Archive for the 'Careers' Category

Book Review: Rework

Published by Taylor on March 23, 2010 in Book Reviews, Books, Business, Careers, Culture, Entrepreneurship and Productivity. View Comments

The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk. But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .] You don’t need more hours; you need better hours. When people have something to do at home, they get down to business. They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be. They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.

-Rework (affiliate link)

The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success. They call Rework a “by product” of their business; the equivalent of a cookbook written by a chef confident enough that their mastery will still trump any upstart competitors armed with detailed instructions. One of the ideas promoted in Rework, after all, is to strengthen and promote your business by teaching–customers, other business owners, even competitors:

[E]mulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? This book is our cookbook.

And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business. The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:

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“It’s Always Been My Dream to Own a Joyless Moneypit”

Published by Taylor on March 18, 2010 in Business, Careers and Entrepreneurship. View Comments

As Ezra Klein neatly summarizes in his link to this story (an old link, but worth revisiting), “Opening a coffee shop is really hard.” And yet, be honest: some part of you has imagined doing it.

I’m intrigued by the types of businesses that are so romantically attractive to would-be entrepreneurs (yours truly), midlife crisis corporate types, and ambitious retirees…despite being nearly impossible to launch successfully. From the Slate story Ezra references about a nice couple who decided to chase their dream and open a coffee shop:

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one’s own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it.

[...] Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, [my wife] and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other’s throats. [...] Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee.

The restaurant business can be worse. Here’s one industry veteran’s warning to day-dreamers:

I had somebody approach me who had a very good job with a major company and an MBA from a prestigious university [and wanted to open a restaurant]. I looked at him and asked, “Is your career in danger?” He said, “No, but I’ve always loved food. I love to cook. I love to have parties.” I told him to invite 20 friends over, throw a great dinner party, and then take a stack of $100 bills and burn them one by one. It will be fun—and cheaper than opening a restaurant.

It’s easy to confuse the types of establishments we like to frequent with the types of enterprises we’d like to run. Coffee shops embody a tremendous mythology based on the notion that since it’s so relaxing and fun to be a coffee shop patron it must similarly be painless and joyous to create that space for others. Unfortunately, customers people can be unreasonable, stingy, fickle, and downright unpleasant when they’re low on caffeine or faced with a slightly-stale scone.

Almost any business can seem more glamorous and, frankly, easy to manage from the outside. The trick is understanding enough about the good, the bad, and the ugly reality before jumping into a new industry or setting out on your own…while maintaining enough of that naivete and idealism to succeed, even in impossibly difficult endeavors. No one dreams of owning a joyless moneypit that serves coffee or Italian food. But the great coffee shops and Italian eateries are run by people who knew the risks and decided to give it a shot anyway.

Image of a presumably very happy and well-run coffee shop used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user pellesten.

Reconsidering Personal Branding as a Concept and a Practice

Published by Taylor on December 18, 2009 in Careers, Culture, Lifestyle and Social Networks. View Comments

A thought on personal branding from my friend Luis Sandoval, from his latest newsletter:

All of us have a level of personal value that in today’s connected community driven conversations, we can establish very quickly. This personal value relies heavily on the skills you hold and in how you use them. With access to social networks, online media outlets, and the ability to expand your network, personal branding can catapult you and the knowledge you have to new heights.

This strikes a chord with me, as I’m typically skeptical of “personal branding” as a discipline. It always feels inherently phony; as something you do to hide anything that doesn’t fit in whatever box you’re carefully crafting for yourself. But lately I’m giving in a bit to the personal branding evangelists, mainly because I’m gaining more and more confidence that who I am personally and professionally will, on balance, lead to more opportunities than disappointments if it is reflected online.

Part of what always bothered me about personal branding was a sense that you needed to be “on message” at all times. I first experienced social media in a purely social way as a college student on Facebook. The evolution of social media into a tool for business, politics, and activism still hasn’t changed my prevailing view that certain social networks can and should remain social in nature. Any friend of mine who seems “on message” on Facebook actually strikes me as being “incredibly dull.” Thus, any attempt at message discipline on my part results in a bit of self-loathing: I worry that I’m becoming “one of those people” who seem unable to let their guard down long enough to genuinely converse with people online or publish an honest, unfiltered reaction to news or life events.

All of the personal branding experts (and blogging experts, for that matter) will tell you to pick a single topic and stick to it. The word from social media “pros” is to develop expertise and build your reputation. I’m interested in many different things, and I go through phases of intense interest in very random industries, issues, concepts, and hobbies. I liken my consumption of online content to a continuation of the liberal arts education I so enjoyed. As a result I have trouble focusing with any consistency on one topic, one angle, or one message. Nowhere is this more apparent than, well, right here: the theme of this blog is “change.” And to think, Jarred and I worried that would be too limiting.

But now I’ve come to view my own brand—and, by extension, the concept of personal branding—to be inclusive of both my authentic self (versus a caricature crafted for the internet) and of my varied, ever evolving interests.

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Impatient Experts: Deciding When (Or If) To Try Something New

Published by Jarred on December 17, 2008 in Careers and Culture. View Comments

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, gave an interesting piece of advice on his blog last night: “Do something new every three years.” He writes:

For the first ten years of my career, I changed jobs every three years. Then, for the seven years I was at The Economist, I changed countries every three years (London, Hong Kong, and New York, although sadly not long enough at the last). Here at Wired, I seem to have achieved the same rhythm by publishing a book after my fifth year and, next summer, my eighth. Each time it changes my life and puts me back on a steep learning curve with a new subject to immerse in and a new pace of travel and speaking. I’ve got a new foreign land to explore.

Anderson goes on to tie his “three and flee” advice (my words) to a theory advanced by Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers: that it takes about 10,000 hours of disciplined application to something to create a true master. In an excerpt from the book provided by The Guardian, Gladwell writes:

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Though I appreciate the unique insight he brings to interesting subjects — and I’ll also admit I haven’t yet read Outliers — I’ve always been slightly skeptical of Gladwell’s reductionist theories (see also: Thomas Friedman’s Flexible Deadlines and the F.U.). My skepticism aside, Anderson calculates that (60 hours/week) x (50 weeks/year) x (3 years) = (a little under 10,000 hours). And so, according to rough Gladwellian-Andersonian metrics, if you work your butt off for a little over three years, you can consider yourself a master in your field.

Having done that, Anderson writes: “Great. Now go do something else.”

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Blogging Your Passions (or, How I Got Into Google)

Published by Jarred on October 7, 2008 in Blogging and Careers. View Comments

Robert Scoble, a famous tech personality in Silicon Valley, is hiring an assistant. In a post expressing his frustrations with the résumés he’s received so far, he lets the candidates know the best way to stand out: blog. Sure Scoble’s hiring for a “tech” position, but I am confident that blogging is going to play an increasingly prominent role as a qualification for all sorts of opportunities. Unfortunately, this aspect of the Web’s impact is not getting as prominent a place as the warnings against expsoing too much about yourself on Facebook. This tone damages the conversation, overemphasizing the paranoia and neglecting (if not rejecting) the positive possibilities. I want to change that tone, and that’s what this post is all about.

Scare Tactics

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of commotion about how companies, and even universities nowadays, are investigating the digital “breadcrumbs” left across the Internet by candidates for employment/admission. Whether doing a simple Google search to see what appears in the top few results, or using dedicated tools to “check between the sofa cushions”, if you will: those whom we seek to impress are taking more and more seriously our online behavior. (On an interesting side note, Spokeo — which I covered in one of my first posts on this blog — has begun advertising itself as a tool for HR professionals to do “deep social search” on job candidates).

I’ll never forget the story my friend Henry told me of his first day at the White House as an intern last year. As they walked into one of their orientations, there was a projector and screen set up showing slideshow. The images being projected were drawn from the public albums of the new interns’ Facebook profiles; you can imagine that a good number of those pictures were, well… not flattering. When the nervous interns were settled uncomfortably in their seats, they had a nice little talking-to about how they were the face of the White House, how all these images could be accessed and republished by anyone, etc. Luckily for Henry, he had previously (and famously) sanitized his profile to include only the following message: “I’d rather talk to you in person.”

“Be careful what you leave behind,” the experts and mainstream media tell us. This is certainly fair advice. What they fail to point out are the many positive ways in which we can embrace the idea of the “perpetual digital dossier”, and harness it to really take ourselves places.

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