I went camping this past weekend with some buddies of mine. We went zip lining, rock wall climbing, as well as some hiking. The entire experience was designed to leave the phones behind, spend some time reflecting and form deeper bonds.

It gave me a chance to take a pause in my busy life and truly reflect on my meaning and what my passion should be. Did it culminate in a vision that I can carry forth? Absolutely not, however I did lay a foundation.

I think often about the grand journey of it all. When I fantasize about winning the lottery I truly think it will be great to finally have time off to climb the Seven Sisters, the highest mountain on each continent. I am less interested in stuff and more interested in experiences. The idea of climbing alone or going on a sprit quest has great appeal for me.

Why? I have thought about that, too. The closest idea I can come up with is that I am unsatisfied in my current state.

I lack the vision, so instead I seek an experience where I will be alone to receive it. But isn’t that shortsighted? Instead of waiting for our passion or vision, shouldn’t we just act and move toward it?

I think it may be a combination of both. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon he had a vision for something greater than just selling books, but I’m sure he didn’t envision what it currently is. Successes build upon each other and passion can too. So maybe we just need a small sample that we can turn into the finished product.

Where do you seek your passion?

Image credit: pirate_renee

A few years ago I ended a post about youth and age with these words,

Everybody in tech focuses on the importance of “data driven” decisions—until the data doesn’t support the decision they want to make.

That’s when they start talking about the importance of “gut instinct” and “unconscious pattern recognition.”

Data only matters when it supports prevailing prejudice.

Everywhere you look you’ll find well-researched data that proves diversity significantly improves companies’ financial results no matter how you measure them.

Real diversity, however, means more than hiring women and minorities.

It means hiring them — men, women and minorities — at all stages of life.

Because, simply put, experience comes with age — wisdom is supposed to, but there’s no guarantee that it will.

In 2015 Google celebrated it’s experienced people.

The doll, a special edition of Google’s Android mascot, was a jokey tribute to the Greyglers, a group for the 40-and-over crowd at Google, and the doll hinted at how it felt to be an older worker in tech: funny, self-conscious, a little out of place.

That description certainly doesn’t fit Greyglers such as Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Susan Wojcicki to name the most obvious.

Satya Nadella was 47 in 2014 when he envisioned a new Microsoft. Not only envisioned it, but is orchestrating it into existence.

No way a twenty-something could have done either.

Age has enormous value, especially in fast-moving industries like tech.

The value at all levels comes not only from understanding the need for flexibility and developing it, but also the learning curve that comes from learning/using/discarding/repeat languages, etc. at the speed of tech. Not to mention the empathy that sparks innovation and usually (not always) comes with time and living.

Beyond the norm, the value of age/experience increases exponentially when it come to enterprise products.

Innovative/creative solutions to enterprise challenges resonate more clearly when building on a historical knowledge base than when starting from scratch.

So whether you are focusing on diversity hiring because it’s the right thing to do or for the financial gain, remember that true diversity goes beyond gender and race to encompass age.

Image credit: Search Engine Roundtable

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

In a country still focused on youth it’s good to remember that Rob Hull was no spring chicken when he founded Adaptive Insights in 2003, was rejected 70 times by VCs and survived the 2008 recession. Adaptive is now a software unicorn that seems to have no interest in chasing spring chickens when hiring — just great talent of whatever age — and ranks 3.9 on glassdoor.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Who does a company, with explosive growth, founded and built by old folks in their forties and fifties all with extensive executive management experience, turn to when moving to the next level?

The company hasn’t disclosed exact revenue figures, but it says it grew new annual recurring revenue by more than 50% in 2014, and claims more than 2,500 companies, including Coca Cola, Toyota, and AAA use its software. It’s raised $100 million in funding from investors like Salesforce, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The company is Adaptive Insights and the guy is Tom Bogan, an even older guy, with even more experience.

A guy who is (gasp) 63 years old.

Gasp, because according to a recent study, old people shouldn’t even go out in public.

When a large sample of Facebook groups created by 20- to 29-year-olds was examined by a team based at the Yale School of Public Health, three-quarters of the groups were found to denigrate old people. More than a third advocated banning old people from public activities like shopping.

Of course, one assumes that the ‘old people’ to which they refer aren’t their relatives.

(I’d like to hear them on the subject 10, 20, 30 and 40 years from now.)

There is enormous value in having ‘been there/done that’ through multiple economic cycles, cultural change, globalization and technology evolution/revolution.

But to take advantage of it you need to be comfortable enough in your own skin to admit you need to learn — like Mark Zukerberg and Larry Page.

Image credit: Adaptive Insights

A couple of weeks ago, in an aside in a post about transformation, I said, “(‘wise’ being very different than ‘smart’).”

Since then, I got a couple of phone calls (I love phone calls; that’s why my number is displayed on the blog.) wanting to discuss the difference.

They both suggested I share my thoughts here, in case anyone else was curious — my thoughts based on my experience. Feel free to disagree.

Smart isn’t about what you know — that’s knowledge.

Smart isn’t about innate intelligence — but about how you use it.

Smart is about what you do with what you learn, whether from books, experience, the streets, general human interactions, or all of the above.

Learning starts when you’re born and continues all your life — or it should.

Obviously, you’ll be better off if it does — and in deep doodoo if it doesn’t.

Wise is a whole different thing.

There is no guarantee you’ll ever become wise — no matter how much you learn or how smart you become.

Wise starts when you apply what you learn to various situations, but goes way beyond the application.

Wise comes from applying, tweaking, synthesizing and repeating over and over in multiple versions and situations.

Wise isn’t something you say about yourself on social media; it’s something that others say about you — eventually.

Wise isn’t fast; it happens over a long period of time — no instant gratification, except the pleasure that comes from knowing that what you figured out worked.

Finally, while you can learn from devices, they will never make you smart, let alone wise.

Image credit: arvind grover

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

In 1405 Chaucer enlightened us that “love is blind” and it’s been proven through both scientific and anecdotal evidence ever since.

In past centuries this referred to romantic partners and kids, but, as with most things, that, too, has changed in the Twenty-first Century.

Now researchers at Finland’s Aalto University have gone a step further.

(From the abstract) Here we tested the hypothesis that entrepreneurs’ emotional experience and brain responses toward their own firm resemble those of parents toward their own children.

Surprise, surprise — the results show that they are the same.

Anyone who has been around entrepreneurs, especially young entrepreneurs, won’t be surprised.

In my experience the more life experience founders have the more open they are to hearing critism about their startup baby.

However, that statement comes with a caveat.

It’s not just age or experiences that makes the difference, but the kind of experience — specifically raising kids.

Travis Kalanick may be 40, but he hasn’t been responsible for the shaping of a successful human being.

Mark Zukerberg may be raising kids, but they aren’t old enough to know how they’ll turn out, let alone what they will do along the way.

Just as parents believe their kid wouldn’t bully/drink/drug/cheat/steal, founders notoriously won’t listen to criticism of their vision/business model/culture/management.

Some, not all — obviously — but the number seems to be growing

It will be interesting to see if young, data enamored entrepreneurs will embrace this research.

Those whose kids are in their teens or older don’t need data, they have, or are getting, experience.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Yesterday’s Golden Oldie provided links to a variety of fools, most of which you can do without.

That said, there is one variety of fool that every company should have — and that is the wise fool, as described in King Lear.

Cloaked in the form of discourteous comments or unfiltered remarks, King Lear’s fool was able to express the thoughts that others were reluctant to express. Through the mask of comedy, he would remind the monarch of his own folly and humanity. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “every despot must have one disloyal subject to keep him sane.”

Look around; does your company have at least one fool? Or, better yet, one fool in each department?

As Manfred Kets De Vries, the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development & Organizational Change at INSEAD, points out.

All in all, fools are honest and loyal protectors, who allow society to reflect on and laugh at its own complex power relations. They can act as our “conscience” by helping us question our perceptions of wisdom and truth and their relationship to everyday experience. Through humor and frank communication, the “fool” and the “king” or “queen” engage in a form of deep play that deals with fundamental issues of human nature, such as control, rivalry, passivity, and action.

As such, fools contribute to group cohesion and an atmosphere of trust by providing an opportunity to humorously and critically review our values and judgments as the powerful socio-cultural structures of power pull, push, and shape our identity.

And, beyond all that, fools are a repository of wisdom — based on strong critical thinking coupled with extensive experience — which makes them excellent role models and a great source from which to learn.

Finally, whether a boss can hire, let alone keep, a fool is an accurate reflection of their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and a good indicator of the prevailing culture.

Flickr image credit: Francesca Romana Correale

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

How many members of your team have been “bloodied in combat?”

How many have worked successfully through multiple economic (upturns/downturns) realities?

Who would you ask if you needed dynamic (question/discuss), as opposed to static (online postings), advice of “the been there/done that” variety to

• land a candidate;
• sell in a recession;
• tweak/kill a marketing campaign;
• beat the competition; or
• Layoff a team member?

Don’t ask me; I’ve answered this question multiple times in varied forms.

Instead, ask millennial Tom Goodwin.

Maybe you’ll listen to him.

Image credit: HikingArtist

It’s amazing to me, but looking back at more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

I’ve written a lot over the years about hiring, but it’s a subject that never gets old. We’re going to be looking at the subject again this week and I thought this Golden Oldie would be a good way to kick off the conversation.

Read other Golden Oldies here

Michael Cascio, a former executive at the National Geographic Channel, A&E and Animal Planet, who now runs M&C Media, has a favorite interview question.

Early on he asks, “What did you do in the summers during college and high school?”

Not a question most candidates are expecting, but one that stems from Cascio’s personal experience.

He worked two summers as a janitor at the Wolf Trap event venue while he was getting his MBA.

You might not expect that would be a defining experience for a “middle-class college kid headed for a white-collar life,” but it was.

Cascio says it was in that job that he learned the basics of a great career and it was his janitorial boss who gave him the best career advice.

The basics:

You have to show up every day, and on time. You have to appreciate everyone who works around you. You should acknowledge — and learn to deal with — the pecking order in the working world. You have to exert yourself in ways you may not have learned in school. And you often have to do things that have nothing — and everything — to do with your career and your life ahead.

The best advice:

“Never turn down a chance to take on more responsibility.”

The point is that it’s not just about what candidates have done, but what they learned from the experience that matters—no matter what it was.

Flickr image credit: warrenski

I only have time for a quick note before my plane lands, but I wanted to share two quotes that have helped me keep going in rough times.

The first is something we all know from our own experience, but it always helps to hear it from “names” who have already pushed through and succeeded.

Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes it’s built on catastrophe. — Sumner Redstone

The second is something that every entrepreneur will swear to, although it would be nice to have summer vacation as we did while actually in school.

There is no education like adversity. –Benjamin Disraeli

Judging from these words of wisdom, I will be phenomenally well educated by the time Quarrio is a huge success.

Plane’s landing; back to work.

A colleague commented that he feared tackling a major project he had never done before. He said the challenge was exciting, but it was still scary.

I told him to think about all the stuff he does now that at some point he hadn’t done before.

This is just one more new thing that would soon become old.

Old and comfortable.

It’s how one gains experience and, occasionally, wisdom.

I reminded him that anyone who figures out how to do something the second time without doing it the first, could sell the hack and be a billionaire.

Flickr image credit: fry_theonly