Good stuff comes and bad stuff happens; people come and go—and die; great bosses join—and leave; companies start, grow, get acquired, shrink, layoff and file bankruptcy.
It’s called life; and no matter what you do, it rolls on inexorably
You can influence it, but you can’t control it.
The only thing you can control in life is yourself and your MAP.
We all have a tendency to forget this.
For better or for worse, you are the only thing you will always have; the only thing you can truly count on, so why not appreciate yourself? Value the best and improve the rest.
There is only one you and you get to live only one life, so focus your time and energy on changing/adjusting/enhancing what you do control and let the rest go.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Have you defined your market?
Do you know what it takes to reach your market?
Who do you talk to when your market doesn’t respond?
That’s the problem that edX, a consortium started by MIT and Harvard University to develop free online courses, faced and here is what they found.
Though edX aimed to reach the world, its initial courses were designed for the people professors at MIT and Ivy-caliber partners know best—the ultraqualified students they’re accustomed to teaching in their hallowed halls.
edX needed to learn why they weren’t reaching their target market, since it there was no question of the need.
And learn they did, but not from the brainpower already involved in the project.
They learned from a 15 year-old user from Mongolia who aced the course in spite of the way the experts designed it (it’s been changed).
The edX team and contributors show the error in looking to ‘stars’ and assuming what they say/do is the best approach.
While Battushig Myanganbayar is a genius, one of the best skills I offer clients is my ignorance of their project, but they will literally fight to forcibly educate me about it.
But it is ignorance that allows me to ask the question-sans-assumptions that light up inconsistencies, missing pieces, and other customer turnoffs.
The Lean approach pushes founders to talk to their market early and often, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the main market.
Often you can learn more talking to outliers, both inside and outside the company, than you can from the majority and the experts.
This year’s pair of April surveys confirmed that, as in previous years, employers are having trouble finding people with advanced computer and interpersonal skills, punctuality, and reliability.
Think about it.
Problems finding people who understand that they need to
consistently show up at the agreed upon time; and
always do what they say they will do.
Not exactly rocket science, but a substantial problem.
The first shows that 36% of businesses in the manufacturing sector that responded to the survey are having moderate difficulty finding workers who are punctual and reliable, while 11% report great difficulty in finding workers with those traits. In the services sector, it’s not as bad — 22% of respondents report moderate difficulty finding punctual, reliable workers, whereas only 3% report great difficulty.
The interpersonal skills are a far more significant concern.
In an age when face-to-face communications is giving way to texting, IMing and email, the ability to work in close proximity with people and not only get along, but bond to create high performing teams, is becoming more and more difficult.
Hard skills, from learning new programming languages or moving from technical work on a financial program to developing mobile apps are learnable, as are all hard skills.
Changing and redirecting the character traits that lead to being punctual and reliable or teaching interpersonal skills to a (probably) uninterested party are most often exercises in frustration.
These are the core reasons why attitude and aptitude are more important than current skills when hiring and a subject we’ll look at in more depth this week.
The results of a new survey of 500 business leaders drives the home the importance of personality, which makes perfect sense, since it is “personality traits” that underlay “cultural fit.”
78% cited “personality” as the most desirable quality in employees, followed in importance by “cultural alignment,” and then finally “skill-set.”
“Skill-set” as a distant number three makes perfect sense considering the speed of change, especially when technology is involved.
In 1984, at age 22, Pierson was hit by a drunk driver. The car tore her body apart, slicing open her throat, gouging her chest, leaving her heart and lungs fully exposed.
Pierson was in a coma for 18 months. She was totally blind for 11 years, though she has regained partial sight in her left eye thanks to a corneal transplant. It was the process of having to learn just about everything from scratch (including how to breath and walk) that made her realize how important it was to be a lifelong learner.
Which shaped her approach to hiring.
“We don’t hire people for a job. We look for very smart people and look for roles that let them continue along their path.”
KG Charles-Harris has a similar attitude and since I’m helping him with staffing I thought I’d share his Hiring Manifesto with you today.
It’s one I hope more managers/companies adopt.
QUARRIO HIRING MANIFESTO
Quarrio has used AI technologies (natural language processing & machine learning) to create the technology that enables natural language querying and analytics of structured and semi-structured data sources. We believe this will change the analytics and enterprise software markets.
We are seeking programmers to join our team who are willing to work for options until we are funded. We expect funding to be in the coming 3-4 months.
Our compensation plan is completely transparent and we are happy to share it once we establish mutual interest.
WHAT WE WANT
Most companies, especially startups, look for “stars” with extensive experience in specific skills sets.
Quarrio has a different approach.
We seek people willing to work hard, constantly learn new stuff and who are diligent and dependable. People who perform at their peak because they care and constantly strive to improve. Our current team is truly world class and we plan on maintaining that standard as we grow.
We are a company of experience; our current team members are all over 40 with extensive and varied backgrounds. While their knowledge is deep they love learning; they know multiple languages and operating systems, are familiar with many others and have learned new ones as needed for our product.
WHAT WE NEED IMMEDIATELY
Programmers with
Ruby or related knowledge
Ruby on Rails
HTML 5 & CSS3 & JavaScript
OR
willingness to learn them coupled with a viable technical base on which to build.
If your experience comes from a formal background, working/OJT experience, self-taught at home or different tech background, but strong desire to learn and branch out;
where you live (current team includes Seattle); or
what you are.
One or another of our current team has faced and overcome every prejudice that is/was active in the workplace.
First and foremost, we care about getting the work done, so by hiring your mind and attitude as opposed to your body and proximity we have the luxury of finding talent that many companies miss. For example,
wounded warriors and others with disabilities;
minorities, including extraterrestrials;
mothers re-entering the work force;
“old” people;
women;
people with no interest in relocating to Berkeley.
In spite of the current prefunded status I honestly believe that Quarrio offers a unique and real opportunity or I wouldn’t post it here.
Yes, along with the right attitude you need to be willing to take the risk—but everything is a risk these days. And you owe it to yourself to take the time to evaluate this one.
I also hope you will share this post with your friends and network wherever they may be.
Please write miki@rampupsolutions.com or call me at 360.335.8054 for more information to discuss the opportunities.
Juice your culture, because, as you grow, your culture will assimilate and mimic the traits of those you hire.
D’Souza was a diplomatic brat whose family moved every two years. The result was an ingrained learning curve and appreciation for those different from himself.
We learned how to love the world. There’s this great richness of diversity, yet people are far more similar than they are different. You’re not as likely to learn that when you grow up in one town, in one environment, in one culture or in one country.
This applies as well to those who change companies, since every company has its own culture and every manager a subculture.
Culture is a reflection of values, so the trick to good hiring is to know what which values in your own culture are truly critical.
It’s not important if previous cultures were similar to yours; what is important is understanding in which cultures the candidate thrived and how they compared to yours. As discussed Friday, skills and performance are not independent of environment.
The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.
Good cultures foster personal growth, which requires personal awareness and a willingness to recognize what needs to change.
Finally, talent and attitude are far more important than current skills.
And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?
Your team and therefore your culture are stronger when people crave new challenges that not only stretch their current skills, but are outside their comfort zone.
People who aggressively drive to constantly learn, grow and change are only a challenge to management when they aren’t given those opportunities.
When that happens everyone suffers; the individual; the team; the company; and you.
Personal and professional growth is a major focus for most people—that’s one of the reasons you’re reading this blog.
We research, dissect, write, discuss, preach, teach, and study, all with the goal of improving ourselves.
No matter what you seek to learn/improve think of yourself as a computer.
Huh?
In computing, the term I/O refers to input, whatever is received by the system, and output, that which results from the processing.
Programmers know that the results coming out of the computer won’t be any better than the information given it and this phenomenon is know as “garbage in/garbage out.”
And there you have the secret.
No matter if it’s career-related, relationship-focused personal-internal or something else, I/O applies to everything in life.
What comes out is a function of what you put in.
Blindly accepting everything offered by even the most brilliant source will result in garbage out at some point.
Learning/improving requires critical thinking on your part—no one person, past, present or future, has all the answers.
You need to evaluate the available information, take a bit from here and a bit from there, apply it to your situation and, like a computer, process it.
The result will be at least slightly different from what you started with, because you’ve added the flavor of your own life experiences, knowledge and MAP to the mix—and that’s good, it shouldn’t be an exact copy.
Because, as Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”
Yesterday I received the following email from Sean.
Hi Miki, I need some advice. When I graduated I accepted a position with a company I had interned with. The job isn’t terrific and I took it mainly because it gave me the opportunity to learn a lot in a short time and participate in various training programs. I was excited when my manager chose me for leadership training, which was supposed to fast track me into a more senior role. Pretty heady stuff for someone just a year out of college. The problem is that the leadership training feels more like brainwashing. But I don’t really have anything to compare to, so I thought I would write and see if this is typical.
Reading this reminded me of a post late last year by Jim Stroup over at Managing Leadership; I sent it to Sean and decided to share both question and answer with you.
As the modern leadership movement’s (MLM) many and various advocates compete for attention, we inevitably find ourselves being bombarded with simplistic insights, each one, its “discoverer” will argue, the very cornerstone of a brave new world that can be built only on its foundation.
As it happens, if you can dismiss the ludicrous promises made for many of these, what is left may still be useful to peruse, even thought-provoking and helpful.
Unfortunately, though, the intensity of our angst over how we each individually relate to the pseudo-vital subject of leadership can make it difficult to distinguish between the product and its packaging.
This is particularly so in the MLM – with its devastatingly misplaced focus on the uniquely special attributes of the individual. Leadership is what you are, they pontificate. What you are – if you are the right things – is leadership, they add with trivializing profundity.
An exceptionally unnerving quality can become embroiled in this unstable mixture when the advocates of a particular insight-based approach come to uncritically accept their own hype. They can then become dogmatic about it, almost fanatical. Even not-so-subtly intimidating.
A manager recently wrote me about just such a leadership sect, if you will. The group is a well-known leadership consultancy of international reach, and the beneficiary of explosive growth built on the back of a run-away best-selling book by the founder. This book presented the well-worn idea – but with spectacularly well-tuned spin in the telling – that there is an inseparable link between success and wisdom in one’s person and private life, and one’s business position and career.
This group had been hired by my correspondent’s organization to present its leadership training program to the outfit’s managers. It seems, though, that some disquiet was caused by the presenters’ almost glassy-eyed praise of the founding principles of the program philosophy. Evidently, it was even described to the attendees as something that would – indeed, that must – have a “spiritual” impact on them.
The last straw for my correspondent was when there appeared to develop real, personal pressure on the attendees to demonstrate their willingness to drink the Kool-Aid. It seems as though an inordinate amount of time was spent ensuring that each attendee had genuinely internalized – rather than merely stipulated to for the sake of the argument – the philosophical underpinnings of the program. Those that resisted drew unsettlingly focused attention, and it seemed as though the program would not progress until they capitulated.
At this point, the alarm bells sounding in this manager’s head succeeded in drowning out the liturgical droning of the acolytes. He left the multi-day workshop, which had been a requirement, and explained to his seniors why.
When you hear alarm bells yourself during any sort of presentation – especially a workshop like this one – always heed them. Try to determine what they might mean. And never let yourself be intimidated by those who want to rush you along into group-thinking lock-step with their positions without allowing you time for calm, clear deliberation. Get out of the hot-house and evaluate the comprehensiveness and consistency of the case presented yourself. Make your own decisions, and draw your own conclusions.
Certainly, don’t turn into a mindless “follower” of a “leadership” of this ilk. If you’re alert to the phenomenon, you’ll be surprised to find how much of this kind of “training” so dangerously fits this mold.
I highly recommend Jim’s work, and especially his book, if you are interested in debunking leadership myths and creating a leadership culture instead, nor is this first time I’ve recommended him to you.
It comes with the impeccable credentials of TED and is called, rightly so, TED-Ed.
It’s a link to a world for you to explore with your kids and other learning-oriented friends.
It’s one of those links that you should blast out to everyone in each of your networks and Tweet so the world will know.
“Our goal here is to offer teachers free tools in a way they will find empowering,” said TED Curator Chris Anderson, on the new TED Ed site. “This new platform allows them to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson plan around it. Great teaching skills are never displaced by technology. On the contrary, they’re amplified by it. That’s our purpose here: to give teachers an exciting new way to extend learning beyond classroom hours.”
Yes, it’s a fantastic tool for actual teachers (send those you know the link), but, in the end, we are all teachers and learners.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Have you defined your market?
The results of a 
I read an 
Personal and professional growth is a major focus for most people—that’s one of the reasons you’re reading this blog.
I’ve
Reading this reminded me of a post late last year by Jim Stroup over at 
I have only 
