Even if my skin should parch, even if my hand should wither, even if my bones should crumble into dust, until I have attained supreme knowledge I shall not move from this seat.
- Siddhartha under the Tree of Knowledge
So at Pixar, we want people who are good at something. Not just a little good at it - really good at it. And depth is a great thing. It's in a sense the way how everybody hires. It's the resume based hire who wants somebody who really knows that skill. There's a problem with that.
Most of the interesting jobs out there fall in this category, whether it's true or not, of being innovative jobs in innovative companies. If you're doing something that's never been done before, well, it's hard to imagine how you can find from somebody's resume that shows that they're not only able to do it but deep in it.
NASA had this exact problem when they wanted to hire the first man to walk on the moon (should have been 'person', okay, times are changing). So their first search was this depth-based search and what they found was that there are far too many people who were deep, who were very good. They couldn't use that as a filter. They realized what they wanted was not merely people who were successful and in fact, maybe that was exactly what they couldn't afford in their depth-based search.
They needed to find people who had failed and recovered. Those who'd failed and had recovered were not applying. They weren't around anymore, we're talking about test pilots, for the most part (that filters out one group!). So that ended up being the way that the astronaut core was chosen. They were looking for people who had not simply avoided failure but rather those who had seen failure and had figured out how to turn it into something.
The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. So in the depth-based hire, we need something that allows us to look across that success in their depth to see something about their ability in terms of resiliency and adaptability to actually solve a real problem that's never been solved before. So what do we do? Well, of course, we look at their depth in terms of their resume but we also try and find some parallel that's a predictor of success in that way.
And what we've recognized is mastery in anything is a really good predictor of mastery in the thing you want done. If you take a young person who is the best skate-board person that you have ever seen or the best glassblower or a really good play in spoons, you're gonna find something about that person. Now if they're truly a master, that has set their mind in a way that you can use in your enterprise, whether you're an educator or a business person or both.
That sense of "I'm gonna get to the top of that mountain!" separates them from all of the other candidates almost instantly. And you know, in the high pace of what we do in school and in business, there's very little chance that someone's going to achieve mastery on the job if they didn't get there before coming to your workplace.
So you gotta have it in the can. Not just "I wanna" or "I wish" or "Maybe I could" but "I've done that!" It's one of the great things about the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a resume.
- Randy Nelson, Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age
