Category Archives: Philosophy

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It’s Not What You Need, It’s Who You Help

Networking Can Be Learned, Once You Dump All Your Bad Habits
by Ken Goldstein
Fourth in a Series of Ten

Networking is of the most misunderstood and underappreciated activities in which we partake.  We are taught to begin networking as early as we can, in high school and college, to build our network of contacts so we know important people downstream who can help us improve all our metrics — financial results, recruitment, sales leads, and career development, just to name a few.  Yet even though we know we are supposed to network, do we have a clue what effective networking is?  How do we calculate an ROI on time spent, and oh how I despise this word, schmoozing?

Let’s start with the basics — schmoozing is not networking.  Idle chit chat at industry cocktail parties is not going to help you achieve a record quarter or land the gig of a lifetime.  You can point to examples where it worked, but you can also point to people who win the lottery.  In my experience, with the exception of sales people, no one really likes schmoozing — it’s weird, it’s thin, it’s shallow, and it’s uncomfortable.  To be clear, the best sales people I know only pretend to schmooze, what they are really doing in these circles is selling, because professional sales people are selling all the time.  So for everyone who is not in sales, let’s toss out schmoozing as a way to move forward.  If you have that kind of time on your hands, spend it with family and friends, you’ll have a much better and more honest day or evening.

Networking is the single best chance we have to make an impression on someone, an impression that lasts, possibly for the rest of the time you are on the planet.  What better way is there for you to make a positive impression, to get someone to remember you and care about you and think about taking your call?  Help them.  Help them any way you can.  Answer their email, return their call, listen to their problem or concern, and if you have something relevant to share, share it.  You want to know what we really appreciate in life and business?  Any simple act of kindness or respect.  Do it, do it often, trade your schmoozing time for helping time.  Do it now, it doesn’t matter if you are at the top or bottom of your game, if you are busy or bored.  Don’t discriminate, you are building a base of support and trust, you have no clue whatsoever where anyone around you will be in several years time.  They may be CEO, they may be down and out, they matter equally; in another year’s time, the tables can turn very quickly.

So once you help someone, it’s like The Godfather, right?  They owe you a favor?  Fuggedaboutit.  You give and offer to give because it’s the right thing to do.  You do it selflessly and without expectation.  You do it because it feels good and right to you.  You do not keep score.  If you network correctly, you forget every act you ever did to help someone so you never make the awful mistake of reminding them.  Let them remember.  They will.

Successful networking is like successful investing, it’s long term results that matter.  I can’t tell you how immensely consistent a theme this has been in my own life.  My contacts list is something I cherish, I can call any one of the people I consider contacts and they will get back to me promptly.  Why, because they think I have something for them?  No, because we have a human connection.  With that human connection comes access and trust.  Do not mistake this for friendship, it might be friendship, but that is rare.  It is a covenant of interchange, where connection and productivity are rooted in history.

You want history?  Start now.  Help someone today, then again tomorrow.  You will be shocked at just how powerful your network grows in the years to come, and how satisfied you feel to be part of an endlessly winning circle.

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When an A Minus is an F

Good Enough is Not Good
by Ken Goldstein
Third in a Series of Ten

Doug Carlston was the inspirational and visionary CEO and co-Founder of Broderbund Software when I had the privilege of joining that one-of-kind company.  Throughout my earliest meetings with Doug and repeated my first day on the job, he told me, “The world is filled with 90 percenters; in product development 90% is just enough to lose everything you have.”

We all grew up with a school grading system where 90% was an A-, certainly not an A+, but nothing you were usually afraid to show your parents or tell your friends. On the strict GPA scale, 90% got you the same 4.0 added to your cumulative tally (divided by 1) as 100%, so even though you might lose the bragging rights of a full A or a rare A+, in terms of your GPA it was mission accomplished, you had squeaked by with a top mark.

In business, squeaking by won’t cut it. We live in a fully global landscape with minimal constraints on distribution, vast market fragmentation, unending innovation, and almost unquantifiable competition for the loyalty of customers.  In almost every category of products and services, customers have immeasurable choices, more choices every year, month, week, and hour. Even in a society like ours that celebrates great deals and value prices, trying to keep a customer’s loyalty with products that reflect “good enough for what you paid” is a path to pure disaster. You may get away with it for a while, but you won’t build a great company like Apple.

Think of it this way, suppose you paid even for the cheapest seats to the symphony, and the symphony got 90% of the notes right. OK, rough extreme, you’d be gone by the first break, probably try to sneak out before. Suppose your hometown baseball team played 90% error free, that’s an A-, right? Gone. Suppose 90% of the features worked on your car, would you buy another of the same brand? Or your desktop software could be counted on to work 90% of the time (some of us learned to live with that for many years, until competition showed it was an unacceptable standard). You get the idea, 90% excellence for a consumer product or service as a sustainable proposition that will delight and “enchant” customers and bring them back to you time and again is an absurdity.

So where do 90% products comes from, and how do they still get released to market with a prayer for success? Do we think our marketing colleagues can just smooth everything over with a good story and reassure customers who are angry 10% of the time? If you think that, I invite you to request a shift on the phones in your company’s customer service department, I dare you to listen for an hour and try not to rethink everything you are doing. Listen to yourself the next time you call customer service to “offer feedback,” your tone may reflect much less than 90% satisfaction.  When you call, remember, they need you way more than you need them.  In your business, same thing, you need them way more than they need you. 

The point is that 90% products come from 90% employees, probably not all of them, and very unlikely intentional — very few of us set out happily on a path to be “good enough” but as deadlines approach, we test the corporate culture to see what is valued most. What Doug taught us at Broderbund over and over is that in business, getting to 90% is just not that hard, so many people can do it, it’s just not worth celebrating. You could often look at a Broderbund product development schedule and see we’d try to get to 90%, either Alpha or Beta, in a few months, leaving a year or even two to release the product. What’s that I say, 90% of the schedule for the final 10% of the product? That’s because in Doug’s mind, the final 10% of the product was the product, the 90% working model was the fun and easy part, the “inspiration phase” as another great inventor coined the phrase.

If you allow 90% employees to inhabit your company culture and let them think they are succeeding with 90% success again and again, you continue to allow your world to be filled with 90 percenters. It’s wrong, you don’t want them, and you can’t allow it. Customers work hard for the money that pays for their goods and services, just like you do, they deserve 100% all the time, and now they expect it. A 90 percenter is an evangelist for mediocrity. Besides, it’s no fun to squeak by, thinking that being a 90 percenter will either secure you a sense of accomplishment or a basket of rewards. See through the 90% haze with 100% people, and you have a shot at delivering robust, breakthrough, world-changing products and services that reflect the hard work and true values you believe are worthy of your brand.

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Why Revere Talent?

The People Factor
by Ken Goldstein
Second in a Series of Ten

Talent is a tremendously overused term, often in an almost commoditized sense.  Be advised, talent is not a commodity, not in the least.  Talent is a gift, and like anyone who has or receives a gift, it must be nourished, nurtured, protected, developed, and polished.  Talent is best developed by experience; without hard won field play, the full potential of talent is too often unrealized.  Talent is elusive and unpredictable, but realized in sweat and support.  You know it when you see it, and you know when you see it being wasted.  This is The People Factor, very real and very human, which drives the workplace… or not.

One of my favorite exchanges of all time on this topic is from the 1988 movie Bull Durham, where Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis, the catcher who could have been, let’s loose on Tim Robbins’s Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, the pitcher who could be —

LaLoosh: How come you don’t like me?
Davis: Because you don’t respect yourself, which is your problem. But you don’t respect the game, and that’s my problem. You got a gift.
LaLoosh: I got a what?
Davis: You got a gift. When you were a baby, the Gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you’re pissing it away.
LaLoosh: I ain’t pissing nothing away. I got a Porsche already; a 911 with a quadrophonic Blaupunkt.
Davis: Christ, you don’t need a quadrophonic Blaupunkt! What you need is a curveball! In the show, everyone can hit heat.
LaLoosh: Well, how would you know? YOU been in the majors?
Davis: Yeah, I’ve been in the majors.

Crash wanted to stay in The Show more than anything in life, and he was good, but not good enough.  Nuke took The Show for granted, and did everything he could to let it slip away.  Crash found his real talent was mentoring, and showed Nuke that if he didn’t start taking his talent seriously, it hardly mattered that he ever had it.

Talent in the workplace is like that.  We are all born with some talent, sometimes we just don’t know what it is and we wish it were otherwise.  Yet once we come to a true sense of honesty about what that talent is, I believe we have an almost moral responsibility to put it to its test.  To squander talent is no more noble than to push cash in a barrel and burn it, because if you don’t give your talent its full work out, that’s what you are doing.

Likewise, as a manager, recognizing and mentoring talent is not just your job, it is your calling.  While some individuals will understate or overstate their own talent, it is a leader’s responsibility to cut through the muck and help talent rise to it’s potential.  The cream does not rise in the workplace all by itself, would that it were true, but bureaucracy and politics have a tendency to maintain the status quo and hold people back to keep the norm at the mean — hey, it’s easier to be graded when the curve is soft, we all know that!  So a manager has to see clearly, be bold, and be a champion for talent.  If you’ve been a boss, you know the difference between having empowered talent at your side and having mediocrity swamp you with excuses; you can’t win with mediocrity, not a chance.

Career fulfillment is part unlocking your own talent, but much more unlocking that of those around you.  As you experience the results of winning and just how much helping others achieve their potential matters, you come to understand that talent is not ordinary, it is rare.  When you are in the company of talent, everyone does better.  Helping others unlock talent is also one of the most satisfying experiences you can ever enjoy at work, and one you take with you when you leave any particular job and travel onward.

Never take talent for granted, it is precious.  Revere the gift!

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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

Getting to 50-50 by Sharon Meers and Joanna StroberThey 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.