Category Archives: Career

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This You Must Do

Say What You Are Going To Do, Then Do It
by Ken Goldstein
Ninth in a Series of Ten

Of all the many lessons I have learned over the years in watching the difference between success and failure, this tiny bit of advice is the most basic concept, the easiest to understand, the most consistently impactful, and the most abused and violated. It comes down to this — all we have is our word. Credibility, trust, betting on talent, in the final analysis, it just does not get any more understandable than this:

Winners say what they are going to do, and then they do it.

Successful people don’t mince words, they are clear. They know themselves what matters, and they share that information with utter transparency to all with whom they come in contact. Then, having made a statement of purpose or declaration of intent, they put action behind their words. Successful people do not do this from time to time, they do it all the time. They do not differentiate claims and actions by tiers, they are predictably consistent. When you know someone believes what they are saying, and then will do what they say, you will follow them, you will invest in them, you will believe in them, and you will stick by them.

How hard or easy is this to pull off? Let’s start with the easiest of all possible promises. You bump into someone at a party, the mall, or a sporting event. You haven’t seen them in a while. You talk briefly but you are in a hurry. In departing, you say, “I will call you for lunch.”  Contrary to the Los Angeles standard exported lexicon, “I will call you for lunch” is not the same thing as saying, “Goodbye, I have to go now.” If “Goodbye, I have to go now” is what you mean, then say that, not a problem. It’s honest, it’s true, and it comes with no attachment. How many people have told me they will call me for lunch and then don’t? Too many. Would I do business with them? Probably not. If they can’t follow-up on a suggested lunch, how can I expect they will follow-up on anything more important?

Now let’s step it up. In order to get back to a task you think is more important than the one your boss is asking you about, you say to your anxious boss, “I will get you a report on that before the end of the week.” You have escaped, and perhaps you believe your boss will forget you said that. Your boss will not forget that, and the end of the week is Friday or Saturday, not Monday or Tuesday or never. Do you reinforce what you promised by doing it, or do you let it slide? If you really, really get jammed up, do you call or see your boss before the end of the week and ask forbearance, reminding your boss that you made a promise but suggesting that you have some other critical matters at hand and would like to re-prioritize this if possible before the deadline comes. How many people get this right? I promise you, not enough.

Here’s another step up. In a team meeting everyone agrees on a set of tasks. The engineers will write program code to execute a set of features, the marketing managers will develop collateral to evangelize that set of features, the sales representatives will tell their customers that this set of features is coming and when. Meeting adjourned, break huddle. A week later, the engineers got a better idea and developed a different set of features that are much more cool, the marketing managers created an online brochure and email campaign that described a set of features they always wanted but were never discussed, and the sales representatives secretly always hated the entire concept so they just never told any of the customers anything at all. How are we doing there? Some teamwork, huh? No alignment, no success path.  Happens every day.

Let’s step it up again. You are the CEO or CFO, you give earnings guidance to the street of $0.26 per share. On the earnings call you report $0.13, some unexpected problems emerged subsequent to your guidance. What do your shareholders think now? They think you missed your own guidance. You would have been better off not giving any guidance than giving poor guidance. In fact, saying “We don’t give guidance” is a strategy that many companies utilize, because they don’t want to be in a position of creating lack of faith in their understanding or leadership. So they say what they are going to do, not give guidance, and they do that. It may not be satisfying to everyone who follows the company, but it is honest and consistent, much better than being wrong by a factor of 50%.

What is the through line in all four of these cases? Dependability. It does not matter if it’s a promise for lunch, a promise to deliver a report, a promise to own a subset of a team’s tasks, or a promise on corporate performance to shareholders. The winning case is the one that builds trust and confidence, however simple or complex. I had the privilege to work for one of the most successful corporate CEOs of all time, and when he said he was going to do something, he did it, without a reminder, regardless of the circumstances under which he made the commitment, however casual. If he could do that with his schedule, how could I not be expected to do the same? It was a cultural mandate, and it built a bond I hold to this day.

How many people get this right? So few I could make you cry.  A student tells me they are going to send me their resume and they forget.  A colleague tells me they are going to have a friend they know look at our product proposal for feedback and they don’t. An employee tells me the current approach we are taking is wrong and I invite them to submit a better idea, never hear from them again.

Want to leap ahead of the pack? Save this point, glue it to your forehead, make it religion. Just by saying what you are going to do and then doing it — right or wrong, good or bad — you are leaping to the front of the line. You may think I am kidding and I am not. Other tasks are hard, this one really is that easy. Yes, Just Do It.

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It’s Not Lotto, It’s Life

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get
by Ken Goldstein
Eighth in a Series of Ten

The quote in the subtitle above, “The harder you work, the luckier you get” has been attributed to so many individuals it is probably best accepted as a cliché, but since I heard it first and most often from my father, I’m giving him the credit.  I’ll apply another cliché, “minor poets borrow, great poets steal,” so credit here is probably less important than viral sharing, which is the value of any common sense idea broadly distributed.

Yet how common is the common sense in seeking luck by giving your all to what you do? Those seem like different things. Luck is elusive, ephemeral, it may not even exist except in hindsight, as a descriptor rather than a force. Work is what you do, effort that you control, with results that may or may not have the impact you desire based on any number of uncontrollable market forces. You cannot will good fortune anymore than you can guarantee an outcome where you cannot predict and guide any number of moving parts well beyond your scope of influence.

Or can you? Think about this for a moment, the people in business who you would call lucky — do they tend to be lucky once or lucky many times over? You would probably answer both. So let’s toss out the one timers and call them lottery winners, nothing we can learn there except sometimes good stuff happens to both good and bad people, and that’s just it, it happens. Now let’s think about the consistently lucky individuals we see winning over and over, in good times and bad. Are there any consistencies in their actions? My guess is that they may just be working a little harder than their competition, pushing themselves intellectually beyond the obvious tasks that others do to get by, challenging themselves to Think Different and really work a complex set of issues to unexpected outcomes. I am not sure they make luck happen, but they do allow themselves to be in positions where they can be more often than others open to unusual and often positive circumstances. They might be just a little more dedicated than others, just a little more optimistic about creativity as a tool, just a little more self-energized to seize upon an unexpected win scenario when it appears out of nowhere.

Last month in a Wall Street Journal column entitled “How to Get a Real Education,” not less than Scott Adams, the visionary mind behind Dilbert, offered this among his tidbits of advice to college students whom he was trying to give a shortcut to success given his own treks through the school of hard knocks. Wrote Adams under the header Attract Luck:

You can’t manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn’t work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It’s not obvious to a teenager.

Fans of popular quotes may hear the echo of Pasteur’s “Fortune favors the prepared mind” in the words of Dilbert’s creator, which simply reinforces the same theme.  Harnessing luck might be akin to catching lightning in a bottle, but how are you going to capture the lightning if you don’t have a bottle ready, and if you aren’t willing to get wet in a storm without real expectation of what’s awaiting you under the clouds?  What’s out there that can change your life for the better or improve your success ratios is seldom obvious or clearly labeled, but if you aren’t on an active quest, your chances of bumping into it will be awfully low.

Hockey great Wayne Gretzky bottles this in yet another flavor: “You will miss 100% of shots you don’t take.”  How often in all sport do we hear the announcer say on a big point or play, “Now that was lucky!”  Sometimes it is, and we may need a bit of luck to break the stalemate when the other team is our equal in every way.  Yet is it really luck, or is it captured opportunity because we were trying just a little bit harder at that moment.  Who can say, probably a little of both.  I’ll take it.

There is another argument that reminds us to maintain humility in a lucky outcome.  We can only take so much credit for what we do, and if we are humble about recognizing what we did accomplish and that from which we simply benefitted, my sense is we have a lot more chance of it happening again — or at least of our peers not taking us for fools or blowhards when we don’t acknowledge the fate factor in our success tracts.  That which we can control is our effort, our ethics, and attitude, I would say people who strive to take those items very seriously in a team approach are going to be beneficiaries of luck now and again, maybe not when we most want, but often when we least expect it.

Perhaps it is just the word itself, luck, which causes us the problem, because we can’t prove it exists and we can’t reach in our quiver and pull out the luck arrow when we face a nasty monster.  So how about another word that could be a better factor in our control: openness.  Then we might have: “The more you remain open to opportunity by pursuing it in different venues, the more chance opportunity may have of finding you.”  Nah, too many words, I liked the original quote better — but I’ll keep an open mind about a better phrasing that might emerge.

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Attributes in Balance

Our Greatest Strengths Are Our Greatest Weaknesses
by Ken Goldstein
Seventh in a Series of Ten

Many years ago a company where I held a senior position suggested a “voluntary task” that our executive team all take the Myers-Briggs “Personality Test” to help us better understand our “management styles.” Deeply suspicious and mistrustful of the kinds of words I put in quotations in the prior sentence and the ability for a series of multiple choice questions to tell me anything of business or psychological value, I only reluctantly complied to gently nudge Dilbert from the premises. To my great surprise, although I found most of the questions telegraph transparent and almost silly obvious, the results of that test seemed remarkably accurate to me. Rather than find myself in a defensive posture, I was actually quite pleased with the summary — I found it to make sense, and I liked what it implied. That’s when the learning began.

To this day I will never forget discussing the attribute matrix with our head of Human Resources, which served as an incredible bridge between my view of the world and hers, and led to a tremendous lifelong friendship. She agreed the summary was a good reflection of reality, and she was pleased that I was pleased because it meant I would stop widely dismissing the test as brain-dead corporate-speak. Then she made it make sense without judgment or criticism; her words were simple, memorable, and strangely this was the very first time I had heard them, the words captured in the sub-head above: “Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses.”

That’s one I wish I had known and digested thirty years prior, maybe around birth, because it is not at all terribly intuitive and not something one of your high school or college friends, teachers, or coaches is likely to blurt out. So what does it mean?

Suppose you are an extremely independent thinker, you don’t much worry about what the crowd says, you let the noise blow past your ears and stick to your muse, to what you believe is true and right and just and fair and a winning approach. That’s a very good thing, right? It is a strength of which you can be proud, it will keep your eyes on your moral compass and let you make honest, uncompromised, unpolluted decisions everyday that steer you and your team to unprecedented success. You go, fellow! A strength is a strength and you got one.

But wait! What if there is another voice in the room that could ever so slightly adjust your approach, if only you heard it. What if the collective wisdom of those around you can improve your opinion, and with it build a consensus that becomes everyone’s shared moral compass. Isn’t that better? Well of course it is, especially if it’s more right than where you started. Yet you have this amazing strength to stay focused, so you don’t hear it, or you don’t encourage others to articulate it. So how is your strength a strength if it doesn’t get you the best possible point of view on an approach?

Oh, that’s fuzzy and messy, isn’t it? Not quite as clear and straightforward as we hoped. Now let’s flip it the other way.

Suppose you are a spectacular listener and consensus builder, the best ever. Your team actually looks forward to meetings because they know everyone has a say in everything, that their voices will always be heard and you will never move forward without consensus. Your colleagues across the board think you are great, kind, wonderful, open, accessible, even friendly.  That’s an incredible strength, you are a genuine team player. Your strength is your people skills, that too rare comforting gift which we seldom see in abundance.

Yet what if the team could not come to consensus? What if there is no shared point of view, no collaborative moral compass? What if the people around you are shooting from the hip? They haven’t really researched the facts on the topic at hand, but since you expect contributions from all they feel they have to say something even if it is not well-considered. So now you have a dialogue, but you don’t have a punchline. Or worse, you have a consensus, but because the input was tarnished, the direction you are taking is clearly wrong out of the gate. You remain respected for your strength, but when you get to the edge of Niagara Falls, you are still going to tumble over the edge with a mighty hard landing awaiting you in the rocks below.

The other side of strength may be weakness, and the other side of weakness may be strength. Balance is the hard part, and balance is what you find in the collective wisdom and talents of those around you. A quarterback leading the league in passing might be forced off his game by a smart defense, but does he know that and what is he doing with that knowledge? A virtuoso guitarist in a band may have the limelight and power to stand center stage, but is her voice the best to carry the song? These are not easy lessons or easy choices, but the answer is most often in the ask, and the ask is what we don’t often enough unravel.

With your talent came some offsets; unless you are superhuman that’s a fact. To know the offset is to enhance the talent. To balance the offset is to give the talent life.

That HR VP sure knew her stuff.  I am glad I learned to listen to her. Before the Myers-Briggs test, I probably wouldn’t have.

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What Iron Mike Got Right

Plan All You Want, But Be Nimble
by Ken Goldstein
Sixth in a Series of Ten

I’m not at all a fan of Mike Tyson, but his most memorable and useful quote in my mind remains: “A plan is something you have, until you get hit.”  I have a Hebrew carving in my home that says this a different way, “Man Plans and God Laughs.”  One of my earliest mentors, the great writer David Milch, said it yet another way, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

Yesterday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of books, magician and author Ricky Jay was asked by someone in the audience, “If I want to be a magician, what do I study in college?”  Ricky couldn’t answer the question.  A friend of his, a professor in the USC creative writing program was also in the audience, so Ricky kicked it to him — he couldn’t answer it either.  Ricky wasn’t sure how to tell the student to prepare for life’s later adventures, because as he reflected, if you asked him at college age if he would be writing for the New Yorker and doing radio commentaries and writing books of historical anecdotes and also doing magic at this age, he never could have predicted it, maybe the magic.  Patti Smith, who won the National Book Award for Just Kids, her memoir about artist Robert Mappelthorpe, was equally sage — she wondered why she had to be labeled an author or a musician or a poet or a painter, couldn’t a creative life be OK in simply exploring the creative process.  “What would Da Vinci have answered?” she asked, “Oh come on, Leonardo, which are you, a painter, a sculptor, a scientist, you can’t really be all of those.”  Did he know he would be all of those, and at a level that would last and command respect for so many generations to follow?  What if he had simply stuck to The Plan?  Could any of us predict where we are now at a level of detail that would paint an accurate picture?  Then toss in the hits.  I wonder.

To the point of a plan, yes, I think you should have one at any given time.  With a road map you will probably get somewhere, maybe not to the precise destination you originally intended, but somewhere that eventually makes sense.  Without any road map, you will more likely wander, which is not the same as exploration, and not necessarily a bad thing.  With no map, no plan, you may get somewhere you like in a time frame that is right for you, but how many of us are really comfortable with that little structure?  Even Kerouac and the Merry Pranksters thought they were going somewhere, but it was the detours that came to matter most to them.

So what about that part where the surprise left or right jab literally knocks the thinking process from your brain?  That was Tyson’s point, and the metaphor is crystal clear.  You train for the fight, you study your opponent’s every move, and you go into the ring knowing exactly what to do.  Then he does something different and you get clobbered.  Your head is ringing, you can’t see straight, but the fight is not over unless you let it be.  That’s when you decide if there is another chapter, can you react, can you recalculate on the fly, do you have another idea?  Your plan has crumbled, but you’re still in the fight, unless you choose otherwise.

The ability to plan and prepare, be directed and be focused, these are elements of success.  Yet equally critical is the know how to accept the extemporaneous and be ready, always ready, to seize opportunity on a second’s notice when every rule you believe to be true is changed, spun, flipped, or junked.  Knowing that a fork is there in the road takes staggering intuition that you may not even know you are calling on when it happens, because that fork won’t be labeled, that sucker punch won’t be broadcast, that opportunity when you get to it will not say “Walk This Way.”

I have one friend who recently went from a boss who thought she was a star to a boss who can’t find anything she does right.  I have another friend who thought he beat cancer, then awoke one day to discover he is going to have to beat it again.  Three friends who believed they were in forever marriages are now going through divorce.  A vast handful of former employees who never thought they would see a layoff notice were met over the past few years with a surprise to the contrary.  In no event did The Plans for any of these people include these brutal hits.  In no event have they wholeheartedly abandoned their long cherished plans.  Yet in no event have their plans gone without editing, adjustment, or real-time recalibration.  It would be too crass to say they are rolling with the punches, a true hit doesn’t much let you roll, but shaken as they are, they are reacting, and they are on their feet with resilience and conviction.

There is a difference between focus and rigidity, just like there is a difference between improvisation and chaos. You can’t predict an outcome, but when you are looking back, you’ll see where those inflection points appeared and you were simultaneously grounded and flexible.  It’s a tough balancing act, but it’s one that can separate win from loss, modest success from great success, definition from label.

Be directed, but be fluid.  Don’t get knocked off your game, and don’t refuse to play simply because someone changes the rules.  Prepare, then pivot.