The latest issue of Networking Times is now at the newsstands and up online — which means, so is my latest editorial.

It’s called, “Who Gets In: What If We Threw Out the Three Foot Rule and Started Holding a Higher Standard?” — and it reflects, aside from my own thoughts, two extraordinary conversations I had the privilege to hold a few months ago.

This autumn I spoke with Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines and Tony Hsiseh (pronounced “Shay”), the CEO of Zappos, the billion-dollar online shoe retailer.

Having two conversations with the heads of two billion-dollar household-name brands in the course of 24 hours was a positively ethereal experience. And what they had to say had a fascinating and direct bearing on network marketing, and how we could be doing it a lot better.

Here’s an excerpt:

I recently had an opportunity to talk with the leaders of two extraordinary billion-dollar corporations, Zappos (Tony Hsieh) and Southwest Airlines (Colleen Barrett). Both are industry leaders flourishing during times when so many of their competitors are struggling, and both owe a great deal of their success to their unusual approach to creating a culture. When asked how they manage to promulgate and maintain that culture within their huge organizations, Hsieh and Barrett both had essentially the same answer:

“First, we figure out who we are. Then, we screen all our potential newcomers to make sure they fit that description.”

How simple! How obvious! How brilliant! But of course, we can’t do that in our network marketing organizations, can we? Because we don’t exactly interview people to see if we’re going to hire them, right? In fact, we pride ourselves on the fact that anyone can join our business, right? We don’t screen people out, we go to any lengths to get them in … right?

Or should we perhaps be rethinking every one of those assumptions?

To read my complete interviews with Colleen Barrett and Tony Hsieh, you have to be a paid subscriber, but with just registering on the site you can read the entire editorial here.