Health & Medical
Go for the gold
How to use talent to your company’s advantage
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Tampa Bay | September 2009
Page 1 of 2
Jacob Beckel, founder, chairman and CEO, AnazaoHealth Corp.
If Jacob Beckel has the opportunity to bring in talent to help AnazaoHealth Corp. do its job more effectively, he’s going to do it.
“I always ask my team, ‘If you’re a professional basketball team and you’re the coach and you have an opportunity to pick Michael Jordan, are you going to pick him or are you going to play in that spot?’” says the founder, chairman and CEO. “The question is, ‘Do you want to win or not?’ If the response is, ‘No, I just want to play,’ OK, then you’re not going to be a world championship team.”
The lesson is hard to grasp for leaders who feel easily threatened by others with unique abilities.
“That A player brings people that can potentially be A players up to the A level,” Beckel says. “The question is, ‘How do you attract them?’”
Beckel needs strong players who can help AnazaoHealth in its mission, which is to create better ways for medication to help people. The 140-employee company took in $30 million in 2008.
Smart Business spoke with Beckel about how to find talent and use it effectively.
Bring in the best. I grew up in northern Minnesota. There was a football coach named Bud Grant who coached the Vikings and almost every year they’d have a winning season, and the question they always asked Bud Grant was, ‘What is your philosophy on picking players?’ His theory was, ‘I’ll pick the best player available.’ He might have five linebackers and the next guy in the draft was a linebacker and he’d pick him. And they’d go, ‘You don’t need a linebacker.’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t today, but he was the best person available.’ And sure enough, six months later in the season, someone would go down or he would trade that linebacker for a tight end or somebody. It would always look like, ‘How did he know to do that?’
People will come to me looking for a job and I’ll say, ‘You know, I really don’t have that opening,’ but I knew the guy or girl was a really good team member and I would hire them in a different position, knowing they would eventually end up in a position I needed them in.
Find the A player first. When Tony Dungy built his whole defense around Warren Sapp, that’s basically what I have done. I found that one key person. He came in as chief operating officer, but now is the president and chief operating officer, and he had skill sets that I did not have at all.
We built the team around his skill set. I had not done that in prior companies properly. First of all, they have the skill set, but No. 2, they are morally and ethically on the same page with you.
A company prior, I had a guy with the skill set, but he was morally and ethically bankrupt, and ultimately, that absolutely destroys a company when times go bad, and it did. That was my mistake. I blame no one but myself for that. That hire was the key hire.
