Dan Willis — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:20:19 GMT

Nice work on this article!
While I’m digging most of what you say, I’m a bit uncomfortable with your overview of innies vs. outties, specifically the requirements you give for in-house staff. You write: “those building in-house teams should discount candidates who need variety to thrive.” I don’t think it’s a question of variety because in-house work can be wildly diverse and varied.
What’s different is that an outtie may have no consistent elements of their work experience from one project to the next. As a consultant for Sapient, I recently hopped from a Web strategy project with a finance organization to a wayfinding project at the American Museum of Natural History. There was almost nothing from the first project that had anything to do with the second. The ability to shift from a strategy engagement to a wayfinding project was less about variety and more about how well an individual can start completely over … and usually at a full sprint. That’s a unique skill that won’t get much use as an in-house staff member. But that’s only a bad thing when the ex-outtie is addicted to the shifting. In that case, I’d agree that they should be discounted from consideration.
I also think you’re underplaying the need for in-house staffers to be politically savvy. Not only are innies’ heavily affected by the politics of their organizations, they have to do so without a major piece of mojo that consultants take for granted. An innie can repeat a point a hundred times and gain no traction, but as soon as an outtie comes into the organization and makes the same comment just once, it suddenly becomes An Amazing Insight. So innies are typically navigating political waters at the same time they’re fighting for credibility.
One last comment: I love your line that “a creative person doesn’t see a glass half empty or half full, but instead asks why it should be a glass at all,” but it’s worth mentioning that contrarian a**holes ask the same thing … and they’d be a bad fit for just about any environment.

Dan Willis — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:18:20 GMT

Is it worth adding a comment five months after an article publishes? Oh, what the hell:

The detail from Cooper’s “slim” chapter of the Inmates book that pops back in my head most often is his description of personas as a key that unlocks a specific puzzle box. I agree with Andrew, but I think he and most everybody else misses this gem. In the book, the puzzle box was the core functionality of a device on an airplane and the key turned out to be a senior citizen with a bad attitude. My experience is that the value of the warmth and fuzziness of personas is fleeting; bit its value as a problem-solving mechanism is significant and long-lasting.

You heard it here last.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Dan Willis