Anything You Want

It's OK to be casual

My hiring policy was ridiculous.

Because I was “too busy to bother,” I'd just ask my current employees if they

had any friends who needed work.

Someone always did, so I'd say, “Tel them to start tomorrow morning. Ten dol

ars an hour. Show them what to do.” And that was that.

The thought was that it's almost impossible to tel what someone's going to be

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like on the job until he's actual y on the job for a few weeks. So I'd hire lightly

and fire lightly. Luckily we didn't need to fire that often.

But  maybe  the  fact  that  the  new  hires  were  friends  of  friends  helped  with  the

trust part.

To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in the

warehouse.  But  I  also  took  this  same  casual  approach  when  I  needed  an

important high-tech systems administrator.

“Anyone have a friend who's good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK, tel him to

start tomorrow.”

The first time I did that I found Ryan. The second time, I found Jason. Both guys

are amazing and are key people at CD Baby to this day.

Don't try to impress an invisible jury of MBA professors. It's OK to be casual.

Naïve quitting

My first real job was as the librarian at Warner/Chappel Music.

I loved it. I was twenty years old, and I had just graduated from Berklee Col ege

of Music in Boston and moved to New York City. I took the job real y seriously

and learned a lot.

After two and a half years, though, I decided to quit to be a ful -time musician.

(Partial y because I was too happy there! I was scared that if I didn't force myself

to quit, I'd never leave. Too comfortable.)

Since I had never quit a job before and didn't know how, I did what seemed to be

the respectful and considerate thing to do: I found and trained my replacement.

(It wasn't my boss's fault I wanted to quit, so why should I make it his problem?

If I want to quit, it's my problem.) I cal ed on my old friend Nikki, who I knew

would be perfect, and offered her my job at my current salary.

She came with me to the office for a week while I trained her in every aspect of

the job.

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Once she had it mastered, I went into my boss's office on a Friday afternoon and

said, “I need to quit now, but I've already trained my replacement.

She's great. She'l take over for me starting Monday.”

My boss just looked a little stunned, then said, “Uh. Wel . OK. We'l miss you.

Tel her to see HR about the paperwork.” And that was that.

Ten years later, I'm running CD Baby, and for the first time, an employee tel s

me he needs to quit.

I said, “Drag. Wel . OK. I wish you the best! Who's your replacement?”

He looked confused.

I said, “Have you found and trained a replacement yet?”

He looked a little stunned, then said, “No.... I think that's your job.”

Now I was stunned. I asked a few friends and found out he was right. People can

just quit a job without finding and training their replacements. I had no idea. Al

these years, I just assumed what I did was normal.

There's a benefit to being naïve about the norms of the world— deciding from

scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others

do.

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