A Head in the Hunt - Pilot

From the Hot Desk:

After a year of sitting in on some interesting internal conversations around marketing, brand, and public presence, I can’t help but want to take on some of that experience and personally make it my own. So, I’m pulling together a regular brief.

The hope for this bi-weekly note is twofold: ideation and information. The fact of the matter is, recruiting and headhunting is ripe for ongoing improvement. After thousands of years of civilization, a number of cultural, business and technological innovations, and countless pages of philosophy and theory, the fact still remains that our reasons and methods for picking teams can be murky and ambiguous. Conflicting theories and principles of talent acquisition, and a professional network site densely filled with all sorts of opinions on the state of hiring, all speak to a very conflicted state of affairs.

So, goal one is to ideate, and simply explore possibilities around how work, hiring, recruitment, and careerism can be approached differently, so candidates and clients can perhaps experiment with me and enjoy better outcomes. This is a place to thoughtfully reflect, clear from hotheaded emotional baiting. I’ll share my observations of how creative, intelligent voices add to the conversation rather than bury truth under self-aggrandizing posturing (and attention-grabbing memes).

Goal two is to provide information. Whenever I find myself in conflict, I find that ?a consistent failing on my part is contributing information properly to the discussion. By not disclosing all the right information, the right way, I leave room for assumption, and assumptions easily give way to bias. “Crucial Conversions” calls this “adding to the shared pool of meaning”, and it is one of the two critical pillars of effective dialogue. In the same way, the universe (and job market) can feel cold, unfeeling, and opaque. I cannot solve this personally. But I can give insight into (1) the things me and my team are working on and (2) what’s happening in and around Music City.

This information should be considered more than just a call to action to apply to the positions I share about. Take the next step and ask yourself: what does this article or content make me think about? What questions does this material elicit? Run a Google search. Ask your favorite LLM. Write about it in your journal. In the words of my favorite YouTuber 3Blue1Brown, “Ponder this for a moment.” Take a moment and apply some second order thinking. Talk to a friend about what you read, and what you think about it.

As time goes by, this format might change, but for now, we will stick to simple. This will be a bit of an adventure. I hope you’ll join me.

What I’m Reading: Blue Ocean Strategy

I shamelessly ask ChatGPT for book recommendations. This came from a prompt regarding “MBA books that cover business strategy at a high level.” A bit dated, from two professionals out of INSEAD, but I’m finding a great primer in prompting a deeper level of thought about how to tackle business strategy.

In short, (for my fellow non-MBA’s who also haven’t read this book), the vision of the authors is to focus less on competition, and more around creating (and dominating) unclaimed space. They label heavily competitive markets “red oceans” (on account of the blood spilled competing) and the non-competitive, high-value and high-potential markets “blue oceans” (roll credits). They provide a few frameworks on how to find and execute blue ocean strategy, with a few anecdotes on the way (including persistent callbacks to Cirque du Soleil).

I feel that readers of this book potentially runs the risk of getting “too heady”, where you can theoretically construct blue oceans where none exist. The authors try to bake in references to intensive research efforts, but those take time and energy, and literature as a medium can do a poor job capturing a sense of effort in a project. Simply put, humans are fallible, and if you get fixated on an idea, interpret the data accordingly, and surround yourself with a team that doesn’t call out the illusion, you may wind up aground. But still a great starting point for thinking about strategy, and I think there’s a degree of timelessness to the overall advice and perspective of the authors.

Questions I’m asking myself:

• As more of an independent contributor and operator in a consultancy-based model, how much can I meaningfully contribute to a broader sense of strategy in the business?
• Where might I create “blue seas” of value, smaller pockets of value innovation, without compromising on the day-to-day value of my own work?

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

We’ve got a few interesting projects going on in Gallagherland:

1. My colleague Ian Turnbell has a number of neat roles for Curative , a Texas-based health insurance company taking a big swing on the way health coverage works in America. I’ve jumped into the breach with one of their projects as well.
2. There’s a number of heavy-hitter hospital searches (which dominate our slate of offerings, but more on that another time), check out the links and reach out if you'd like to learn more.
3. Other projects include: an HR leader for an entertainment group.

Tune Into Music City

Not personally attending this year, but Nashville Health Care Council’s Healthcare Sessions runs weeklong, and LinkedIn has been a great way to keep abreast on the latest happenings. The fact is, Nashville really has evolved into a regional powerhouse in healthcare, so it’ll be curious to see how the city becomes more or less relevant in innovation in such a dominant sector in the US.