1. “All organisations would benefit from hiring
the smartest people they can get. “
MBA 4xx Organizational Behavior
Group 3

2. The Microsoft Philosophy
• Include the
employees in
decision making
process.
• If the workforce is
intelligent and smart
then certainly
innovative and
diversified
dimensions towards
a solution of a
problem will be
explored.

3. The Microsoft Philosophy
• Seems to be working.
• Most other organizations focus on
experience.
• Microsoft gives extraordinary attention to
one single factor—intelligence!
• This has resulted in greater diversity as well.
• Microsoft believes its greatest asset is the
collective intellectual resources of its
employees.

4. Hiring Employees in Organisation
• Should I not hire someone who is smarter than
me?
• Will he/she take my position
This is where most managers fail - they hire people
who will not challenge them.
By hiring the individual who has more knowledge in
your area or in other areas of expertise, you expand
the opportunities for your organisations many fold.

5. Why you need to find your smartest employee
• Smart people have the potential to do smart things. In
an organization, you want to make the right decisions
– usually dumb people don’t.
• Smart people usually know other smart people. In an
organization, you want to get rid of your dumb people
and hire more smart people.
• Smart people know the fakers. Organizations make
people selection mistakes. It happens all the time so
don’t be embarrassed, just don’t let one bad decision
turn into another by keeping a mistake.
• Business grows when you employ smartest people

6. Intelligence vs. Hardworking

7. Intelligence vs. Hardworking
• In high tech industries for example, intelligence is always
a critical element in any employee, because the nature
of work is difficult and complex and the competitors are
filled with extremely smart people.
• However, intelligence is not the only important quality.
Being effective in a company also means working hard,
being reliable, and being an excellent member of the
team.
• It is the management’s job to create an environment
where brilliant people of all backgrounds, personality
types, and work styles would thrive.
• Companies where people with diverse backgrounds and
work-styles have significant over those that don’t.

8. When Smart People are Bad Employees
In the following few slides we will discuss
examples where smart people
are the worst employees.
1. The Heretic
2. The Flake
3. The Jerk

9. The Heretic
• Any sizable company produces some
number of strategies, projects, processes,
promotions, and other activities that don’t
make sense. No large organization achieves
perfection. As a result, a company needs
lots of smart, super engaged employees
who can identify its particular weaknesses
and help it improve them.

10. The Heretic
• Sometimes really smart employees develop agendas
other than improving the company.
• Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can
fix them, he looks for faults to build his case.
• Specifically, he builds his case that the company is
hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.
• The smarter the employee, the more destructive
this type of behavior can be.
• Simply put, it takes a really smart person to be
maximally destructive, because otherwise nobody
else will listen to him.

11. The Heretic
Why would a smart person try to destroy the
company that he works for? There are actually
many reasons. Here are few:
• 1. He is disempowered—He feels that she
cannot access the people in charge and, as a
result, complaining is his only vehicle to get the
truth out.
• 2. He is fundamentally a rebel—He will not be
happy unless he is rebelling; this can be a deep
personality trait. Sometimes these people
actually make better CEOs than employees.

12. The Heretic
• 3. He is immature and naïve—He cannot
comprehend that the people running the company
do not know every minute detail of the operation
and therefore they are complicit in everything that’s
broken.

13. The Heretic
• Often, it’s very difficult to turn these kinds
of cases around. Once an employee takes a
public stance, the social pressure for him to
be consistent is enormous. If he tells 50 of
his closest friends that the CEO is the
stupidest person on the planet, then
reversing that position will cost him a great
amount of credibility the next time he
complains. Most people are not willing to
take the credibility hit.

14. The Flake
• Some brilliant people can be totally unreliable.
• At Openwave (Fictious Name), the management once hired a genius—Lets call him
Tomasi (not his real name). Tomasi was an engineer in an area of the product
development where a typical new hire would take 3 months to become fully productive.
• Tomasi came fully up to speed in two days.
• Projects that were scheduled to take a month to complete, was completed in 3 days with
nearly flawless quality.
• 72 non-stop hours: No stops, no sleep, no nothing but coding. In his first quarter on the
job, he was the best employee that they had and was immediately promoted.
• Then Tomasi changed He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss
weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior
didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused.
• Flakey behavior often has a seriously problematic root cause. Causes range from self-
destructive streaks to drinking habbits. A company is a team effort and, no matter how
high an employee’s potential, you cannot get value from him unless he does his work
in a manner in which he can be relied upon.

15. The Jerk
• This particular smart-bad-employee type can occur anywhere in the
organization, but is most destructive at the executive level.
• Most executives can be pricks or a variety of other profane adjectives at times.
Being dramatically impolite can be used to improve clarity or emphasize an
important lesson.
• When used consistently, silly behavior can be crippling.
• If every time anyone brings up an issue with the marketing organization, the
VP of marketing jumps down their throat, then guess what topic will never
come up? This behavior can become so bad that nobody brings up any topic
when the VP is in the room.
• As a result, communication across the executive staff breaks down and the
entire company slowly degenerates.
• Note that this only happens if the person in question is unquestionably
brilliant. Otherwise, nobody will care when she attacks them.

16. When do you hold the bus?
• Phil Jackson, the basketball coach who has won the most
NBA championships, was once asked about his famously
flakey superstar Dennis Rodman. Rodman was both one of
the most talented players in the game and one of the
biggest rebels: “Since Dennis Rodman is allowed to miss
practice, does this mean other star players like Michael
Jordan and Scottie Pippen can miss practice too?” Jackson
replied: “Of course not. There is only room for one Dennis
Rodman on this team. In fact, you really can only have a
very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole; otherwise,
we would degenerate into anarchy.”

17. When do you hold the bus?
• “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll
be so late that you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that.
The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll
have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him,
but only him.”
• You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of
the above descriptions, but nonetheless makes a massive
positive contribution to the company. You may decide that
you will personally mitigate the employee’s negative
attributes and keep them from polluting the overall
company culture.

18. Conclusion
• The type of person an organization should hire depends on the
nature of work.. A job may need a person with physical abilities
or a person with mental abilities or both. For example,
companies like Microsoft Inc, would emphasize more on mental
strength (smartness) because they need people smart enough
to develop efficient, effective and intelligent programs.
• No two are equal in this world; everyone has his/her own set of
strengths and weaknesses. These strengths and weaknesses
make one better in performing tasks and activities. It is up to the
organizations to make sure that people use their physical and
mental abilities to do their jobs well.

19. Questions?
• We welcome any Comments or questions?