Be inspirational
Guertin recently heard a quote from Bob Noyce, one of the co-founders of Intel Corp., who said, “Don’t be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful.”
You have to keep looking beyond what your reality is to pull in people who don’t use your products yet.
“If you just pay attention to history, you’ve been misled about what the future should be,” he says. “Don’t automate the cow paths. Don’t look at the cow paths and decide where the roads ought to be. If you think originally about what customers want, you can sometimes see that an evolutionary step is the wrong step. You need to rethink what people do in order to imagine a new solution.”
Guertin points out the creation of the iPod as an example.
“Sony should have thought of the iPod,” he says. “They made disk drives, they made everything necessary to do it, but they missed it because they were encumbered by their own history. That’s one thing you don’t want to do.”
When you’re thinking revolutionary, your products will inspire people and get them excited. For example, the typical house has a kitchen, living room, dining room, bathrooms, bedrooms and a garage.
“A person who is not a designer can pretty much draw a house, but a great architect can draw a house that’s an inspiration to the person who lives in it every day,” Guertin says.
He points out Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater as an example.
“The houses of that day compared to Frank Lloyd Wright, you can see that he went to a place nobody had ever gone before,” he says. “That’s what great designers do.”
But often when you look at your own abilities, you realize that your skills are more preschool-like rather than Picasso-like.
“You have to hire people, who by their life experience, have learned how to do that,” Guertin says. “… You have to have those people in your organization.”
To get those people into your organization, you have to spark their passion in the interview process by asking what they’ve most enjoyed in their career. Their response doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you drill down by asking them to tell you more and to explain it in great details. You’re looking at what that answer stirs up inside of them.
“If it was, in truth, something that they really enjoyed and something that they learned a lot from, they’ll be able to tell me a tremendous amount about it, and the more they talk, the [more] enthusiastic they would be,” he says. “By the depth of knowledge they display and the enthusiasm that they show, I can tell what kind of person they are.”
If you can find that passion in someone, you know they’ll also find a passion for your business and products and work to make both more inspirational.
“People put on an interview face, but frankly, most people’s interview faces aren’t that good,” he says. “Passionate people don’t put on that face. … They show love and affection for doing a good job. If someone doesn’t show me love and affection and a good job in an interview, they probably won’t show it to me in the job.”
How to reach: Varian Medical Systems Inc., www.varian.com
