I have discovered over the years that if I’m good at anything it’s deeply understanding people and building meaningful relationships. It has been the key to my success in building supremely effective teams.I have three main passions (and thus strengths): Building high functioning teams, building business strategy creation frameworks and reifying these two passions through building great software (no matter what business you're in, you're in software business now.)Business strategy has two major components: 1) positioning and 2) a system of people.Positioning entails defining the target market, the product, and customer segmentation. System of people, on the other hand, is comprised of innumerable, complex and wispy things such as hiring, retaining, process, structure, clarity of mission, inspiration, personal growth, happiness, sense of belonging, celebration, transparency, having fun etc, etc.Which of the two strategy components do you think is harder to get right? Consider this: Major consultancies such as McKinsey or BCG make it their core competence to gather very deep and broad knowledge of every viable industry sector. They can make short work of defining a valid positioning for just about any company.It’s the system of people that requires 90% of the attention. And yet most top executives spend majority of their time on activities pertaining to positioning. Of all the strategies that you’ve ever heard, the number one strategy, by far, is to hire and retain the right people. I believe in hiring people who are selfless, positive, open, conscientious, humble and demonstrate good judgement. Whether one’s hiring sales associates, HR generalist or software developers, this same criteria applies to every position and role in the company.