profiling for attitude
selecting for fit

Why hiring a “perfect” Susannah turned out to be a catastrophe?

High hopes…! Susannah is a well-qualified, experienced project manager in her early forties. Her CV shows she has a successful twelve-year track record managing IT projects with several well-known global companies. For ExCel_ITO Limited Susannah seemed to be a perfect fit for running a dispersed, cross-functional, multi-cultural project team focused on the development and introduction […]

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Culture, Strategy and Transition

All aboard the ‘Change Express’  We recently had the good fortune to work with a very forward-thinking CEO of a small IT software firm that was about five years into its life and had just secured a new investor. Strategically he was about to embark on a path of significant and fast expansion. In contemplating […]

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People, attitudes and the Ritz Carlton, Astana

I was in Astana recently working on strategy with board directors of Kazakhstan state industries. What a wonderfully iconoclastic place Astana is. A fantastically modern, 21st century city in the middle of the steppes and hundreds of kilometres from anywhere! Bizarre but impressive and a highly enjoyable visit. Just as enjoyable was my stay at […]

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Worse things happen at sea…or maybe not.

The following story bears comparison with the underlying reality of modern-day recruitment especially with respect to selection and high performance. “Hello sailor…” I joined the Merchant Navy and went to sea shortly after my eighteenth birthday. The interesting thing about the seagoing career was that once you were ‘certificated’ (qualified) shipping companies did little or […]

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