This interview with Wendy Kopp, founder and chief executive of Teach for America, reveals some interesting parallel thinking with ideas 37signals has also discussed.

Kopp on the pointlessness of planning…

I also had this revelation that we were no longer going to go through all this development of strategic plans. We would go through this massive process of creating these endless strategic plans and reviewing them. And I don’t know how many years we did that until I said: “Forget it. We don’t even need to do this anymore. Let’s figure out our priorities and how we are going to measure our success. And then we’re going to let people run after those goals.” And that just freed up all the energy.

Related: Don’t write a functional specifications document and Eliminate unnecessary paperwork [Getting Real] and The only plan is to learn as you go [SvN].

On the importance of saying no…

There are certain lessons…One of them is the importance of focus, the importance of saying no.

There was so much good momentum and we were asking all sorts of good questions and launching new, good ideas. But ultimately, they took away resources and energy from the fundamental core of what we do, which we came back to believing was the most powerful thing. The obsession with truly staying focused on our core mission, I think, came from that.

Related: Start With No [Getting Real] and The most powerful word is no [SvN]

On test-driving employees before hiring…

I used to hire people and then realize within two days whether someone was going to thrive or not. So I said, “Let’s actually find out what we’re going to know two days in, before someone starts.” We just send them a bunch of stuff that they would get otherwise on their first day and say, “Here are the challenges of the day.” And we ask them to write up their answers, and then actually engage with them deeply so that we understand whether they have the skills that a particular role is going to require.

Related: Work with prospective employees on a test-basis first [Getting Real].

In Origin Story, an episode of This American Life, Host Ira Glass talks to business professor Pino Audia and Fast Company magazine columnist Dan Heath about corporate creation myths, and why so many of them involve garages.

Along the way, it’s mentioned that the whole story about eBay being founded to trade Pez dispensers is a myth. Reporter David Rowan explains:

It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant’s humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush’s few success stories – even though, in the words of the company’s PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply “as kind of a love token”.

It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. “No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market,” Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a “creation myth”, and hoodwinked some of the world’s most respected reporters. Some of her victims are furious.

Sometimes I’m looking for a word to describe a certain kind of company. One that’s small and cares about quality and is trying to do something great for a few customers instead of trying to mass produce crap in order to maximize profit. A company like Coudal Partners or Zingerman’s.

The word that usually seems to fit best is boutique. But that never seems quite right. Boutique has connotations. It conjures up fashion. Something that’s precious and hoity-toity. And it seems exclusionary too. Like it’s just for the elites or something. If someone said, “We should go with a boutique agency”...it would make me roll my eyes a bit. (And why do we always have to go French on this stuff?)

We need a new word. Something that conveys the ideas of that first paragraph without the pretentious baggage of the second paragraph.

Small is too generic. Indie has other connotations. QOQ (Quality Over Quantity) is kinda accurate but a silly acronym. Any suggestions?

Digital Journalist has a great collection of photos from Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss along with explanations of how he got the shots. Neat backstory to this photo of “The Catch” (Joe Montana to Dwight Clark TD pass in 1982 Championship Game), the most famous picture he’s ever taken.

Walter Iooss Jr. had set up in the end zone and snapped a soaring Dwight Clark in what has become one of the magazine’s enduring images (as the abundant yellow stickers on the slide attest). Iooss’s picture, though, was the result of more than positioning. He’d been shooting the beginning of this play with a telephoto lens, but as he saw the action coming his way, he quickly switched to a camera around his neck with a 50-millimeter lens, better suited to close-up action. He framed the moment perfectly.

In the Digital Journalist piece, Iooss explains why the Clark shot is one he never wanted to happen.

What’s ironic about this picture, which came to be known as The Catch, is that I never wanted it to happen. I had been covering the Dallas Cowboys the entire NFL season. I was given total access: the locker room, the trainer’s room, the off-limits spots where no photographer had been before. I’d seen the things the Cowboys did so they could play in pain. I’d become friends with one player who, the first time I was in the locker room, came up to me and said, “I want you to take a picture of me getting a needle in my shoulder.” I looked around, thinking maybe I was being put on, and said, “You’re kidding, right? Why would you want me to do that?” He said, “Because I want to give it to my son to make sure he never plays football again.” On the day of this game the same player said, “I don’t know what to do. My knee is in such pain, my shoulder is in pain, but I can’t take two shots. It’s too much. I don’t know which one to take.” With 58 seconds left in the NFC Championship Game, Joe Montana rolled out to my left and launched a pass. Something to my right came into my peripheral vision, and I reached for my camera with the 50mm lens, trying to focus. I just started hitting the motor drive and shot. Dwight Clark caught the ball probably 20 feet away from me. The 49ers scored the touchdown that sent them to the Super Bowl and the Cowboys’ season was over. I was heartbroken. I had spent a whole season with the team and had gotten close with the players. I went in the locker room after the game and the mood was as if somebody had lost their family in a car crash. In a single moment my whole story went down the tubes. But the shot of Clark catching the touchdown pass ran on the cover of SI and became the most famous picture I’ve ever taken.

Related: Sports Illustrated has a new book called Slide Show:

The thing about slides, beyond the obvious that you could touch them and hold them up to the light, was that you could scribble notes on them. You might use the slide mount to jot down a quick description of what’s happening in the photo. You could give the mount a return to stamp, if you were messengering the slide across town in those days before e-mail…These artifacts of a rapidly receding era of magazine publishing brim with a found beauty; a humble cardboard square somehow fuses a photographic moment with its slowly accumulating embellishments of history.

See slides from the book.

If you go to a cocktail party where everyone is a stranger, the conversation is dull and stiff. You make small talk about the weather, sports, TV shows, etc. You shy away from serious conversations and controversial opinions.

A small, intimate dinner party among old friends is a different story, though. There are genuinely interesting conversations and heated debates. At the end of the night, you feel like you actually got something out of it.

Hire a ton of people rapidly and a “strangers at a cocktail party” problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, “This idea sucks.” People appease instead of challenge.

And that appeasement is what gets companies into trouble. You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. If that doesn’t happen, you start churning out something that doesn’t offend anyone but also doesn’t make anyone fall in love.

You need an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be honest when things get tough. You need to know how far you can push someone. You need to know what someone really means when they say something.

If you have to hire, hire slowly. It’s the only way to avoid winding up at a cocktail party of strangers.

Are you giving employees time to play? Often, that’s when breakthrough ideas happen.

It’s something Jim Coudal has mentioned before — how he actually encourages employees to goof around. I asked him to expand on that and here’s what he wrote:

Most of the smart, creative, successful people I know spend a good deal of time looking for inspiration, tracking down ideas and doing research.

We do all those things too, we just don’t have a problem with calling it what it is, “goofing around.”

Play is essential, it’s through play that you find connections between things that might not be at all obvious through logic or practicality.

If you don’t have any accidents how are you ever going to have happy ones?

3M gives all employees 15-20 percent free time to work on their own projects. If it’s a success, the project can be spun off into a new business and the employee who originated it is given an equity share. Most of the inventions that 3M depends upon today came from this free time.

In 1968, 3M employee [Art] Fry was singing in the church choir and got annoyed that his bookmark kept falling out of his hymnal. “It was during the sermon,” Fry remembers, “that I first thought, What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.” Fry wondered whether it would be possible to create a repositionable bookmark that would stick only gently to a page. In the months after his church choir daydreaming, he spent his side-project time researching what would ultimately become the adhesive behind the hugely popular yellow Post-it Note. It was an unexpected, even random, invention that saw the light of day thanks to 3M’s flexible employee policy.

And you’ve probably heard about how Google offers engineers “20-percent time” so they’re free to work on things they’re passionate about. One interesting side effect of that is a more long-term view. People who are given free time often see further down the road since they’re not forced to focus on immediate problems.

IBM also gives lab researchers time to experiment and play. In fact, that’s how IBM invented the application of laser for eye surgery. A group of IBM scientists were experimenting with laser for improving IBM products. One scientist wanted to see what the effect of laser would be on a cut on his finger. Intrigued by the results, the scientists experimented on cows’ eyes and eventually human eyes. IBM eventually licensed out the technology, making millions in profit.

If you want breakthroughs, then give people some freedom.

Good lesson learned while working on the new book: Sometimes writer’s block isn’t really writer’s block, it’s just typer’s block.

See, you’ll be talking about an idea and nail it. But then when you sit down and try to type it out, it just doesn’t come out right. You dance around the idea. Words get in the way of what you’re trying to say.

A solution that’s worked for us: Record the conversation where you get it out right. When you speak an idea, it engages a different part of your brain than when you write it. You often say it clearer when you’re just riffing aloud. And you get to more gut-level stuff too. You bypass that “should I say this?” filter. You get it straight from your gut/brain instead of your fingers.

When you’re done recording, transcribe the good parts of what you said and use that as the foundation. Usually, it’ll come out a lot more plain-spoken and conversational. That’s a good thing too.

It might seem like a waste of time to do that talking/recording/transcribing process, but it’s not when you compare it to rewriting the same few paragraphs 5+ times.