interviewee”. But over time I started to feel concerned. He had clearly taken many seminars and/or read many books on how to interview well and speak well and had clearly been an eager student of them. And he was trying his damnedest to apply those lessons. Every single question I asked him eventually came back to a summary of why my company was so great and he thought he’d be a good fit and this job fit with his goals. Every one, even me asking him why he wanted to be an astronaut at some point in his past.

That was good in a way. It demonstrated pretty clearly to me that he was interested in self-improvement and was a good student and could take advice well and apply it. But the interview told me nothing overall about who he was. It left me having to decipher for each answer how much was bullshit (or, more kindly, positive spin) and how much was the real person I’d end up having to manage if I gave him the job. So even though I found no red flags in the interview and in fact was a little excited by the candidate, I still left feeling a little uneasy.

Nobody is that perfect, and no job is a perfect fit and it’s a farce to pretend otherwise. I’d rather know up front where our challenges will be and decide to hire someone anyway than find out as a surprise when they’re already in the door.

A more experienced candidate I’d pass on right away as a result because they should know better by now. But this one I might chalk up to inexperience and well-intentioned eagerness and hire anyway. I don’t know; I guess I’ll just have to see what the other interviewers say.