Dr. Pavan Soni
A case for looking at ‘irrelevant’ work experience Innovators actively look for ‘irrelevant’ work experience; people who could bring more than what meets the eye and what the resume suggests
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ere is a short introduction of Ken Kocienda, the software engineer who worked with Steve Jobs on the Apple iPhone and iPad projects. Ken Kocienda was a software engineer and designer at Apple for over fifteen years. After graduating from Yale [Bachelor of Arts], he fixed motorcycles, worked in the editorial library of a newspaper, taught English in Japan, and made fine art photographs. Eventually, he discovered the internet, taught himself computer programming, and made his way through a succession of dot-com-era start-ups, before landing at Apple in 2001, where he worked on the software teams that created the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Now, you might wonder what is an arts major and a self-taught computer programmer doing at Apple, and that too as one of the 25 members who designed the ground-breaking iPhone? It’s the classic round peg in
| July 2021
a square hole, and yet the profile of Kocienda is typical of folks at Apple, and elsewhere at innovative organizations. Innovators actively look for ‘irrelevant’ work experience; people who could bring more than what meets the eye and what the resume suggests. In the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, “We need not just value differences but also actively seek them out, invite them in. And as a result, our ideas will be better, our products will be better, and our customers will be better served.” Our evolution has taught us one thing that we humans are the agents of creation and not the engines of
productivity. But does this realization reflect in our hiring strategies? Sadly, no. We still hire for predictability and not serendipity. We look at consistency and not variance, and, this way, we inadvertently still value productivity over creativity, often to our own undoing. If you are more likely to seek relevant work experience, you are missing out on the most important insurance against your corporate irrelevance? You need to bring more variety into the mix of innovation if you wish to heighten your odds of relevance in the fast-changing social, economic and technological milieu. And this article tells you how. According to research from McKinsey and Deloitte, the companies that attract, foster, and retain diverse teams tend to outperform their peers on critical business matrices. They have up to 20 percent higher rate of innovation and 19 percent higher innovation revenues. They demonstrate a greater ability of spotting
