Why You Should Avoid Hiring Well-Rounded Employees

The new edition of Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead was published a few weeks ago and within days we sold out of the first print run. If you grabbed your copy, thank you! The publisher says the new print run should ship within a few days.

For the new edition, my co-author, HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan and I each wrote a new preface. Brian’s essay “What Every CEO Should Learn from Jerry Garcia” is a fascinating look at how Brian used lessons learned from Jerry, the Grateful Dead guitarist, songwriter, and spiritual leader to build HubSpot into a company with $3 billion in annual revenue.

Here is a short excerpt from Brian’s essay:

The Grateful Dead, and particularly Jerry Garcia, profoundly influenced me—not just in designing HubSpot but also in understanding how to lead the team and the community. This book is filled with stories, lessons, and strategies from their journey—a journey that challenged the norms and reshaped what a successful enterprise can be. I hope it sparks your imagination and guides you to lead in your own way—just as Jerry did.

When scaling a company, it’s a huge temptation to hire “well-rounded” executive talent. The bigger your company gets, the more people you include in the interview process, the more likely you are to hire the candidate with the least weaknesses as opposed to the candidate with a combination of spike-y strengths and spike-y weaknesses. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say a company has 8 internal folks interview candidate A and candidate B. For candidate A, half of them are 4/10 and half are 10/10. For candidate B, all of them are 7/10s. Almost inevitably, the scaling company goes with candidate B, the one with the “least weaknesses.”  More often than not, that company is looking for a replacement for candidate B 18 months later.

Ok, so what about Garcia? When he was forming the band, he went with all As. The band was formed a few years after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the first phases of the rock’n’roll era. Garcia himself was a bluegrass banjo player. When selecting bandmates, he steered clear of folks like himself. His bass player, Phil Lesh, was a classically trained jazz trumpet player that Garcia convinced to learn the bass. His keyboard player, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a bluesman. One of his drummers (they had two!) was a drum majorette in a marching band.

Jerry built a spikey team and stayed away from hiring folks in his own image. It’s the spikes—not the well-roundedness— that drive breakthroughs in the companies I work with.

Grab your copy of Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead to learn many more ways that the Grateful Dead became the most iconic bands in history and how you can apply those ideas to your business.

Jerry Garcia photo by Jay Blakesberg / Retro Photo Archive