10 Dumb, 10 Smart, and 10 Celebrity CEO Interview Questions

At the Forbes web site on March 4, 2018 there was an article by Liz Ryan titled Ten Smart Interview Questions – and Ten Painfully Dumb Ones. Here are Liz’s dumb ones:

 

D01] Why do you want to work here?

D02] What’s your greatest weakness?

D03] Where do you see yourself in five years?

D04] What would your last manager say about you?

D05] What are three words you would use to describe yourself?

D06] If you were a can of soup, what kind of soup would you be?

D07] What do you bring to our team?

D08] Why should we hire you?

D09] Tell me about a time when you overcame a challenge.

D10] How badly do you want the job?

Over the years I’ve been asked many of them. The best answer I’d heard given to D03] (Where do you see yourself in five years?) reportedly came from someone who was being interviewed for Vice President of Research at a materials company (a position from which no further promotion was possible). He simply replied:

 “retired and living in the south of France.”

For D06] (If you were a can of soup, what kind of soup would you be?) I’d be tempted to say condensed Cream of Mutant Soup or Cream of Zombie Soup.

For D10] (How badly do you want the job?) I once almost blurted out that I didn’t want that job nearly as badly as you thought I did. That interviewer incorrectly had assumed that I must be desperate to immediately find another position. Then he told me a story about a previous candidate who hadn’t been worth hiring (D08]), and made me a lowball starting salary offer. But I wasn’t desperate – just insulted. I walked away since I had six months more unemployment coming in, that more than covered all my living expenses.

Here are Liz’s smart questions:

S01] What have you learned about our company so far?

S02] Here’s a quick description of the role. How do you think this job will be similar to other jobs you’ve had?

S03] Here’s what we’re dealing with in the department. (Explain) What are your thoughts about our 2018 challenges and opportunities?

S04] What can I tell you about the role, the team, the company or the industry that will help you understand what the job is all about?

S05] Here’s a typical day on the job. (Explain) What parts of the position sound like they’d be the most challenging? How would you overcome those challenges?

S06] Here’s the biggest project you’d take on in this role in the first few months. (Explain) How would you approach that project?

S07] I’d love to hear a story from one of your past jobs that illustrates how you show up at work. Tell me a story about a situation where you were in your glory, doing what you love to do and making a positive difference.

S08] How does this job move your career forward? What does it give you that you don’t already have?

S09] What do you imagine will be the highest priorities for the person in this job, in their first few months?

S10] If you were offered and accepted this position, how would you step into the role? What would your ‘attack plan’ be?

There was another set of ten in an article titled Celebrity CEOs: What they ask in interviews that had appeared on March 1, 2018 in the biweekly Managing People at Work newsletter:

C01] Tell me something that’s true, that almost nobody agrees with you on.

C02] If you were able to sit yourself down 10 years ago, what advice would you give your younger self?

C03] On your very best day at work, what did you do that day?

C04] What would someone who doesn’t like you say about you?

C05] Are you the smartest person you know?

C06] What didn’t you get the chance to include on your resume?

C07] What do you want to be when you grow up?

C08] Can you tell me about four people whose careers you have improved?

C09] How would you describe yourself in one word?

C10] On a scale from 1 to 10, how weird are you?

The person who asked C05] (Are you the smartest person you know?) wanted to hear a YES. But if you suggested another person, then he would try to hire them. My wife said that question was missing the critical context phrase “for this job.” If she was asked it in an interview for an accounting job, she might say I was. But I know nothing about accounting, and thus would be worthless.

The Savage Chickens cartoon from February 22, 2018 was titled Didn’t Get the Job.

  

A very compact flexible prop

On March 3rd the Idaho Statesman had a very brief article by Dave Southorn titled Burley’s cheerleaders use odd props during halftime performance vs. Century with a 13-second video clip. The text simply said:

“At halftime of Friday night's 4A boys basketball semifinal between Burley and Century, the Burley cheer team performed a somewhat unusual dance for fans in attendance. Burley defeated Century 72-59.”

Those cheerleaders danced inside lengths of flexible air conditioning duct, as shown above. It’s just a larger version of the vent for a clothes dryer. The 4” diameter dryer vent material would work as a storytelling prop to represent a python or other large snake.

What was that dance about? One Facebook commenter noted that there was another story by Nicole Blanchard on February 28th titled Idaho cheerleaders sue school district, claim they were kicked off squad for sit-in. It might not be very cheerful at all.

Are consumer brands dead? Of course not!

On February 25, 2018 at her Speechwriter-Ghostwriter blog Jane Genova pontificated about Consumer brands – end of that era (beginning in 1930s at P&G). She began by quoting from a 2017 book by Scott Galloway 2017 that had claimed:

“Google signaled the end of the brand era as consumers, armed with search, no longer need to defer to the brand…”

But 12 days earlier she had posted about Doritos and Cheetos that Orange is new cool at PepsiCo. Quarterly sales from their snack business let them top Wall Street forecasts even though sugary drinks had declined. Those brands clearly were alive and well. And in 2016 there was a book by Mark Schatzker titled The Dorito Effect: the surprising new truth about food and flavor.

On February 27, 2018 Jane had blogged about Alexa et al. – voice tech eliminating traditional brands, consumer choice. She again referred to Scott Galloway who said when he needed to buy AAA batteries the Alexa app for an Amazon Echo just referred him to the AmazonBasics brand. 

But that reminded me about how I last bought batteries a month ago. The 9V alkaline backup battery in one of the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors had begun warning me at 2:00 AM by repeating the annoying voice message phrase “low battery”. That kept me from nodding off. I got a ladder from the garage and replaced it. But I knew that batteries in all the other detectors also would need replacement very soon, and I didn’t have enough on hand to do them all. So later that morning I went to a nearby shopping center with a Lowes and a Walmart and bought a package of four Rayovac ones (the cheapest national brand).

Would I ever buy batteries from Amazon? Probably not. I don’t even have an Amazon Echo. On December 10, 2017 I blogged about Use the right tools (visual aids) to give a great speech. In that post I described how I usually carry around a pocket-sized Nikon Coolpix L110 camera which uses 4 AA batteries. I keep a spare set in the console of my car. Every year or two I stop at Costco for a giant package of 48 Kirkland AA batteries.

I still consistently buy one ancient P&G brand – Ivory soap. When I run low, on my next grocery shopping trip to Winco, I grab another pack of three bars to use in the shower.      

       

Not the best way to annotate a graph

On the Speaking Pro Central website I saw an article by Rosie Hoyland at Presentation Guru on February 22, 2018 titled The Best Way to Annotate a Graph. She began by saying:

“A good graph will make its story quickly and clearly and how you annotate it will be a major part of telling that story. Clutter confuses and makes it difficult to see the wood from the trees, whereas simplicity enables clear and direct attention.”

She linked to a graph makeover article by Bruce Gabrielle at Speaking PowerPoint on January 24, 2018 titled 10 Rules for Graph Annotations. Bruce had started from a modification of an article by Matt Chambers at Sir Viz-a-Lot on November 28, 2016 titled Makeover Monday: The Wealth Gap. A graph of the data Matt began with is shown above. (I have borrowed the version of that graph shown at Business Insider in a November 23, 2016 article by Elena Holodny titled The top 0.1% of American households hold the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%). Bruce actually had prettied it up by labeling the horizontal time axis at five-year intervals.    

Bruce’s starting point had referenced six points on that graph via text boxes with a total of over 130 words. My parody of it is shown above. Then he showed how to twiddle the layout to try and improve things. It’s far from best though. The basic problem still is that there are way too many words for a presentation slide. It’s a slideument or slidedoc – something that belongs in a handout for afterwords, or an infographic rather than a slide for during a presentation. Rosie should have referred to a guest article at Presentation Guru by Oliver Hauss on September 12, 2017 titled Can a slidedoc ever be a presentation?

What Bruce could have done was to unpack that slide into a set of six slides, each with a caption referencing a single point. That would have been seeing the forest for the trees. An example is shown above. Instead Bruce talked about Signposts, Text, and Placement and fiddled around. His advice makes sense in general though. He began with:

“Text is great. But too much text can feel overwhelming and unwelcome to read. People need to be able to skim your graph and get the message quickly. Long text annotations slow them down, so you need short text phrases (‘Signposts’) so the reader can skim.”

But isn’t signpost just another word for a headline? Why do we need another term to describe what we’ve already seen in newspapers?

Were you recently visited by the Table Topics Bunny?

Where do Table Topics Questions come from? One answer is that each year the Table Topics Bunny (TTB) hops down the chimney and leaves a bushel basket of them for good little Toastmasters. The TTB does this on February 22nd - the birthday for the founder, Ralph W. Smedley.

If you didn’t get a basket on Thursday it was probably because the TTB won’t visit unless you already believe in him. He’s like the Great Pumpkin. Or, perhaps he’s just a tall tale from a decade ago.

So you have to make up your own questions, or borrow them from someone else. I’ve discussed six dozen in three recent blog posts. On January 27, 2018 I blogged about 25 Questions for Table Topics from Claire Lew. On February 12, 2018 I blogged about Falling in love and Table Topics questions – the famous 36 Questions. On February 14, 2018 I blogged about 11 Table Topics questions from the 2017 book Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss.

Claire Lew’s article was titled The 25 most popular icebreaker questions based on four years of data. When you search for other questions, remember to use the phrase “icebreaker questions” to broaden your search beyond Toastmasters. You will find an October 24, 2016 article by Carly Sims at MuseumHack that lists a hundred titled The only list of icebreaker questions you’ll ever need. There also is a January 5, 2015 article at Icebreaker Ideas titled 600+ Icebreaker Questions – Biggest List EVER!

The TTB is a mash-up of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. His image is a PowerPoint creation using two OpenClipart images - one of a rabbit-with-eggs and another of papers.   

Want someone to change? Have a conversation with them!

On February 15, 2018 Bill Lampton posted a YouTube video titled When in Doubt Leave the Word Out about how he was offended by one foul word in an article at LinkedIn that was otherwise creative, constructive, helpful, and made him think. He just stopped reading. (I saw a post about the video he put on the Public Speaking Network group at LinkedIn).

Bill said he’d never commented on that article, and didn’t identify it in his video. He calls himself the Biz Communication Guy. But in this case he just walked away rather than communicating his feedback. That’s a loss. Back on December 12, 2016 Bill had an article at LinkedIn Pulse titled Winners Get What They Want By Asking.  

On December 8, 2017 at the ETHOS3 blog Kelly Allison had posted about 5 Reasons Why You Should Join a Toastmasters Group. I blogged about it the next day in a post titled Not quite my name, and mentioned that post on the two Toastmasters International groups at LinkedIn. Most commenters at the groups told me to quit whining about her saying Group rather than Club, and to just enjoy the free publicity. But one asked if I’d bothered to speak up and comment on that Ethos blog post. I hadn’t yet, so then I did. First Kelly changed the wording, and then she also fixed the title. Now that post is a testimonial that a Toastmasters club can proudly point to.

Remembering Fred Rogers and the Children’s Corner

Most of Monday’s Fresh Air program at National Public Radio was about how It’s a beautiful 50th birthday for ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.’ That got me thinking about my joyful memories of Fred Rogers, from early childhood in Pittsburgh.

The Neighborhood actually was his third TV show. It was proceeded by Misterogers, a 15-minute program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1963 to 1966. His first show was only in Pittsburgh on WQED beginning in 1954. It was called The Children’s Corner, and ran for an hour on weekdays. There is a summary for one episode. Fred produced, wrote and played the music, but the visible hostess on live TV was Josie Carey (who wrote lyrics). 

Fred also operated his puppets, who engaged in impromptu conversations with Josie when the educational films they were showing broke. For example, there is a minute of YouTube video about building a house.

Daniel Striped Tiger, King Friday XIII, Xscape the Owl, etc. all first appeared on the Children’s Corner. King Friday had a royally pompous version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat:

“Propel, propel, propel your craft

gently down liquid solution

Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,

Existence is but an illusion”

There was a 1954 book about the series called Our Small World. I vaguely remember that the Daniel Striped Tiger’s chapter contained several recipes, which all began something like: 

“Take four pounds of medium-grind hamburger.” 

Not much video of the show is easily accessible, but there are some audio recordings on YouTube, like from the 1958 LP Around the Children’s Corner.