THE WELCH WAY: “Team Building: Wrong and Right; The President-elect must avoid the same hiring hazards that face any new CEO,” by Jack and Suzy Welch, BusinessWeek, 24 November 2008.

There is always the feeding frenzy when a new president takes office, especially if the break for the party in question is 8 years or more. You have this entire universe of super-talented, ambitious and supremely focused players who’ve gone into the exile of think tanks for the long winter, cranking all manner of—admittedly—pretty dull books (you want to say careful things) and attending conference after conference to network like crazy, and never turning down any commissions or what not. So when the floodgates open, it’s not pretty. I mean, you’re talking about true addicts to power—as in, people who’ve organized their entire lives around these moments of possibility.

Trust me, the DC area is a hard place to live and raise a family. The people who put in the years on that one truly have sacrificed for the chance/cause, because it is an environment that's almost completely charmless and full of daily tension.

So yeah, it gets intense! For a lot of these people, this swing at the bat may not come around again for a very long time, and there’s the need to feel like any job you take is better than the one you had last time, so emotions and ego run very high. As one pundit on TV put it recently, for any top job, there’s at least 10 people who’ve crafted their entire career for this moment, and nine of them will go away very unhappy. So the discipline required on the part of the Obama team will be vast, testing its very structure of rule.

Welch & the Missus offer three simple rules:

1) do not automatically reward loyalists

2) do not hire people who need the work or lust for the prestige of being on your team

3) do not focus all your attention on crisis hires

Good advice, but hard to follow.