It is a foggy, gray October morning in New York City. I saw my daughter last night… we got a big search project over the finish line earlier this week… I have a large cup from my favorite New York City coffee shop, Marathon Coffee…

What could be better than this?

This week’s “Thoughts” is a miscellany:

• Does anyone reading this have any connections to the US House of Representatives?

I would like to offer to have Caldwell Partners perform an executive search to find the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. This would not be a “pro bono” search; I will charge Congress the going rate for an executive search, seeing that they are charging me the going rate for my federal income taxes.

“Should I take this job?”

I get that question quite often. When you are a headhunter, people tend to think you are in a position to opine on the relative merits of most job opportunities, kind of like one appraises jewelry. It is like I am the guy hunched over a desk, looking at the job through a magnifying glass, assessing its nooks and crannies, its feel, its value, its intrinsic worth.

My usual response to the question “Should I take this job?” is “I don’t know.”

I will then listen to the things that the “job considerer” is mulling over:

Hey there! I hope you are having a good weekend. Why would I want you to have a bad weekend?

I may have just said something misleading.

I wasn’t really ”hoping.”

And I wasn’t really thinking about you, much less thinking about the quality of your weekend.

All of which leads me to share the epiphany I had in June of 2021, and it is this:

No one wakes up in the morning with their first thought being, “I wonder how Rich Perkey is doing today?”

Heck, even I don’t wake up and ask that question of myself! (I am thinking about dressing and making coffee…)

I am constantly thinking about how to take my executive search game to a higher level. How can I execute assignments faster and better? How can I ensure that the client gets a better result from the “successful candidate,” as we used to call “placements” in my old firm. (Executive search pioneer Russ Reynolds felt that it was incorrect to say that headhunters ‘place’ someone in a job, so to refer to someone as a “placement” is wrong. The person who gets the job is the candidate who successfully runs the gauntlet to the end of the process thus, they are the “successful candidate.”)

But the fact of the matter is that much of the way that we headhunters conduct executive searches in the year 2023 AD utilizes processes and conforms to the same rhythms as was done 50 years ago. We conduct intake meetings with the client to develop a position specification; we research who is who in a given industry, and we begin to work our magic, making contacts, developing a long list of candidates… we then help the client whittle down the candidates to a “short list” of 2 to 3 finalists, from among whom the client makes the hiring selection.

For the rest of our lives, 9/11 will be a day of remembrance. And it should be. How can I forget the surreal experience of turning on the television in the break room at work that Tuesday morning? Jill had just called because she had heard on the car radio that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. As I was talking to her, the second plane hit the South Tower. 142 minutes later, my colleagues and I were frozen, bewildered and sickened, as we watched the Twin Towers collapse under the fire of hate.

9/11/01 was a horrible day.

I left work early and Jill and I picked up our kids from school. In the rear view mirror there sat my 2.5 year old daughter, Mary Brooks, who was attending the “Two-day 2’s” class at Trinity School in Atlanta.

As I write this week’s “Thoughts,” I am excited about this new day and what it represents.

You see, Caldwell’s fiscal year-end is August 31st. Thus, our wonderful accounting gnomes and elves magically snuck into our computers and turned all the dials back to “0”.

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Thus, we are now 7.5 hours into Fiscal 2024 at Caldwell Partners, and I have done not one thing to positively impact the firm’s performance.