The Gentle Art of Firing Someone

April 25, 2009

The news seems to get worse everyday.  Thousands of people are losing their jobs because of the economic meltdown.  Firing someone is always difficult, especially for poor performance.  But today, many employees being fired are good at their jobs.  They’re out because the company is performing poorly.  Senior management may actually be the culprits.  There is the surgical way and the gentle way to fire somone. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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