Laziness as a business asset
I am slightly nervous about writing this post. I am sure my boss will read it and I really do not want him to get the wrong idea. But I will crack on regardless.
Over the years I have commonly been involved in hiring staff. Typically, I would meet the person, and then spend the next couple of hours talking with them and perhaps showing them around. In many cases, within moments of meeting them, I would have reservations and spend the time trying to overcome my negative feelings about the candidate. I can think of no case where I had such feelings, hired the person anyway, and they went on to be very successful. On the other hand, I recall a couple of instances where my instant reaction, on meeting the candidate, was “yes!” I then spent the two hours sanity checking my gut reaction. In both those cases we hired the people who went on to be very valuable members of staff.
I have a new idea on how to select good people. It is all to do with how hard they work …
It would seem intuitive that the best people to hire are hard workers. But I would like to question that. A clue to my attitude comes from a slogan used by Hewlett Packard a few years back: “Work smarter, not harder”. [They now seem to have moved on to “Let’s do amazing”, which challenges me grammatically.]
My suggestion is that you look for smart, lazy people. This may sound odd. Smart is reasonable, but lazy!? The logic is simple: a lazy person, as long as they are intelligent, will always try to minimize the amount of work they have to do and they will achieve this in two ways:
- Look for the fastest and easiest way to achieve a result; i.e. the most efficient way to do a job. Would you prefer inefficiency?
- Obsessively avoid reinventing wheels and reuse work whenever possible [to avoid the effort of doing something new]. They will borrow/steal materials from colleagues. Being smart, they will realize that sharing their own documents, presentations etc. is a good way to encourage others to share too. Would you rather have a team who do redundant work and have a secretive attitude?
So, here is the action plan for hiring staff:
- Are they smart? Check.
- Are they lazy? Check.
- Hired!
