Goal: More At-Bats Per Unit of Time and Money

From Gary Hamel's CliffNotes version of how to "outrun change":

Yet to outpace change, every organization is going to have to master the art of rapid prototyping. Here the goal is to maximize the ratio of learning over investment -- to find the sweet spot of demand for a new product, or perfect a nascent business more rapidly and inexpensively than your competitors. Listen to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, on this point: “Our goal is to have more at bats per unit of time and money than anyone else.” Your goal should be the same.

Exactly. Here's my long article on the importance of side projects to innovation. Institutionalized side project time is fundamentally about increasing the number of at-bats on the R&D front.

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Bob Sutton blogs about the one definitive paper on which employee selection methods are best at predicting job performance. Top three: work sample tests, general mental ability (IQ, etc), and structured interviews.