Arthur Combs, Author at OE Consulting

Hire for Character

August 23, 2023 Arthur Combs Executive Search Comments Off

What executives so often get wrong about talent acquisition. Many years ago the CEO of an American Fortune 50 company told me that for the first twenty years of his career, he optimized for skill set in his senior hires. Eventually he realized that, when he had to fire someone, [...]

OE Consulting Quarterly Newsletter: Summer 2023

August 2, 2023 Arthur Combs Consulting, Executive Search Comments Off

What We’re Working on Now - Summer 2023 No summer slowdown over here. The search side of the business is working on various stages of a dozen executive placements, three of them connected to strategic and organizational design engagements. Here is a brief overview of just a few of our [...]

How Executive Searches Fail

August 2, 2023 Arthur Combs Executive Search Comments Off

Spoiler Alert: It's probably not what you think If you ask 100 executives what is most likely to cause underperformance in an executive search 90% will get it wrong. Most don’t realize that a high risk of failure is frequently built into their processes before the position is even publicized. [...]

Call it What it is: Power

April 10, 2023 Arthur Combs Uncategorized No comments yet

By Arthur Combs THESIS We have observed that defining power, methods of sharing power, and reinforcing these practices through meaningful performance management, can be a starting point for greater productivity, talent retention, and workplace wellbeing. CONTEXT Consensus over command-and-control. It’s become axiomatic that many Global 500 companies are finding [...]

Purpose Driven? If You Cannot Define it, Probably Not

April 10, 2023 Arthur Combs Uncategorized No comments yet

Any organization that claims to be purpose, impact, or mission driven had better define its terms. “Purpose driven” has become a common, but poorly defined phrase for many organizations in the impact sector. We challenged ourselves to think critically about how we define purpose, and what being a purpose driven […]

Meaning and Work: A Series

August 17, 2021 Arthur Combs Uncategorized No comments yet

After money, the thing most people seek in their work is meaning. At Schaffer&Combs we get to work with thousands of people who are making our planet more measurably prosperous, fair, and just plain pleasant. Some of them are well known, and the meaning they make at work is […]

All posts by Arthur Combs