Yes, Dear. Let's organize and develop.

Two bits of wisdom in HR, courtesy of Softerware's Nathan Relles and Google's People Operations:

First, the single most revealing question to ask an interviewee?  Ask them to tell you about your company.

Nathan believes (and I agree) that hiring is like a marriage.  This is very much the process and analogy that Ricardo Semler uses, too.  Think of it as an engagement.

My two cents: The best employees are already borderline fanatics about your company and will be bright enough to teach you something new about your company before you hire them.  You should also judge a person by their past performance and ability to understand the current situation, not by their ability to create strong positive feelings (although that's important, too).

Second, Google's People Operations mentions their philosophy on their webpage.  "Find them, grow them, and keep them". Yes!  Yet for some reason, traditional companies seem to under-emphasize Organizational Development (grow & keep).  I am fighting to convince RMS to commit significant resources to 'grow'.

I have been listening to a lot of Elon Musk podcasts in the car recently.  His Oxford talk goes in to particularly juicy detail over his concept of first principles - which I sheepishly admit I got a bit wrong. The good news is that my interpretation, combined with his, is enormously powerful!

I interpreted first principles rather simply: Find the most basic rules about the nature of things and then derive from them to meet the needs of a complex situation. This is how physicists work.  I am sure this is intuitive to Elon, and he has learned to apply this in his business, but I wonder if he has a core life's philosophy.

It's funny how obsessed I am with people as opposed to other natural forms. I am guilty of anthrpocentrism in spite of my pledge of Deep Ecology and biocentrism.  But then again, people do seem to be where the action is these days - at least in terms of the most prominent threats to the future of the planet.  But we could be the most responsible stewards of this planet as well.  Just read Ishmael.

Anyway, the bottom line is I try to find philosophical first principles about people - simple tools for negotiating life with humans such as thinking of ideas as memes, extrapolating from that that all people are inherently 'good' that is, they are all trying to advocate for the survival of their genetic code.  Unfortunately, sometimes that gets a bit haywire with such a complex piece of genetic machinery as a person, occasionally with disastrous results.  But for the most part it appears evolution has done an amazing job of weeding out destructive forces such that even the most twisted individuals are often actually very sick. And you try to help sick people, you don't hate them.

Pick your least favorite person, living or dead.  If you'd been given the same genetics, at the same time, expressed the same way, gone through the same experiences in the same environment, you'd basically be that person - you'd make decisions just how they do. So there's only this narrow margin of becoming exposed to new things beyond one's control, absorbing that experience or information, and changing your own course because of it. That's why creating social structures, 'situations' which are designed to optimize human experience, is so important.  You need the set people up to succeed.

And I try to do that using first principles.

Elon is thinking a bit more about technology when he talks about first principles.  He's literally applying the laws of physics to the technology to see 'back of the envelope' what the growth potential of his technology is.  If it can outperform a mainstream technology by a significant margin (usually a multiple of some key efficiency indicator, sometimes orders of magnitude) then he figures it will eventually be profitable.  (Space X was a crazy folkloric gamble, but I'm guessing he had backup plans.) For example, he could see the opportunity to improve battery technology, and figure that eventually electric cars could be cheaper to run than gas ones if the energy density goes up and cost goes down.

And one of my core challenges I grapple with in first principles of people is that idea of how to influence people. Maybe I'll post more on that later.  Gotta get to work!