Startups talk about their “value proposition.”

Sales people present their product as the solution to customers’ “problems/pain”.

As a candidate you should do both.

The smartest candidates recognize this and position themselves as high-value solutions that will make the manager look good to the higher-ups.

Steve Blank’s video explains how to identify and evaluate the value proposition of your product or service, but with very little tweaking you can apply it to yourself.

Candidates who focus primarily on what the company will do for them a la compensation, stock, benefits, promotions, etc., will miss many of the best opportunities, because managers see that attitude as a form of narcissism.

In other words, managers have problems and hire the best solution, i.e., candidate, to solve them.

Or to paraphrase JFK, think not what the manager/company can do for you, but what you can do for the manager/company.

EMANIO CEO and occasional contributor here KG Charles-Harris and I were discussing an article about how being a trouble-maker as a teenager can be predictive behavior to becoming an entrepreneur.

The same urge to innovate, think outside the box, take risks and break rules that helps an entrepreneur later in life might lead them to more destructive behavior as a teenager.

But only the guys.

However, the association only held up in the case of male entrepreneurs. Female entrepreneurship could not be predicted by moderately anti-social teenage behavior.

And those guys were well-off and white.

People coming from families that were comparatively well off in 1979, where the parents had some level of higher education, and where they lived in a two-parent home through age 14 or so, were more likely to be entrepreneurs.

Essentially the whole thing says what we all know, but rarely admit.

Affluent, white, male troublemakers are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

Their families have enough pull and resources to prevent them from being labeled ‘difficult’, let alone ‘delinquent’, because once you label a person and they are treated by society according to that label they often end up believing the label themselves…whatever it is.

And that label often becomes self-fulfilling prophesy.

Are you really surprised that when a middle or upper-class boy acts out the long-term result will be substantially different than when a black, inner city boy does the same thing?

Professionally, managers often do the same thing when they treat their people based on their title—then wonder why they don’t fulfill their promise.

Flickr image credit: SiSter PhotograPher

See all mY generation posts here.

Silos kill, no question about it.

They kill innovation, retard product development, and encourage reinvention of the wheel.

Some companies encourage silos; some have no clue on how to break them down; and a very few don’t have them.

Instead, they have collaboration across not only departments, but also divisions.

3M is such a company, with collaboration embedded deep within its DNA.

3M is one of the few companies in private industry that is still active in basic research; it pays off because the results are immediately available to the R&D groups.

What’s the secret to fostering this kind of culture; to getting disparate individuals and organizations working together?

Collaboration doesn’t happen by accident.

• The company maintains a “…database of technical reports written by the more than 7,000 scientists at the company. Those scientists are spread between a corporate lab devoted to basic research, 40 division labs that essentially form a bridge between that basic science and the market, and 35 international labs.”
• It enables “TechForum, an employee-run organization designed to foster communications between scientists in different labs or divisions.”
• “Three years ago, 3M also created the “R&D Workcenter” networking Web site, which Mitra describes as a “LinkedIn for 3M scientists.”

But 3M knows that all the technology, all the meet-ups and all the talk aren’t always enough—the wrong kind of competition will quickly kill collaboration.

“Such sharing of resources is almost impossible when different units of a company feel they are competing against each other to deliver better financial results or the next breakthrough technology. But at 3M, employees are expected to collaborate—and are evaluated on their success.”

3M clearly tells its employees at all levels that they are expected to share across all boundaries, but just telling people doesn’t always work. It’s easy to share information without the added intelligence that makes the information truly valuable.

So they measure the success of the effort, not just the act. That is very different—it puts the money where the mouth is and taps into employees’ vested self-interest.

Image credit: Wesley Fryer on flickr