Lately I have become very involved with the look of my pool. I live in Florida and we are almost to swim time, my apologies to my northern friends. I’m not obsessed in a vain way, more in that the activity of scooping out leaves calms me in some way.

I find that the gentle swirl of the water and satisfying thunk of leaves pulled from the pool can relax me immensely.

During the activity there are always one or two leaves that have escaped my net and I think, just a bit more and I will have them all.

While this may be a simple analogy I have found it can be applied throughout my daily activities.

I’m in sales and the results of my actions are very apparent on the big sales board. I manage a practice within my company that is unique and still being nurtured.

One aspect of that is I receive very little feedback on how I am doing on a given day. It can take months or years before I truly see the impact. That can be a bit debilitating if you need a constant ego stroke. My solution for this is to look at short term successes and activities. I try to do a bit more each day.

As we go through the week, I would imagine you’re facing challenges that may require a bit more. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with the big stuff, so I break it down. Build upon and expand. How do you approach those activities?

Perhaps it’s a single minded focus, micro doses of acid, or just the elephant approach of taking one bite at a time.

This week make it a point to do just a bit more.

I can assure you that you’ll be happy with the results.

Image credit: KimManleyOrt

It still surprises me, but 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.

“Joe” called to wish me a happy 2018 and update me on what he’s doing. It’s been six years since decided to ignore the pressure pushing him to become an entrepreneur.

Since then he’s changed companies twice and was just promoted to director of advanced engineering. He’s having a great time building a team to work on a totally new product. Joe says he’s having a ball.

Joe is proof of two things

1. Peer pressure never ends.
2. Winners do what they want, not what other people think they should want.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

“Joe” called me today. He said he was thinking of leaving his company not because he wanted to, but because everyone thought he should.

He explained that everyone who knew him kept showing him articles and telling him that he was a born entrepreneur and should start his own company.

Joe said he had worked for everything from large companies to startups and as long as he had a good manager and liked the culture he was happy. He worked hard and felt he was fairly compensated.

Joe said he had discussed it with his family and they said he should do what made him happy and they would support that decision.

However, he didn’t want to end up looking like a loser because he didn’t do it.

Boiled down, here is my response.

• Contrary to current media coverage people who work for companies are not losers and entrepreneurs are not the be all and end all of success.
• Few, if any, knowledge workers at any level work 8-hour days, disconnect and go home.
• In the current recession, entrepreneurs are to the 21^st Century what consultants were to the recessions of the 20^th Century.
• Having entrepreneurial MAP does not mean you want, or have to be, an entrepreneur.

The last point is especially important.

I saw yet another list of 10 traits of entrepreneurs and I had to chuckle. Here it is

1. They Are Not Stopped by Fear
2. They Know When to Ask for Help
3. They Are Persistent
4. They Are Passionate About Their Businesses
5. They Are Willing to Market and Sell
6. They Know Their Numbers
7. They’re Disciplined
8. They Have Integrity
9. They’re Great Communicators
10. They Think Long-Term

I chuckled because these are the same traits that all good people have when adjusted for their position and experience.

They are also the traits that the best managers look for when they are hiring. There are, however, many mangers too insecure to appreciate them.

Many years ago I read an article about the guy who invented the tiles used on the Challenger spacecraft to protect it when it reentered the atmosphere.

He wasn’t an entrepreneur, he was a Lockheed engineer. He didn’t get a bonus for his work, it was his job. He didn’t care; he was happy at his company, proud of what he did and liked being part of something larger.

He was a winner.

The lesson here is that great people work for existing companies and great people start companies and both win.

Joe is a winner.

The losers are those who disparage other people’s choice.

Image credit: chokingsun

The heart of a champion is measured not by their victories but by how they come back from defeat.

I may not have mentioned it before, but I am a University of Georgia grad and proud to be a Bulldawg!

My beloved college football team went into double overtime and defeated Oklahoma in this year’s Rose Bowl. That win propelled them to compete in the National Championship next week against Alabama. This is the first time in 38 years since UGA has competed for the title and I’m excited to see how they do.

Why do I bring this up you may ask? Well, for one thing, I am taking every chance I get to celebrate the great season my team is having. The second reason is that the current news is absolutely depressing and tends to drag me down.

One goal for the new year is to surround myself with positive people and mindsets. The news doesn’t fit into that.

I previously brought up failure and how it can transform or destroy someone. As mentioned, I attended UGA  and graduated with a degree in Economics. One of the required courses was Finance 300, all business majors had to have it and it wasn’t the easiest of courses. I enrolled and about midway through I realized I was going to fail the class. Not even close to a C, a solid F.

I had a choice to make then and there. Stop attending and sleep in ( it was and 8am class) or continue on with zero stress, absorb and study and then retake it in the summer. I chose the latter and was very happy about it.

My professor saw that I continued attending and partaking in the class and I built a relationship with him. As a student it was great, I felt like I was auditing the class and was not worried about grades. When the summer rolled around I was able to master the course and finished with a B+.

I actually still look back at that time with fondness, even years later.

So much of our life can be full of regret, why not embrace the failure and learn from it?

I did and am sure you can as well.

Image credit: Josh Hallett

I attended a tech talk recently that was put on by the Tampa Bay Tech Garage here in Tampa, FL. Like most mid sized cities we have some thriving tech companies as well as startups.

The tech garage is an incubator that provides mentoring, work spaces and community to those that are growing their businesses. One way they facilitate this is by hosting talks with well established owners who can speak to their trials and successes, all in an effort to grow the tech community in our area.

Side note: if your reading this and you’re cold then consider the Tampa/St Petersburg area, it’s warm, full of sun and has a thriving community.

The discussion I attended centered on how failure is inevitable, but creates innovation and break-throughs if approached in the right way.

Our speaker was Chad Nuss, CEO of Inside Out, a sales innovation lab that teaches, tests and optimizes sales teams across the country. He had been the owner of several startups with successful exits and is just a great guy to be around. In his different roles he has also experienced epic failures that he had to learn from.

The topic was relevant in a lot of ways.

In tech we tend to say that revenue covers a multitude of sins. The evidence is there when you look at the Ubers or [insert any other money-losing company] of the moment.

Successful people also have epic failures, but if they are generating revenue it shouldn’t matter.

This is the wrong approach! It leads to us brushing off failure, burying our head in the sand and not learning. It is one reason you see companies have spectacular rises and sudden falls.

There is a better way.

Examining a failure in your life can be humbling, but also rewarding. You can learn from it, approach it differently next time, or achieve a breakthrough.

As I look at my own life I can count the many ways I have failed and repeated that same mistake again. I actually do not mind failing but I hate repeating that.

How often have you achieved a breakthrough or innovation after a failure?

What did you learn and how did you make it better?

As we go forward we shouldn’t fear failure, we should embrace it and grow.

Happy failing!

Flickr image credit: Jason Tester Guerrilla Futures

Yesterday we looked at some terrible management advice; today we’ll check out the unstated, totally ignored elephant in the room when it comes to hiring.

When AI tells you the success of your new hire, before you hire them is a typical misleading media headline.

While the experts talk about the enormous amount of candidate data available online that goes way beyond education, skills, experience and even background checks, and AI’s ability to correlate and to some extent, interpret it, they agree that it still requires human involvement.

But comprehending someone’s motivations and soft skills – attentiveness, nimbleness or assertiveness — requires a level of interpretation that some recruiters don’t believe machines have just yet. (…)

That type of intuition is already being built into machines. In the hiring process, the data to analyze is flooding in and it will require powerful and intelligent machines to digest it all; companies are realizing they need to be more precise about their hiring needs in order to get answers from machines; and already we’re seeing some machines conduct simple tasks, such as administrative matching.

Once again the elephant is ignored.

All focus is on candidates, while the elephants are completely ignored.

What are the elephants?

The manager and the culture they create in their individual domain all the way down to a team leader.

That’s why the person who soars as a star working for X can easily burn out and crash after going to work for Y and vice versa.

The elephants aren’t new; they’ve always been around and even occasionally written about, but rarely credited with candidate success or failure.

Will/can AI change that?

Unlikely, because, as seen in hundreds of examples, self-analysis is rarely accurate and how someone wants to be managed is not necessarily predictive of how they will manage others.

So, as long as the elephants continue to roam and thrive, it remains unlikely that AI will actually be able to predict hiring success.

Image credit: David Blackwell

This is a short post, because it contains links to the two biggest Silicon Valley lies.

I realize that lies aren’t nearly the big deal they used to be, but when the source of those lies is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) prevalent in a critical piece of US infrastructure the lies take on a life of their own.

They carry so much credibility that their insidious spread is guaranteed.

The first lie is that success requires constant hustle. Whether starting a company or working in an existing one, hustle means giving up everything else — family, friends, recreation, relaxation, whatever, no exceptions — and work 24/7/365 (more if you can figure out how).

But for some, “hustle” is just a euphemism for extreme workaholism. Gary Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary Vee, an entrepreneur and angel investor who has 1.5 million Twitter followers and a string of best-selling books with titles like “Crush It!,” tells his acolytes they should be working 18 hours a day. Every day. No vacations, no going on dates, no watching TV. “If you want bling bling, if you want to buy the jets?” he asks in one of his motivational speeches. “Work. That’s how you get it.”

Which, as anyone familiar with productivity research knows, is a pile of poop.

The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the Stanford economist John Pencavel. But the point may be less about productivity than about demonstrating commitment and team spirit.

The second lie is that Silicon Valley is special. But Silicon Valley’s special is completely self-serving.

Silicon Valley has a lot of self-interested reasons for preferring to maintain a facade that its culture is special, and that its industry is more innovative, virtuous and productive than every other industry. It serves as a great recruiting tool as the region competes for talent with other industries and areas. It allows insiders to maintain outsize control of their companies. And it is a way to prevent regulators from coming in and regulating Silicon Valley to the extent that it might otherwise seek to do.

Stop drinking the Valley kool-aid. Facebook doesn’t love you, it loves your identifiable personal data, which is slices, dices and sells to all comers. Google jettisoned its “don’t be evil” motto when it got in the way of revenue generation.

Read the articles.

Share them, tweet them and stop ruining your own life by believing them.

Image credit: Elektor Labs

I touched on this a bit last week with regards to what motivates people. It’s different for all of us of course, but there is something that drives us.

Whenever I am particularly candid with myself, I find that fear of disappointing others is always high on my list. But I also have a drive to be unique.

Sometimes I look at lists that show how only a few people have achieved something and I make it my goal to join that group.

A bucket list item of mine is to climb the seven summits. These are the highest peaks on each continent. Very few have done it as it requires an immense amount of time and money. I figure if I can accomplish that then I have done something right in other areas if my life. Enough about me though.

What motivates others?

I had a conversation today with a fellow sales rep. She has been successful in the past couple of years and has accomplished some life goals. One was paying off debt. That’s a big one. She also had her eye on a few personal objects, one being a Rolex.

Last year she said she had the ability to finally buy one and not feel guilty. I realize most out there probably have other priorities, but this was hers.

As she began her search for a Rolex that would fit her tastes she was surprised to learn that her company had went ahead and purchased one for her as a gift.

Her boss had overheard her saying how she wanted one and decided to reward her hard work by giving the Rolex as a gift. My friend said this was the most meaningful item she had ever received in her career.

When I asked why she said it wasn’t because of the watch. It was the fact that someone took the time to listen to her, remember what she said and care.

Her boss didn’t have to give the gift, but they understood that we are all motivated in different ways. For my friend that motivation was to feel validated.

As I go about my week I am going to take the time to see what motivates those around me.

What motivates you?

Image credit: hypo-physe

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over 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 are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Considering the accusations/confessions, resignations, terminations, mea culpas, etc., I thought this post from 2009 and its supporting links should be front and center once again, since nothing has changed in the intervening eight years.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Oh goody. Another CEO study. I haven’t seen the study, but David Brooks (NY Times) gives an overview (whatever you do, don’t miss the comments), while Dan McCarthy (Great Leadership laments the fascination with such studies.

I pretty much ignore them, except for their amusement value—sort of like all the food studies that tell us which food that was recommended last year will kill us this year.

Speaking of which, I wish someone would do a study like that on CEOs.

A ranking of CEOs who were lauded for x amount of time before they crashed and burned for the same traits that were their supposed strengths.

And a corollary ranking of all the pundits, gurus and executive coaches who did the lauding and how many have come forward to apologize for mistaking hubris for competence.

Of course, that would be a very long list.

Image credit: Beeeeezzz on flickr

If you’re reading this I am making the assumption that you’re a knowledge worker. You may be in an office, a coffee shop, or perhaps some hillside retreat. Regardless of where you may be you have work to do and it needs to be done in a timely manner. When I am truly engrossed in something that has all my attention I get a hit of dopamine that channels my energy. Some call this flow.

Your brain is being fully maximized, distractions fade away and creativity takes place. When I am in this state it feels like work takes less effort. I am satisfied with the results and I feel accomplished. Truth be told I wish I could achieve this state more often and for longer periods of time.

As I was thinking about the concept of flow I was thinking how it could be applied to culture. If we are looking at flow in a way that reduces effort and gets faster results than perhaps we can apply that principle to culture as well.

I read a quote from Steve Jobs where he said, no one individual accomplishes something great, a team does. As I thought on that it occurred to me that the culture of Apple must be one where the team comes first, rather than the individual.

In my mind that is culture at work.

Any new hire would quickly see that belief in action, mimic it, and before they knew it they would assimilate without any conscious thought. That’s not a bad thing, since our brains have so many other things to worry about.

I think the same could be said of the military. You read stories of folks who did heroic things and their reasoning was that they didn’t want to let their team down.  As a former Marine myself I can assure you that peer pressure is real and the last thing you want to do is let your buddies down. As a result you see some extraordinary actions on the part of service member, first responders and others. In my mind that is flow at work.

As always, though, we need to figure out how to iterate and expand our culture to a point where flow is achieved and it seems effortless.

I have found that surrounding yourself with folks that have passion for life, push themselves past their comfort zone, and care for others is a terrific foundation to achieve success.

Image credit: ReflectedSerendipity

I had the opportunity to spend some time in Raleigh, NC this week in the Research Triangle. If you haven’t had an opportunity to spend some time here, I highly recommend it. Not only is the area full of beauty, it’s a melting pot of diversity that exemplifies the best of America. The hub of elite universities and top ranked tech companies make this a desirable place to raise a family, but also pursue a career with meaning.

I was here to spend some time with BMC software and was able to sit in and watch first hand on how they train their inside sales teams. I was thinking about how I wanted to approach this topic and this forum allowed for me to point out some real world examples of how a cultural revolution can be started.

A little background on BMC. They are one of the largest private software companies in the world and create products for enterprise IT systems to do everything from track assets, create help desk tickets, manage capacity and sit on top of complex environments to manage jobs.

In a real world example Starbucks is a customer and if BMC’s software failed at any time then Starbucks would be unable to accept any form of plastic.

I say all of this to say they are in big spaces doing the behind the scenes work that is required for us to live this modern life. They were acquired by Bain Capital a few years ago and have been in a massive growth trajectory lately.

One major change that Bain made was the expansion of inside sales teams, BDR’s and inside sales reps.

When you think of sales you think of someone wining and dining with customers and comping their dinners; these guys don’t live that life. They manage the sales cycles through phone, email and LinkedIn.

It is a special skill that is required and it can be taught. These teams add great value to the organization by sourcing leads, closing business and creating value for the customers and field representatives. 

An entry level role is as a BDR, Business Development Representative. My experience at other companies has been that these are young college grads that are hungry.

You have some of that at BMC, but they also have folks that have years of experience in other industries who are starting out in software.

You also have some that just enjoy that role and have done it for years. BMC takes these folks from all different backgrounds and shapes them to its vision and culture.

How do they do this?

One way they do it is by constant feedback and coaching opportunities. Now, this can be done the wrong way, but they seem to balance it well here where people seek out opportunities to learn and improve.

They also spend time highlighting team members who are doing something unique that works for them. They take folks that are young in their career and allow them to teach others. This does wonders for morale and also inspires others.

The last thing that I saw that helps is that they like to have fun as a team. They have happy hours, Vegas trips, president’s clubs. Constant incentives to allow people to reach their full potential.

I was impressed with the way they won as a team and built on mutual successes. They were not afraid to share best practices and they helped each other out as much as possible. 

Now, maybe we can’t all go to Vegas but some of the things they are doing are very scaleable, not rocket science, and can be repeated at any org. 

And then start the revolution.

Image credit: BMC