The only three true job interview questions are:

1.  Can you do the job?
2.  Will you love the job?
3.  Can we tolerate working with you?

That’s it.  Those three.  Think back, every question you’ve ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions.  Each question potentially may be asked using different words, but every question, however it is phrased, is just a variation on one of these topics: Strengths, Motivation, and Fit.

Can You Do the Job? – Strengths

Executive Search firm Heidrick & Struggles CEO, Kevin Kelly explained to me that it’s not just about the technical skills, but also about leadership and interpersonal strengths.  Technical skills help you climb the ladder.  As you get there, managing up, down and across become more important.

You can’t tell by looking at a piece of paper what some of the strengths and weaknesses really are…We ask for specific examples of not only what’s been successful but what they’ve done that hasn’t gone well or a task they they’ve, quite frankly, failed at and how they learned from that experience and what they’d do different in a new scenario.

Not only is it important to look at the technical skill set they have…but also the strengths on what I call the EQ side of the equation in terms of getting along and dealing or interacting with people.

Will You Love the Job? -Motivation

Cornerstone International Group CEO, Bill Guy emphasizes the changing nature of motivation,

…younger employees do not wish to get paid merely for working hard—just the reverse: they will work hard because they enjoy their environment and the challenges associated with their work…. Executiveswho embrace this new management style are attracting and retaining better employees.

Can We Tolerate Working With You? – Fit

Continuing on with our conversation, Heidrick’s Kelly went on to explain the importance of cultural fit:

A lot of it is cultural fit and whether they are going to fit well into the organization…  The perception is that when (senior leaders) come into the firm, a totally new environment, they know everything.  And they could do little things such as send emails in a voicemail culture that tend to negatively snowball over time.  Feedback or onboarding is critical.  If you don’t get that feedback, you will get turnover later on.

He made the same point earlier in an interview with Smart Business, referencing Heidrick’s internal study of 20,000 searches.

40 percent of senior executives leave organizations or are fired or pushed out within 18 months. It’s not because they’re dumb; it’s because a lot of times culturally they may not fit in with the organization or it’s not clearly articulated to them as they joined.

Preparing for Interviews

If you’re the one doing the interviewing, get clear on what strengths, motivational and fit insights you’re looking for before you go into your interviews.

If you’re the one being interviewed, prepare by thinking through examples that illustrate your strengths, what motivates you about the organization and role you’re interviewing for, and the fit between your own preferences and the organization’s Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, and Environment (BRAVE).  But remember that interviews are exercises in solution selling.  They are not about you.

Think of the interview process as a chance for you to show your ability to solve the organization and interviewer’s problem. That’s why you need to highlight strengths in the areas most important to the interviewers, talk about how you would be motivated by the role’s challenges, and discuss why you would be a BRAVE fit with the organization’s culture.

There are several components of this including positioning yourself for a leadership role, selling before you buy, mapping and avoiding the most common land mines, uncovering hidden risks in the organization, role, and fit, and choosing the right approach for your transition type.

The successful IPO of Facebook, the flak surrounding Twitter’s decision to censor some tweets, and Google’s weaker-than-expected 4th-quarter earnings all point to one of the big events of our times: The crazy, chaotic, idealistic days of the Internet are ending. Once, the Prairies were open and shared by everyone. Then the farmers arrived and fenced them in. The same is happening to the Internet: Apple, Amazon and Facebook are putting up fences — and Google is increasingly being left outside.

The old Internet on which Google has thrived is still there, of course, but like the wilderness it is shrinking. Often these days, we sign up for Facebook or Amazon’s private version of the Internet. At other times, we use a smartphone and download an App instead of using Google search.

Investors are already placing their bets on who the winners of the new Internet will be: Over the past five years Amazon’s shares, despite their recent fall, have risen 370%. Apple’s are up 438%. Google’s, meanwhile, have merely risen by 17% in all that time.  It is still the early days of this long-term trend, but my hunch is that this gap in performance will widen over the coming year — and that Google’s long slow decline has already begun.

What makes Google’s predicament so serious is that it has little to do with technology and everything to do with business models. You can buy or copy technology, but changing a business model is about the hardest thing any company can do. Google’s business model, and nearly all its revenue and profits, depend on the Internet remaining open. When we search, Google pockets billions from advertising. If the old Internet is changing, Google’s original way of doing business loses value.

When Google reported its results two weeks ago, the first headlines focused on the 25% increase in fourth quarter revenues compared to last year. Investors, however, focused on the drop in the cost per click that Google is able to charge advertisers. The main reasons for the decline in this all-important metric is increased competition from Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

Start with Facebook, which has erected a cyber fence around its 800 million-plus users and refuses to share some important data with Google. This means that Google’s searches are not quite as valuable to advertisers as they used to be when the Internet was open and when Facebook was much smaller than it is today.

Amazon is increasingly playing a similar trick — but with a twist. Amazon has taken Google’s freely available Android operating system and adapted it for its new Fire tablet. Amazon gets to free ride upon Google’s software, in other words, while the search giant gets nothing back in return. No data, and no advertising revenue.

Apple’s land grab, meanwhile, may be the most definitive. The Apple universe is like a cable TV network that owns content or aggregates it. It’s phones, computers and tablets are like the set-top boxes your cable company gives you. The content you consume might be a film that you download, a song, a book, an application or something you buy on line, like a pair of shoes. And none of the data Apple’s customers generate is available to Google. (Amazon basically has the same arrangement going with its Kindle and Fire. The only thing it doesn’t own is the network, but it doesn’t matter: Once you log into Amazon with a password, you’ve left Google’s open Internet.)

The danger to Google, in other words, is that as social networking, smartphones and tablets increasingly come to dominate the Internet, Google’s chance to earn advertising revenues from searching will shrink along with its influence.

Yes, Google has the Android and Google+, but these may not be enough to fight the shift to the closed Internet. Google+, of course, has just a tiny fraction of Facebook’s scale and there’s currently little reason to think it can catch up. The Android operating system, also an attempt by Google to build its own internet eco-system, is a more conspicuous success. Most commentators focus on the rapid growth of Android and the fact that it has greater market share than the iPhone.

But this analysis misses the point: The Android may have market share, but more than half of mobile searches come from iPhone users. Google may have developed Android but, unlike Apple’s iPhone, it does not really control it. Licensees like Samsung and HTC are able to adapt Android software to their own ends. And smart companies like Amazon are getting a free ride on Android while sharing little of the spoils with Google.

Don’t get me wrong: Google is still a force, just as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are. But they are no longer at the epicentre of the zeitgeist. Like Microsoft before it, Google can fight the good fight on many different fronts. Whether it can ever find an engine of growth capable of supplanting its core business is another question.

About the Author

Keith Woolcock has been covering technology as an analyst and journalist since the mid 1980s. He has worked for Nomura, Merrill Lynch, the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday; appears regularly on CNBC in London; and in 2010 founded 5thcolumnideas, which provides global thematic research and spots important investment trends — especially in technology – for institutional investors.

A young woman I know is a star. In her early thirties, she had an M.B.A. and was already running a small division of a successful fashion company. She had that rare combination of design sense and business savvy that makes a virtuoso fashion executive.

The owner of her company noticed. And when the company’s president left, the owner tapped my friend for the job.

She had her doubts. In the job, she would be more disconnected from the design work she loved and she would be focused far more on finances and doing deals. More than anything, she would have to manage the owner who was temperamental. That wasn’t really her forte or interest.

On the other hand, what an opportunity! And honor! It would look amazing on her résumé, the money was great, and to be president at this young age? How could she turn it down?

So she took the job.

The first few months were grueling, but she expected that. What she didn’t expect is that it wouldn’t get better. She mastered the finances – and even enjoyed that part – but the politics of her relationship with the owner were sapping her energy. Things began to slip through the cracks. The designs began to sell less well. And the owner was becoming increasingly tense and erratic.

Within a few years, she left the job and the company.

If you think about it, the entire outcome was predictable.

We all have a sweet spot where everything seems to flow; where we feel happy, competent, in sync with everything around us, uniquely talented, and predictably successful. It feels like magic, but it’s not: It’s the intersection of our strengths, weaknesses, passions, and differences.

My friend, in taking the job, veered from her sweet spot.

The scenario is not uncommon. Of more than 10,000 people who have taken a productivity quiz on my website, a full 72% admit to doing work they neither excel at nor enjoy.

That’s a mistake. We should plan our work and our lives so that we operate in that intersection. Outside it? Chances are we’ll fail. We might succeed at first, but it won’t be sustainable.

So why do we ever leave our sweet spot? Sometimes, it’s because we want to learn. One of the reasons my friend took the position was to get experience running her own business.

But there’s another temptation at play: ego. A new job sounds impressive and the external rewards and recognition are significant, so we think we should take it, even when we might know in our gut it’s not the right fit.

A few years ago, I was asked to sit on the board of a non-profit. I was honored and I accepted. After a few meetings though, my enthusiasm started to wane. I liked the organization and I liked the people on the board, but I didn’t care enough to devote real time to it. It wasn’t something I was passionate enough about and it required that I be a strong fundraiser, definitely a weakness of mine. In other words, it failed two out of four of my sweet spot criteria.

Here’s the crazy thing: A year later, they asked me to be president of the board, and I accepted again. I lasted a year.

So, why did I accept? I’m embarrassed to say that, mostly, I liked the idea of being president of the board, even though the role took me out of my sweet spot.

At first glance, you might think the dilemma of seduction could be solved by being clear about what you want versus what other people what from you. That would be a fairly easy distinction to sort out.

But it’s more complicated than that. In fact, the dilemma is entirely within us: It’s between what we want and what we think we should want, which is hard to distinguish.

Still, in the midst of that complexity, there’s a simple way to assess an opportunity. Next time you’re given an “offer you can’t refuse,” ask yourself if it will place you squarely in your sweet spot. If it won’t, you know what to do.

As for my friend? She eventually started her own company. She works on the designs herself, which she loves, and is very close to the marketing, promotions and finances. And politics? Very little.

The company is successful, of course. She’s in her sweet spot.

About the Author

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

[Via WSJ]

Brad* is as hard a worker as anyone I know. He’s not just busy, he’s keenly focused on getting the right things done. And it pays off — he is the largest single revenue generator at his well-known professional services firm.

A few days before Thanksgiving, Brad flew from Boston to Los Angeles with his family. He was going to work for the first few days and then relax with his family. During the flight, he decided not to use the plane’s internet access, choosing to talk and play with his children instead. A five-hour digital vacation.

When they landed, Brad turned on his BlackBerry and discovered that a crisis had developed while he was in the air and he had close to 500 email messages waiting for him.

So much for a digital vacation.

The truth is, we can’t ever really get away from it. There is no escaping the nonstop surge of email, text, voicemail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — and that’s just the technology-based stream. How can we ever catch up?

We can’t.

The idea that we can get it all done is the biggest myth in time management. There’s no way Brad can meaningfully go through all his email and there’s no way any of us are going to accomplish everything we want to get done.

Face it: You’re a limited resource.

Each day only has 24 hours and we can’t sustainably work through all of them.
On the one hand, that’s depressing. On the other hand, acknowledging it can be tremendously empowering. Once we admit that we aren’t going to get it all done, we’re in a much better position to make explicit choices about what we are going to do. Instead of letting things haphazardly fall through the cracks, we can intentionally push the unimportant things aside and focus our energy on the things that matter most.

There are two main challenges in doing the right things: identifying “the right things” and “doing” them.

Most of us manage our time reactively, making choices based on the needs that land on our desks. To determine the “right things,” we need to make deliberate choices that will move us toward the outcomes we most want. Which, of course, also means that we need to make deliberate choices about what not to do. The world will take what it can from us. It’s never been more important to be strategic about what we choose to give it.

In terms of the second challenge — “doing” or following through — we need tools and rituals. We need an environment that makes it more likely that we will do the things that matter most and less likely that we will waste our time with meaningless, unproductive diversions. We need to know how to prioritize properly, delegate deliberately, tabulate to-do lists, and mitigate multi-tasking.

But which tools work best? Which rituals will help us follow through? If you spend all your time discovering and using all the advice you get from me and others, it could become a distraction to the work itself. Here’s a process to help you avoid turning time management into another excuse to procrastinate on your most important priorities.

1. Think for a moment about the time-management problems you face. Do you leave the office with a nagging feeling that you worked all day but didn’t get your most important work done? Do you feel like you aren’t taking advantage of your talents and passions? Are you distracted by little things? Avoiding big hairy projects? Do you interrupt yourself with email and other distractions? Try taking this three-minute quiz to discover where you are distracting yourself the most.
2. Once you’ve identified your biggest time-management challenges, choose a single one to tackle. Maybe you’re not clear on your “right things.” Maybe you use the wrong rituals. Maybe you strive for perfection. Pick the challenge that most often gets in your way. Then choose one time-management tactic to solve that challenge — just one of the many good suggestions you’ve encountered here and elsewhere.
3. If that tactic works, repeat the process with another challenge. If it doesn’t, try a new tactic. Continue to approach things this way, one at a time, so you can be sure what works for you and what doesn’t.

Brad, overwhelmed by his hundreds of emails, put his BlackBerry away and did nothing until he arrived in his hotel room. Then, using his laptop, he triaged his now more than 500 emails based on what he knew were his most important priorities, answering the ones he needed to and deleting the majority of them. Within an hour, he was done. He shut his laptop, left his BlackBerry in his room (gasp!), and enjoyed a fun, chaos-filled dinner with his family, which, at that time, was precisely the right thing for him to do.

*Names and some details have been changed

Last year, Intel began talking about a new category of super-thin notebook computers called the ultrabook. Here at the International Consumer Electronics Show, the company, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips, made it clear it plans to pour a lot of money and effort into turning ultrabooks into the next big computing phenomenon.

Ultrabooks are essentially an effort to bring to notebooks based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system the lightweight, thin design of Apple’s MacBook Air, a machine with the thickness of a short stack of papers. Intel knows a lot about the MacBook Air because it supplies the chips that run Apple’s product, but the company wants the much larger market of Windows-based notebooks to embrace the style of the Apple device too.

At a news conference on Monday here at the show, Intel said 75 new ultrabook designs are expected to be released in 2012. Intel executives demonstrated a few of the machines, all of which were very thin, often with eye-catching metallic cases like the MacBook Air’s. One design theme Intel pitched was the idea of a hybrid ultrabook-tablet, which has a traditional keyboard for intensive data entry and a touch screen for zooming in on photos and manipulating other software.

One of the wackier-looking designs Intel showed was a concept ultrabook it calls Nikishki. Below its keyboard, the device has a huge touchpad that runs the entire width of the machine, allowing users to switch easily to touch gestures from typing.

The touchpad is transparent so that when Nikishki is closed, you  can see through the underside of the laptop. Through that window, you can view a portion of the computer’s display, which will allow you to glance at e-mails, news and calendar appointments the way many people do with their smartphones today.

Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC client group, said touch will no longer be confined to tablets and smartphones. But he said the presence of a keyboard will give ultrabooks greater versatility than those devices. “Ultrabooks with touch will be the ultimate solution,” he said.

Intel also said it was trying to create new ways of interacting with computers besides touch. The company cut a deal with Nuance to add voice recognition technology made by that company to ultrabooks.

Touch screens have been tried by Windows notebook makers in the past though, without much success. No one yet has proved that there is a meaningful market of people who want a hybrid notebook and tablet, although there are plenty of people who buy those as separate products.

Intel and its partners could have one advantage over Apple if they can bring the prices of ultrabooks down to mass market levels. Right now, most ultrabooks hover around the $999 starting price of the MacBook Air. “You will see pricing going down and down,” Mr. Eden said. “You will see ultrabooks going into mainstream price points.”

Intel is using its own cash to help accelerate the decline in ultrabook prices. Last year, it announced a $300 million ultrabook fund to subsidize the development of thinner components like displays and batteries that make ultrabooks possible.

Kevin Sellers, vice president for advertising and digital marketing at Intel, said the company would also pour an undisclosed amount of money into marketing the ultrabook category to create more consumer awareness of the devices. He said an ultrabook advertising campaign will start later this year, representing one of Intel’s most significant ever.

“It’s going to be very epic, very cinematic,” he said.

[Via Gadgetwise]

Here’s how a typical press interview with Steve Jobs used to go in the early 2000s. You wouldn’t be immediately ushered into his presence; you would be passed from PR person to PR person, corridor to corridor, waiting at each step, until you reached the inner sanctum.

You would often pass a fellow journalist on his way out, looking white as a sheet and shaking his head like he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. You would mentally prepare your questions about the latest Apple product, knowing that Steve would bat them away like flies and say what he wanted to say.

And then there you were, with the man himself: black turtleneck, jeans, white trainers, spiky salt-and-pepper stubble, and those no-nonsense eyes that could look straight into your soul. You’d sputter out a question while he sipped from a bottle of Odwalla. Perhaps he would deign to answer politely, or perhaps he would interrupt: “that’s a stupid question. That’s not what we should be talking about.”

If you could survive twenty minutes of this without cracking, his demeanor would soften. If you were lucky, then just for a moment the mask would slip, and Steve would break into a broad smile. It was a grin that acknowledged the silliness of this interview game — and that you both loved playing your roles in it.

Always Passionate

As a technology writer for Time magazine in the 1990s and 2000s, I went through this routine a dozen times. It’s easy to forget, but back then an Apple product launch was not a huge deal. The company was seen as struggling, a distant second to Microsoft, even years after Jobs had retaken the helm. I had to fight for a single page on the launch of the iPod in 2001, for instance, at a time when the headlines were all about war and terror.

But Jobs was always compelling. He was the news. His enormous passion for a product was unrivaled in any industry, before or since. As long as I could convey him on the page, Steve as he really was, Apple stories were an easy sell for my editors.

The Urgency of the Future

The more stories I did, the friendlier Steve got. He started calling me at home with story ideas and off-the-record information. He asked me to interview him on a video that would be broadcast at a Warner Music conference; this was when he was still trying to persuade the record labels to let him sell songs within iTunes.

I figured this meant we should start with a few softball questions about music in general, but Steve interrupted and got straight to the pitch: 99-cent MP3s would save the music industry. Of course, he was absolutely right, and of course, he got his way.

Here was a man who knew precisely what the future looked like, and had no patience for anyone or anything who got in the way. Not a second was to be wasted. The vision was too important. This is what he meant in that famous Stanford commencement speech: “your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Making Airplanes In the Sun

But there was a whimsical side to him, too. Once Steve tried to pitch me a story on the architecture of Pixar’s headquarters. It wasn’t new; he was just eager to show it off, and hounded me until I agreed to take a tour with him. We must have sat down in every room in the building, Steve grinning like a proud parent the whole time. I patiently explained why it probably wasn’t going to be in the magazine (this was before modern Web journalism and its infinite capacity for stories).

It didn’t faze him one bit. In his mind, it was a worthy story, and that was all that mattered. For Steve Jobs, every day was like Christmas morning, and nothing could shake that feeling.

My most enduring memory of him speaks to that fact too. It was a Saturday afternoon in Palo Alto, and I was having lunch with a friend in an Italian restaurant. Suddenly, Steve came in and ordered takeout. He was wearing a T-shirt and cut-off jeans, just another happy suburban dad.

He took his food and left, and as he walked down that beautiful leafy street, he stretched out his arms like an airplane — like he was flying into the sunshine.

For all the times I’ve seen him at the height of his powers on stage, and for all the sweat-inducing interviews, that is how I will remember Steve Jobs — completely confident and carefree, being just who he wanted to be, flying straight into the future.

Jim Wolfensohn was a second-year student at the University of Sydney when a friend of his and the captain of the fencing team, Rupert Bligh, asked if he wanted to go to Melbourne the next day to fence in the national university championships.

“You’ve got to be mad,” Jim said. “I’ve never fenced in my life.”

Rupert wasn’t mad, just desperate. A member of the team had fallen ill and they needed a replacement to qualify for the event.

It was a crazy thing to consider. Jim had no money for the trip to Melbourne and no chance of success.

But he said yes, borrowed the money from his parents, and learned what he could from his new teammates on the train to Melbourne.

What a wonderful story this would be if it ended with Jim uncovering a hidden, inborn talent and vanquishing all his opponents. But that’s not this story. Jim lost every bout and failed to score a single point.

Still, he writes in his well-worth-the-read memoir, A Global Life, “I tried to invent new ways to score points on the opponent…I could not remember having such a good time ever before.”

Even with his losses, the team won the championship. And Jim stuck with fencing for years, eventually fencing in the 1956 Olympics and becoming President of the World Bank, a position he held from 1995 to 2005.

What does Jim’s fencing experience have to do with his esteemed business and political career? Everything.

Every life story is complex, with an infinite number of factors contributing to a person’s fate. And yet, there are patterns, ways in which we habitually interact with our experiences. Over time, those patterns become our destinies.

For most of us, our patterns can be seen early in our lives. Jim’s patterns — the ones that led him to great personal, business, and political success — were already clear in his failed fencing bouts.

First, some disclosure: I’ve known Jim most of my life and have always admired him, not just for his accomplishments, but also for his integrity as a person and as a leader. He’s always been on my short list of people I want to be like when I grow up. I’m still working on it.

So what’s the pattern behind Jim’s success?

Psychologists might focus on his upbringing. He grew up poor and developed the dynamic combination of insecurity and ambition that underlies so many stories of achievement.

Life coaches might point to his willingness to agree to opportunities that are larger than he can could handle — often without even really knowing what he was getting into — and then to work tirelessly to succeed, accepting help wherever he could find it.

Sure, consultants might offer, that’s part of it. But the real source of his success is his analytical mind and the disciplined way he solves problems. He enters a situation and assesses it, seeking to understand the system and figure out what’s getting in the way. He identifies the smallest number of actions that will have the biggest impact, and he follows through.

It’s his optimism, positive psychologists would likely suggest. How else could he say, after losing every bout, “I could not remember having such a good time ever before.” And his relationships gave him opportunities, as well. He never would have fenced if not for Rupert offering him a place on the team.

Yes, but he would not have been able to achieve anything if he were not capable, his professors at Harvard would argue. Jim is smart and skilled. He works hard. And he never stops learning. The story of his fencing trip to Melbourne is dramatic, but his success as a fencer — and as a business and world leader — is hidden in the long stretch between that bout and the Olympics. He spent years working hard, honing his skills, and increasing his talent.

Maybe Jim’s pattern is really an equation: Jim = integrity + insecurity + ambition + saying yes + asking for help + problem solving + optimism + relationships + capability. Like I said, every life story is complex.

But the more I think about Jim, the more clearly I see simplicity in his success. A single underlying force drove his decision-making. It’s the key that unlocked his equation. Without it, his tremendous talent would have lain dormant.

That key is a question.

Most people, when they explore an opportunity, next step, or decision, ask: “Will I succeed?”

But Jim asks a different question: “Is it worth the risk?”

The difference in those questions is the difference between never fencing at all and fencing in the Olympics. When Rupert asked Jim to fence in the championships, there’s no chance he could have succeeded. Failure was the inevitable outcome. But was it worth the risk? For Jim, it certainly was.

Jim’s approach to life is to take a risk, learn from it, and take his new knowledge and understanding to the next risk. Failure is an essential part of his strategy.

Really taking risks requires failing. You have to fear failure enough to work hard to make the risks pan out successfully, but not so much that you don’t take the risks in the first place. Viewed through the lens of learning, failure is at least as beneficial as success. Working only on things you’re pretty sure will work significantly limits what you can achieve. Instead, take risks. And then see what happens.

After serving as President of the World Bank, Jim was asked by President George W. Bush to be the Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement for the Middle East. If he had asked, “Will it work?” he would never have agreed to such a task. Instead, he asked the only question that matters — “Is it worth the risk?” — and took the job.

About the Author

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

(Via HBR)