In Zen Buddhism there exists the tradition of the koan, which Western eyes often see as equivalent to a rhetorical question, eg. ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’

While it is true that these questions don’t have logical, immediately obvious answers, it is not the case that they have no answers at all, or that they are open to creative interpretation. This practice of direct pointing exists to shock the disciple’s brain out of a normalized, cartesian mode of thinking. It is with new, more enlightened perspective that the disciple is able to answer the koan; the approach taken in answering the question is often the answer itself, and there are correct and incorrect approaches.

Let’s intersect this practice with the classic consulting interview questions, you know, the ones like “tell me, in your best estimation, what is the median number of replacement rollerblade wheels owned by a Scandinavian adult?” or “how many D-cell batteries are frozen in the Antarctic tundra?”

What the interviewer is looking for is not a correct answer, but rather she attempts to glean information about the mode of thinking of the interviewee. Some people will just glaze over (though most of these folks would not have been invited in to interview at McKinsey in the first place, not that that is an indication of jack sh*t, believe me), so those people are rejected swiftly. Some people will apply solid 80/20 logic, determine what crucial additional metrics would be necessary to estimate within 2x of the actual answer, and so forth. Those folks certainly will fare better in the interview process, though I couldn’t say for sure.

This approach is undoubtedly helpful to the hiring manager(s) evaluating candidates, but could one take the best of both the Zen and consulting worlds? What if you aren’t looking for a candidate to fill a business analyst role at a consulting company, but an inventor?

So this leads me to my first recruiting koan (drum roll please):

Why is everyone, including architects and managers, required to wear a hard hat on a construction site?

We rowed doubles on Monday night, as opposed to the oversized single shells affectionately known as ‘tubbies.’ It was quite a change.

As soon as we began to row, it was clear this was a whole new ballgame. You don’t just get to start and stop rowing when you feel like it, you can’t change your stroke rate (how fast you are taking strokes), etc… you are dependent on your partner for, well, everything.

At first, I thought “geez, i sure wish i was a better rower right now.” Pretty quickly it became clear that being a better individual rower would have helped, though not nearly as much as the ability to adjust quickly. When you row by yourself, all that matters is how well you are rowing. When you are rowing with others, you are all dependent on each other to maintain a fragile balance of timing, balance, and force.

It’s not hard to imaginge that life, and business, are much the same way. Being a strong individual contributor is important, but being able to react to the movements, skills, weaknesses, and proclivities of those around you is far more powerful.

Do you feel yourself adjusting?

WBCN (The Rock of Boston) closed it’s doors this morning at 12:05am. wow.

Is rock dying a slow but speeding death?

Modern rock bands all seem to suck, new U2 sucks, and there are only so many records the Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters can put out, for heaven’s sake.

The jamband movement is stuck in mediocre-gear, praying on the low standards of - ahem - mentally distracted youths. We can’t expect to get our next great guitar hero out of that scene. Trey could’ve done it but really crashed and burned, which is too bad.

Old rocks bands are too old to record OR tour. Exhibit A: Aerosmith.

Who will save the day? Kings of Leon? Pike?

Guess I’ll keep the strat handy, just in case.

I love Google App Engine for many reasons.

One reason is the lightweight development environment, and the nakedness of a brand new app (sorry rails!).

I find myself drawn to doing MVC apps in the following manner. It is not complicated.

- Model: have a file called ‘model.py’ and put all your model class definitions in there.

- Controller: have a file called ‘controller.py’ and put all your business logic in there, which means essentially 1) webapp.RequestHandler classes and 2) utility functions to support those.

- View: .html templates. Django tempaltes come baked in to GAE, which I learned after spending a morning getting a full Django implementation up and running on GAE when all I needed was the darn templating.

Here’s an example class that would live in controller.py:

class homeResponder(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
user = users.get_current_user()
if user:
loggedIn = ‘true’
query = db.GqlQuery(“SELECT * FROM Entity WHERE owner = :1”, user)
results = query.fetch(100)
else:
loggedIn = ‘false’
template_values = {
‘loginURL’: users.create_login_url(‘/home/’),
‘entities’: results,
‘loggedIn’: loggedIn,
‘page_title’: ‘Home’
}
path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), ‘home.html’)
self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))

…so then you’d need a file called ‘home.html’ that might look something like:

<html>
<head>
<title>{{ page_title }}</title>
{% include “header_meta.html” %}
</head>
<body>
{% include “top_bar.html” %}
<div id=’maincenter’>
<div class=”entities”>
{% for entity in entities %}
{{ entity.name }}
{% endfor %}
</div>
</div>
{% include “tracking_tag.html” %}
</body></html>

Enjoy.

- CTOD

FREE SADIE!