I just listened to a great podcast:
http://thehive.org.au/gideon-shalwick-of-rapid-video-blogging/
There’s lots of great aussie entrepreneurial stories at the hive web site. Sounds like they’re finishing up on the site which is a shame. One snippet from Gideon Shalwick’s talk was as follows:
The question is to explain the difference between the kind of work that A players do and the kind of work that B players do. Let me give you this with an example. This will illustrate it. So I had two designers in my company. One of them… I’ll let you guess which one it is. I would describe the task to him and say I need this graphic. It would need to do this sort of thing and it is to fit in with this sort of theme.. or this sort of feel. He’d end up asking me a tonne of questions..and we’d probably had around ten iterations of that graphic to be able to make it look the way I want it to. Now it would take a tonne of time for either me or my manager. You could probably guess who that is… the B player. The A player on the other hand I would say “I need this graphic”. Same instructions. It needs to have this sort of feel etc. etc. That’s it. The next thing I hear from my designer is a download of the graphic and guess what.. nine out of ten times its better than I could have imagined.
Now A players.. they take initiative. There’s a bunch of key things that they have.. that they do. It’s just the way they are.. that B players can never have and so when you get those A players, it can help you save a tonne of time even though they cost more money and also because you save time, you save money.
It makes such a difference when you can describe a concept or a task and then someone just runs with it without heading down needless paths. It’s that ability to understand your intent and then work out all of the details. The reverse is also soul destroying i.e. having to lead someone down every decision point and effectively do their work for them. One thing I don’t agree on is that B players can never have what A player’s have. Though there’s always some aspect of inherent ability, A player behaviour can be learnt and you can turn B players into A players. I think it’s an equal measure of attitude and ability.