It shouldn’t be this tough.

There is no company that has too many good people. So, if you interview someone bright, ethical and enthusiastic, someone with a good work ethic, someone whose training matches the position you are seeking to fill and whose attitude is a perfect fit with the group he or she would be hired to join, go for it.

Hiring While De-Hiring

Companies take hiring especially seriously when they are in re-engineering mode. The ingress and egress of people come and go in turns; they must, therefore, be handled carefully so as not to get in each other’s way. But serious and cautious do not necessarily mean wise. Re-engineering sometimes gets in the way of intelligent thought and intelligent hiring. If a critical position needs to be filled, fill it. Quickly! I have seen companies stall hiring, saving salary and losing invaluable momentum in the process.

Inside Hiring Outside

I have been privy to numerous debates about hiring from within as being a virtue or a vice. One CEO said to me, “If a company cannot find anyone from within to fill a senior position, then management, starting at the very top, has failed”. I know of several Fortune 500 companies that move people up in spiral fashion, alternating between staff and operating positions. Others, however, see things differently. Companies, they say, need to refresh themselves, need to add new blood, new ideas, new energy. They see recycling employees as slowly grinding companies into mediocrity. I have even witnessed debates about what constitutes inside and outside. For example, how would you qualify a long-term temp being made permanent? Or the rehire of a former employee who has gained valuable experience elsewhere? Trust me, those competing for the position have very different – and not altogether generous - views of the issue.

Family Matters

Then there is the matter of hiring family. Generally, the more paternalistic the company, the more likely it is to hire employees’ relatives. Not surprisingly, this maximizes loyalty and minimizes turnover. Not surprisingly, those who prefer hiring from the outside see reasonable turnover as healthy and the lack of turnover ossifying. What is healthy? Between 5 and 10% annually. I am of two minds on the family issue. It should not prevent a hire, all things being equal. But, things are never quite equal. When family members are involved in anything negative (a layoff, for example), emotions will run somewhat higher than usual. Conversely, when family members do well, there is always a suspicion (even if there is not a hint) of patronage. Many companies would rather not take the chance. It’s a shame.

When Too Much is Not Enough

It is easy to understand why you wouldn’t risk hiring someone you believe is too junior for a position and likely not up to the job. It is more difficult to accept not hiring someone because they are too senior and likely to quit within six months because the job would not be enough of a challenge or provide enough opportunities for growth. Surprisingly, I have seen the second case occur more often than the first. The problem is clearly bigger than the people involved. If any job situation does not provide enough scope or latitude for growth, then the company is not worth the time applying to in the first place. Jobs must be clearly defined. Job situations, however, should never have boundaries set so tight that we cannot foresee growth, laterally or vertically, for quality people who are placed in them.

Running the Gauntlet

In some companies, even lower level hires are expected to meet a variety of difficult thresholds, to say nothing of a host of senior managers, before getting the nod. I find it strange bordering on the scary to force entry-level prospects to run a gauntlet of managers, with gusts up to vice-presidents, to get a job. They are repeatedly put on the spot, a spot that I imagine seems to them somewhere close to the guillotine. I can understand – and, in fact, always insisted on - the process for senior hires. I personally have interviewed over a dozen candidates for senior positions. But I can also recall the process once being used in a way that completely intimidated a wonderful candidate for a relatively low-paying clerical job. I must confess, though, I kinda sorta didn’t follow the process. In truth, I counseled the candidate on how to navigate the gauntlet, how to handle the pressure and the people involved. Perhaps I helped, perhaps my help wasn’t needed, but the candidate did just fine. And two years later is still doing fine, thank you very much.

There are a number of excellent books on corporate strategy that merit your attention and that will provide value for your time and for a twenty. There are, of course, others not so excellent, books that at my most generous I would consider hollow in content, penned by pop authors contemptuous of their readers. Unfortunately, in business books as in so much else, popularity is not necessarily reflective of value.

There are times, however, when strategy junkies need a quicker fix than can be provided by books, good or bad. These cravings can be satisfied by reading various business magazines and blogs. Not all are of these are of equal value either and some blogs, especially, are thinly-disguised platforms for selling services and are unabashedly self-serving.

All this is to introduce a business magazine I discovered quite by accident in a store that offers for sale obscure magazines, toy soldiers and Marvel comic memorabilia. The discovery was the Spring ’08 issue of Strategy + Business. Published by Booz Allen Hamilton, the huge strategic management and technology consulting firm, Strategy + Business is - to their credit and my relief – neatly disguised and only mildly self-serving.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the feature articles that most captured my attention but the front section columns. A number of these should get you thinking :

Upturn Thinking in Downturn Years

In market downturns, the companies that emerge strongest are those that, while retrenching, push ahead with long-term strategic planning. One example of a company that did just that is Lucent; even while the telecom hardware business was in decline, CEO Patricia Russo pushed ahead with an initiative to identify new growth areas that would make use of Lucent’s core capabilities and provide stable revenue and income streams going forward.

New Metrics for Media Campaigns

The reach and frequency metrics used in assessing traditional media campaigns are losing relevance in this age of the web, social networking platforms, cell phones, PDAs, podcasts and video games. Marketers are looking to deliver “contextually relevant messages” to specific, i.e., targeted concentrations of potential customers. They are seeking more precise information on how this digital activity correlates to actual sales. As this information becomes available, they will increasingly embrace the pay-for-performance advertising model.

Undiscovered Riches in IP

In an age of commoditization and globalization, you might imagine companies would dig deep to find and exploit assets that yield sustainable differentiation. Among those assets, Intellectual Property may well be the next frontier. Companies are getting wise to the significant revenues that can be gained through patent and technology licensing. IP is moving out of the legal counsel’s office and into the corporate development arena. In fact, in the past 15 years, licensing revenues have burgeoned from $15 billion to $110 billion. To take it to the next level, companies will have to make their intellectual property both serve the business and be a business in its own right.

New Life for Tired Brands

Ford is attempting to revive the Taurus brand out of the ashes of the Five Hundred, and Proctor & Gamble is using Red Zone antiperspirants and deodorants to reposition Old Spice among teen males. Should and can old brands be revitalized? Have the attributes which once made the brands successful been eroded or been made irrelevant by competing brands? Are the products suffering from the poor opinion of its original customer base or poor awareness from new, potential customers? A proposed four-step Brand Vitality Assessment (which, no doubt, Uno Who could conduct) would provide the answers.

All in all, I rate this magazine a lucky find, one for which you might keep an eye out. You might also want to scour the back issues. Go to www.strategy-business.com. Of course, with Booz Allen Hamilton being a mega consultant, you should not expect a free lunch. Not while they’re trying to build the brand at any rate.

A few days ago, marketing maven Seth Godin made a wonderful observation: An inbound phone call is the ultimate in short-term permission. The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. (See Who Answers the Phone?)

Every marketer has been taught about contact points, where stakeholders’ paths, direct or indirect, intersect with those of the company. It can be a trucker asking for directions, or a dealer following up on an order, or a consumer with a complaint, or a shareholder with a query. It can be opening your package or looking you up in the yellow pages. It can be reaching you – or not – on the phone, via e-mail or in person, at the door. For marketers, each point of intersection is vindication, at least, that something is working, and a valuable opportunity to make that something (and the relationship if nothing else) work better.

Too many companies underestimate – and therefore, under-resource (in manpower and funding) customer service in all its various forms. Time is money but, when it concerns customer service, the money is seen as spent rather than earned, outbound rather than inbound.

I once had a bright employee who was asked to coordinate shipments during a period of tight supply. Since we had cleaned out most of our inventory, we were operating on a just-in-time or, as we put it, on an as-needed basis. To keep all this transparent to customers, we had to keep one step ahead of them, knowing what their needs were before they did. This required constant tracking and communications, a maximum of effort and empathy for a minimum of 12 hours a day. It was reputation-making stuff and, precisely for that reason, this employee had a request – that her title did not include the words Customer Service, which would have devalued her role dramatically. When and how, I wondered, did this unfortunate devolution of customer service begin?

Branding is ultimately about how people see your company, its products and/or services. Customer service is what you do at that critical moment when people get to see your company as it really is. The two are inextricably linked. Companies that spend a ton of marketing dollars to build the brand should remember this.