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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Given the choice, I’d pick a war zone assignment over a cubicle any day.
I know how to keep a secret—and there is a great deal of information classified as top secret for very good reason.
firsthand account can trump even the most sophisticated data analysis. Sometimes you just have to be there to really understand—and if you can’t be there, then you need someone who can be there for you.
charismatic without being flashy, inquisitive without being nosy, friendly without being boisterous, smart without being pedantic, and confident without seeming arrogant. Above all, a good spy is a great listener.
Strategic elicitation involves getting the answers that you need without ever directly asking the question.
the information you seek may be readily available if you simply pay attention to the right clues.
When the stakes are high, you can’t rely on just one person’s version of the facts.
Establish trust and rapport through natural and gradually progressive contact and actions. Seek out small opportunities to demonstrate your skills and your trustworthiness in a professional capacity. Bringing your client a latte at every meeting may endear you on a caffeine level, but it won’t get you a contract extension. It is far better to slowly and surely build a track record of integrity, directness, and skill.
security and counterintelligence plans that ignore human frailties are incomplete at best.
Most companies are scrupulous about analyzing financial data and trends, but ignore other information that can have just as much impact on the bottom line.
Listening to detractors goes hand in hand with trend spotting.
Exit interviews, if conducted in a consistent, supportive, confidential manner, can yield far more accurate information than a written survey.
Your employees are your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. This duality is simply human nature.
a job interview is a highly artificial environment and is not conducive to making accurate personality assessments. Job candidates are wearing their best suits, using their firmest handshakes, and spitting out their best (i.e., most rehearsed) answers to your questions.
Prescreening may mean that everyone who walks into your office for an interview is smart, but there are plenty of smart liars, thieves, and jerks in the world.
When interviewing, keep in mind that you don’t need to like your employees. You should respect and trust them, and be able to work side by side without conflict or animosity. Friendship in the workplace, however, should be a happy coincidence—not an employment requirement. Let your gut guide you if you think that there is something amiss during a job interview, but base your hiring decisions on facts instead of intuition.
The “best” (on paper) applicant you interview may also be the most likely to quit after two weeks if the job and the organization don’t live up to the expectations that you as the employer have inaccurately conveyed.
CIA background investigators not only contact the references given by applicants, but they also ask those references for the names of additional contacts. They continue to branch out to additional references other than those originally supplied until they are satisfied.
High performers hate stagnant environments.
A company with only six employees simply can’t justify promoting to the management ranks everyone who shows potential; to do so would result in a top-heavy, unproductive organization. However, allowing talented employees to move between departments, functions, and locations breeds a multidimensional workforce, and also helps to circulate knowledge and talent throughout your organization.
If you are serious about attracting the top talent in your industry, you can’t afford to let your employees languish in unchallenging positions. Too often, employers recruit bright and talented individuals, but then hesitate to give them any real responsibility until they are more “seasoned” or more senior in the organization.
employees’ skills and abilities—not their seniority or job title—should determine who is best qualified for the most high-stakes assignments.
when making assignments, do consider an employee’s personality, skill set, language capabilities, and whatever else may impress your customer.
Your reputation is an asset, because trust is a currency. You can earn it, you can grow it, you can spend it, you can gamble with it, and you can lose it. The more trust capital you have banked with a person or organization, the more you can ask of them.
The ethical principle here is that your team members are a reflection on you. If you tolerate unprincipled behavior among your peers or subordinates in the interest of achieving results, you shouldn’t be surprised when the sharks start circling back on you.
Don’t boast about your knowledge, don’t spread information for malicious purposes, and don’t share other people’s secrets gratuitously. You lose trust capital with every loose secret, so make sure that your revelations are worth the price.
Too many midlevel managers, in particular, treat information as a competitive advantage; they withhold it from peers and subordinates in order to have a greater share of the power. There are many reasons to withhold information, but putting your teammates at a disadvantage is not one of them.
when the stakes are high, creating the solution is a lot more important than owning the mistake.
employers who become aware of issues either criminal or simply unethical should not be so quick to dismiss the impact on the organization just because the crime occurred on personal time.
seek out individuals who can be aggressive in a business setting but compassionate on an interpersonal level.
Protect your assets as you proceed, but be open to opportunities that may arise with the unlikeliest partners.
In the corporate world, the focus during times of crisis tends to be overwhelmingly internal. Once it becomes clear to everyone that their company is going downhill fast, productivity grinds to a screeching halt.
keep your employees apprised of the good, the bad, and the ugly, you allow them to spend more time on their work and less time speculating about what might be happening around them.
Organizations in crisis therefore need to make realistic minimum commitments that will allow nervous employees to focus on the job, instead of the job search. Whether that involves a commitment to avoid layoffs for a week at a time, a commitment to pay generous bonuses once (if) the crisis abates, or a commitment to severance packages, employers need to make whatever commitments possible to ensure that employees’ personal needs don’t surmount organizational needs.
If your organization can’t afford a party, then neither can your employees. They are saving their money in case you decide to lay them off.)
avoiding difficult questions does nothing to assuage a crisis—rather, it just fuels the rumor mills.
Empowerment in a time of crisis is risky. When the future of your organization is on the line, every decision and every commitment takes on a monumental importance. But if you can’t trust those employees on the front line—meaning those employees who deal most closely with your customers—to continue to make the right decisions in a time of crisis, then your hiring, training, and management practices are so flawed that your organization may very well be doomed to fail, regardless of senior-level intervention.
Empowering all ranks of your organizations allows senior leadership to be more accessible than ever, because they are free to lead rather than micromanage.
employees who have to face the public and deal with your customers as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening internally. These employees are the ones you need to protect the most from the turbulence associated with an organizational crisis. Give them the information, the resources, and the shelter from the internal power struggles that they need to convince your customers that your organization is just as capable as ever to provide them with the service they expect. Give them the authority and the protection to continue to carry on your organization’s core business.
Too often people choose either input or output. They’re either listening or they’re talking. But if you are trying to make a sale, you need to maintain constant vigilance, even midspeech. The best speakers and the best salespeople can detect the moment when they begin to lose their audience. Watch for the signs as part of your ongoing assessment, and correct course instantly.
Understanding your worst helps you perform your best.
Don’t take your clients or customers for granted, and don’t wait until they threaten to move to your competitor before you rerecruit. Rerecruitment should be a regular, ongoing habit, even within your organization.
as few people to be involved in a decision as possible. More people mean more leaks, more risks, more biases, more arguments, more time, more possible naysayers, and more minds to change.
Establish control by choosing a venue that is more conducive to small meetings. In fact, use the idea of a meeting on a sailboat as your gold standard. Participation is limited, privacy is maximized, the surroundings are conducive to pleasure and relaxation, and you maintain total control over the timing. Even if you can’t literally procure a sailboat for your meeting site (not many of us can), always make an effort to woo your negotiating opponent before getting down to business.
this extended supply chain, every degree of separation means a loss of control and oversight. With a loss of control and oversight, of course, comes all sorts of problems that you never in a million years thought you would have to deal with.
Require suppliers to sign an agreement promising compliance with your corporate code of conduct, which pledges adherence to legal standards and ethical principles.
relinquishing control does not, however, always relinquish liability, it is imperative that you address problems quickly and directly.
how differently people from different walks of life can interpret the same events and facts.
If you’re in marketing, you need to understand the engineers. If you’re in HR, you need to understand production. Every industry and every career path has its own jargon; mastering the “language” used by the people who can provide you with critical information makes you much more approachable when the need arises. If you are unlikely to understand the explanation, then people don’t want to bother bringing you into the loop.
By establishing yourself as someone who speaks their language—whether technical jargon or actual idiom—you let potential sources know that you have the capacity to hear and to understand.
