Part 1 can be read here.
Imagine a hiring scenario that a New Wave coach might deal with…
3 finalists for a D3 HC job. You are one of them.
2 current D3 guys that aren’t really ‘getting it done’ but have the D3 HC experience on their resume.
1 guy from junior hockey, is ‘unproven’.
This ‘unproven’ word carries perceived risk in our risk-averse industry.
But I want you to think of something first…
Why aren’t we hiring the unproven one every time?
Call me crazy, but it deals with the surgeon's paradox we talked about in Part 1.
Here’s a quote to get us going in the right direction from Jeff Bezos:
"Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 percent change of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.
"We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments."
Ever heard of this cliche?
“No risk, no reward.”
We are time and again hiring one of the first two candidates that has the current level already on his resume. And we rarely hire the guy that is ‘coming up’ to ‘break in’ to the new level.
Unless your coach is retiring or advancing to a higher level, most coaching vacancies are due to the team ‘sucking’. Not a professional term, but it makes my point.
So when you suck, you need a hire to move the needle. You need to hit 1000 home runs in one swing.
The two guys that have D3 HC experience on their resumes are stagnating at their level. Probably not the guys you want to step up to the plate to hit 1000 home runs in one swing.
Yet we hire them most of the time in these situations.
The person that is ‘breaking in’ to the new level has greater ‘high-velocity’ potential.
He also has dealt with the surgeon’s paradox his whole career.
He also started on Level 1.
Pick that guy. Because…
There’s no outsized return in the ‘currently mediocre but experienced’.
Outsized returns are found in high-velocity people.
Do you have an example of a team that did this? Took a risk on a less experienced hire and it produced a huge shift for the team?