Categories

Knowing what to do when a jagged-résumé candidate enters the picture is the single biggest differentiator between leaders with a gift for picking winners – and those who keep wrong-footing themselves.

…individual careers can benefit from the gritty work required to recover from a career stumble.

Only when organizations have the courage to make judgments about potential do the odds of landing an eventual superstar increase.

The assessors who do the best job of sizing up such candidates are the ones whose own life experiences speak to the traits they are seeking.

If assessors all felt comfortable drawing insights from their own lives… organizations’ ability to make sense of jagged résumés would be far more advanced than it is.

…it’s easy to say that [fringe] candidates aren’t worth the time it would take to assess them. Yet… ignoring all of these outsiders can mean squandering access to a vast amount of talent.

Great discoveries happen only if assessors are willing to suspend their skepticism at first, so that underdogs get a chance to show a spark of promise.

…at the moments when assessors must decide on someone’s potential, listening for clues about what could go right can be as delicate as trying to pick up baby’s heartbeat through the muffled layers of heavy winter clothing.

The dividing line between success and failure comes down to how well executives can manage their portfolio of guesses.

High achievers’ desire to make a mark in the world is so intense that it usually trumps every other motivator.