{"id":954,"date":"2010-06-24T12:06:11","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T11:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=954"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:32:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:32:40","slug":"laziness-as-a-business-asset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2010\/06\/24\/laziness-as-a-business-asset\/","title":{"rendered":"Laziness as a business asset"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.
\nI have a new idea on how to select good people. It is all to do with how hard they work …<\/p>\n

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.]
\nMy 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:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. 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?<\/li>\n
  2. 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?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, here is the action plan for hiring staff:<\/p>\n