Well written article. This approach may work in a larger company. In small companies, startups that I have either worked for or started the demand for talent, scarcity of talent and time pressures forced us hire the best person that we felt could do the job. An interesting reality which I noticed was that the type of person hired varied greatly – the company was a startup during the dot-com days, and with the extreme scarcity of talent we hired whoever we felt could do the job. The distribution of people hired turned out to be more broad than narrow (think normal distribution in statistics, with a wide range of values on the x-axiS). On the other hand a large company that I worked for hired a lot of people out of the Big 6 (at that time there were 6!) – there was less diversity.

I like the concept but my experience at 4 startups (2 that I worked for and 2 that I started) has shown that it is impractical to implement, even though the unintended result may actually be a diverse pool!!! Strange!

Unconventional thinking is difficult to do when resources are tight and everyone has to work efficiently to meet a goal. In that situation, there’s no time to detour into new and unproven ideas. For unconventional thinking to be effective, there has to be enough bandwidth for trial and error, room for mistakes, and time to prove out ideas. Funding some of these unconventional ideas, knowing some of them will work and some won’t, is part of what’s made our VC community so successful. I hope that tradition continues!