Category Archives: Career

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Your Next Move

Few people these days seem to have a lot of choices to make about job opportunities. With national unemployment stuck above 9% for the past 26 months, those who have jobs are largely counting their blessings, and those who don’t are spending most of their waking moments trying to get anything at all, hoping to stay in a field relevant to their expertise and not drain their savings. We all hear the stories of people’s sorrow, hardship, and demoralization. The impact is daunting, and those you meet fighting to pursue their passions and remain financially independent deserve our most sincere empathy. If you have the chance to offer support to a friend or networked acquaintance, do it. Even if all you can do is lend an ear, you may be surprised how much that outreach is valued and appreciated.

This past week I had the opportunity to lend an ear on a different tangent, helping advise a bright young rising executive on his next career move. I enjoy being able to mentor those whose careers I have watched evolve anywhere from one to thirty years, and although the last thing in the world I ever want to do (or will do) is tell someone what to do, I do like to put very difficult and often uncomfortable questions in front of people for them to answer, hoping that the thought process leads them to their own answers. My sense is, the better the questions, the better chance you have at improved answers, and anyone who knows me knows that I love to ask questions.

I didn’t know this fellow extremely well, but I had the good fortune of observing his broad range of skills. He called me up and wanted me to help him decide if he should leave his current position and take another offer. Simple enough, right? You have this package and set of circumstances, and the other company is offering that package and set of circumstances. Compare and contrast, make a decision, stay in place or move on. Well, if that’s your framework for making a career decision, I am certainly the wrong person to ask for coaching. First, you don’t need someone else to help you with that framework; you can do that math in your head all by yourself. Second, I would never use that framework; to me it’s a path to an almost certain dead-end.

Where I begin the process of deciding if you should make a move is with a very simple metaphor: have you ever played pool? If you haven’t, have you ever watched a pro run the table? And if you haven’t, check out Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman in the original 1961 version of The Hustler. But I digress. What you observe in the difference between amateur and professional pool is how the table is run. Amateurs look for the best shot on the table and sink that ball. Pros only take a shot when it lines up their next shot, so after a ball has dropped, there is another ball ready to drop, then another, then another, letting them run the table and only then sink the eight ball. An expertly-targeted pool shot is only good if it strategically sets up the next shot.

That’s the framework I suggest for anyone trying to make a tough career decision: each move has to set up the next move, even if you don’t know where the balls are going to stop moving—which you never will because our lives are governed by market forces and luck as much as they are our determination (that’s a lesson humility teaches us). The job and package you have is known. The package being offered is known, the job not so much because you haven’t done it yet. What is unknown is where and when you will be at the end of the next job if you take it, and the one after that, and the one after that. Those can never be known unless you can see the future, in which case you don’t need to have lunch with me.

To have a chance at getting the right decision, you’re going to need to answer three extremely personal questions. Sorry.

The first question I asked this fellow was quite simple: to what do you aspire? If you could see the future, five years out, ten years out, what do you think you want those elusive opportunities in your target sights to be? Force yourself to focus on that, think about what you want downstream. It may never happen and you may change your mind a dozen or more times between now and then, that’s fine and natural. Still, ask yourself right now, what is the downstream job you want?

Now the second question: why can’t you have that job right now? It’s a trick question. You can’t have it because it isn’t being offered, but the real question is what skills and experience don’t you have right now that would let you step into that job? You know what experience and knowledge you have today. What don’t you know or haven’t you learned to make you qualified for that opportunity? You must answer this honestly and specifically.

Now you’re ready for the third and most important question: what knowledge and experience do you need to acquire in your next opportunity to most closely qualify you for the opportunity beyond it? You know the present, you have an inkling of what you think you want the future to look like. How do you close the gap between the present and the future? What do you really want out of your next job to set you up for the job beyond it, or set you up for the best chance at the desired job beyond it, or set you up for the best and broadest set of potential choice opportunities for the job beyond it?

To me, that is how you decide if the next gig you are being offered is the right gig for you. Don’t take the shot unless it sets up another shot. More money is nice, more responsibility is nice, an expense account is nice, a beautiful office is nice. All of those things are very, very nice. And all of those things are fleeting. They can disappear in a nanosecond. When they are gone, what will you have? The only thing you will have is your experience—what you have learned is what you can take with you. Nothing more, including salary history. What you can do next is a combination of your track record, your integrity (= your reputation), and the probability that what you have learned will be of value to your next set of challenges.

At the end of our lunch, the fellow whom I assaulted with these questions made an interesting decision. He was neither going to stay in his current job nor take the new offer on the table. He was going to revisit an offer that had been made to him a few months earlier that he had rejected. He realized he had rejected it for the wrong reasons. He rejected it for the package and relocation requirement. When he thought about the opportunity downstream that he really wanted and the gap he needed to fill to be ready for that, the offer he rejected appeared to him to be the perfect fit. He left the lunch hungry to see if that gig would still be there, and if not, how he could actively find one more like it. He was 100% focused on filling the learning gap—that was his new criteria! That felt pretty spot on to me, and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here. I have a pretty good idea that he and I will be talking again in about five years.

Oh, one more thing. If you are going to be a manager and have never had a good boss, get one. The odds are terribly against this, as you know from your history. The reason most employees complain about their bosses is because their bosses aren’t good bosses, and the reason their bosses aren’t good bosses is because they never had a really good boss. There is no way you can learn to be a good boss if you haven’t experienced one, been mentored by one, and drained them dry of all they know. If this is part of the package, value it over cash big time. Most people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses. The value of someone who cares about you and will help you become your best cannot be quantified.

_______________

Image: Pixabay

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Bird by Bird

And now for something from the other side of the brain… I want to share with you a book I read this summer.  It was introduced to me by my good friend and classmate, Will Schwalbe, who among other things was Editor-in-Chief at Disney’s Hyperion books and has since founded Cookstr.com.

The book is called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  It’s by Anne Lamott.  It was originally published in 1994.  I read it for the Instructions on Writing.  I’m sharing it for the Instructions on Life.

Lamott’s guidance was extremely helpful to me as a creative inspiration, but that is precisely when I realized the entire book can be read as a linked set of metaphors.  Even if you don’t have the least bit of interest in creative writing, I would still recommend this book.  Let’s start with the basic conceit, lifted from the back cover, quoting the author:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write,  [It] was due the next day.  We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.  Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.’

Okay, if you don’t have a little goofy sentimentality in your outlook you can link off now and ignore the rest of this blog post, because that passage reflects the spirit of Lamott’s clear observations and confidence, encouragement without pretension, honesty and uplifting outlook.  It worked for me.

Anne Lamott is not a cheerleader, more like the Burgess Meredith with the water bottle and bucket in Rocky’s corner between rounds — I’m also guessing she wouldn’t wilt if she had to slash your eye open if like Rocky it got sealed shut.  She knows you are going to get hit hard, and she reminds you that you know it too.  She tells you not to get distracted by that which doesn’t matter to the process of writing.  Much of this she learned from her father, who was also a career writer.  He taught her it was the doing that mattered, not the surrounding mechanical functions that seem like they matter.

bird by bird 2What struck me repeatedly in Lamott’s mini-lessons was her deep understanding of process — that output of a work is not so much the full work itself, but an assembly of building blocks, one at a time, each a commitment, and only in totality something more.  She does not advocate bonehead process or ridiculous formulaic mandate — this is not a how-to manual — she just wants us to care about what we are doing and accomplish it in a series of heartfelt steps.  There are no shortcuts, it’s a little more each day, a continuum that adds up to a satisfying and cohesive whole.  This is not breakthrough thinking, but it’s a lesson we need to learn over and over, and it’s not just about writing.  Creative process is the heart of innovation.   Think of all the elements that make the iPad great.  If all the elements weren’t great, it would not be great.  Same with a restaurant menu and wine list.  Same with an office skyscraper or memorial monument.  Same with a short story, same with a novel.  Summary impression rests in the details, all the many tiny parts or moments — and all those details require hard thought and careful design.

Lamott is smart about this, she tells you that getting it right is not going to happen out of the gate and unnerving strides at perfection can be your worst enemy.  She has an excellent descriptor for the real quality of the first drafts to which we aspire.  I’ll let you discover that on your own so the word does not get scraped here.  Her point is, just get the words out, work on making them better later, a layer at a time.

She also allows us not to obsess unnecessarily with locking the full road map before we explore, because again that can impede our work.  How far do we need to see ahead?  “About two or three feet ahead of you” is plenty she tell us, quoting E.L. Doctorow: “..writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  She says this is “right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”  I tend to agree.

There is tremendous empathy in Lamott’s world view, she offers a sense of shared experience that is reinforcing and comforting.  Lamott talks about the imaginary radio station playing in your head — another colorful descriptor I will let you discover — that tells us over and over again why we can’t do something, why the work we are doing is neither good nor worth doing.  Learning to turn off that radio is our key to moving forward, we all hear it from time to time, but when it becomes perpetual, that is when our ability to create interesting work stops completely.

Lamott is just so honest and clear about all the factors that stop us from moving forward because she not only has experienced them, she continues to experience them.  She does not position herself as a guru or weekend seminar success evangelist, but simply as someone who can reflect on problems of creativity because she deals with problems of creativity endlessly in her own life.  She is even more honest in telling us that no one can make these problems go away once and for all, certainly not with any form of temporal success.  All we can do is know that these obstructions will always be there, so we must embrace confronting them.  Sometimes it really is good to know that none of us are experiencing roadblocks on our own, the fact that someone like Lamott tells you she is experiencing what you are experiencing is precisely the empathy that builds strength and resistance because the experiences are shared, bad and good.  Her humility is reinforcing and refreshing and uncompromisingly inspiring.

“Bird by Bird” is not a long book, it can be read if you wish initially in a single sitting, but it is the kind of book you will find yourself coming back to for this chapter or that, this phrase or that.  Lamott writes with good humor, even when she tackles very difficult and personal matters of her own life and those around her.  The more I think about her framework, the more I am convinced it is much more broadly applicable then perhaps she even considered.  I see the guidance as useful in company life, in financial life, in family life, in political life, and in government life.  All of these require effective process to get them right, there are no shortcuts, and the rewards can be the smallest where the challenges are the greatest.  That does not mean the rewards aren’t meaningful, but it is the context of those rewards and the expectations that one sets for success that truly inform us when we are steering toward a final draft.

How do you get from idea in your head to finished manuscript?  The same way you build a company.  The same way elegant software libraries become paradigm defining customer experiences.   The same way we fix the economy and replace our government leaders with people who want to work on behalf of the people instead of themselves.  Process.  Commitment.  Focus.  Humility.  Honesty.  Bird by bird by bird by bird…

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Deadlines, The Final Frontier

Looks like we dodged a bullet.  The United States of America will not default on its debt, We The People will be allowed to borrow more money to stay current in our obligations by way of a vague deal to curb deficit spending going forward that the House, Senate, and President will find a way to stomach late in the 11th hour.  Why don’t I feel proud?

In my mind, the process for resolution which was recently described by Senator McCain as “bizarro” has been a farce of such epic embarrassment, it is impossible to comprehend as somehow reflective of our shared values.  Last minute threats and posturing and leverage and mano a mano entrenchment ignore the obvious framework of achieving a shared vision — that working relationships must continue long after the dirty work is done.  Last week in a fairly heated discussion thread about the debt ceiling on another social networking site, an astute friend of mine wrote:

…the whole situation is disappointing. No one on the national scene has really acted that well.   Should we even give them praise for negotiating?  Has it come to that–we have to praise people for doing what sensible people do?

His exasperation is well-founded, and leads me to ask again, why must we accept one set of standards of conduct for business and a different set for government?  This is especially troubling since so many people in government have spent at least some of their career working in the private sector, where market forces determine the kinds of norms of acceptability and consequence our elected officials seem to ignore.

To be clear, I am not talking about mission structure — government service is not profit minded by design, so of course decision-making is not intended to be ROI focused, that would be absurd.  We go to war because our security is at stake, it is a cost.  We fix roads and build new infrastructure because they are the backbone of our shared needs, they are cost centers paid for by taxes, they are not profit centers so boardroom discussions will always be different.  I am talking about standards of conduct, behavioral norms — like honest discussion and earnest debate and timely resolution.

Consider that last one for a moment: timely resolution.  Anyone who has ever worked on a project knows the meaning of the term deadline.  Anyone who has ever taken a class knows that the date does not move for the final exam.  Anyone who has ever paid a bill knows that the due date is not negotiable, miss it and you pay a penalty out of your pocket and potentially suffer a credit score impact.  Anyone who owes a balance on their taxes knows that April 15 is not negotiable — it’s not magical, it’s just not negotiable, it is the law.  Although deadlines appear to be abstracts — fictitious creations of human imagination imposed as structure on others to compel action — deadlines are part of life.  They are real.  We learn as children to address them and as adults to manage them, or we suffer the consequences personally and professionally.

Deadlines teach us to manage two of the great success factors of businesses and careers: timeliness and urgency.  Timeliness means just that, occurring at a suitable or opportune time — being appropriately on time according to expectation and need.  Urgency is the competitive advantage of not being satisfied with timeliness, getting ahead of the curve so that winning is more possibly in reach by better applied and more efficient use of time to create distance ahead of the competition.

What can we learn from government with respect to timeliness and urgency? Does government consider these to be core values, even expectations of government’s viability?  Does government consider timeliness and urgency as Nice-to-Have or Must-Have?  We observe their philosophical commitment in their actions.  My sense is, there is not much here worth emulating.  If anything, government process is the antithesis to lessons a good business understands — and that includes leaving big blocks of time for rigorous review.

Our elected officials for whatever reason simply do not seem to take the notion of deadlines as seriously as the rest of us.  In some ways, a lack of respect for deadlines is the very notion of an entitlement culture — if you do what is expected, you get paid, and if you don’t do what is expected, you still get paid, right up until you get thrown out by the voters.  When you get thrown out by the voters, you get a pension.  Perhaps we are seeing the reason why deadlines don’t seem to matter in the halls of Washington.

Perhaps the reason our government has become so dysfunctional is because we have allowed it to be so.  In the working world, there are rules, and if you violate them, there are consequences.  In elected office there only seem to be two rules:

1) Don’t be party to a scandal that your opponents can manipulate to your demise.

2) Get elected, then reelected.

Pretty much everything else seems to be forgivable.  A missed deadline is a missed deadline.  Since there is no profit motive, there is no personally assessed penalty.  That’s just wrong.  It lacks humility.

Bosses are often accused of setting arbitrary deadlines.  What is the difference between an arbitrary and real deadline?  Not much, really.  If the boss sets a schedule and declares that milestones must be accomplished according to the schedule, there is usually nothing empirical or even mythical about the published dates — well, maybe the December holidays for retail, or similarly calendar driven events.  Most deadlines are made up, they are criticized and chastised and the stuff of Dilbert moments — but imagine a business enterprise without them.  Someone has to be Dilbert.  Someone has to create urgency.  Urgency combined with innovation are the stuff of success, creativity combined with timely delivery are the stuff of investment payoffs.

Most of us hate deadlines, but we all know they drive us to make hard decisions sooner, get past analysis paralysis, come together as teams and deliver.  Deadlines are the stuff of anger and stress and resentment — and the stuff of competition and collaboration and reward.  We hate them, but we embrace them, because we aren’t given a choice.  Arbitrary or organic, deadlines make us get stuff done to the best of our ability given the time allotted, and with some success, we then often get the chance to come back later and improve on our progress.  Deadlines are motivation and measurement, realities we learn to meet as challenges.  That’s why bosses set “arbitrary” deadlines — because timeliness is an expectation for compensation, and urgency is often a path from good to great.

I am not a big fan of rules just to have rules, but as a boss, I have to insist on a few or work does not get done and value is not created.  Deadlines are sometimes extended or forgiven for good reasons, but anyone who has worked in a high performance environment knows not to take forbearance for granted.  An occasional exception for truly improved work or some extenuating circumstance?  Of course, that’s possible.  The same rotten outcome I could have had yesterday a week from tomorrow?  Not a chance.

Just hitting a date with no breathing room and a lousy set of deliverables is not making a deadline, it is surrendering to mediocrity and living to play another day.  If that is allowable process, dysfunction has triumphed over reason.  It’s not urgency, and it’s not okay.  In business, you would likely get fired for it, or your business would go under.

Urgency is hard.  Urgency is a factor in competitive advantage.  Urgency matters.

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What Are You Waiting For?

The Journey is the Reward
by Ken Goldstein
Tenth in a Series of Ten

Here are some phrases in various shapes and flavors that I hear much too often:

“If I just get through this test, it will be smooth sailing to the end of the semester.”

“If I just get this promotion, I will have the authority and title needed to do my job.”

“If I just get through the budget, the rest of the fiscal year will be a breeze.”

“If I just survive until my boss fires my arch nemesis, all of the stupid conflict in my day will be eliminated.”

“If I just hold on until the stock hits 100, I will have enough coin to blow out of this asylum and ditch these losers.”

Each one of these statements has the same element in common: Delusion.  Yes, these are delusional declarations.  They seem so credible when we think them, and so laughable in hindsight.

This tenth hard lesson learned in the series is the hardest of all to accept.  Learn it young and you can spare yourself a good deal of needless angst.  Suspend your wishful thinking now and understand the pure and existential truth of career making, perhaps life making:

There is no such thing as “If I just…”

If you just get over the hill ahead of you, I promise you almost without exception there is another hill that begins where that one ends, and in all likelihood it will be steeper causing you to sweat more.  If you just get through the performance review next week, I promise you almost without exception there is another one next year, and that next boss will probably not be any easier on you.  If you just get promoted to Director, I promise you almost without exception you will immediately set your sights on Senior Director, then VP, then Senior VP, then Executive VP, then Division President, and then you will feel empty until you move into the holding pattern awaiting to be ordained C-Level.

If you long for a game changer, you are likely Waiting for Godot.  No matter what you achieve in the here, there will always be a there, and another there behind it.  The solution is all too simple: stop deceiving yourself into believing today’s milestone somehow miraculously is The One that Solves The Problem.  It’s not.  It never is.  My apologies, but the system is designed that way.  It wants you to think there is a short-term fix to the long-term problem, but that’s just so you will work even harder at breaking the back of the short-term fix, which is what the system wants you to do, because it needs the short-term fix more than you do, and your motivation is a conduit to the short-term fix.  That’s the dangling carrot in front of the carriage, but you know, if the horse gets the carrot, there’s no reason for it to keep pulling the carriage.  Business is much better designed than the carriage, much more complex and enduring, not often second guessed in rapid succession.

Try this instead of projecting the fanciful: run a search and replace in your vocabulary for “If I just…” with “Because it’s now…”  Instead of “If I just get over this hill…” think in terms of “Because it’s now, I am going to observe everything I can on the way up this hill to see what is around me.”  Instead of “If I just get this promotion…” think in terms of “Because it’s now, I have the opportunity and ability to show my boss and peers my creativity in the otherwise crushing task I don’t know why I accepted.”  Instead of “If I just hold onto the stock a while longer…” think in terms of “Because it’s now I have ownership in a great company where my talents can add value to the mix every day.”  You get the idea, all you are doing is reframing the context of the exact same challenge you are taking on, but instead of seeing it as an exit strategy, you begin to see it as a continuum.

There is a very good reason this is more than semantics, more than some guru espousing the power of positive thinking (author’s sidebar: if you know me, you know I am not that guy).  Almost all of leadership stems from the ability to inspire and motivate.  If you can’t inspire and motivate yourself, your chance of helping others in this capacity is really quite low.  And I am understating how low that low can be.

There really is only one truly important career-making question I think we need to answer on a regular basis to keep climbing hill after hill as a journey rather than a series of destinations, a marathon instead of a series of sprints.  Try asking yourself at the end of each day, “What did I learn today?”  If you don’t have a good answer, try again tomorrow.  If a week or a month goes by and you still don’t have an answer, you are likely in a dire situation.  While you might be awaiting an “If I just…” moment, the people around you might be getting better at what they do, possibly at your expense.  In a flourishing environment, everyone learns together, that is The Journey.  If the environment is not flourishing, you may have a bigger problem than you think, it might be time to tackle that.  If you are in a flourishing environment and you are not flourishing, it probably is time to hear the words, “Because it’s now…”  Trust me on this, you don’t have much time, and any time you lose, you aren’t getting back.

When we enter the work force we think it is about what we get in compensation, perks, awards, and acknowledgment.  Each time those carrots get a little tastier, we realize that extrinsic rewards are soon supplanted and eventually replaced by intrinsic satisfaction.  That is when we come to understand that The Journey itself is why we set out on this path, not for what is at the end of the path, we don’t have a clue when or where that is.  The Journey itself is The Reward, because it constantly opens our eyes, teaches us, surprises us, allows us to see what was always there, and make better decisions to help others get down the trail with less deception and more learning.  With that Journey will certainly come material bounty, all facets of the “If I just…” mode of thinking.  Yet if you’re not seeing The Journey as its own Reward, you aren’t only missing the most important motivation of all, you might be stuck in the lobby for the whole show.

Every day will not bring party time, we all know that, and truth be told, setbacks will always outnumber successes, the math makes it so.  To revel only in successes is to allow ourselves to be consumed by the setbacks.  “Because it’s now…” makes all setbacks part of success.  That to me seems like an easier hill to climb, especially because we now understand, the hill we are climbing only trends upward for a reason — to see who figures it out, and what they do with that knowledge when they discover it.

Earn Each Moment.