Poking through 14+ 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.

Who you are includes all the previous yous in your life. And each you developed unique skills appropriate to what you did and what was going on in that you’s life.

That cumulative effect made the current you deeper, richer, more valuable, smarter, and more adaptive. It doesn’t matter if the skills were developed in response to a need at work or a situation in your personal life. They are there to use if you choose, but first you need to acknowledge them — which can be difficult in a world that worships youth, AKA, no experiences / no depth.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

For decades, I’ve said that people have two sides to their head, personal and professional, and rarely do they use the skills from one side in dealing with the challenges on the other. For example, when you have two employees arguing by email with each other and copying the entire group use the skills you use with your kids. They work on the adults because, in situations such as this, the adults are acting like kids.

Sad as it is in a world where career change is more drastic than ever before, it seems that these self-inflicted barriers are increasing; not so much in general skill usage, but rather in “specialized” skills.

I know several investment bankers, unhappy with what they were doing, who moved to companies in senior operational roles, but don’t use/adapt many of their banking skills to the new environment. The same is true for many of what I call radical career changers—engineers who move to financial services; salespeople who become technical and vice versa.

Because I run into it more and more, I’ve spent time figuring out why it happens and the easiest way to eliminate the barriers. Partly, it’s because people often go back to school for their new career, and so assume that their old skills don’t apply, but it’s also a language thing.

Every type of work has its own language, i.e., applying industry/job specific definitions to various words; because the meaning changes, the associated skill is often relegated to the “previous life.”

Humans are cumulative animals, without an effective delete key, so, when you’re adding new skills be sure to keep using the old ones by remembering to recognize when it’s the language that’s changed, rather than the action, and learning to tweak previous skills to apply to your new situation.

Image credit: Luigi Mengato

It’s the last day of June and I’m a bit burned out. So I’ve decided to do something I have done in the 12 years of this blog.

I’m going to take the entire next week, July 1-7 off. Call it a mental health week.

Rather leave you with nothing to do while I’m gone I thought I’d share a three valuable links and one excellent joke (or maybe it’s a meme)

A techie and his wife were having a conversation about their attitudes towards life and death.

The techie had very strong feelings about his end-of-life preferences. He said didn’t want his brain frozen or any other Silicon Valley ideas.

“Never let me live in a vegetative state, totally dependent on machines and liquids from a bottle. If you see me in that state I want you to disconnect all the connections that are keeping me alive, I’d much rather die.”

At that point, his wife got up from the sofa with a look of pure admiration on her face and came towards him.

She gave him a hug and proceeded to disconnect the Cable TV,  DVD, computer, smart phone, iPod,  Xbox, and Alexa.

Then she went to the bar and threw away all the whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, along with the beer from the fridge.

Then she held him tenderly and used mouth-to-mouth to help him breathe.

Because her husband almost died.

As to the links,

Obvious as it sound, watching experts does not improve your skills.

A pair of researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business conducted six separate experiments in which people who watched an expert demonstration of a particular skill experienced a big surge in confidence in their own skill-doing ability, and zero increase in their actual ability.

A first person account of why you shouldn’t always believe websites, social media or reviews.

Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express (or F.A.K.E., for short). I made it up and paid strangers to pump up its online footprint to make it seem real. I didn’t do it to scam anyone or even for the LULZ. I wanted to see firsthand how the fake reputation economy operates. The investigation led me to an online marketplace where a good reputation comes cheap.

Impressive. John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, contributed to the Grateful Dead as a lyricist and in figured out what it took to be a good adult.

According to his Reddit AMA four years ago: “I found myself so surprised to have reached an age of indisputable adult that I wrote up a set of “adult principles” that I’ve been trying to live up to for 35 years.” The rules below are concise, practical, and can be applied to nearly every aspect of life: from waiting in line at the market to having a difficult conversation with a loved one.

Have a fabulous Fourth of July and I’ll see you on the 9th.

Image credit: HikingArtist.com

Looking for a perk or bonus for your people that won’t break the bank?

Consider paying for them to take a course that interests them at sites such as Pluralsight or Universal Class, whether career oriented or just of personal interest.

Because it’s a perk/bonus, it’s similar to providing movie tickets, i.e., while you choose the theater you don’t pick the movie.

It doesn’t matter if they want to learn a new programming language or how to make wine.

The point is it’s a reward, beyond normal compensation, for their hard work.

Yes, the classes provide them with new skills they may choose to apply elsewhere, but if they don’t have the opportunity to learn new skills, face new challenges or get bored they will leave anyway.

Providing learning opportunities won’t hasten the process; what it will do is give them reason to sing your praises as a great boss/company to work for in the event they do leave.

All of which will positively impact your street rep and improve/enhance your recruiting efforts.

Image credit: Eric Harrison

Here are the three main things to consider when hiring in order of their importance.

They aren’t rocket science, but they work.

1. Attitude—convincing someone to change it is like convincing the horse to drink the water.
2. Skills—can be learned; look for the frequency of job moves that required new skills.
3. Degrees—are like new cars that lose value the minute you take them off the lot.

Make sure the culture and management style they expect, based on discussions when interviewing, is what they get.

And practice daily the three main actions that will keep them loyal.

1. Appreciate them.
2. Provide ways for them to make a difference and notice when they do.
3. Provide feedback and challenges to help them grow.

Again, not rocket science.

Flickr image credit: Simon Cocks

Tuesday I wrote that you should always consider the source of a comment before considering the comment itself.

The same day Serguei Beloussov, founder of Parallels and Runa Capital, said the same thing with regard to money sources in TechCrunch.

By viewing money as the most important thing for their business, startups often bring themselves into a corner.  Entrepreneurs must place a premium on the quality of the investor(s) and understand why a smaller amount of money can serve companies better, in most cases, than big money with little or no relevant business expertise.

Sources also matter when it comes to the skills you need in your startup.

When a badly needed set of skills walks through the door managers and even team members will often turn a blind eye to the possessor of those skills.

The red flags that pop up during interviews are rationalized or ignored—even when they are waving madly in a high wind—a ‘get the skills and we’ll worry about the rest later’ attitude prevails.

The problem, of course, is that ‘later’ comes very quickly, often with weeks and sometimes just days.

At that point, you are faced with the choice of keeping the person and having your team damaged or even torn asunder or terminating her and starting your search over.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re evaluating comments or money or skills it’s the source that counts.

Or put another way (paraphrasing), it’s the people, stupid.

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Flickr image credit: Hartwig HKD

Did you start your company to become a millionaire in a few years?

If so, you’re in for a rude awakening.

If candidates’ reason for joining is to become rich when the company exits should raise more than red flags; it should ring every alarm you have and send you running for the nearest exit.

That’s true no matter how badly you need his skills or how much the team likes him.

Candidates who join because they believe they’ll be millionaires in a few years are walking time bombs and hiring them could be your worst nightmare.

Why?

Because, as the man once said, “It ain’t gonna happen.”

This isn’t about the well know statistic that half of all startups fail (they don’t), but it is based on some interesting stats I came across in a blog called the “MarketInfoGuide” sponsored by China Research and Intelligence, a market research and consulting firm in Shanghai.

Slide sold for 200 million dollars to Google, but the employees made almost nothing, because so little was left for the common stock shareholders after the preferred shareholders were paid back.

I bounced it off Matt Weeks to see how solid the information and numbers were.

“Math is wrong regarding the participating preferred, but the main point is still pretty accurate… don’t join a startup to make a million in 3 yrs.”

Also, some phrasing slants the text in a decidedly negative way, but that doesn’t change the stats.

So why should you start a company?

To solve a problem, make a difference in people’s lives, maybe even help solve one or another of society’s ills and create a happy place to work.

Why should you join a startup?

To work on the bleeding edge of technology, contribute to something amazing, be challenged, grow exponentially, be happy.

Whichever side of the table you are on remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, Google was founded in 1998 and IPOed six years later; and Facebook was founded eight years ago in 2004.

Even when it happens it doesn’t happen fast.

Flickr image credit: Alan Cleaver

First came the New Your Times interview with Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, in which she categorically stated that women were better managers than men.

A few days later an NYT editorial asked Do Women Make Better Bosses?

Among the reader response was one that said it all for me.

“While I am sure that there are effective women bosses out there, I am equally sure that mine isn’t one of them. She is terribly emotional, paranoid, and an absolute dictator. She is also incredibly inefficient and stubborn, and as a result our entire group is far less productive than similar groups in our organization.

But I do not think this is a gender issue at all. I’m sure there are some really stupid male bosses out there (again, one of the male bosses from work quickly comes to mind). — Grunt2″

ABC is asking for reader input and stories on the subject (click over and share your story, you might even be interviewed).

I’ve read a lot of these stories, especially since the meltdown, including the ones that say if women had been in charge it wouldn’t have happened.

While I agree that there are differences between the sexes, but to say that those differences are uniform or guarantee a certain action is ridiculous.

The whole argument is parallel with similar comments, such as blacks can dance better than whites and women are better at parenting.

Some are, but it’s not a given.

I believe that race and gender will always take a backseat to MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), which is what really drives and guides people.

What do you think?

Image credit: erwinbacik on sxc.hu

It’s funny how you’ll read several articles over a long period of time and suddenly your mind clicks and they go together. That’s what happened last night and I thought I’d share it with you.

First, in Business Week, The Workplace Gets Raunchier—
‘More women say they’re hearing “sexually inappropriate” comments at work, according to a 2007 phone survey just released by Novations Group, a Boston consultant. Some 38% of women said they heard sexual innuendo, wisecracks, or taunts at the office last year, up from 22% in 2006. The percentage of men hearing such comments stayed steady, at 45%. Indeed, men were more likely than women to hear all types of tasteless or questionable comments, with 44% saying they heard racial slurs, for instance, compared with 24% of women…the big increase in sexual remarks heard by women is hard to explain. One theory is that women’s impatience with such comments—rather than the comments’ frequency—is rising. But Paul Secunda, professor of law at the University of Mississippi, says the responses could partly reflect a lowering of barriers between the sexes, with male employees making remarks more openly as a way of treating women like peers. The problem, he says, is that ‘what might be reasonable to a man may not be reasonable to a woman…”

That made me flash on a question asked last month on CNN’s Ask Bing by a young (I hope) man—

‘I recently interviewed with a company for a spot with a team of five women that’s led by a woman. I am a man and my concern is that I would not fit in. Furthermore, I have heard recent statistics that a high percentage of the population would rather work for a man.

I work for a company now where it’s good ‘ole boys…I can golf, go out for drinks, swear, etc. in a corporate setting. Am I setting myself up for failure by taking a job in an arena dominated by women? The reason for change is 100% salary based.’

Personally I don’t know any managers, male or female, who would want this guy on their team, considering both his concerns and motivation.

Now add to the mix a post from Michael Fitzgerald with links to commentary on women’s strength in management, leadership, adaptability and even investing, along with the complimentary nature of women’s and men’s skills.

Good stuff, folks. Enjoy.

Would you want to work for a woman?

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