April 5, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 1 Comment

Dynamic Duos

The Toughest “Soft Call” You’re Likely to Make
by Ken Goldstein
First in a Series of Ten

You’re going into the roughest, toughest, most ruthless, unending, dirty, nasty, few-rules-everything-at-risk, energy-consuming and only momentarily gladdening bash up fight of your life. It’s called your career.

Who do you want in your corner?

You train, you study, you fight your way up the ranks, but somewhere along the way you make a choice that you don’t even realize is going to have significant impact and maybe determine your outcomes in those fights — your life partner. Boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, domestic partner, husband, wife, call him or her what you want. You make this choice for romantic reasons, for family reasons, for selfless reasons, for religious reasons. Do you make this choice for business reasons?

Well, I suppose there are people who are that calculating, in the olden days some folks talked about “marrying up” and such, but that’s not what I am talking about here. I am not at all talking about making a political call to better your career by making business value part of your criteria of choice. I am not even suggesting you must have someone in your corner, that may not be your style, and that might be a great choice. My point here is if you have the wrong life partner on any number of levels, if you and your partner pick each other without enough thought and are not where you should be, it is going to be mighty difficult to fight the battles ahead. I am sure fighters can go into a title match without anyone in their corner, but that certainly would be a lonely place to look each time the bell rang.

Successful business executives Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober (turned authors!) cover multiple aspects of this complex topic — practical and advisory — in their extraordinary book:

Getting to 50/50

They have conducted significant academic research with dual working couples and found unending common themes that lead to success and lack of such in personal and professional circumstances. For me, the key takeaway was the concept of being mutually supportive on an ongoing basis. This would seem like such a simple working premise, but think about it, how many couples do you know where both partners are equally supportive of the dreams, visions, hopes, challenges, and aspirations of the other, whatever they might be, and however they may evolve and change? We may praise this activity when we see it and think how wonderful it is for making the happy home, but the equal observation is that it makes for the same success in the workplace.

You might believe in yourself at any given time, but when that sucker punch comes and you are on your back looking up at the little birdies going around your head and the referee getting close to 10 on the count, who is going to make sure you are back on your feet? You? Well, you are going to have to get the feet under you, surely that’s your problem. But you’ve just taken a hard hit to the head, perhaps even a sneaky baseball bat. Could be your confidence is shaken, your values are confused, or you’re just lost and dizzy and can’t find your way back to arena. When someone believes in you more than you believe in yourself, you will go back, every single time, and the simple act of going back is an act of winning. Likewise, when you offer the same selfless encouragement to someone day after day, you grow stronger, smarter, more focused, and better at what you do, no more what it is you do. It absolutely must go both ways or it does not work.

Believe in someone 100% all the time, help them with their strengths and weaknesses, and receive the same encouragement in return and you have every chance at success. Blow this off at your own peril. Let in someone who doesn’t really believe in you and the chances of that being a self-fulfilling prophecy become frighteningly tangible.

Give and get, learn and teach, share the lessons and overcome the obstacles. If someone is going to be in your corner and you in theirs, the fight will be a lot less scary.

April 3, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 1 Comment

What I’d Wish I’d Known

Ten Tips Now for Then
by Ken Goldstein

About a year ago I was asked to give a talk to a group of high school seniors with aspirations to pursue entrepreneurial careers. I though at length about when I could tell a bunch of young men and women who hadn’t even left home yet, in a voice they might actually hear and not ignore.

The path I picked was a series of tidbits that I wish I had known at their age, that might have made the next thirty years a bit easier to navigate. My thinking was that if they only remembered one of the ten for even the next few years of their lives, the talk would have been successful. I invited them to contact me any time and let me know how it was going, and a few have been in touch.

I thought I would d share the summary of the those ten tidbits here, and then over the next few weeks riff on each with a bit of cake under the frosting. Understand that these have been borrowed and adapted, cut and pasted from friends, writers, bosses, and colleagues over the years, so if you smell poetic theft, you smell correctly. I promise attribution as best I can in the follow-on entries. These are not necessarily in order of importance, but emotional resonance at this particular moment in time.

1) The most important career decision we make is who we choose as a life partner.

2) Talent is precious — and rare — revere it!

3) The world is filled with 90 percenters — a.k.a. good enough is not good.

4) Networking is not going to parties — it’s helping as many people as we can as often as we can.

5) Investing is not the same as speculating.

6) A plan is something you have, until you get hit.

7) Our greatest strength are our greatest weaknesses.

8) The harder you work, the luckier you get.

9) Tell people what you are going to do, then do it.

10) The journey is the reward — it will take longer, cost more, and return less than you think, so you better enjoy it.

Stay tuned for a more detail on each individual theme…

March 31, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 0 comments

Bosses Can’t Know Everything Because No One Tells Them Anything

From Character Counts — March 21, 2011

“Seven Truths for Bosses” by Michael Josephson

Michael Josephson is a wonderful commentator who focuses on ethics through his Josephson Institute in Los Angeles. He offers short radio blasts each day which you will see me quote from time to time. I don’t agree with everything he says, but his heart is always in the right place, and with these snippets, he does a good job of bringing complex concepts down to one minute sermons.

Here he is talking as much to the managed as the manager, creating empathy for the manager’s dilemma while keeping the manager on point with some stark statements you might call clichés, but you can’t ignore their truth. Without hitting all seven (which you should read in the link), here’s my takeaway:

* Good communication in the workplace is harder than you think it is; without it, there is no alignment.

* The boss rarely gets the whole truth, and that is everyone’s problem, not just the boss’s nightmare.

* You can teach job skills, but you can’t teach character.

* Hiring is everything; think Casting.

* Values have to be alive and well in the workplace; lead by example and remember, it’s a marathon, not a series of sprints.

Always remember, jobs are short, relationships are long… or not. Trust and information exchange have to go both ways, or no one wins.

In April I will be covering a series of my own snippets, hard learned bits that I originally cobbled together for some aspiring high school entrepreneurs last year.

March 29, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 0 comments

Welcome to a New Kind of Tension

From Newsweek — August 24, 2010:

“Silly Things We Believe About Witches, Obama, and More” by David A. Graham

Orwell taught us that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. How much simpler and profound does it get than that? Depends on how deeply you value your belief set.

There are a few ways to cause people to deny that two plus two make four. The most basic of course is to cause them to suffer so much physical or psychological pain that they will say anything to make the pain stop. In Orwell’s anti-Utopian 1984, that was the most expedient, effective, and predictable approach. With power-based fear as a means of control and the ability to inflict pain, an autocratic society can not only write its own rules, it can divine its own science and history. We know the parable of 1984 is extreme, but we also know the context and landscape from which it emerged. Thus far, our core values have largely prevailed, at least within most of our own sphere of influence. The fact that I can freely type these words and publish them globally without restriction or anticipated retribution suggests we have collectively heeded the warning and fought reasonably successfully against the absurd.

Yet there is a more subtle and gnawing mode of drowning in Orwell’s soup without tangible restraint or any violence. It’s called repetition. If enough people say enough times that our President was not born of Constitutional privilege to hold his office — and that his true religion is something other than what he does choose to practice — the echoes will resonate, first slowly with skepticism, then with snowballing strength, and soon enough with mystical authority. Can the untrue be perceived as true without fundamental questioning? Why certainly, if there is no agenda to question the rhetoric which most suits a listener’s taste. When we test the waters for the tides, we refer to the methodology as opinion polling. Opinions are entirely products of freedom, they are shared freely without legislative filter, and they contain the power to be as impactful if not more so than facts. Is this a game? Indeed, it is a well-played game where the stakes transcend all that we hold to be sacred.

We teach our children not to gossip. Why? Because gossip is hurtful, it is beneath us as educated, civilized, felicitous members of intersecting communities. So how do we get the strange beliefs assembled in the August 19, 2010 Pew Poll cited in Graham’s Newsweek story? It’s not conspiracy, that requires sophisticated orchestration well beyond the bounds of random lunacy. We get there because people “pass it on” in ways that suit their tastes, it’s just that simple. Without respect for the truth, opinions can too easily become shared and replace truth with equal detriment.

This is a very simple corollary that precedes the more recent Newsweek story on why 38% of Americans can’t pass a citizenship test. They can’t pass it because they don’t find it important enough to be able to pass it. Likewise, any number of individuals don’t find it important enough to validate their opinions by referencing a fact base before they pass them on; it’s inconvenient to fact check, and may not align with deeply held biases that will always be more resonant than facts.

Integrity is the only path beyond the metaphorical Orwell. We can abolish torture by law, then practice and praise ourselves for preserving freedom, but if freedom is the freedom to teach and evangelize that two plus two make five, have we really come as far as we should expect of ourselves? Education must be at the core of our debate and discussion, allowing us always to differ on opinion, but when we entrench the unreal in a parade of support, we do no one any favors. Instead we betray the trust of the very freedom that allows us to say what we will, and we exploit the gift of open exchange by blowing wind rather filling the air with choice words.