"3 Interview Questions That Reveal Everything"

Interviewing job candidates is tough, especially because some candidates are a lot better at interviewing than they are at working.

To get the core info you need about the candidates you interview, here's a simple but incredibly effective interview technique I learned from John Younger, the CEO ofAccolo, a cloud recruiting solutions provider. (If you think you've conducted a lot of interviews, think again: Younger has interviewed thousands of people.)

Here's how it works. Just start from the beginning of the candidate's work history and work your way through each subsequent job. Move quickly, and don't ask for detail. And don't ask follow-up questions, at least not yet.

Go through each job and ask the same three questions:

1. How did you find out about the job?

2. What did you like about the job before you started?

3. Why did you leave?

"What's amazing," Younger says, "is that after a few minutes, you will always have learned something about the candidate--whether positive or negative--that you would never have learned otherwise."

Here's why:

How did you find out about the job?

Job boards, general postings, online listings, job fairs--most people find their first few jobs that way, so that's certainly not a red flag.

But a candidate who continues to find each successive job from general postings probably hasn't figured out what he or she wants to do--and where he or she would like to do it.

He or she is just looking for a job; often, any job.

And that probably means he or she isn't particularly eager to work for you. He or she just wants a job. Yours will do--until something else comes along.

"Plus, by the time you get to Job Three, Four, or Five in your career, and you haven't been pulled into a job by someone you previously worked for, that's a red flag," Younger says. "That shows you didn't build relationships, develop trust, and show a level of competence that made someone go out of their way to bring you into their organization."

On the flip side, being pulled in is like a great reference--without the letter.

What did you like about the job before you started?

In time, interviewees should describe the reason they took a particular job for more specific reasons than "great opportunity," "chance to learn about the industry," or "next step in my career."

Great employees don't work hard because of lofty titles or huge salaries. They work hard because they appreciate their work environment and enjoy what they do. (Titles and salary are just icing on the fulfillment cake.)

That means they know the kind of environment they will thrive in, and they know the type of work that motivates and challenges them--and not only can they describe it, they actively seek it.

Why did you leave?

Sometimes people leave for a better opportunity. Sometimes they leave for more money.

Often, though, they leave because an employer is too demanding. Or the employee doesn't get along with his or her boss. Or the employee doesn't get along with co-workers.

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When that is the case, don't be judgmental. Resist the temptation to ask for detail. Hang on to follow-ups. Stick to the rhythm of the three questions. That makes it natural for candidates to be more open and candid.

In the process, many candidates will describe issues with management or disagreements with other employees or with taking responsibility--issues they otherwise would not have shared.

Then follow up on patterns that concern you.

"It's a quick way to get to get to the heart of a candidate's sense of teamwork and responsibility," Younger says. "Some people never take ownership and always see problems as someone else's problem. And some candidates have consistently had problems with their bosses--which means they'll also have issues with you."

And a bonus question:

How many people have you hired, and where did you find them?

Say you're interviewing candidates for a leadership position. Want to know how their direct reports feel about them?

Don't look only for candidates who were brought into an organization by someone else; look for candidates who brought employees into their organization.

"Great employees go out of their way to work with great leaders," Younger says. "If you're tough but fair, and you treat people well, they will go out of their way to work with you. The fact that employees changed jobs just so they could work for you speaks volumes to your leadership and people skills.

The Best Sales Reps Avoid "Talkers"

You call on a new customer and have an incredible sales conversation. You learn this person is fairly senior, he can network you with nearly anyone in his organization, he loves your products, he's upfront and honest, he's willing to dish the dirt on what's really happening inside his company, he's got some skin in the game and is personally on the hook to deliver business improvement, and he really wants to help you win this business!

A deal is all but certain.

Most sales people would lock onto this customer. But star-performing salespeople do something very different after such a conversation — they start over. They walk away from all those promises and commitments. Sure they might take good notes, maybe even ask for few more names, but they will not hitch their wagon to this contact. Our research, as discussed in our latest HBR article, "The End of Solution Sales," shows us they've recognized something that average -performers haven't — this customer contact can't build the consensus required to get a deal done.

In our analysis of over 700 unique B2B purchases, we identified seven distinct customer contact profiles.

1. Go-Getters: Motivated by organizational improvement and constantly looking for good ideas, Go-Getters champion action around great insights wherever they find them.
2. Teachers: Passionate about sharing insights and ideas, teachers are sought out by colleagues for their input. They're especially good at persuading others to take a specific course of action.
3. Skeptics: Wary of large complicated projects, Skeptics push back on almost everything. Even when championing a new idea, they'll counsel careful, measured implementation.
4. Guides: Willing to share the organization's latest gossip, Guides furnish information that is typically unavailable to outsiders.
5. Friends: Just as nice as the name suggests, Friends are readily accessible and happily help reps network with other stakeholders in the organization.
6. Climbers: Focused primarily on personal gain, Climbers back projects that will raise their own profiles, and they expect to be rewarded when those projects succeed.
7. Blockers: Perhaps better described as "anti-stakeholders," Blockers are strongly oriented toward the status quo. They have little interest in speaking to outside vendors.

Of those seven profiles, the first three (Go-Getters, Teachers, and Skeptics) are effective in driving a purchase to completion by navigating consensus requirements, politicking, and sharing a compelling vision with their organization. Collectively we call these three Mobilizers, because they mobilize action. Three of the remaining profiles are poor at driving purchases (Guides, Friends, and Climbers); we refer to them as Talkers, because they do little more than that. The final profile, Blockers, simply get in the way. Not surprisingly, star salespeople orient towards Mobilizers and away from Talkers and Blockers.

There is a troubling paradox in the Talker. This profile embodies much of what sales leaders tell salespeople to seek out in the ideal stakeholder: they are accessible, they provide great information, they act as a hub for networking, they are pro-supplier — the list goes on and on. In the end, however, these very traits ultimately harm their credibility inside the organization. The access they grant to the supplier and their energetic backing of that supplier results in doubt amongst their peers. Indeed, our data show that Talkers are anywhere from four to six times less able to build consensus for a purchase compared to Mobilizers.

Even more troubling is that over 30% of Talkers are senior executives. The senior Talker is an average performing salesperson's worst nightmare. Great conversations, followed by empty commitments — repeated over and over. One company we work with shared a painful story of selling to a senior Talker. Every month for four years this deal was forecast. It wasn't until after that contact left and a new contact stepped in that the business was closed. Despite his seniority, this contact was not able (or perhaps unwilling) to amass support for the purchase.

In fact, our clients conducting win/loss analysis have frequently shared stories of no-decisions that left them scratching their heads. Deals with good momentum, senior backing, significant access, plenty of activity in a short period of time, but nothing happens. All the indicators of progress are seemingly present. However, once they examined these deals with the Mobilizer/Talker/Blocker lens, it became abundantly clear that the key contact was a Talker. Little support was generated for the purchase beyond this person.

On the other hand, Mobilizers put their own business first. Our analysis shows they care little about any given supplier. Mobilizers don't want to be sold something — they want to do something. They value suppliers for new ideas and insights on ways to run their business, not for the features and benefits that suppliers offer. A sales conversation with a Mobilizer is like walking the gauntlet. They push back. They demand evidence. They challenge the salesperson's claims. To the average salesperson, this sure doesn't look like the advocate they were told to find. But to the star performer, this is ideal.

"True Secret to Success (It's Not What You Think)"

I'm utterly convinced that the key to lifelong success is the regular exercise of a single emotional muscle: gratitude.

People who approach life with a sense of gratitude are constantly aware of what's wonderful in their life. Because they enjoy the fruits of their successes, they seek out more success. And when things don't go as planned, people who are grateful can put failure into perspective.

By contrast, people who lack gratitude are never truly happy. If they succeed at a task, they don't enjoy it. For them, a string of successes is like trying to fill a bucket with a huge leak in the bottom. And failure invariably makes them bitter, angry, and discouraged.

Therefore, if you want to be successful, you need to feel more gratitude. Fortunately, gratitude, like most emotions, is like a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger and more resilient it becomes.

Practice Nightly

The best time to exercise gratitude is just before bed. Take out your tablet (electronic or otherwise) and record the events of the day that created positive emotions, either in you or in those around you.

Did you help somebody solve a problem? Write it down. Did you connect with a colleague or friend? Write it down. Did you make somebody smile? Write it down.

What you're doing is "programming your brain" to view your day more positively. You're throwing mental focus on what worked well, and shrugging off what didn't. As a result, you'll sleep better, and you'll wake up more refreshed.

Reprogramming Your Brain

More important, you're also programming your brain to notice even more reasons to feel gratitude. You'll quickly discover that even a "bad day" is full of moments that are worthy of gratitude. Success becomes sweeter; failure, less sour.

The more regularly you practice this exercise, the stronger its effects.

Over time, your "gratitude muscle" will become so strong that you'll attract more success into your life, not to mention greater numbers of successful (i.e., grateful) people. You'll also find yourself thanking people more often. That's good for you and for them, too.

This method works. If you don't believe me, try it for at least a week. You'll be amazed at what a huge difference it makes.

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time"

Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.

Wanner’s experience is not uncommon. Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of distraction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the course of doing consulting and coaching at large organizations during the past five years. With remarkable consistency, these executives tell us they’re pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are at a breaking point.

The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible.

To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.

The rituals and behaviors Wanner established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better able to connect with his wife and children.

Establishing simple rituals like these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of employees through a pilot energy management program and then measured their performance against that of a control group. The participants outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal satisfaction. In this article, we’ll describe the Wachovia study in a little more detail. Then we’ll explain what executives and managers can do to increase and regularly renew work capacity—the approach used by the Energy Project, which builds on, deepens, and extends several core concepts developed by Tony’s former partner Jim Loehr in his seminal work with athletes.

Linking Capacity and Performance at Wachovia

Most large organizations invest in developing employees’ skills, knowledge, and competence. Very few help build and sustain their capacity—their energy—which is typically taken for granted. In fact, greater capacity makes it possible to get more done in less time at a higher level of engagement and with more sustainability. Our experience at Wachovia bore this out.

"Think of Start-ups as Shots on Goal"

With concern running high about the prospects for continued economic growth, two recent e-books show where the debate is centered now: on the question of whether we can, through sheer inventiveness, keep driving the productivity gains that lead to higher incomes. George Mason’s Tyler Cowen is pessimistic, seeing a “great stagnation” setting in. A counterargument comes from MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who find in the rapidly advancing technology of robotics and other productivity enhancers every reason to be optimistic. These opposing conclusions suggest once again why economists as a group are not all that good at predicting the future.

We’ll know who was right when the productivity numbers finally come in. But let me point out a number we can look at now to learn whether we’re on track or in trouble: the number of business starts.

That’s a number we know how to move. The key is to understand that innovation is not just invention. Even more, it’s a matter of commercialization. And the truly disruptive technologies that have advanced living standards most over the long run have usually been commercialized by entrepreneurs rather than established companies. Think of the telegraph, the telephone, the car, the airplane, computers (mainframe, personal, and mini), most software, internet search engines, air-conditioning—innovations that define modernity. All were brought to market by entrepreneurs.

To be sure, most start-ups don’t get very far, and only a tiny fraction grow to have the impact of Ford, GM, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, or Google. But the number of start-ups launched can at least tell us what the odds are that companies like those will be generated. Other things being equal, the more business starts there are, the more “shots on goal” an economy has to produce great results.

Unfortunately, things don’t look good at the moment in the United States. In the dozen years preceding the recession, somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 new firms were launched annually, seemingly impervious to the business cycle. The crisis-induced recession of 2008–2009 changed that. In 2009 (the most recent year for which we have reliable data) new starts plunged to 400,000.

No doubt this depressing statistic helped to rally the bipartisan support we saw last spring for the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act—legislation designed to promote new and growing businesses, especially those that want to go public, by reducing their cost of capital.

But more-comprehensive legislation is needed, to go beyond entrepreneurs’ capital requirements and also to facilitate their access to talent and opportunity. We need immigration reform to attract and retain high-skilled immigrants, particularly those who hope to start new businesses right away. We need reform of the technology-licensing practices at research universities that are heavily funded by the federal government. We need regulatory reform to update, modify, or eliminate excessively costly existing rules and to require cost/benefit justification for new rules.

Proposals to do all this have been introduced in the Senate. Given the impending presidential election, it will be a (welcome) surprise if Congress seriously considers them this year, although they have broad-based and growing support. But start-up legislation should become a congressional priority for 2013.

We can argue over the details, but we’ll make progress if we begin by agreeing on what drives economic growth and what must be encouraged: start-ups.

"The Best Strategy for Reducing Stress"

Imagine you're sailing in the Bahamas, sipping a cold drink and listening to the water lapping the sides of the boat.

Relaxing, right? Not for my friend Rob.*

Rob is not usually stressed-out. For many people, Rob's daily work would be hair-pulling stressful — he's a real estate developer who routinely deals with a multitude of nagging problems related to renters, banks, lawsuits, property management, and rapidly changing valuations. But Rob routinely handles it all with steadiness and perspective.

So why was he stressed that blissful day on his boat? The same reason most of us get stressed: frustrated expectations. Rob had an important call to make and his cell phone wasn't working. He was experiencing the gap between what he expected to happen and what was actually happening.

That's the underlying cause of stress and it's afflicting us more these days than ever because our expectations keep rising, thanks in part to exponential improvements in our technology.

In a hilarious interview with Conan O'Brien, the comedian Louis C.K. talked about how everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. He tells the story of being on a plane and, for the first time, experiencing working internet at 30,000 feet. He was amazed. The person in the seat next to him was also surfing the web happily until the connection dropped. The man immediately threw his arms up in the air and yelled, "This is bullshit!"

"How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago." Louis C.K. said. I fall into this trap, and most people around me do too. We expect more not only from our technology, but from each other and from ourselves.

Rob is usually laid-back in the face of his ever-present problems precisely because they're ever-present. He expects them. Renters always have complaints. Banks always want more information. Lawsuits happen. Valuations always change. These things are routine and he has routine responses to them, so they don't stress him out.

But that day on his boat, Rob was expecting his cell to work. So the cell outage far from land, where there's no alternative means of communicating his absence on an important phone call created a stressful unmet expectation.

So what can you do about the stress and frustration that comes from unmet expectations? You have two choices: Either change the reality around you or change your expectations.

Sometimes it's possible to change reality. Continuously frustrated with an employee? 

Try to help him improve his competence. If that doesn't work, you can fire him.

But often the reality around you is difficult to change. What if it's a peer with whom you're frustrated? Or maybe an entire department? You can't fire them all. Maybe you can stop working with them, but that's probably not in your control. You could quit, but that brings with it a host of new stress.

In my experience, trying to change reality isn't usually a stress reliever, it's a stress creator. A small thing — like changing my seat on an airplane — can be such a pain that even if it works it's often not worth the struggle. And the bigger things — like getting more accomplished in a day — can be even more frustrating. That last example is especially frustrating because it's an expectation I have of myself so I really believe it should be in my control.

Which leaves us with what I've come to believe is the best strategy for reducing stress: Change your expectations.

In other words, get used to not getting what you want. I know this isn't consistent with the kind of go-get-'em attitude most of us have been taught to embrace. But most of the time, fighting reality is not worth the effort. Either you can't change what's around you, or the fight is more stressful than the reward.

If changing your expectations proves too hard, your next best move is to get some perspective.

Imagine a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the worst reality you can imagine. Like living in a war zone or being in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Maybe 9 is a serious illness that most probably will result in death. Perhaps 8 is something that will forever alter your life, like going to jail or an accident that puts you in a wheelchair. Let's say 7 is something that temporarily alters your life like losing your job or having to move out of a home you can no longer afford.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Almost everything we freak out about is somewhere in the 1-2 range of dashed expectations. In other words, our moods and our stress levels are determined by events that actually matter remarkably little.

That's useful to remember when you find yourself utterly irritated at your cable company because they erroneously added $5 to your bill or keep you on hold for 30 minutes while they investigate the matter. Or when a direct report gives you work you consider sloppy. I'm not saying don't correct the work. I'm simply suggesting it may not be worth getting worked up about.

That's not always easy. A number of small stressors add up to a lot of stress and it's natural to be stressed by things that don't really matter in the whole scheme of things. I do it all the time.

But we can substantially reduce our stress by recognizing that in many situations, we have become perfectionists in realms where perfection isn't necessary, realistic, or even useful.

Rob's stress was highest when he thought the problem was just with his cell phone. But, eventually, he found out that there was a cell outage throughout the Bahamas. Somehow, that helped him change his expectations. He knew there was nothing he could do.

And once he settled into his new reality, he was able to get some perspective. Where was missing that call on the scale from 1 to 10? No more than a 1.

"A Radical Prescription for Sales"

Artwork: Chad Wys, Gold Blast, 2011, spray paint on found print, 8.5" x 11"

Some things in life we know are true. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force. And the best way to motivate salespeople is by offering them commissions.

But what if we’re wrong, at least about that last one? What if paying salespeople commissions is rooted more in tradition than logic? What if it’s a practice so cemented into orthodoxy that it’s no longer an actual decision? That’s what a handful of companies have begun discovering. To the surprise of many, these firms are showing that commissions can sometimes do more harm than good—and that getting rid of them can open a path to higher profits.

Though this may seem counterintuitive, scientific research on human motivation backs it up. For the past 30 years, a group of social scientists around the world—from pioneers like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, at the University of Rochester, to a new generation of scholars such as Adam Grant, at Wharton—have articulated a more subtle view of what motivates people in a variety of settings, including work.

One of their findings is that the effectiveness of motivators varies with the task. In particular, they have discovered that contingent rewards—I call them “if then” rewards, as in “If you do this, then you get that”—work well with routine tasks social scientists dub “algorithmic.” Think stuffing envelopes quickly or turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line. The promise of a reward, especially cash, excites our attention, and we focus narrowly on getting the job done.

However, those same if-then rewards turn out to be far less effective for complex, creative, conceptual endeavors—what psychologists call “heuristic” work. Think inventing a new product or working with a client to tackle a problem neither of you has confronted before. For those projects, you need a broader perspective, which, research shows, can be inhibited by if-then rewards.

That leads us back to sales. In the middle of the last century, selling was fairly simple. Memorize your script, open your sample case a certain way, fire back standard responses to predictable objections—and do it over and over again until the law of averages works in your favor.

Today, though, the transactional aspects of sales are disappearing. When routine functions can be automated, and when customers and prospects often have as much data as the saleswoman herself, the skills that matter most are heuristic: Curating and interpreting information instead of merely dispensing it. Identifying new problems along with solving established ones. Selling insights rather than items.

Mitch Little began questioning the received wisdom on sales commissions in the late 1990s, shortly before he became vice president for worldwide sales and applications at Microchip Technology, a large semiconductor company headquartered near Phoenix. He oversaw 400 salespeople whose compensation plan was the industry standard—60% base salary, 40% commissions

"The Exponential Rise of Lean Business"

Ries recently joined the team at Singularity University as the Entrepreneurship track chair to bolster the organization’s mission of incubating businesses and organizations that can positively impact a billion people. He sat down with Vivek Wadhwa to discuss how his ideas can be applied to Singularity University’s grand-scale, high-tech ventures.

Back to the marshmallow challenge, an 18-minute exercise where groups compete to build the tallest freestanding structure they can from 20 spaghetti sticks, a yard each of tape and string, and a marshmallow. The only rule is that the marshmallow must sit on top. How hard can this be? Unexpectedly hard, depending on who plays. While the average group manages about 20 inches, b-school grads average less than half that, while kindergarteners rise above to 26 inches, nearly three times the b-school average.

How does this apply to innovation and your business?  Deconstructing the elements of success, the kids won, not by planning to build, but by building and failing, repeatedly – each experiment teaching them what it takes to keep the marshmallow standing.  Teamwork, risk taking, prototyping and resilience: these are the  pillars of success, and the kids handled these dynamics better than the MBAs.  Innovation through less planning and more doing outmatched traditional business-model schools of thought, and this mode has become a best practice strategy in Silicon Valley and innovation hubs around the world.

One implementation of this strategy is referred to as the lean startup movement, and its methodology has become what many call a science of entrepreneurship. Eric Ries constructed the game plan in his book The Lean Startup. His premise: start with a testable hypothesis – where your idea is possible and can be built, and customers will want what you build – and then test it with the least effort possible. This least effort product, known as the Minimum Viable Product (or MVP), validates the hypothesis using the least amount of resources you can. The goal is to quickly verify that people are interested in what you plan to create, before you sink your time, energy and money in creating it. The MVP isn’t perfect, in fact, Ries likes to say that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product then you’ve waited too long.

Build, then build again, says Ries. Move from the MVP into a series of iterations that slowly but surely guide the business forward, staying honest with what he calls innovation accounting. This delineates the key metrics to measure a product’s growth and ensure you’re on the right track: if the math doesn’t work, iterate again.  All in all, the entire system – from the idea’s inception to its manifestation – should take no longer than the time it takes an MBA to write a business plan. It is this idea of rapid prototyping and flexibility in the plan (as demonstrated by our fearless youth in the marshmallow challenge) that yields the greatest chance for success.

And in an age of rapidly advancing technologies, being lean may be even more important. Technologies that are information enabled (computing, biology, even solar technologies) can speed up in a Moore’s Law like fashion, according to Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns.  These greater speeds make for an increasingly competitive and volatile environment, and embedding agility in your business, being able to iterate and pivot when necessary, may be the difference between bonus and bankruptcy.

If business environments are changing this quickly, then lean principles to rapidly adapt could be a strategy to test at any scale, from Fortune 500 companies to startups and  local shops. Exponential trends empower you to experiment, prototype, and do a lot with a little. High speed computing, global connectivity, cloud computing and 3D Printing provide you – or your competitors – with an innovator’s toolkit that barely existed just a decade ago.  With widespread access to data and the ability to get feedback in real time, a lean business is in tune with potential opportunities and resilient in the face of disruption. All of these developments have sparked an evolution in the business frontier – and only the lean will surviv

"Disrupt Yourself"

Whitney Johnson on disruptive innovation and your career path.

My career path has been an unusual one. I started as a secretary on Wall Street, worked my way up in my firm’s investment banking group, and then stepped back to become an equity research analyst. Eight years later, I quit that job to produce a TV show and write a children’s book, but I ended up blogging about work/life issues and cofounding a hedge fund backed by a man I’d met at church. It’s not what you’d call a traditional corporate trajectory. But perhaps that’s the new normal.

In the United States and many other developed, capitalist countries, the idea of a “company man” (or woman) with a job for life has long been outdated. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median job tenure for American workers age 25 or older has held steady at about five years since 1983, and for men it has slightly declined. Baby boomers born from 1957 through 1964 held 11 jobs, on average, between ages 18 and 44, says another BLS report. And studies tracking long-term employment from 1976 to 2006 paint a similar picture: The percentages of people who have been with their companies at least 10 and at least 20 years have fallen substantially.

Career change isn’t as easily documented, because it’s harder to define than a job switch. But many economists and sociologists think that these bigger shifts are becoming more common, and case studies to support that hypothesis abound.

Consider Martin Crampton, a former research scientist and math teacher from Australia. He parlayed a stint as a developer and demo specialist for a software company in Melbourne into a decade-long marketing career, first at the software firm and then at two multinational manufacturing companies (Bic and Stihl), before starting his own consultancy. In 1993 he leapt into another profession and, with his partner, created Australia’s first national real estate portal (before Realtor.com). Crampton later sold that business and started another one that focused on online services. He currently works on ventures involving franchised data and social media.

Then there’s Liz Brown, once a hard-charging law firm partner who left Fish & Richardson to become executive director of an angel investment network and a professor; Alex McClung, whose 23-year career has spanned 15 diverse roles at six different health care companies; and Heather Coughlin, who started her career in equity sales at Goldman Sachs, helped it launch a third-party research subsidiary, and is now CEO of a mother-and-baby support, education, and retail chain.

It’s hard to make sense of seemingly wanton—yet ultimately rewarding—career choices like those, until you consider the theories of the man I met in church: Clayton M. Christensen.

As HBR readers well know, Christensen is the father of disruptive innovation —the idea that the most successful innovations are those that create new markets and value networks, thereby upending existing ones. Volumes of research and evidence show how disruptive thinking improves the odds of success for products, companies, even countries. Our investment fund focuses on disruptive stocks, and it has outperformed relevant indices by a sizable margin over the past decade.

I believe that disruption can also work on a personal level, not just for entrepreneurs who launch disruptive companies but for people who work within and move between organizations. Zigzagging career paths may be common now, but the people who zigzag best don’t do it randomly

FORTUNE -- For more than 40 years the mouse has been a blunt tool for communication with our computers. We grasp, we click, we awkwardly move a cursor around a screen. Then, four years ago, smartphones arrived en masse, followed by touch tablets, and the communication gap between man and machine narrowed (and very young children became savvy computer users). Touch is good: We naturally communicate with our hands, so what better human quality to translate into a stream of zeros and ones for computers to process? But touch is along a two-dimensional plane. Untethered from a flat screen, our hands, moving through the air and seen through gesture-recognition hardware, approach the man-machine communication gap and smash right through it.

As scientist and entrepreneur John Underkoffler puts it, "Gesture is the richest possible digital input that we, as humans, can deliver." Underkoffler's early work in gesture recognition remains the platform's most iconic. His futuristic interface designs were used in the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report, when Tom Cruise moved between screens with a hand wave. Today Underkoffler's Los Angeles-based startup, called Oblong Industries, is making those same interfaces a reality. Except now they're even better than in the movies. His "spatial operating environments" for clients such as Boeing (BA, Fortune 500), used for global collaboration, are sensitive enough to pick up movements as slight as a quivering finger.

More: 10 brilliant tech minds

While Oblong customizes its products for different office environments, Microsoft (MSFT,Fortune 500) launched a revolution of its own when it introduced the Kinect, a motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360 that cost just $150 and could "see" human movement in three dimensions. More than 19 million Kinects have been sold in the year and a half since its launch, and more than 350 companies, including Toyota (TM), Coca-Cola (KO, Fortune 500), and Siemens (SI), have signed up to use the hardware. When Nissan wanted to unveil its Pathfinder 2013 at the Chicago Auto Show last February but had no vehicle to show, it used a Kinect to build an interactive model. Attendees could shift side to side to view different angles, walk around the vehicle's exterior, and crouch to examine the SUV's detailing. Navigating from menu panel to menu panel no longer meant a flick of the controller joystick and the press of a button, but a wave of the hand.

The next generation of gesture-recognition hardware is due this winter.Called the Leap, it has 100 times the accuracy of the Kinect and costs just $70. The Leap is small -- about as big as a fun-size candy bar -- and compatible with Macs and PCs. Those of us sitting in front of a computer screen all day (more than 100 million in the U.S.) will be able to perform everyday tasks more adroitly and collaborate with each other as we would in person. Soon the mouse will no longer feel like a throwback -- it will simply be 

"The End of Solution Sales"

Artwork: Chad Wys, Thrift Store Landscape With a Color Test, 2009, paint on found canvas and frame, 42" x 34" x 2"

The hardest thing about B2B selling today is that customers don’t need you the way they used to. In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers’ needs and selling them “solutions”—generally, complex combinations of products and services. This worked because customers didn’t know how to solve their own problems, even though they often had a good understanding of what their problems were. But now, owing to increasingly sophisticated procurement teams and purchasing consultants armed with troves of data, companies can readily define solutions for themselves.

In fact, a recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 B2B customers found that those customers completed, on average, nearly 60% of a typical purchasing decision—researching solutions, ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking pricing, and so on—before even having a conversation with a supplier. In this world the celebrated “solution sales rep” can be more of an annoyance than an asset. Customers in an array of industries, from IT to insurance to business process outsourcing, are often way ahead of the salespeople who are “helping” them.

But the news is not all bad. Although traditional reps are at a distinct disadvantage in this environment, a select group of high performers are flourishing. These superior reps have abandoned much of the conventional wisdom taught in sales organizations. They:

• evaluate prospects according to criteria different from those used by other reps, targeting agile organizations in a state of flux rather than ones with a clear understanding of their needs

• seek out a very different set of stakeholders, preferring skeptical change agents over friendly informants

• coach those change agents on how to buy, instead of quizzing them about their company’s purchasing process

These sales professionals don’t just sell more effectively—they sell differently. This means that boosting the performance of average salespeople isn’t a matter of improving how they currently sell; it involves altogether changing how they sell. To accomplish this, organizations need to fundamentally rethink the training and support provided to their reps.

Coming Up Short

Under the conventional solution-selling method that has prevailed since the 1980s, salespeople are trained to align a solution with an acknowledged customer need and demonstrate why it is better than the competition’s. This translates into a very practical approach: A rep begins by identifying customers who recognize a problem that the supplier can solve, and gives priority to those who are ready to act. Then, by asking questions, she surfaces a “hook” that enables her to attach her company’s solution to that problem. Part and parcel of this approach is her ability to find and nurture somebody within the customer organization—an advocate, or coach—who can help her navigate the company and drive the deal to completion.

But customers have radically departed from the old ways of buying, and sales leaders are increasingly finding that their staffs are relegated to price-driven bake-offs. One CSO at a high-tech organization told us, “Our customers are coming to the table armed to the teeth with a deep understanding of their problem and a well-scoped RFP for a solution. It’s turning many of our sales conversations into fulfillment conversations.” Reps must learn to engage customers much earlier, well before customers fully understand their own needs. In many ways, this is a strategy as old as sales itself: To win a deal, you’ve got to get ahead of the RFP. But our research shows that although that’s more important than ever, it’s no longer sufficient.

To find out what high-performing sales professionals (defined as those in the top 20% in terms of quota attainment) do differently from other reps, Corporate Executive Board conducted three studies. In the first, we surveyed more than 6,000 reps from 83 companies, spanning every major industry, about how they prioritize opportunities, target and engage stakeholders, and execute the sales process. In the second, we examined complex purchasing scenarios in nearly 600 companies in a variety of industries to understand the various structures and influences of formal and informal buying teams. In the third, we studied more than 700 individual customer stakeholders involved in complex B2B purchases to determine the impact specific kinds of stakeholders can have on organizational buying decisions.

Our key finding: The top-performing reps have abandoned the traditional playbook and devised a novel, even radical, sales approach built on the three strategies outlined above. Let’s take a close look at each