Well done.. even more powerful because this isn't typical fare on this website. If read on a personal development website, it would read like more content fodder. Read here, it reads like amazing.
This is pretty obvious to me, made complicated by people who want super answers or miracle get rich quicks or anything like that. If you see your weight every day and seeing it going up, you eat less. If you see it going down, you get motivated and stay on the same track.
"I lost 20 pounds...How? I drank bear piss and took up fencing. How the fuck you think, son? I exercised."
People will probably bite back saying that exercise doesn't correlate with weight loss. That is true, but less important than the ultimate result: persistent weight loss. And exercise corresponds damned well with persistent weight loss. Cheers!
This was arguably the funniest I have ever seen Conan - you can see how he got his start. He was funny as hell, people loved him, then he got reined in to the standard talk show paradigm.
He was still funny enough in that setting to make it work - in the 12:30 slot, anyways.
"See Randomness" by Paul Graham fits here. Yes, you didn't get the job, but the person never meant to make you mull and wait. You just weren't their first priority, put e-mailing you back on the back burner, then went off to do something else and forgot.
It's unfortunate and inconsiderate, but it's part of life. After a week, give up and move on to the next one.
I'm not even sure you should wait a week before moving on to the next one. In situations where you're going to get little courtesy (as in the majority of job hunting), you might as well blitz your way through as much as you can and then cherry pick from any positive responses.
That's true, and if you think about it, that's what the employer is doing as well. Simultaneously moving forward with many people, and choosing the best match. Nothing wrong with it on either side, as long as everyone is courteous. A reasonable employer should have no problem with this.
This would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a standard because of this.
Jack Welch strongly advocates for this approach, and it's how GE operated when he was CEO (I don't know if they still do or not). NetFlix also does something similar.
Why do you think it would be a morale nightmare? If you're doing well at your job, wouldn't you take comfort in knowing the person down the line who isn't pulling his weight will be cut out of the company at some point? High expectations are motivating.
Well you could be pushing people to only be about themselves and their team and not the company as a whole. Why would I want to work with and help another team if it means I may move them above the 10% line and me below?
So while you're right that it would push people to do their job well it could also push them to submarine others.
The point is that companies shouldn't waste a lot of time trying to salvage or put up with people who aren't helping them succeed. If a person is hovering around the bottom 10% and they think the solution is to screw someone else over, they probably should go. I know I wouldn't want to work with them.
It wouldn't be a morale nightmare for me, but for those people who aren't as motivated and are just sitting at the poverty line in terms of their progression in the workplace, knowing about stuff like this can loom over their head and create a plague of gossip and backtalk in the workplace.
If I recall correctly, Netflix does this: cutting n percent of the workforce on a yearly basis ("adequate performance gets you a generous severance package").
It's countered by paying above market salaries and ensuring that these salaries _remain as such_ (even going to the point of where employees aren't discouraged from interviewing elsewhere to "sample the market").
Microsoft, I believe, does something similar. Whether it's the right approach is another matter.
It would only be a morale nightmare if the decisions were made randomly (or for political reasons), and not based on performance/job fit. My experience is that people tend to view letting underperformers go as a positive. It's far more damaging to morale to keep the underperformers around.
I liked this quote, taken from DHH from 37signals: "“An idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost a rounding error”. If you only have one competitor, you're OK. If you have 4,000, you aren't.
Something bigger to consider is what the barriers to entry are - even if you only have 1 competitor now, can 50 other companies do it comparably in five months if the idea blows up?
From what they've said in the past, it's because of the Smashing Book they produced. They put too much money into making it just so, or something.
In terms of day to day costs of keeping the content flowing, considering the number and caliber of ads they've got, they shouldn't be having any problems at all unless they're really bad at managing their cash-flow.
