Seth Godin had two great posts last week with two simple lessons worth remembering. Both posts are super short, I recommend checking them out.
The first points out that success comes not just from working hard, but from working on the right things. Often, knowing what not to do is harder than knowing what to do.
The second discusses the balance between knowing a lot about one little thing but also knowing a little about a lot. Both are crucial.
I read Reid Hoffman's (LinkedIn's co-founder) new book last week, the Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself and Transform Your Career.
The thesis of the book is that everyone (from CEOs down to the lowest level employees) should view themselves as entrepreneurs. It argues that you need to manage your career the same way an entrepreneur would manage a new enterprise.
I agree with this concept completely, and for those that haven't been exposed to this thesis, it's worth the read. If you're already familiar with this career approach, you won't find much value in the book. It describes the concept effectively, gives several practical tips and action items to help get you there but largely it comes off as a long advertisement for LinkedIn.
That said, there were a few valuable insights that I took from the book. Here are two:
The first is about managing your network and asking for help/favors. When you ask someone for something like advice or an introduction, try hard to give that person something first: a link to an article they might be interested in, an insight you picked up that might help their business, a connection or recommendation that might help them do their job better. Also, give them some thoughtful and insightful context on what you need. Once you've done this, then ask for the favor. Give them a "gift" before you ask them for help. This is a neat approach to managing your network.
The second is about risk. The book cites a Neurophysicist that explains that to keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities). This caused our ancestors to be very good at avoiding dangerous tribes or animals that could kill them in favor of seeking out opportunities for more food or shelter or resources. While this was a practical approach at the time (they had to avoid death), this instinct is far less applicable to the world we live in today; a bad investment or a poor career decision isn't going to kill us. The book encourages the reader to keep this instinct in mind when navigating your career and to try to resist it. You're likely vastly overestimating the risk and potential pain that could come from most career decisions.
In short, the book is a fairly engaging and quick read and the message is spot on. If this is new concept for you, I'd definitely recommend picking up a copy.
I gave a short talk a few weeks ago on some of my thoughts on being effective at managing up.
Managing up is critical. Bosses want to be assured that you care, that you're getting results and that you're contributing to moving the business forward. With that in mind, here are the three tips I gave on managing up:
1. Have a Point of View. That is, have an opinion, hopefully a strong one, on how you should grow your business, both for your group and the company as as whole. You may not get your way, that's life, but you should always have a point of view. Be interested and passionate and opinionated. Don't be annoying and try to push all of your ideas through but have an opinion and advocate for it.
2. Drip Your Insights. I like to say that "insights are just as important as results". Obviously results are what everyone wants and they should be the primary tool for measuring success or failure. But when you get results, you should be able to tell your boss exactly how you did it. You should have insights that are repeatable and scalable. Of course, the opposite is also true. When you're not getting results, you should be able to tell your boss exactly why. It's ok to not get results in the short term if you're showing that you're making massive gains and getting smarter every day and closer to success. As you gain these insights, be sure to "drip" them to your team, your clients, your boss. Send emails, share them in meetings, write them on a whiteboard. Sharing your development and how you're getting smarter is critical to managing up. Show that you're obsessing over figuring out how to hit your goals. And that you're getting smarter everyday -- when you're getting results and when you're not.
3. Build Trust. This one is the hardest and I'm reluctant to give too much advice on how to build trust. People do it in their own way and you should build trust with your boss in a way that works for you. But one thing that's clear is that you're never going to be the lynchpin in your organization if you aren't trusted. One way I've built trust in the past is to effectively walk the fine line between being a complainer and being a trusted advisor that speaks up when it's needed. In short, you have to learn to not sweat the small stuff. Your boss has a lot to worry about -- likely a lot more than you. Taking problems on yourself and not complaining upstream makes your boss's life easier. But, when a problem is important enough, raising it up the ladder is also critical. When you've proven you can balance what's important and what's not your boss will be inclined to shift the more important projects in your direction.
Several weeks ago I posted my favorite question to ask a job candidate. This is the question:
How do you see yourself adding value to a company? That is, when you get a job, a company is going to invest in you and pay you (hopefully a lot), so, ideally, what would you like to be doing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to ensure a high return on that investment?
I thought I'd post my own answer to this question here. For me, the answer to this question is always evolving. But there are three critical pieces to the answer that must always be there for me. What I want to do has to be something that 1.) I really enjoy doing 2.) I'm pretty good at and 3.) is something people will pay for now and into the future.
With that in mind, here's my answer:
I'd like to take innovative products that solve important problems and shape them and the stories around them to get them adopted into the market well before the market is ready.
On Friday I was asked to walk a small team through some of my thoughts on what makes individuals successful at work. After the session the team was asked to send me their key takeaways. There were some interesting trends in what they sent back. I'm posting their takeaways here – in their own words.
This changes over time, but here’s my favorite question to ask a job candidate:
How do you see yourself adding value to a company? That is, when you get a job, a company is going to invest in you and pay you (hopefully a lot), so, ideally, what would you like to be doing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to ensure a high return on that investment?
Typically, you can learn several things from their answer:
Of course I would never qualify or disqualify a candidate based on the answer to one question, but the answer to this question usually tells me a lot.
Recently I made the following comment on a blog post:
I recall watching an interview with Bill Gates. The interviewer asked him what was the biggest mistake he made when he was building Microsoft. Because I admire Bill Gates enormously, I was on the edge of my seat to hear his answer...
His answer: the biggest mistake he made was assuming that their best engineers would also make good managers.
Of course it's intuitive to promote the best tactical performers but given how often this fails I'm amazed at how companies -- big and small -- continue to use this approach.
A few days later, I came across a theory known as the "Peter Principle":
The "Peter Principle" states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence, meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently.
It's easy to see how management allows this to happen in their organizations. If someone performs well it's only logical that they go onto the next step in their career path. But of course it's extremely dangerous for companies to operate with a bunch of employees that can't do their job well, much less competently.
The solution to this, I believe, it to shake up the old fashioned "career path culture" and build a culture that values the "do'er" and not the manager. To promote this type of culture, companies should setup formal incentive systems that reward the employee without promoting them into management. Incentives can include:
Most cultures, especially in large companies, value the managers -- employees want to be "in management". It's critical to setup values and formal systems that disrupt this type of culture to avoid mediocrity and the dangers of the Peter Principle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Seth Godin has countless awesome blog posts but to me this might be his best and most most inspiring ever. Even when you have a job I think it's great to maintain a list like this that takes you to the next level and changes your success run rate. Read it here.
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.
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.
...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.
A person's online presence is becoming more and more important. People have suggested that you no longer need a resume - employers/partners can just Google you now. Think I'll use this blog to keep a short list of where I post writings/content/information on myself. Here's what I've got so far: LinkedIn Facebook Yahoo! Answers Kiva