Corner Office, Interview with Kip Tindell, chief executive of the Container Store; New York Times, 3/14/10

Corner Office, New York Times; Interview with Kip Tindell, chief executive of the Container Store: Three Good Hires? He’ll Pay More for One Who’s Great:

"Q. How do you hire for a senior position from the outside?

A. I’m going to ask a lot of sort of business philosophy questions. I’m going to try to make sure that you’re capable of understanding that business is not really a zero-sum game, even though a lot of people think it is. I’m going to make sure I like you personally, because I think that’s a good gauge. I’ve spent a lot of time teaching other managers to not be afraid to use that as a criterion.

Q. So what are the specific questions?

A. Well, it’s kind of a discussion more than questions. We’ll go into our heartfelt feeling about the type of business that we are. We believe that we’re trying to build sort of a mutually interdependent group of stakeholders made up of the employees, the customers, the vendors, the community — and all of those people are interdependent and balanced. So we’ll talk about that a lot and just see how they sort of react. Some people will think that sounds nutty or impossible. We’ll also work in a statement that communication and leadership are the same thing and see how they react to that.

Q. Is there anything unusual about the way you run meetings?

A. We’re big on what we call the whole-brain concept, which is simply trying to eliminate silos. So we probably have more people than we need in each meeting, and we don’t believe that’s unproductive. In fact, we think it creates a whole-brain awareness. We get a lot of innovation that way.

There’s a real belief in meetings on our part. They’re passionate. They’re long. They’re frequent. We get tired of being in meetings all the time. I know the whole world feels that way, but I actually think we’re at meetings more than just about any other business I can think of. I think it’s really good for us because of the communicative culture we have.

Also, probably 85 percent of our top leaders are women. I don’t want to get into a generalization here, but guess who tends to communicate the best? So I think there’s a natural tendency for more group communication here than there would be if 85 percent of our top leaders were men."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/business/14corners.html