Hiring Top Talent

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at the Chicago GSB to help you advance in your career. Today we're speaking with Claudio Fernández of Egon Zehnder International. He leads the firm's intellectual capital development as a partner and member of Egon Zehnder International's global executive committee. He's published several articles on the topic of people decisions, including the bestselling Harvard Business Review article “Hiring Without Firing,” and as the author of a wonderful book called Great People Decisions.

It was published in the US by Wiley in June 2007 and has received very strong endorsements from Jack Welch, Jim Collins, and Daniel Goleman, among others. It achieved instant global presence and is currently being translated into several languages. Claudio, thank you so much for being here today. It's really an honor.

Claudio Fernández: Thank you very much. And it is my honor and my pleasure.

Anita Brick: Having looked at some of the things on the Egon Zehnder website and your book and some of the other things that I just mentioned, it's clear that you are incredibly passionate about great people decisions.

Claudio Fernández: I certainly am, yes.

Anita Brick: Why do you insist that this is probably one of the most crucial things that a leader can do in an organization?

Claudio Fernández: Well Anita, after 22 years practicing as an executive search consultant globally and having traveled seven times around the world giving speeches, I am convinced that probably nothing is more important for your career success than making great people decisions. It's especially important once you become a manager, because everything you do will depend on the people you've chosen.

Your results, your performance, your raise, your chances of being promoted. So that's the main reason why I believe that making great people decisions is crucially important for our career success. In addition, making great decisions is critically important for building organizational value. Tim Collins has shown that in order to build a great company, there are two foundational conditions is having the right leader at the top.

And as he would put it, you know, the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and the people on the right side. So those are the two reasons it's crucially important for our own individual career success and for organizational value.

Anita Brick: I know you also worked at McKinsey prior to Egon Zehnder. How did your being in very high-level strategy consulting influence your philosophy about great people decisions?

Claudio Fernández: When I worked with McKinsey in Europe, in several countries, on the one hand I realized how much value one could add as a consultant, but on the other hand, I realized that in most cases, the root of the problems were the people at the top, people who either had not been able to make the right diagnostic about the situation to set the right strategy, or to implement it properly.

After several years with them in Europe, I joined the executive search profession. I realized that it was even more than one could achieve in terms of change if the right people were in the right places, that even having the right people on board … Tim Collins … This great analysis was actually a first step.

He would say first who, then what? First, you need to have the right people on board, and then you can confirm your strategy. And then for implementing it, you need the right people on board.

Anita Brick: OK. So if everyone can make great people decisions, all companies would be fabulous. It's a hard thing to do. Why is it so hard?

Claudio Fernández: Well, it is hard mainly, Anita, because we have an old brain for a new task. I mean, our brains have been shaped by evolution over the millennia, but this is a very slow process. Our brains are not very different from those of the primitive hunter gatherer who 10,000 years ago was gathering food and hunting in the savanna. That person basically needed to make one decision.

It was something moving. And the decision was, is that thing going to eat me or am I going to eat that thing? That was crucial for survival, and we are having this conversation today with you because our ancestors made the right decisions. But the world in which we live today is a very complex world. That type of decision, which is almost an instinct, resides in the amygdala, which is a very fast part of the brain, but it is only able to process very simple information.

For in order to make great people decisions, you need to do some very complex analysis about what is needed for a specific position in a given company in a given context. It is extremely hard to think about what are the competencies needed for that position, and it requires immense discipline to follow a proven process to check who is the best candidate for that.

So for all of this, it is very hard and we typically fall into all sorts of unconscious psychological biases. One, for example, is making snap judgments. There's lots of research that shows that in a fraction of a second, you form an unconscious impression about the person in front of you. Again, this was perhaps key for survival because you met someone and you rapidly had to decide, is this person friend or foe.

In order to make great people decisions, these snap judgments are very long on snap, but very short on judgment. It really requires a conscious analytical process and that's why these decisions don't come naturally.

Anita Brick: Actually, one of the students asked a question about do you use software as part of that process, or is it more of an intuitive art?

Claudio Fernández: It's neither nor. There are some software tools that can be of help, but the person is much more important than the instrument in this area. With respect to the other part of the question, most people think that this is an art, some sort of an intuition, a gut feeling—that making great people decisions is something that some people are just naturally good at it and others are bad.

And my personal experience, my deep conviction, is that it is not like that. In spite of what most people think, making great people decisions is not an art. It's not intuition. It is a craft and a discipline that can be learned and should be learned for your career success and organizational value.

Anita Brick: So what are some key things that you can begin to do to develop those skills?

Claudio Fernández: First, you really need to study and to learn. Because an amazing thing that I discovered in my 20-plus years of experience as an executive search consultant is that despite this crucial importance of making people decisions—perhaps the most important factor for career success and the most important, controllable factor for organizational value—we don't learn how to make decisions.

I find it so surprising. I think it's such a huge blind spot that you spend years, at least in school, studying finance and accounting and marketing and strategy, but you don't even spend a week building real skill at making people decisions. I find this surprising. So the first thing is to realize importance and to get yourself educated. That's the reason why, basically, I wrote the book, which is supposed to help anyone make better decisions, whether it is promoting someone from within, hiring someone from outside or with or without professional help …

Anita Brick: What are some specific things that one can study? I mean, I know that there's a chapter of your book on the website and people can read that, but what specific things do you think that people should study?

Claudio Fernández: Excellent question. Because the important thing is that, of course, you will never get this right 100% of the time. As Jack Welch once told me, making people decisions is hard, and making great people decisions is brutally hard. And even Jack Welch, who led perhaps the largest creation of value in world history when he was at the helm of GE as CEO, he would say that initially his hit rate in people decisions was 50%, and when he retired, it was only 80%.

So this is hard. Now what can you do? I think that there is a proven process that you can follow with discipline, which will drastically enhance your chances of success and this proven process has like six key questions that you can learn to properly answer. One is deciding when a change is needed, because this is not obvious.

Typically people wait until it is too late for a people change, and one should be more proactive than that. Originally, for example, I saw a research from McKinsey where 90% of executives thought that their organizations were not good at removing poor performers. Now, can you imagine a soccer team where less than 10% of the wrong players are changed?

No. First step is when a change is needed. And then there's a series of best practices for deciding what to look for in a candidate. How important, for example, is experience versus potential versus values versus IQ versus emotional intelligence.

Third step is where to look for candidates. Should you look inside? Should you look outside? Shall you do both things? And how can you find the candidate? Fourth step is how to actually assess candidates, which is extremely difficult. If it were simple, there would be no divorces, there would be no lawyers, and of course they would be without a job. And there are many best practices for that. And the last two steps are about how to attract the best.

Because we are increasingly facing a war for talent. And people have options. And these are mutual choices. And the final step is actually how to integrate the best into your organization after you have hired. Then, because there are lots of things that you can do, preparing the ground in order to increase the chances of success and the expected performance.

Anita Brick: In fact, in the March CareerCast, we had a conversation with George Bradt. He does a lot of stuff on onboarding, and it is so crucial and it has to start so early. I mean, as soon as the offer is actually made. So there were some questions around that whole aptitude attitude. And how do you decide whether someone needs to already have the experience or if you can make a good choice based on the fact that they have potential and on the cultural side, it's a good fit?

Claudio Fernández: It's an excellent question. So … which has many angles to attack it. First, if it's a very, very senior position, there is so much at stake in terms of the amount of resources demanded, the performance impact, the visibility, that you really ideally want to hire someone who has the attitude and the aptitude because there's simply no time to learn.

The opportunity cost is very high. And so shareholders and analysts are not going to … The lower you go in the organizational pyramid, the more important it is to make absolutely sure that you not only have the right attitude, but that you look at the right potential because the opportunity cost of the learning is lower and also that investment in the individual, you are going to benefit from it for longer.

So the first answer is at the very top. Ideally, there's so much at stake, and the difference in performance is so valuable that you should try to find someone who has both the attitude and the aptitude at lower levels. Potential should be much more important now in all of these levels. Related to that question, if you have someone who has all the industry knowledge, all the experience in the world, who is absolutely bright, but he or she is not strong in the emotional intelligence based competencies, in the ability to manage him or herself and the relationship with others, that person will fail miserably.

So that is a very important point. So for any type of position, it is even more important than experience and industry knowledge to make sure that the person is able to manage himself or herself in the relationship with others in the right way.

Anita Brick: How might this change in a startup?

Claudio Fernández: If you're working on a startup, then I would differentiate for technical positions. You would definitely need people who have the right competence and aptitude in addition to the right attitude, because typically the technical conditions and competencies are key for a startup. You really need to come up with a product idea, and you really need to come up with a product that works.

And usually startups are very thin in resources. So there's only one bullet and one tiger, and you can't afford to miss. For all of the other positions, the attitude is essential for a startup and you can relax a little bit the need for sector expertise.

Anita Brick: At the beginning stage when you are sort of in the hiring mode—I know that the things that you had mentioned are crucial throughout. Are there some things in particular that you would look for? Some people get very good at answering interview questions. And then that interview and being able to evaluate on those questions that benefit disappears.

What other things do you look for, and what other things do you put into that hiring process to make sure the best hires are made?

Claudio Fernández: First, you really need to define before you look because, for example, I think that I've interviewed more than 20,000 people, a thousand a year, which is for a working day in my career, and I've participated in thousands of sessions where the clients I was working with were interviewing candidates. And one usually finds that there are many even senior executives who have a set of preferred questions for any situation.

Questions such as, you know, what are your strengths and weaknesses, what do you want to be five years from now, and so on, so forth. Now these questions are really useless because interview questions need to be specific to the situation. It's like this question of how is your spouse? And the answer is compared to what you know. So you really need to define what are the specific managerial challenges for that position, what are the objectives, and based on those, what are the relevant competencies for that position?

Once you have identified those relevant competencies, then the second best practice for better interviews is to make sure that you use a technique which is called behavioral based questioning and probing. So it's asking, for example … in the competencies to be able to meet a deadline under pressure. Then you ask the questions: Have you ever been in a situation where you had to meet a deadline under pressure, and then you try to find out, so what was your role?

What did you do? How did you do it? What were the consequences, what was the situation? And so on and so forth. So you really try to dig deeper. You try to find what the person has done in the past, something that demonstrates the competence to do it in the future under the relevant circumstances.

So that's the second best practice and the third best practice any day, is to make sure that you complement these interviews with good, reliable reference checking processes. Because even if someone is absolutely honest in their answers, there is lots of research that shows that we are extremely optimistic when it comes to our self-assessment. For example, last year there was a special issue of Businessweek on the future of work. You might remember it, it was like a 20-page special report, and that was based on a poll of 2,000 executives and middle managers.

Now, one of the questions they asked to all of them was, are you in the top 10% within your organization? And of course, you would expect 10% of the people to respond yes. And you know how many believe they are in the top 10% of their organization? An incredible and impossible 90%.

Anita Brick: Yeah. This is a surprise to me, actually.

Claudio Fernández: Yeah. So, you know, women were slightly more modest. Only 89% of women believe that. And 91% of us arrogant men, we believe that we are. That's why you really ideally need to check with someone who has seen the candidate work, ideally in a similar situation, tell you what it was that he or she really accomplished, and particularly what was the way in which he or she will accomplish it? Because coming back to your previous question about cultural fit, it's not just getting the results, it's the way in which the individuals get the results, which may or not be in line with the values of a specific organization.

Anita Brick: Those are some very good, solid, foundational things. How do you then fine-tune so that you separate someone who might be at the 75 or 80% level to someone who's really going to be a star?

Claudio Fernández: That's a very good question. Here I will speak both about the detailed work but also about a very important generalization, which I think will be invaluable for your audience and based on my 20 years of learning. So at the detail level, ideally one should have the discipline to confirm what are the specific relevant competencies. For example, some competencies that we found that almost every time are essential for a senior managerial position are strategic orientation, results, orientation, team leadership and collaboration, and the ability to influence others who don't necessarily belong to your own team, such as peers and all sorts of external stakeholders.

So for each job, you should understand how relevant these competencies are and at what level. For example, strategic orientation—does this person just need to implement within his or her unit the corporate strategy? Or does he or she need to contribute to defining that strategy, or does he or she need to define the strategy for their organizational unit and so forth?

So once you have done the homework, before you even start looking for candidates, you can define what I would call the target levels for these competencies. And then when you have the different candidates, you check which one has the best fit with respect to that. So that's the detail-level answer on how you can find the best potential candidates for a given job.

Now, I would like to make a point if you want, Anita, on generalization. So based on my experience, what have been in general the best candidate type hire and what have been in general, those cases where I did really hire failures who were either fired in the end or where the client was frustrated because the performance and the potential were just not there.

If there is one key learning I cannot emphasize enough is making sure that you not only check for experience and IQ, which is sort of a typical thing that people look at when hiring someone. You look at the CV, look for a great education or background from some of the best schools, which is very highly correlated with IQ.

And then you look at some relevant experience, sector experience, situation experience, functional experience, and all of that is invaluable and is great. But the point is that if that does not come together with strong emotional intelligence based competencies, with a great ability, as I say, to manage yourself and your relationship with others, the likelihood of that candidate being a failure is almost 10 times larger than of those candidates who, in addition of having the heart, are also masters at dealing with them and with others.

Anita Brick: Well, I think it's interesting. It's a very, very complex thing. A couple of … actually students and alums had a question about … now you’ve identified some great people, how do you close the deal, both from the candidate side and from the employer side?

Claudio Fernández: Good question. And this is becoming particularly critical these days for two reasons. One is the demographic phenomena of the aging of the baby boomers, and particularly people in the 35- to 45-year-old range are becoming scarce. And it's becoming also a very hot issue in some parts of the world, particularly in Asia. It's booming, and you have some sectors with unbelievable growth rates of 20 to 30% compounded growth rate per year. And where the talent pool is very limited because in some parts of the world, such as in China, you didn't have an MBA until, say, 10 years ago or so, it's very hard to find enough talent for such amazing demand.

So this would be my recommendation on how to proceed. And we see, for example, in China and in India, sometimes we have candidates that have three offers in their pockets, and they come to interview with us to get the fourth one. They really have options. This is the way in which I would see it.

The first thing that you need to do, as a hiring entity, is to make sure that you have properly assessed the person and that you have in front of you a person who is competent. Now, having done that, it's time to shift into selling mode. Before that, I think that one important thing to check is whether not only the candidate will be good for your organization, but whether your organization and that job is going to be good for the candidate.

I think that it's extremely important to check the candidate's motivations to check whether that job could eventually destroy the candidates, as I've seen happening with people who committed suicide as a result of the stress of a wrong job. So that's the first thing. Now, after you have checked that, and it takes discipline to check that because, you know, you are desperate to hire, but only if you do that you will have the conviction so that you really can sell with passion your job, because nothing convinces more than conviction.

And if you are genuinely convinced that the job is the best for the candidate, then the next step is, as Jack Welch once said to me, Claudio, the way to attract the best people is to paint them a picture of how much you value that position, how much you value that business, how you are going to support that individual through thick and thin.

So it's a picture, and then finally, it's the money. It's money and picture. But I think that's the order: first checking that the job is good for the candidate. Then, the picture. And only in the end, the money. The money has to be right. But it's not good that that's the first and primary motivation. That's not what motivates the best candidates.

Jim Collins, for example, when working on Good to Great, had 112 different analysts trying to find whether there was any correlation between compensation and the ability of a company to make the leap from good to great. And he found no evidence. And so, as he would put it, what’s more important than how much you pay or even how you pay is who you pay in the first place, right? That would be my view for closing the deal.

Anita Brick: So it sounds like it's the same on both sides: that the candidate needs to demonstrate competencies, whether they're a career changer or not—to paint a picture of the value they're going to bring to your organization. And then the compensation should be really the third thing.

Claudio Fernández: Absolutely, Anita, and by the way, it's a brilliant insight from your side. I sometimes make the analogy of hiring decisions with a statistical phenomenon, which is that whenever you are trying to make an estimate in statistics, you can make two types of error. They are known as error one and error two. One is the error of accepting a wrong hypothesis, and the other one is the error of rejecting a right hypothesis.

And here it is the same thing. So hiring entities can either go in two directions: hiding the wrong person or missing that exceptional talent. Same thing with a candidate. They can get into a job they will not like, or where they will fail or they can miss an amazing opportunity. Now, the problem with these two errors is that if you want to minimize one, you increase the other.

For example, if you never want to miss a great talent, you will hire many wrong people and vice versa. If you never want to make a mistake, you will miss some great stars. Now what's the way to reduce both errors at the same time? In statistics, the way to deal with that is increasing the sample size. In a process like this, it is increasing communication, information exchange, mutual knowledge.

So that's why I would recommend that at this stage, both the hiring entity and the candidate have great discipline to make sure that objectively, that candidate is the right one. And this is the best thing for him or her. And from the candidate, particularly if he or she is without a job, it's very easy to rationalize and to think that you are the best for that job and that's the best for you.

But there's nothing worse than making a mistake, even if you are unemployed. And so it requires enormous emotional discipline to make an objective assessment of whether that's the right thing for you. And you are the right thing for them as well.

Anita Brick: Very good point. There obviously are a number of people, especially in the banking world, who are unemployed, at least at this moment. How does someone still have the confidence to negotiate a sizable compensation package, if that's what's warranted?

Claudio Fernández: Well, if your question is—and I can expect it coming from an MBA student, probably, as I was many years ago—about what tactics are most effective, right, in negotiating the highest possible compensation package …

Anita Brick: Absolutely.

Claudio Fernández: My answer to that, Anita, is that I would not recommend that, particularly if someone is right at the beginning of their career. The decision about the job should not be about the level of income at all. Unless of course, I mean, you have a huge debt you need to pay back for your MBA program and you have no other way to go.

But I think that the decision should not be about your personal income statement, but about your balance sheet. What is going to be the job that is going to develop your skills and level of competence and reputation, which in the future will allow you to generate a stream of income which will be much more important with a much higher net present value?

So I think that particularly initial career decisions should not be significantly about how much money you make, but about how much you are going to learn, how much you're going to develop your skills, how much you're going to develop your reputation, and in the end, what you really like. And this for two reasons. First, because there's tons of research that shows that if you work on what you like, your chances of becoming a star are much higher because performance depends on competence, it depends even more on motivation.

So that would be my recommendation. And so what would I check from an employee perspective, as we are speaking? I would check three conditions. Three necessary conditions in a potential employer. First, that is a reliable employer. And by this I mean an organization and even a boss who at least has the intention to fulfill their promises.

Right? So that's the first thing. The second, I would check that it's a sound business, something that has a significant probability of making it. And the third condition is to make sure that you have something unique for that reliable employer with its own business, that you have a source of competitive advantage, that you have relevant skills. Now, if those three conditions are there—reliable employers, own business, and you are being a critical resource—initial compensation is irrelevant because once in that sound business, they realize what you do, they will not want to lose you.

And if they are a reliable employer, I mean they will treat you well. So that would be my recommendation.

Anita Brick: OK, one thing you alluded to before were some missteps in people decisions, and I'd love it if you could share a little bit and what you learned.

Claudio Fernández: Well, if I have to generalize again, I think that there are three frequent problems in people decisions I've seen. One is we are not proactive. There's lots of research that shows up in companies in trouble, typically boards, because they receive the pressure from the shareholders and the analysts rapidly fire a CEO. And in some cases they do it wrong.

They are shooting the messenger. Maybe performance was low, but all the right things were being done for the long-term value of the organization. But there's lots of reaction and there's very little productivity when things go reasonably well. Sometimes we don't consider the opportunity cost of how much better things could go.

I see this with all of the corporate scandals. We've all been saddened with these corporate scandals … that have cost tens of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars. Some people lost their lifetime savings. However, when I compare and anticipate, the estimate of corporate fraud in America is 5% of GDP, which is something like $700 billion, it's, of course, a lot of money.

Now, my point is that there's a hidden scandal, which is orders of magnitude larger, which nobody speaks about, which is when you have the wrong people in senior positions. I mean, the aggregate cost to society is orders of magnitude larger. So the first mistake is not being proactive. Second mistake, Anita, is just looking at the tools or the techniques; at the instruments used for people decisions such as, for example, using a competency model with a structure of interviews with behavioral-based questioning and probing—all of which is important—but not looking at the people who are actually using those techniques, those instruments.

For example, if you bring me the best piano in the world, I'm a lousy player and you will disappear the minute I start playing. If you bring a great player with an average piano, you will be delighted. So there is research that shows that even using the best techniques, some people conducting interviews are like a monkey with a machine gun randomly shooting candidates.

Some interviewers have been found to have negative validity. What this basically means is that there is a negative correlation between the assessment and performance of the job if the person is hired. What this means is that if you know who these negative interviewers are, you should actually always do the opposite of what they recommend. So if they say, hire this person, OK, you fire them.

If they say don't hire this person, hire them, promote them, you know, retain them. So the second mistake is not looking carefully at who are the people involved. And on the whole, this also applies to how many people should participate in this decision. For example, if only one person participates, that's not good enough because we all fall into our unconscious biases.

We tend to be surrounded by people similar to us or people who are not intimidating. So monarchy doesn't work into hiring. Now, at the other extreme, if you involve, say, 10 other people in the process, that would be going from monarchy to democracy. That doesn't work either, because the chances of having someone wrongly killing the right candidates increase enormously if you have too many people involved in the process.

Plus you will probably lose many of the candidates just because of the frustration of a long process. So it's neither monarchy nor democracy; it’s a selective aristocracy where you want a few high-caliber individuals involved in this decision—say, no more than 3 or 4, maximum 4 people participating in the decision. And then the third problem, in addition to not being productive and involving the wrong people, I've seen is not following a proven process.

Now, as I said, there is no magic bullet. Even we get surprised sometimes when we look at ourselves in the mirror and we say, how could I do that? Sometimes we are ashamed about some of the things we did, and sometimes we are surprised and delighted because we were able to do some things that we would never have dreamed that we would have the courage or the capability.

So if it's hard to assess ourselves, you can imagine how hard it is to assess us. But the good news, Anita, is that over the last two decades or so, there has been an amazing body of research on what are the best practices for this proven process. So the recommendation, again, is to follow a proven process about when a change is needed, what to look for in a candidate, where to look for candidates, how to assess them, how to attract the best, and how to integrate them properly.

And that's basically what I've tried to summarize in the book to make these tools available, particularly given the fact that surprisingly, we don't study this even at business school.

Anita Brick: So would you say that you fell into those same patterns yourself earlier on, before you were as knowledgeable and aware as you are today?

Claudio Fernández: Well, it's a very good question. So yes, there's an interesting response to that question, Anita. Yes, absolutely. Because one characteristic of our firm, which may surprise you, is that we never hire into our firm, which is an executive search firm, people who come from other executive search firms or from human resources—never, ever. We really believe that these things can be taught.

And one of the obvious proofs that they can be taught is the fact that our firm is one of the more successful ones, despite the fact that we hire people who have never worked in assessment. So we are living proof about the fact that these skills can be taught. And we do that because we believe that we need people who have an MBA, they have worked in a managerial career or as management consultants, and they understand the business need, and then we teach them how to follow each of these steps.

So yes, they can, because I myself, of course, had to learn along the way. And of course, I made many mistakes, and I still make some mistakes, hopefully less frequent …

Anita Brick: OK, good.

Claudio Fernández: … as a result of all of this practice, reflection, learning, research, and investigation.

Anita Brick: All right. So what would you consider to be your greatest victory around people decisions?

Claudio Fernández: Oh, well, personally or professionally?

Anita Brick: Either way, it's fine.

Claudio Fernández: Yes. Well, there are many. I mean, I personally feel extremely proud about many cases where I've hired a CEO for a company, a multibillion-dollar company, and they've multiplied their value by 2 or 3 within a short period of 2 to 3 years. So I've seen the evidence of this. And by the way, there's lots of research from several professors at Harvard that demonstrate the impact on organizational value of the leader effect, which is the most important controlling factor.

There are so many cases where I feel proud. But again, this is not the result of my being naturally gifted. I learned this craft as others can learn it. Now, personally, I feel very proud and happy about having disseminated these ideas in … And I am delighted that some of these ideas have been adopted by some of the best organizations in the world, but also by some of the best civil services of the world, even the Communist Party in China.

Some years ago, this bestselling article I published in HBR about hiring was translated into Chinese, published to HBO China, and the Communist Party in China used it heavily to improve their people positions in the central administration in the state-owned companies. All of that. I feel good because I really believe that the world would be a much better place if through better people decisions, the best people are in the right places, particularly at the top.

And by the way, when I was finishing the book, I sent an email to all my partners globally in our 62 offices, and I asked them about the worst examples they have seen about people decisions, and I got like 200 responses very rapidly. Of course, everybody was speaking about others’ decisions as the best examples of mistakes. But I did, I would say, of course, think about examples from the corporate world.

More than half of the answers were about, you know, presidential elections, nominations of prime ministers and so on and so forth. So I think we are doing a very poor job precisely when it matters the most. And again, this is why I think that this should be told. When I was speaking with Jim Collins and having a discussion about the book, he said to me, you know Claudio, business schools should be teaching how to make people decisions because they teach strategy, for example.

But, you know, if you don't have the right people, you cannot implement it. And that's why I think that the whole world should be educated about at least the importance of people decisions. And as a result, individuals will be more successful, organizations will be more viable, countries will be better run, and as a result, the whole world will be a much better place.

Anita Brick: Good point. Great point, and thank you so much, Claudio.

Claudio Fernández: Oh, it's a big pleasure. Thank you.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at the Chicago GSB. Keep advancing.