Skills can be trained, but not attitude

Attitude is more important in the job interview than skills claims Mark Murphy in Forbes article Hire for attitude.

Yesterday I had a chat in the bus with some youngsters pondering whether they will have sufficient skills for their summer jobs. I commented, that nowadays in most roles learning new and adapting constantly to new environments has become a skill. In my post What's your true profession? I referred to how organizational changes in Nokia made all positions anyway new and the speed of adapting to new environment was crucial. -It might be, that these guys willingness to learn new stuff is the key competence and ticket to new kind of roles that others cannot asses so fast.

I see Murphy's article also linking to my earlier discussion about tacit and explicit challenges in organization. Explicit challenges as known issues can be learned and trained, but how to train or even discuss something so tacit as an attitude?
-Murphy's answer is that you can't.

Are technical and soft skills less important than attitude? Why?

It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change. As Herb Kelleher, former Southwest Airlines CEO used to say, “we can change skill levels through training, but we can’t change attitude."

Mark Murphy, Hire for attitude, Forbes

Personal touch

Today I received a letter from Gässling. First I had no idea about the reason, but I soon realized. Also pretty soon the letter made me smile. In the end I was laughing despite that they just had informed that their original ambitious design had failed in few cases and they were sending me spare buttons.

I have been writing about how an error in service or product should be mended for the customer.
Attached pic tells a story how personal touch can make a difference when something goes wrong.

Naturally personal touch requires actual use of personality leading big companies being hesitant with that kind of approach. Fresh exceptions can be found among recent web startups. They boldly use language that is both approachable and clear for users.

Mending an error smoothly is proved to create even more loyal customers. I cannot evaluate this case objectively, but clearly I'll be happy to change my buttons in case something really happens to them and will not hesitate to buy my next pair of underwear from Gässling =)

How to bridge research to development?

How to transfer insight from research to actual R&D?
While rearranging our bookshelf I ran into a research I have carried with me apparently ten years. It sure has been an interesting topic, but my friends theoretical approach for semi interesting topic just haven't crossed the reading threshold.

The other day I had a good chat with my old boss about an action to bring academical research closer to companies by recruiting a agent inside the company delivering the latest news into companies.
I don't want to say that this Tekes program will fail, but there has been several attempts to enhance the technology transfer from research to development. -In a way we concluded that so far the best method has been individuals that are that much interested on a certain topic that they become specialists and champion on an issue. This is also one topic where 10% of innovation dedicated working hours could be used.

What hit Nokia - Elop or mediocre Middle Managers?

I have been repeatedly asked that what killed Nokia. I thought I'd better do the analysis now, when I still remember something about it. Tomi Ahonen writes exhaustively how incompetent formal Microsoft executive ruined it all, but I have to disagree with Ahonen that much, that there were also other reasons than just Elop.

Accusations on the burning platform memo are valid, but Symbian had already been burning for years. It was like a fireplace that keeps the house warm, but must be watched. More or less the memo peaked the crisis both externally and internally. Despite the crisis, the issue of what was the pothole that caused the decline of the competitiveness and consumed majority of the R&D resources, has not been discussed. Here I name a factor that hasn't been accused before: middle management.


I have several posts where you can find me reflecting this very topic, but in very general level. Now to be more concrete, I'll list few major reasons why Nokia among other big organizations failed:

Culture of finding problems, risks and saying no.
Engineers are taught to find problems. Under pressure, stress can create impossible obstacles out of ordinary challenges. If company culture does not support positive approach of accepting both the challenges And the cruel facts which might follow, the Culture of No get's into speed and managers prefer to make anticipated setbacks easy for their teams and themselves.

Culture to support innovation.
Despite Elop accused his employees of failing to deliver innovation, good proposals never stopped flowing despite repeated setbacks. What explains these contradicting views could be explained by having a highly innovative employees and a middle management cutting the wings of the proposals. According to Johtopätkii, creativity consists of competence, motivation and commitment which were in order thanks to the good reputation of the company among earlier recruits.

Making good work.
Everybody wants to make a good work. It's a matter of what you measure. If project has multiple stakeholders, everyone of them wants to optimize their part of the project. Abstract example; if sourcing, project manager and finance do magnificent work, the result can be poor hardware, hasty design and lousy experience. The need to make good work is also connected to fear of mistakes and to the pressure of getting good results to keep your job.

Pressure and fear.
Before starting in Nokia I had experienced two lay offs and been part of terminating two contracts, but I still thought that it was a unusual situation. Lay off waves in Nokia came more often than once a year. Even a single wave has a huge effect to the motivation, self esteem and effectivity - and repeated more so. Also reorganizing, replanning and the mistakes along with the corrective actions consume a huge amount of time and resources. Further if management anticipates new waves, they try to do extra good work and to say often no, which leads paralyzing the other half of the company.

Lack of vision.
Before Nokia seemed to know what was it and where it was going. But during the great rush Nokia had around the time first iPhone launched, they had focused on money and productivity. When readjusting the organization and portfolio to face the new challenge, mission and vision was replaced by an internal disputes about whether to rely on it's true competences. (Competencies that had already producticed the first touch screen smartphone four years before Apple, but was cancelled due the lack of managerial trust.) Or to make fast correction move and glue the touch onto the existing platform and rely on the ridiculous services agenda.
After that the vision has been jumping from side to side, which enabled the next point.

Rise of the career opportunists.
The questionable character in humans is that when things seem hopeless, they face up and hope that some extraordinary force turns everything good again. In Nokia this meant getting new talent to lead things. Positions started to slide outside of Finland due to the appeal of London and Silicon Valley. What happened was that new people started repeating old stupid mistakes, but now their accent was sexy and their designs rocked - at least on paper. Unfortunately when the faith is strong and you made the hire, seeing the truth takes usually way too long.

A job too well done?

In the morning I made our regular oat porridge and while rinsing the pot I started to think that how far the qualities of oat flakes are tuned to enable easy washing of the pot.

Sometimes doing a really good work can end up ruining the rest of the process. Lately I been pondering how to open up this paradox with an example. This might not be the best of examples, but I promise to discuss this issue further in the next post about What hit Nokia.


If I ever got an assignment to develop a better porridge, I would probably consider rinse-ability as one of the most important issues to solve. Likely I would find it as a pain point in user research and likely that would be something what I could develop and the management would like it because it could be easily measured..

Totally other story might be that is it wise.
People might appreciate actually more organic, unprocessed flakes.
But that wouldn't be my business - so most probably I'd end up overdoing and ruining the whole point of eating oat porridge.

Results reflect the working environment?

Sometimes it can be difficult to justify why nice functional environment is important for designers.

At those moments you can discuss whether a top musician would be expected to enjoy a karaoke bar or further - to do work in such.

If you don't make mistakes, you don't succeed

While ago I wrote about the negative impact a fear of mistakes can create in services. Another major issue with fear of mistakes is it's impact on creativity.

Creative work is usually done in the crossroad of freedom of creative thinking and limiting factors like time and budget. There is clearly a need for both, but like in the post about the facit and explicit communication, the weaker one needs to be supported.

Schedules and budgets as resources are easy to measure and are monitored by managers that usually have a strong background on economy or engineering. Creativity and new ways of thinking can present themselves even as a threat. Typical manager role avoids uncertainty and wants to keep track of the process. Already letting other disciplines follow their process that inherently includes phases of uncertainty requires trust and tolerance for uncertainty.

When all risks are removed and processes optimized it can lead to reverting to old solutions and way of thinking which means that creative process has failed before it even started.
Another risk is that if an organization develops a culture with strong sense of "right" and "wrong",  important and revolutionary opinions may never be said aloud.


Creating something new includes always risks. If there is no room for risks, creating something new might be the wrong way. If organization has a strategy to develop something new, the strategy should surely enable new explorations by not limiting thinking of talented individuals.

How to benefit of a cross functional organization

If organization wants to learn from other domains, it first requires accepting that the other disciplines are not doing it Wrong - just differently.

Hannu Leimun veistos Auringon lapsi (2010)

What's your true profession?

A persons profession might actually be what the person Want's to be good at.

During my time in Nokia I witnessed how experience and competence were repeatedly ignored when organizations were reshaped according to new strategies. Further, when this was understood, there was a strict guidance to ensure that recruits had proper education, which led to overlook the experience.


People really can make up their experience or credibility and talk themselves into almost any job and learn while doing, like the fake doctors also have shown. Fact is that a person might turn out to be incompetent despite the long list of experiences, but on the other hand person can be extremely skilled, but totally lack the motivation for the job.

Despite the idea of crafting ones career might sound awkward for Finnish ears it should be considered. It is proven to be a clear weakness in the competition between Finnish and foreign applicants e.g. in Nokia and has lead to less competent people doing the work with better accent.


Developing a new career without years of training sounds unorthodox for some, but it can be seen also as a huge possibility. This thinking does not corner people into their slots, but opens new possibilities, keeps the motivation up and creates cross discipline innovations.

What really matters, is whether a person wants to learn and grow to a new profession and from employer point of view, is the person interested in the right aspects of the role with potential to learn.

Time, management and how to optimize those two?

Difference of managerial and creative work is

that the first is done in meetings and the latter in between.

Tacit or explicit communication for you organization? -Choose both!

I started to read legendary manual How to Adapt to the Mountain by Jimmy Odén. On first pages Oden reminds how mountaineering skills are divided to tangible and measurable knowhow and to abstract part that he calls mountain sense. According to Odén, mountain sense can be learned slowly through experience, evaluation and reflection.

Odéns duality reminded me not only about organization psychology, but also of my ancient post that compared challenges of free skiing and design process.
Also competences in the office have dual nature, divided similarly to explicit and tacit know how.
As organizations have their mountain tops as goals, the most tangible means are naturally seen the most obvious to get there. -The abstract and non measurable traits of competences can get overlooked although it might lead to compromising the innovation.


Then, how to nurture competences to promote innovation?

One example comes from the discussions we had while making the new sitting arrangements in our office.
It was acknowledged that two types of communication is needed to get creative organization working effectively. The first one being obviously the communication required to make progress in your tasks. Second being the communication that supports the values, learning and openness in the company.

The solution here is to support the primarily the latter - tacit - communication goal, although it might sound controversial. Rationale is that this effort is not on the cognitive level and should come effortlessly - almost unconsciously. Further, mutual learning, shared values and general openness enhances competences and creates good motivation to deliver the innovation - giving good base for the first - explicit - communication goal.

Keeping finnish industries competitive by design thinking - Herrmans

As a bicyclist I was thrilled to see a Finnish bicycle part manufacturer Herrmans seeking for a industrial designer the other year.
Not only that at some point I had spotted that the company might use some design thinking, but in the end because my good friend and extremely talented designer Mikael Heikkilä got the position.

I have been eagerly waiting to see the results of his design efforts and it really starts to have an effect on the brand previously known for OEM manufacturer.

I just replaced original Specialized grips with these Endorfin 3D grips.
I love the tiny detail and the caring thinking in how he has marked the left and right as well as the up directions. Marking these directions means that I can push them with ease and confidence to the bar and that just makes me feel good. -A feeling that is sometimes hard to justify in the R&D meetings, but makes a significant effect on the customer.