Founder: Steven.com The Creator Economy Company, home to FlightStory & FlightCast.
Prince William inspired me to hire more people that have NO EXPERIENCE in our industry, here's why you should too ๐๐พ I've worked with Prince William for a few years on his mission to end homelessness in the UK through his Royal Foundation programme, Homewards. I've watched how he and it work up close. I expected something that looked like a traditional charity. What he's built looks more like a startup. He's gone to six locations across the UK and used his unique leverage to pull together the widest possible group of people with the widest possible range of skills - people who'd never usually work together - and pointed all of them at the problem of homelessness. In some locations that coalition includes landowners, tech start-ups, a homelessness charity, a bank, a mental health organisation, employers, recruitment companies, local schools and more... And it's producing brand new solutions๐ก In Cornwall: new homes, all now lived in by people who were previously homeless. In Aberdeen: empty properties brought back into use. In Newport: abandoned land unlocked. Elsewhere, discarded furniture donated to newly housed people. Many of the partners have worked on homelessness for decades on their own, but together, they're producing ideas and results none of them managed alone. And that is the lesson... Business history shows that innovation usually comes from rare combinations of skills coming together. When you stack skills that are complementary but rarely found together, and you get new answers to old problems. The same is true inside a company. The first innovation any company makes is its org chart - which is basically just a map of the skills it's collected and arranged. Hire the same types of people as your competitors, with the same experience, and you raise the probability of getting the same ideas as them. Hire expertise from outside your industry - skills that are rare in your world but complementary to it - and you build divergent thinking into the org chart itself. Apple is the example I always give of "skill stacking"... Steve Jobs said the Macintosh was great because it was built by musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who ALSO happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. They stacked liberal arts skills on engineering skills - a combination Apple's competitors didn't have and it produced products the world had never seen. Prince William has taken the same idea and pointed it at one of society's hardest problems. And from what I've seen up close, it's working! So maybe, as employers, we've got things a bit backwards. Maybe the CV with "no industry experience" might be exactly the person your company is missing ๐ค! And maybe we need to start viewing a lack of relevant experience as an opportunity for new innovation. Food for thought?