All in Careers
Episode 23 of the podcast is now available and this month, I share stories from my life in Management Consulting, where I spent a decade prior to my entrepreneurial journey. And some of my most interesting lessons from that time had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with people.
The word “partnership” is used quite liberally these days, across just about all aspects of our lives - from the personal to the professional, whether we’re talking about our relationships, about our work colleagues or our suppliers and customers.
But what do we really mean, in any of these contexts, when we use that term?
I recently heard a talk by Bob Myers, General Manager of the Golden State Warriors, on leadership, values and culture in winning teams. It was a great speech and there were many points he raised that made sense, and really resonated with me. (I’ll write about a couple of them in future posts.)
Episode 22 is now available and this episode wraps up our discussion about Marketing and Sales - specifically, how we casually use terms such as "marketing bullshit" and why that points to a deeper, underlying problem within the company.
Cas Hardware - a small hardware retail business in my neighborhood - closed its doors recently after 41 years. It had become a fixture of the Andersonville community and was a place where “the management” was folks you could get to know, who would be on hand to answer your questions, give advice if you needed it and take care of any purchases you needed to make.
If you’ve ever committed to learning a song on a musical instrument, you’ll know that there’s a certain amount of struggle that’s involved in the process.
Part of this struggle is knowing the technical details - where do I put my fingers, what chords do I play, what are the timings and how should I think about the phrasings here or there.
Back when I was in Business School, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Michigan/Ross Business School universe was a gentleman by the name of C.K. Prahalad. In fact, forget the Ross world, Professor Prahalad was, alongside Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, arguably the best thinker in the world on the subject of Corporate Strategy.
I mean, this was the guy who gave us the term, Core Competence of the corporation, and got us thinking about what it was that a business really did.
Episode 20 of the podcast is now available and today’s episode focuses on the importance of standing your ground when working with a customer. We like to say that the customer is always right, but sometimes, a little tough love goes a long way, even if it puts us at commercial risk.
Those Marketing folks - what do they do?
Why do we need to hire another marketing person?
Is it really necessary to spend that on Marketing?
You see it time and time again - organizations have this funny relationship and view of Marketing.
We love the mystique that Apple has built around its business and think it’s entirely down to its products.
Episode 19 of the podcast is now available and this episode kicks off this month's focus on Sales and Marketing - subjects that are both loved and hated.
“Is a dream alive if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruce’s words from The River. There’s a gravity in them - a sense of frustration, but more than that, a sense of finality and hopelessness.
Now, I know the specifics of that song and the context within which he sang those words, but as with all things Bruce, his words apply to so much of how we live our lives and the paths we choose to take and the people we choose to love.
Episode 18 of the podcast is now available and this episode wraps up this month's conversation around aspirations, a subject that's not only topical for this time of year but also central to our ability to achieve and become who we want to be.
This is going to come out wrong but sometimes I feel the worst thing you can do is tell someone that they’re doing amazingly well.
Now, before you react, let me explain. I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing to recognize great performance by someone you work with - I think that’s absolutely essential. I’m also not suggesting that we shouldn’t be positive or motivational with family, friends and colleagues - it’s important that we help each other along positive intent and actions.
The year was 1995 and I’d just started in Management Consulting. Those first few months were interesting, exciting and (very) busy. I hadn’t been staffed on a project as yet, so I busied myself by helping several partners with proposal development and pitch work. That involved lots of research, coordination of different perspectives and inputs across the firm, and plenty of deck preparation.
As a result, the hours were long. A typical day started at around 8 am and if I wrapped up by 9 or 10 pm, that was a ‘good’ day because it meant I could get a decent night’s sleep.
Episode 17 of the podcast is now available and this episode continues this month's conversation around aspirations, a subject that's not only topical for this time of year but also central to our ability to achieve and become who we want to be.
“I remember perfectly well what life was like before (having my own kids). Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that?
See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.” - Paul Graham
(SPOILER ALERT: While I’m not specifically giving anything away in this post, I do reference a key quote from the movie “Ad Astra”. If you haven’t seen the movie and plan to, you might want to skip this post until then.)
Long flights are pretty much the only place I catch up on my movies, and my recent international trip was no exception, when I caught up on the Brad Pitt film, Ad Astra. (Reviews are mixed but I found it to be exceptional.)
Episode 16 of the podcast is now available and this episode continues this month's conversation around aspirations, a subject that's not only topical for this time of year but also central to our ability to achieve and become who we want to be.
There’s a perennial debate about the value of generalists versus specialists, that is, are we better off as generalists or should we all work to become specialists. We all tend to have a particular view as to which one is actually better, certainly from a career development perspective. And usually our point of view is encapsulated in a popular figure of speech - or at least the portion(s) of it that we quote, to serve our case.
If we believe in the generalist approach, we like to use the term “Jack of all trades”, as in “She’s so versatile, she’s a Jack of all trades”.
I’m trying to get my head around the psyche of successful people when they’re pursuing a specific, ambitious goal. Not specifically about the actual goal that is set, or the process of going after that goal (the breaking up of it into manageable chunks, the diligence to work on one bit at a time, the refinement and redirection as you learn from each specific execution, etc.). Rather, the mindset that these folks have as they work to get what they want.
