Category Archives: Business

by - 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…

by - 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.

by - 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.

by - 0 comments

A Civil Right and a Civil Responsibility

From Newsweek — March 21, 2011:

“How Dumb Are We?” by Andrew Romano

Tina Brown of New Yorker and Daily Beast editorial fame is now making her provocative imprint felt on the “new” Newsweek, evidenced here by summary findings in asking our fellow citizens no more than what we ask aspiring citizens.  Since my wife helps prepare many of these aspiring citizens for the same test where the stakes are slightly higher, I have some modest insight into the scope and depth of empathy here.  In the Newsweek test given to 1000 already-Americans, apparently 38% failed.

Click through and take a look at the test before you jump to the conclusion that it is just a dose of unimportant trivial pursuit.  We have to take a basic written test to get a driver’s license, but our sacred one-person one-vote widely evangelized model for democracy comes with only an age restriction.  If you can buy a six-pack of beer at the corner grocery store, even if you can’t calculate the tax in your head, you can vote.

Does this matter?  Methinks it does.  Putting aside the issue of education’s role in bettering newly arrived and long-term citizen’s quality of life as it can apply to the job force, what about the quality of the dialogue (and yes, argument) we need to share with each other to assign executive, legislative, and judicial power to individuals to collectively make the decisions on our behalf that position our nation for solving its current problems, preventing its future conflicts, and making us proud on the world stage.  How can we possibly do our civic duty of discussion and debate if we don’t have any sort of level playing field of knowledge?  We all have to somehow evidence we know the rules of the road to shift out of reverse, at least most of them, but we don’t have to evidence anything to have an opinion on public policy, it shall remain in perpetuity by our Constitution an inalienable right.

So why one set of rules for those already in the club and one for those who so desperately want to join the club?  Are we perhaps asking too much of the newbies, is the test somehow a set of trick questions meant to create a litmus test of seriousness of intent or a number controlling hurdle?  Is it perfunctory?  Or is there wisdom in making people proud of achieving a shared platform of understanding before we welcome them to the permanent pride of  this fragile experiment we call democracy?

If the conclusion one draws from my commentary here is that already-Americans should have to pass the same test to vote, that would hardly be my thinking, that is settled law.  Equally I would not want to eliminate the test for new citizens, because I have personally observed their joy in passing this test and their newfound hope and faith in a future that begins with the reward.

What I am suggesting is that if we don’t start demanding broad, honest, serious, fact-based and critical thinking models of education for every single human being as an absolute, then we’ll get what we’ll get.  We’ll keep fighting with each other, we’ll let Congress keep fighting with each other (the wrestlers change costumes but the steel cage death match remains Groundhog Day), and we’ll keep making mistakes until one day we make one that is just too serious, and our relevancy on the planet will be reversed.

We need to get very, very pissed off.  Each of our votes is one, it counts the same.  We have to have faith that everyone around us has some shared basis of decision-making or our own contribution no longer works.  One generation ago our public education was the envy of the world, we were #1 because we made it a national priority.  Today depending on you who you ask, we are #17.  Is that okay for a nation that by decree gives all power to the people?

Education is not a luxury item, it is not an option, it comes with the territory of democracy.  Without education, we will destroy the environment, the whole landscape be it cash green or forest green, literally and spiritually, and there won’t be a subsequent generation with the resources to fix it.

If we can afford doctors and lawyers and bankers and movie stars, we can afford teachers and schools and educational tools provided in a setting of peace and safety.  If we don’t think that’s important and want to leave anecdotes about ignorance to the late night comedians and midday pundits, we get what we get.  I just can’t believe on a scale of goals and priorities that an uneducated populous is what any already educated individual would find acceptable and sustainable.