I’m a why…

I’m a why person, what are you?

I find that most people are who/what/where/when with maybe a bit of how mixed in.

But you probably know (and have been driven crazy by) a why person—whatever is under discussion, in one way or another, they keep trying to figure out/understand why.

I mostly love being a why person, but I have to admit it can be a real pain—especially to other people.

Beyond why being my kind of fun, it was the basis for over 20 years of headhunting (AKA recruiting) success. Why is hardwired in my brain and headhunting offered a broad opportunity to covertly explore and understand why managers did what they did and why people responded as they did. yielding valuable insights that became an integral part of the company I started in 1997.

Since then, I’ve been looking for a cool way to describe what’s at the bottom of managers’ actions—the why and how, if they choose to, they can change it.

Marketing dictated the need for something cool (as opposed to several paragraphs that nobody would read) which got me thinking. There’s a song in the show Gypsy that says, “Ya gotta have a gimmick” to succeed as a stripper. Well, that’s true for all businesses, always has been and I doubt it’s going to change anytime soon!

Finally (and happily in time for the newest incarnation of our website) the light went on and I found the cool term (yeah, the gimmick): MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Which just goes to show how blind we can be, since I’ve been talking about mindset, attitude and philosophy my whole life—even using those terms!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 3rd, 2006 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Business info, Culture, Hiring, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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