Interviews - Shucking a lot of oysters to find the pearl?

It was my first start up experience, The fifth person to join. I was working for this company called NetQuest (Now called Aditi) founded by an ex Micro-softie.. Being part of Senior leadership, I was coached by him extensively that we needed to hire for potential and not for skills. We had an elaborate interview process and at any round in the process, if somebody objects, the  person is dropped. No exceptions ! Also, we had a list of the Microsoft questions (for example Why are manholes round ?) to identify the folks with "Out of the box" thinking. My mentor, instilled into me this approach deeply so that it became my default interview process. This helped me immensely  in my career as my success is mainly based on finding the right folks to work for me !

Read on to see how this simple technique can help you find and built sustainable productive teams....

Hire Employees for their potential and consultants for their skills !

Spiritual Gravity will bring down Apple in 2012

Most of my friends know that I am a die hard Microsoft fan. I have been working with their products for most of my career.  I have watched Apple rise from the ashes and head to the stratosphere with envy. So please take my predictions with a pinch of salt !
My prediction is  that Apple will peak out in 2012 and start their descent back to earth. Here is why …

1. Apple has to be right all the time. Competition has to be right only once for Apple to fall off its “Number 1 “ pedestal and the competition is getting  very much close to being right !
2. Apple products are not being designed and built by Aliens.Other humans will find way to break it and make something better
3. IT Corporations find it difficult to manage their own much smaller IT application portfolios. Managing over 350K  apps will soon break and rogue applications will slip in to destroy customer confidence
4. Apple products are on the verge of becoming commodities. They will soon drop in the “Cool” factor bringing them down to earth with other products
5. Without Steve Jobs, Apple will fall back into a “Microsoft under Steve Ballmer” paradigm. Still a great company making money. But not THE company !
6. What goes up must come down and what goes up faster must come down faster !! The law of Averages will catch up with Apple soon
7. Mobile virus will become more lucrative considering the exploding population of Apple IOS and we can see a swarm of them hit the ecosystem

Revisit next year same time. Let us see if I got it right !
What are your thoughts?

Raghavan (Raj) Rajendran