On Hiring, Career Advice and Leadership Style from the CEO of Kind Snacks

From the September 8, New York Times and the Corner Office column by Adam Bryant and his interview with Daniel Lubetzky, the chief executive of Kind Snacks.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I ask a lot of questions and I listen to make sure that everything is consistent, because people can be very good at interviewing. They can sound great but you really have to get to know them and understand them and connect things.

I rely heavily on references. The art of a reference check is aligning a candidate’s interest with yours and making sure the reference understands that. You don’t want the person you’re interviewing to come work for you and fail, so you really want to impress that upon the reference.

Reference checks are also an enormous opportunity to strengthen the person if you do hire them — to understand how to get the most out of that person, especially if you’re hiring somebody very senior. You learn about their strengths and weaknesses, so they’re much more likely to have a faster ramp-up and succeed.

I also have strong opinions about the concept of letting people go. There are corporate environments where a person has dedicated their life to working hard, and then they’re fired with a security person escorting them out the door. I find that so demeaning and disrespectful. There are times and places for that, like if somebody is intentionally doing something wrong. And none of what I’m saying has to do with tolerating mediocrity.

But a vast majority of people who work have the best intentions, and sometimes they don’t fit with the work. So if you took the time to hire them and to put them in that situation, and they’re doing their best but just not working out, I think the best practice is to do a few things:

No. 1: Maximum communication, because if you communicate with the person and have constructive criticism early, you might prevent a lot of issues. A lot of problems happen because the manager doesn’t address them, and then it’s too late.

No. 2: If things are not working, set a plan. You have a 30-day plan, a 60-day plan. Hopefully, they get on the right course. If they don’t, maybe it’s just that that particular job doesn’t fit them. So can you move them to another part of the organization? You should have done enough work during the hiring process to determine if the person has your values and your work ethic, but maybe the skill set is not aligned with their job. So can you find another one for them?

Try that first, and if that doesn’t work out, then at that time come up with an elegant way for them to transition out. And we have a different model for that. As long as it’s not someone who has bad intentions — they’re doing their best but you’ve just determined that they need to be doing something else — it’s much better for them to start looking for another job while they’re employed. But they’re also going to help us find the person who will replace them and help train them.

And by the way, in exchange for this culture of us never treating somebody badly, we have an expectation of our employees that they can’t just walk out because they decide to. Everyone is a stockholder, and ownership carries responsibilities. You need to give a minimum of 60 days’ notice if you’re departing. With my direct reports, I require two years. In exchange, I’m blindly loyal to them.

Q. What career advice would you give to a class of graduating seniors?

A. The most important is to make sure that you talk to yourself, that you think hard about what’s important to you and gives you meaning. When I was 19 and walking between classes, I didn’t have a phone, so my brain would take me in different directions. And it’s so healthy and important to be thinking, “Oh, I could have done that better.” Or, “What about this idea?” But nowadays, we’re on our iPhones all the time, and you don’t have time to talk with yourself, to analyze.

It’s very important for people to know what gives them meaning. But it’s hard for people to figure out if you’re not connecting with yourself and taking the time to just be introspective and daydream.

Q. Tell me about your leadership style.

A. I’m very inquisitive. I love hanging around people who can teach me. I ask a lot of questions. And I’m very introspective and self-critical. I try hard to always question myself and wonder: “What could I have done better? What did I do wrong?” The culture at our company is to be self-critical, but you have to balance that as a leader with praise for your team.

Q. What else?

A. We talk a lot about “and, not but,” which is about challenging people’s compromises. It is true that sometimes you have to choose this or that, but many times those are false choices. Our brains help us take shortcuts to be efficient, but sometimes the assumptions you take as givens — to help make decisions quickly — are no longer true or have always been false. It’s important to ask: “What do I want to achieve and what’s stopping it? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it?” It’s about being creative.

Here is a link to the entire article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/business/daniel-lubetzky-of-kind-snacks-on-reaching-multiple-goals.html

It's All About Passion

From the September 1, New York Times and the Corner Office column by Adam Bryant and his interview with Francisco D’Souza, the chief executive of the information technology company Cognizant.

What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned during your career?

A. We started Cognizant in 1994, and there was a period early on when I personally knew everyone in the company. Now we have 160,000 employees, and there were several personal and rapid transitions over that time.

The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.

It’s very hard to see your blind spots, by definition, and it’s very easy to fall into comfort zones, because people like patterns and a sense of familiarity. I’ve tried consciously to say, “What are the tools I can use to identify these blind spots and push through comfort zones?” And I always tell myself that if I wake up in the morning and feel comfortable, I’m probably not pushing myself hard enough.

Q. And what are the tools to help you see your blind spots?

A. One is just talking to other leaders. The conversations with them help me because they are, in a sense, a mirror — I can assess what I think they’re doing well, and where I think their blind spots are. It’s easier to see someone else’s blind spots than it is to see your own, of course, and you can use that to reflect on what your own blind spots are.

I also learned a lot from the people who work for me. Before I took over as C.E.O. in 2007, the board gave me the benefit of some time. I worked with a coach for a while, and he talked to about 20 people who worked for me, above me and around me, and to my board. It was difficult feedback, but very enlightening. That helped me identify a couple of my blind spots.

Q. Can you share one?

A. There was a lot of feedback from my team that people had confidence in my ability, but they also said that when I criticize something they’ve done, the weight of that is very pronounced and significant. It made me understand that the weight of my words was a lot heavier than I gave myself credit for, and it led me to be much more thoughtful and measured in how I give feedback.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I’m looking for passion. The person I’m hiring needs to have passion for what they’re doing, and they need to understand where that passion comes from. They need to be in touch with that. You need to know what drives you.

And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?

Here is the link to the entire article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/business/francisco-dsouza-of-cognizant-on-finding-company-heroes.html

 

Looking for the beasts

From yesterday’s New York Times, and the Corner Office column by Adam Bryant and his interview with Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, the online real estate site.

How do you hire? What are you looking for? What questions do you ask?

A. Mostly what I’ve learned about it is, you can’t judge a book by its cover. It’s very hard in an interview when someone talks about their work to judge them. What you want is to have them do the work. So when I interview engineers, I give them a coding problem and I ask them to work through it. When I interview a marketing person, I say, “Write a press release,” or, if you’re in P.R., “Write a pitch.” I want to see the actual quality of their work.

The other thing that I look for is people who are beasts. I was a dishwasher once and I kept falling behind with all the dishes, and this guy in the kitchen yelled at me to get me going — “You’re an animal. You’re a beast.” And I was just a very intellectual, effete kid — I was probably reading Proust at that point in my life — and that experience made me a lot grittier and tougher.

If I haven’t found evidence that someone’s ever done anything hard in their lives, then I just don’t believe they’re suddenly going to be able to jump into a phone booth, come out wearing a cape and learn how to be tough on this job. I want to know about anything you’ve done that’s hard, really hard. So I tend to focus on that.  

Here is the link to the entire article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/business/be-yourself-redfins-glenn-kelman-says-even-if-youre-a-little-goofy.html

How Do You Hire?

Over the course of the last few years, I've used this blog as a forum to share information on entrepreneurship with college students and readers. However, I'm switching gears a bit now, and while I'm still an entrepreneur who has found his way to teaching and working at a university, the focus of this blog now is going to be on helping students prepare for life after college. So much has been written lately about the need for students to be better prepared for the job market...and since my school…Lynn University… is one of the schools leading the charge to do just that, I thought that the blog can also be used to help students (and anyone else interested in the topic) think about what they need to do to prepare for and get that first job out of college.

With that in mind, today’s piece comes from yesterday’s New York Times and the Corner Office column by Adam Bryant. It’s helpful, as you’re preparing for that first job, to understand how the hiring person approaches that task and more specifically, how do they hire?

Q. How do you hire?

A. The first thing I look for are the nonverbal components of one’s overall presence and presentation. Would I buy from this person? Would I want to do business with that individual? Do they look me in the eye? Do they have a certain energy level? Do they seem confident? Those are the kinds of things that really matter most.

I care less about your résumé in terms of the places you worked or where you went to school. What I do care about is how your résumé can give me insights into why you went from one position to another. I’m listening for how someone weaves together the changes in their career, and why they left one job for another. We all make mistakes. We all have setbacks. I’m listening to why someone left.

If I see multiple positions where there wasn’t necessarily progression, that’s always a point of concern for me. I listen closely if someone had a position that is a major change from the rest of their career — if there’s an outlier role. It’s not the worst thing to say, “I was laid off, and I needed a job and so I pursued this position, I gave it a shot, but I eventually went back to my area of specialization.” That’s perfectly fine.

But when people try to present the story of their career so that every move was a step up, everything was perfect and everything is wonderful, then I have to question whether they are realists. Are they going to be someone I’d feel comfortable working with? Or are they going to be constantly putting a spin on everything that happens?

I also don’t want anyone who’s constantly going to tell me what I want to hear, or what they think I want to hear. I find there are times when, if I make my view known too early, then I’ve just shaped the whole direction of the conversation. So when I’m interviewing someone, I will ask them how they feel about certain issues and points, and how they feel about certain organizations.

Before I describe how Williams Capital operates, I want to hear about their ideal environment. I want to hear how they interact with their colleagues rather than me saying, well, here’s the way Williams Capital is, because then I’ll just hear something similar back from them.

 

Here is a link to the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/business/-christopher-j-williams-of-williams-capital-group-says-a-great-manager-should-expect-a-peaceful-vacation.html?_r=0

New Business School Building and Revised Curriculum

From Sunday’s Palm Beach Post, an article on the Lynn University College of Business new building, written by Emily Roach.

By Emily Roach

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

BOCA RATON —

As it revises its business curriculum, Lynn University is building a compatible home for the College of Business and Management, one with an open and bright design that reflects the school’s mission of collaboration and innovation.

The 34,000-square-foot, platinum-level LEED certified International Business Center is expected to open next spring. The new curriculum, which Dean Thomas Kruczek said incorporates writing, critical thinking, presentations and seeing the organization as a whole, kicks off with incoming freshmen this fall.

“I think those are some of the core pillars of our College of Business, so we tried to incorporate those into our classes,” Kruczek said. Practical preparation for employment and the core principles “get them ready to be able to get that job when they leave here.”

It’s quickly evident how excited Kruczek is about the $14.5 million building. A poster board of the design sits in the middle of his office, and his window overlooks the mostly empty space where ground work has started.

Accounting for 47 percent of the student body with its 1,000 students — 800 undergraduate and 200 graduate — the business school is an integral part of Lynn.

The new building has gained a lot of interest, and been fully funded by donations. A $3 million challenge grant was met at the groundbreaking last month.

Students will be able to see into, and out of, the new building with its open, multiple-window design. Inside space will be set aside for a Venture lab, where budding entrepreneurs will develop their own businesses with the help of faculty and community advisers, as well as team rooms and a technology classroom.

Again, it all complements the new curriculum.

In addition to the traditional classes like economics and accounting, students are required to take courses that will help them develop a career.

During their freshman year, business students will learn about being an entrepreneur and developing their own brand. Sophomore year features career preparation. Junior year advances to professional career development and juniors and seniors have a required internship.

“We want our students when they come here to have a sense of what the business world is like,” Kruczek said. “So when they get out of here, when they’re ready to leave, it’s not a surprise,”

Groundbreaking last month was a huge affair, with VIPs, beribboned shovels and a flight overhead by the school’s associated Burton D. Morgan School of Aeronautics airplanes.

Kruczek is used to the handshaking, as he works to build relationships with local businesses and business leaders.

“They wanted me to be an outward-facing dean,” Kruczek said.

Business school alum and advisory board member Jeremy Office recently engaged the MBA students in a project for his Delray Beach business, Maclendon Wealth Management. Office said he has worked with universities across the country and had dozens of interns. While he thought young business-minded students could help determine if his clients want him to use social media, he was “leery” of the time commitment and ultimate outcome.

“I was overwhelmed with the quality and thought they had put into the effort and assignment,” he said.

Successful projects between the school and local businesses expose Lynn to more people in the community. And they help the advisory board’s efforts as Office described: “to develop bridges within the community.”

In fact, the new business school will have space for businesses to work at the school.

Office credits Kruczek with pointing the school in this direction and said university President Kevin Ross also is steering the curriculum in an important direction.

“They are doing things in very small, measured steps that are opening up opportunities and paths that have not been available to students in the past,” he said.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Lynn has revamped its entire curriculum in recent years. And with the prestige of hosting the final presidential debate last year came the reality of spending hundreds of thousands to upgrade technology, specifically the wireless network. This fall incoming freshman will get an iPad-mini downloaded with course materials.

As a small, private college, Lynn can be responsive to changes in academia and the business climate.

Part of Kruczek’s mission meshes well with the undergraduate Dialogues of Learning, a recent curriculum emphasis that incorporates liberal arts ideals and writing and reading into most classes. Kruczek said employers have stressed that graduates need to be better writers, better presenters and better team members. They need to be able to view their organization as a whole, he said.

“Business schools across the country are going through a transition,” Kruczek said.

The president of the college’s accrediting body, Dennis Gash, agreed. The changes are aimed to supply graduates that have skills employers want.

“We have noticed that over the years that business schools and management schools have been transitioning from more theoretical curricula to more hands-on experiential curricula,” Gash said.

The 229-member International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education just re-accredited the business school last year.

Gash said employers want graduates who can “communicate effectively and work in team, especially cross-functional teams.”

In other words, employers want people who know enough about all functions of the business that they can function in a global business environment, working on teams with people around the world.

Lynn’s international student body makes that even easier, Kruczek said. Recently in class, he heard students talking about wages not just in terms of U.S. conditions, but in the various countries around the world that were represented by the students.

And the new business world is very entrepreneurial. So it helps that Kruczek has overseen entrepreneur centers at other universities as well as being an entrepreneur himself.

---

Features of the International Business Center

34,000 square feet

11 classrooms

12 collaborative rooms

2 conference room

1 entrepreneur center

2 recycling stations

Here is a link to the story at the newspaper’s website: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/business/lynns-business-school-rebuilds-curriculum-as-new-h/nXHJm/

Playing the Matchmaker for Our Business School Students

I wrote the following for the Huffington Post, which was published on March 18, 2013. Here is a link to the Huff Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-kruczek/smaller-bschools-can-play-matchmaker-too_b_2895673.html

 

There has been a lot written lately about how business schools can better match their graduates with prospective employers. The March 6 Wall Street Journal article “In Job Hunt, B-Schools Play Matchmaker,” by Melissa Korn is a recent example of this conversation. For me, seeing a major national publication give this issue some ink was like breath fresh air. Although the article focuses on large schools, it vindicates the thinking we have championed at Lynn University—a small, independent school in Boca Raton, Fla. 

Bringing business students out from behind their desks and into the real world is a key aspect we champion, and I’d like to continue the conversation on this topic by pointing out that you don’t have to be one of the elites to do this. Any size school, such a Lynn, can reorient their thinking to put “matchmaking” high on the priority list. Here are some thoughts on how it can be done. 

We’ve been working with regional and national businesses, meeting with leaders and introducing our B-School and our students. As part of this process, our understanding of the importance of introducing the right student to the right company has matured and become more subtle. As the article mentions, businesses are not hiring large numbers of students at once so they don’t want schools sending them 100 resumes. Schools need to work hard to understand what a business wants and find the right students for them. To help do this, we’ve moved one of our executives-in-residence who has years of experience in the HR field over from a teaching position to a staff position to lead these efforts. 

From our experience, preparation should also be a key part of the process. We’ve built a class, together with the business community, into our January Term (our mini semester) that has as its theme, Career Preparation and Internship. We tested that class this year and had overwhelming positive feedback not only from students who took the class (we thought we would have around 15 students in the class and ended up with 37 students) but also from our business partners who participated in the class. 

It’s also important not to wait until a student’s senior year. Our program also includes, in a class for freshman, Entrepreneurship and Innovation—a section where we get students to think of their own personal brand. They have to think about what that means to them in terms of the things that they need to do over the course of their college and how their brand can help them prepare for their career.

To ensure we make any needed adjustments to adapt to the ever-changing conditions in the business world, we are working with members of the business community through our College's Board of Advisors to further extend and enhance the program. 

We understand that the job market has changed, and we believe that part of our responsibility includes not just helping to prepare students for that first job, but also to help make some of those introductions. Ultimately, as the article argues, it’s up to the student to get the job, but we as educators have to do much more to help them get that first job out of school. 

And finally, prospective parents love this initiative, so it’s great for our marketing. Students entering B-school today have a higher expectation of assistance as they know the job market still lags the recovery and landing that first job may require a team effort.

 

 

5 Key Skills in Entrepreneurship Guest Post

Brad Zomick from SkilledUp.com – the leading source of reviews and ratings including online courses, is providing the following guest post. You can find them online at SkilledUp.com as well as on Facebook and Twitter.SkilledUp.com 

5 Key Skills in Entrepreneurship

He’s built many successful startups, is a prominent philanthropist and humanitarian, invests in and advises fledgling startups, and is a full time family man. We are all wondering how does Richard Branson do it? And Branson is not alone. He stands in an elite group of entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, and the late and great Steve Jobs. All of these entrepreneur wunderkind, have their hands in many cookie jars, and somehow are able to turn each cookie jar into a full scale cookie factory, without breaking a sweat. While they are all smarter than your average bear, they all possess a combination of crucial skills that have helped them every step of the way. If you hope to follow in their footsteps, and become the latest Silicon Valley entrepreneur, you are going to want to develop your skills in one or more of the following areas:

Leadership & Decision Making

It takes a special type of leader to be at the helm of a tech startup, and that person is one part manager, one part technician, and one part evangelist. That leader needs not only needs to monitor what is going on within the company and figure out how to do it better, but also prioritize and figure out what needs to be done now while keeping pace with competitors in the marketplace and maintaining the inspiration and drive of employees. It’s a delicate balancing act and there are many tough decisions to be made that will leave the most confident people second-guessing themselves. Many tech entrepreneurs are not natural born leaders but they learn quickly! Case in point, Mark Zuckerberg and Groupon’s Andrew Mason cut their teeth in leadership via public trial-by-fire, since their companies IPO’ed last year. Both made questionable leadership moves that were publicly lambasted by Wall Street and news media. Save yourself some public embarrassment and start looking for leadership opportunities ASAP.

Communication

Communication may have most of you saying, “No duh!” but more often than not the pace and tempo of a startup is so intense and quick, people forget to communicate and important ideas and messages get lost in the shuffle. So it’s best to over-communicate, communicating early and often ensuring all of the major stakeholders are on the same page. Messaging is equally as important, and good leaders communicate a positive vibe that keeps employees engaged and excited about their company and products. Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman, knows this because his ability to share collective passion around a common purpose is what took Starbucks from a single coffee shop to the global chain it is today.

Sales & Persuasion

Being able to sell and persuade is not just about closing the deal. It’s also about being about to motivate and inspire employees, customers, partners, and investors. A lot of this boils down to people skills, which can be rehearsed and refined. One tech entrepreneur that has mastered this skill is Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. He is not only the Chief Executive Officer but also the Chief Evangelical Officer, and has rallied a loyal army of Salesforce.com employees that share in his vision and help him evangelize the Salesforce product. Go to one of Salesforce’s free Dreamforce conferences and you witness them not only dishing out the Kool-Aid but drinking it too. Not everyone is a natural salesman, so get a leg up on and start putting yourself out in positions that require to you to promote yourself or a product or service.

Programming Skills

While this one seems like a no-brainer, we would be remiss if we did not mention it. All the rock star entrepreneurs listed above all had serious programming chops, and worked at it for years before achieving mastery. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, it takes 10,000 hours to get to a level of mastery in a subject. It’s no surprise that Bill Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, started coding in junior high at the age of 13. Similarly, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started tinkering with computer boards at age 14. Recently, the 10,000 Rule is being contested by serial entrepreneur and meta-learning guru, Tim Ferris, but until you master meta-learning, the art of mastering subjects in a short period of time, we suggest picking a programming language and start coding now!

Flexibility

As an entrepreneur, you can’t prepare for every emergency scenario but you can be ready to think and act quickly. Sometimes the pace of work is frenetic so when an issue pops up, a good entrepreneur can face it head on or duck, swivel, and move in another direction. Peter Thiel exemplified this with a classic business pivot. He founded Confinity in 1999 to process payments between Palm Pilots. We all know the Palm Pilot fizzled out, but Thiel changed directions and Confinity became what we know today as PayPal. Being able to flex does not just apply to tough situations, but also to being able to read the tea leaves of your industry, understand what consumers want, and evolve to meet those needs. In this sense, Steve Jobs was a true visionary. He realized that there was an opportunity in the MP3 player space and developed the iPod, which not only revitalized Apple’s brand but revolutionized the music industry as we know it.

Conclusion

Sadly, there is no go-to guide for becoming a successful entrepreneur. Each successful entrepreneur has his or her own unique story. However, they all have one or more common threads, and those are the core skills that it takes to successfully take a product or service from an idea to a market launch. All of the aforementioned entrepreneurs possessed at least one of the above skills, if not more. So if you fancy yourself to be the next Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates, don’t just sit there, get out and start trying to develop your entrepreneur skillset!