Managing Email

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I posted my approach to managing email in the comments of A VC the other day, thought I'd post it here as well.  I'd love to make the switch over to Gmail at some point, but right now it doesn't jibe well with my approach to emailing.

  • using Outlook
  • setup as many junk mail filters as possible so most email doesn't make it to my inbox in the first place
  • go through my inbox every night and either delete, respond and delete or file it in a folder or leave it in the inbox to do later (often I don't get to every night but I do it at least a few times a week)
  • this leaves me with an inbox full of important emails that I need to address at some point
  • many of my colleagues keep thousands of emails in their inbox (important and unimportant), I don't know how people can manage it this way
  • my strategy centers around good spam management and the "delete" button, I spend a lot of time deleting
  • Gmail doesn't make sorting or deleting emails easy, you either have to check a small box with your mouse or use an awkward keyboard shortcut that is slow and unreliable
  • in Outlook it's easy to sort emails by sender or subject line and it's easy select multiple emails to delete, and you can just hit your keyboard's "delete" button and they're gone 

Emailing is a pain but it's the best system we have, for now.  I've read that several companies have committed to phasing it out over the next few years.  That should drive some much needed innovation in the way we communicate at work.

Evil Plans

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Evil Plans

I've always believed that most business books never should have been written.  Instead, the ideas in the book could have been summed up in a couple of blog posts or a long-form article.  I prefer to digest business content in the form of a blog rather than a book.  Too often business books are stuffed with superfluous examples and repetitive fluff in an effort to turn a somewhat simple concept into a 300 page, $14.99 book.  Like most people that are apt to read a business book, I don't have the time or the desire to read a lot of fluff.

Hugh Macleod, the blogger, artist, and writer must share this opinion.  He's an excellent business writer.  He writes a bit like he's paranoid that the reader is going to get bored.  He knows how to write books for people that are busy.  He makes short and simple points (often with a real life example) and moves onto the next thing.  He almost forces you to read faster than you normally would.  He did this extremely well in his first book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.  Ignore Everybody was one of the best business books I've ever read.  It's full of insightful ideas that are communicated concisely, without the fluff.  I wrote a post on Ignore Everybody a while back where I called out some of the best tidbits.  I highly recommend reading Ignore Everybody.

Over the weekend, I finished reading Hugh's latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the way to World Domination.  While not as insightful as his first, it's just as inspiring.  In short, Hugh asks his readers to develop and act on an Evil Plan.  What's an Evil Plan?  Hugh sums it up well in this line from the book:

"It has never been easier to make a great living doing what you love. But to make it happen, first you need an EVIL PLAN. Everybody needs to get away from lousy bosses, from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate, and ACTUALLY start doing something they love, something that matters. Life is short."

The book is written with a sense of urgency that suggests that the writer has some personal interest in getting you to move on your plan.  Now.

The book is a great reminder that with nothing but a laptop and an internet connection, we all have the power to shape our lives and careers and link up what we do each day with what we love and are passionate about.

If you're looking for a bit of inspiration to get off your butt and start moving on what you love, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Evil Plans.  It won't be a waste of time and I guarantee that it'll at least make you challenge whether or not you should be working on what you're working on.

5 Ways to Grow Your Business

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Here are 5 rules that I try to follow each day to help me stay focused on growth:
  1. Train yourself to never blame your team, your boss, your product, your customers, your competitors or the market; this kind of perspective forces you to innovate.
  2. If you're answering emails and returning phone calls all day you're not initiating.  Don't be satisfied for one second with an empty inbox.  Set aside time to initiate and create, on your own, every single day.
  3. Always be a few steps ahead of your customers; satisfy them with the product they've bought, but spend most of your time leading them towards Version X.
  4. The balance of getting results today but also building for the future is one of the biggest challenges you'll face.  Get comfortable with it, this never gets easy.
  5. Separate what you do each day into two buckets: business as usual (BAU) and incremental growth (i.e. growth that comes from incremental work that you haven't done yet).  Focus 80% of your time on the latter.

Jobs and Young People

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I was talking to  a friend the other day about the value of children starting to work at an early age.  I think it’s a critical part of building and shaping a young person’s work ethic and eventual ability to create value.  As a young person working, you get to see the correlation between effort and return, understand the spectrum of hardworking people that produce and lazy people that don’t.  You build relationships, learn how to manage up, learn how to add value and how to get what you want from work relationships. Personally, my parents strongly encouraged me to work and work hard at a very early age.  While I’m sure I didn’t like it at the time, I know I can thank those experiences for the work ethic and ability to produce results I have today.

For fun, I took a couple of minutes to jot down some of the jobs I’ve had over the years (I tried to put them in somewhat of a chronological order).  I'm sure I forgot some so I'll add them as I think of them.  Regardless, I can't even begin to count the number of important lessons I've taken from each of the jobs on this list.

  1. Newspaper Deliverer
  2. Playground Supervisor
  3. Altar Boy
  4. Camp Counselor at a Baseball Camp
  5. Dishwasher at a Private School
  6. Babysitter
  7. Dogsitter
  8. Basketball Referee
  9. Baseball Umpire
  10. Landscaper
  11. Mover
  12. Snowplower/Shoveler
  13. Waiter at a Nursing Home
  14. Golf Accessories Salesperson
  15. Dishwasher at a Seafood Restaurant
  16. Lifeguard at a Lake
  17. Parking Attendant
  18. Swimming Instructor
  19. Lifeguard at a Pool
  20. Lifeguard at the Ocean
  21. Fitness Center Supervisor
  22. Certified Personal Trainer
  23. Entrepreneur – Accounting/Bookkeeping Business
  24. Office Manager
  25. Advertising Salesperson
  26. Marketing Director
  27. Business Manager
  28. Nonprofit Co-Founder
  29. Director – Business Development
  30. Senior Director – Business Development

Career Insights

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Picked up a couple career insights that I thought were worth posting here:

The first comes from a study from the Gamut News via Penelope Trunk's blog.

The study looks at what they call "Career Limiting Habits" or (CLHs) -- habits that prevent professionals from being successful. They surveyed 972 people and found that these CLHs were the most common:

  1. Unreliability
  2. “It’s not my job”
  3. Procrastination
  4. Resistance to change
  5. Negative attitude

I think this list is spot on.  And it's especially true for startups.  It's almost the exact opposite of a list of habits required to work at a startup.  A top 5 list of positive work habits required to work at a startup would look a lot like this:

  1. Accountable for individual and company results
  2. Willing to do anything to get the job done; gets hands dirty
  3. Starts fast, iterates like crazy
  4. Embraces change
  5. Positive, must-win attitude

Even at a larger, more established company, if you're practicing any of these CLHs you're making your manager's job harder and if you're making your manager's job harder, you're not going to go very far.  

The second couple of insights involve working with headhunters and come from a guest post on Dan Schawbel's blog about personal branding. Dan is a fellow Bentley alum.

Two pretty straightforward insights that might be useful to know:

  1. A headhunter will not find you a job if you are not currently employed
  2. A headhunter will not find you a job if you're not working in their area of focus; e.g. if you work in pharmaceutical sales and the headhunter is looking for a candidate for an advertising sales job, the headhunter will not work with you

This isn't to say you can't get a job in ad sales if you're working in pharma sales.  But a company isn't going to pay a headhunter 30% of a first year salary for a candidate that isn't currently employed and working in their defined area of expertise.  They don't need a headhunter to land that person. 

If you find yourself looking to make a career change, your best bet is to work through a more traditional staffing agency, go to companies through your network, or reach out directly.

What We Don't Know

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Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, said this back in 2002 when responding a to a reporter’s question about links between Saddam Hussein and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction.  It came up again Monday in a column in the Wall Street Journal. “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one."

I’ve always loved this quote; it’s very humbling and so true in business and life (and of course politics and war).

In short, there are things we don’t know that we don’t know we don’t know.

Ignore Everybody

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I ordered Hugh Macleod's new book Ignore Everybody from Amazon and read it cover to cover in one sitting after getting home from work tonight.  Great book.  There were a lot of really cool ideas and observations that I felt I could really relate to.  Some of his lines about New York were right on. ..

Anyway, here are the lines I liked the most and I hope I don't forget.

  • ...most team members are far more concerned with the power relationships going on inside their immediate professional circle than with what may be actually interesting and useful to the customer.
  • Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.  You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven.  But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed and all you will feel is emptiness.
  • Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me.  Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on a antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.
  • Art suffers the moment people start paying for it.
  • Never try to sell a meteor to a Dinosaur.  It wastes your time and annoys the Dinosaur.
  • Quality isn’t Job One.  Being totally f***ing amazing is Job One.
  • It’s hard to sell if nobody has bought in.
  • Stay ahead of the culture by creating the culture.
  • Nobody moves to Ne w York in order to survive.  Of course that’s what most of them end up doing.
  • A lot of people in business say they have twenty years experience, when in fact they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.
  • The biggest mistake young people make is underestimating how competitive the world is out there.
  • "I don’t need a lot to be happy," said Eric.  "Just enough to pay the rent and enjoy a beer with my friends.  I don't think that’s asking for too much."  Eric was obviously a deranged lunatic.
  • Work hard.  Keep at it.  Live simply and quietly.  Remain humble.  Stay positive.  Create your own luck.  Be nice.  Be polite.

Overpaid or Underpaid

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Something to think about... Are you overpaid or underpaid for the work that you do?

If you're overpaid, be careful. It's likely a matter of time before your employer and/or clients make an adjustment. How can you prevent this from happening?

If you're underpaid, how are you going to get more for the work that you do?

If you think your pay is just right, think again. And see above.

Hard Work...

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...isn't enough anymore. I've worked really hard this year.  Probably harder than I have ever worked in one year.  But as I look back on 2008, I realize that very little that I did this year will matter all that much for my career next year. I've made a ton of progress for myself, my team and my company in 2008 but I've gotta do it all over again in 2009.

The fact is that it's always only a matter of time before what we're doing today is outsourced, automated or assigned to someone who'll do it for less money than we're being paid now. That's progress.  And the global economy only speeds up the process of progress. In the 50's, we could think about this reality once a decade. Now we have to think about it once a quarter. To stay ahead and grow, a knowledge worker has to continuously innovate and add irreplaceable value.

This reminds me of an African proverb I read somewhere; just found it online:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.