Work is Personal. The Work Matters. I'm in an EMBA program right now, but I view this journey as something that started long before that program, and which will continue long after -- continuous learning, continuous improvement, a "Perpetual MBA".
Looking through the logs this month, I was surprised to see that Salary Expectations was the second highest read individual post.
You Can Negotiate Anything is the title of one of the books we read for our MBA session on Negotiations. So I asked Drew for an update -- he told me that after that second set of interviews, with the CTO and another manager, the recruiter again pressured him for a salary 'expectation'. He wasn't well prepared and she talked him into revealing his current salary.
Now, our session on Salary Negotiations is coming up next week but I'm fairly certain that if you're looking to maximize your salary in a transition, revealing your current salary is not a good idea. Of course, there are many other reasons to consider a new job -- maybe the job responsibilities (increased or decreased), work environment, or commute are more important than the salary. But all else being equal, why not get paid more?
Since then, Drew called the recruiter back to check on the progress. They said they would have an offer to him by the end of the week. As of last Thursday, he hadn't heard anything more. No offer may mean his negotiations have stalled -- I also reminded him that silence can be one of the most powerful things in negotiation. Since he has a good job, he's in a position of power: he doesn't have to accept anything less than his ideal.
Hopefully after our class next weekend I'll have something useful for him.
Tags: salary, negotiations, career, pmba, job+search
Looking through the logs this month, I was surprised to see that Salary Expectations was the second highest read individual post.
You Can Negotiate Anything is the title of one of the books we read for our MBA session on Negotiations. So I asked Drew for an update -- he told me that after that second set of interviews, with the CTO and another manager, the recruiter again pressured him for a salary 'expectation'. He wasn't well prepared and she talked him into revealing his current salary.
Now, our session on Salary Negotiations is coming up next week but I'm fairly certain that if you're looking to maximize your salary in a transition, revealing your current salary is not a good idea. Of course, there are many other reasons to consider a new job -- maybe the job responsibilities (increased or decreased), work environment, or commute are more important than the salary. But all else being equal, why not get paid more?
Since then, Drew called the recruiter back to check on the progress. They said they would have an offer to him by the end of the week. As of last Thursday, he hadn't heard anything more. No offer may mean his negotiations have stalled -- I also reminded him that silence can be one of the most powerful things in negotiation. Since he has a good job, he's in a position of power: he doesn't have to accept anything less than his ideal.
Hopefully after our class next weekend I'll have something useful for him.
Tags: salary, negotiations, career, pmba, job+search
This is what passes for fun these days -- let's see how these interwebs really work... I reported a few weeks ago that LinkedIn actually works, in that I was able to connect to a person I did not know that was three or four 'degrees' away from me, for the purposes of striking up a conversation about life after getting an MBA. (A post that seems to have disappeared into the ether... odd.)
For our EMBA "Action Learning Project" this semester, we are looking at the marketing strategy and some potential tactics for one of my colleagues firms. We wanted to unleash a viral marketing effort, but at the same time we knew the message had to hit a fairly specific group of hard to reach executives that would ultimately be the decision-makers.
A viral campaign is fine if you want to reach out to everybody and their brother -- a classic example is JibJab, which circluated to just about everybody on the net, and then mutated and crossed the web/tv chasm to be featured on CNN and the Today Show. Now THAT's viral.
But we struggled with how to reach the specific targets with a viral campaign. The allusion I made was "how could you give Bill Gates a cold?" You could spread the cold virus to as many people as possible that you think Bill would come in contact with, but most of us don't have access to Steve Ballmer either, and if either one of them demonstrates decent hygene Bill will never get your cold.
Now does Bill ever suffer from a cold or the flu? I'm sure he does, just like everyone else. I'm sure he saw the JibJab bits too, at least when the first one hit it big. But your virus has got to be that big in order to reach those kind of people, and I don't know of anyone that has been able to engineer an ideavirus that effectively.
OK, so enough about BillG, let's try a variation... I want Dennis VanDusen to read this post. I met Dennis on a project a few jobs ago, and I've been thinking about looking him up and finding out what he's up to, filling him in on my MBA progress (something he advised me about some seven years ago), that kind of thing. I went to his web site and got his email address, and I could email him, but I'd rather see how long it would take for this message to get to him.
Some ground rules -- if you know me and you happen to know him or can figure out his web site address, don't just forward this to him. I'd like a new reader, somebody that I have never actually met but who knows Dennis (or knows someone who knows him, or at least has heard of him), to make the re-introduction.
So Dennis, when you read this, please let me know in the comments. If this works, next time I'll reach out to BillG.
That's my takeaway from our session last weekend. We discussed several case studies and looked at some 3PL (third party logistics) offerings. It was a great class, don't get me wrong, but Manoj really summed it up for me with that simple statement.
During our discussion I said that one of the potential downfalls of outsourcing your supply chain management was that you're leveling the playing field -- you no longer have the opportunity to outgun the competition in that respect. If it's not your specialty that may be to your benefit, but echoing in my head was a rant by Tom Peters about how if everyone adheres to generalized best-practices then industries will miss out on the innovations that change the competitive landscape. So even if your SCM is sub-optimal in the short run, it might make sense to keep it in house and improve on it because you could leapfrog the competition in the long run. Or something like that.
As we broke, Manoj and I were going over some of the finer points of the afternoon, and he boiled it down to its essence: supply chain management is just like information technology (IT) -- no organization can exist without IT, and it's hard to excel with just average IT. Best-practices IT is just the baseline.
Supply-chain's dependence on IT will multiply the problem; your IT architecture has to be up-to-snuff before you can even consider significant supply chain integration. As a result, companies will shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to all tiers of consultants, integrators, and 3PLs to create and execute initiatives which will have incredibly high failure rates (if IT projects are any predictor), all just to keep up with a baseline in their industry. On top of that, they'll have to excel at some other aspect of their business in order to keep from being consumed or killed off.
The good news is, of course, some will excel. And many others will maintain their comparative baseline and sustain themselves.
This all seemed very revolutionary when Manoj said it, but perhaps that was because we had just finished 20 hrs of classroom study within two days and we were feeling a little fried. Now the premature enlightenment has worn off; businesses can't live without IT, can't live without Quality, can't live without efficient processes -- those things just have to be there, and while some industries are just starting to figure it out, supply chain management is the same.
Tags: supply+chain, IT, pmba
Most companies have it all wrong. They don't have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.
Interesting read at Harvard Business School - Working Knowledge... They identify three goals of people at work: Equity, Achievement, and Camaradarie. I'd buy that.
And the authors of the article have also written a book: The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want. I'll have to check that out.
This is also the theme of Zapp!, which I just finished reading and will be reviewing soon.
Tags: motivation, demotivation, HBS, pmba
Tom Raferty wrote that in all his time blogging, he has never been offered a job. From reading that post I'm not surprised, I can't tell what it is that he wants to do -- does he wants to blog full time? Based on his blog output, nobody needs to pay him to do it. Maybe some the rest of his blog gives more insight into his true aspirations (and yes, I will be reading more of his work to find out).
But the idea is interesting. When I think of people getting work through blogging, I think of people like Seth and Hugh and other author/speakers. But their blogs are not landing them a 'job', they're establishing relationships which results in consulative-type work.
Which works for me... and for the record, I am gainfully employed -- but like almost everyone else I would entertain other opportunities. I'm really eager to apply some of the things I'm learning in my MBA program, possibly in a new environment. Possibly. I guess I need to consider getting a resume online...
Tags: career, blogging, job+search
I had to chuckle today in our Supply Chain class. You know that you are going to get a great story or dirty laundery when the professor asks if anyone from a certain organization is in the room.
Luckily we didn't have anyone from Bogomax in our class (Bogomax = a very large defense contractor), so we heard how after they had won a major full-lifecycle contract to supply a weapons system they called in our professor as a consultant. They have provided weapons and systems to Defense for decades, and had never in their history put together a network map to identify where the parts come from, where the production happens, and where the product is delievered.
Not to beat up Bogomax too much -- the Department of Defense had never gone through the procedure either. (This must have been a long time ago -- I'm sure they have been doing it for a long time now.)
[ironically, this is the best example of a supply chain network map I could find on the web -- if you know a non-proprietary one, please let me know].
Sorry, this wasn't supposed to be about supply chain management... it was supposed to be about professor dishing dirt. Whenever a new professor asks "Do we have any consultants in the class?" I no longer raise my hand -- I want to hear what they're going to say about consultants. Sometimes my classmates expose me before the professor delivers the punch line, sometimes they wait until after the observation before they point an accusing finger my way (jokingly, of course). It's all good fun.
Tags: consultants, gossip, class, fun
BusinessWeek bats about the predictable responses to the Personal MBA:
In the article, and on Josh's blog, PMBA proponents keep mentioning the 80/20 principle, arguing that you can get 80% of the benefit of the MBA through the PMBA readings and discussion. I argued against in Josh's comment section:
I understand that the PMBA is designed to Pareto’s 80/20 principle, but respectfully I agree with Kevin, I don’t think these books provide 80% of a complete MBA education.
I just did a little excercise, coming up with the top 5 things I feel I’m getting out of an MBA and rating their contribution to the total. Reading/content accounted for about 15%, but Assignments/Exams (20%) and Classmates/Interactive (30%) easily make up half of my MBA experience. Furthermore, the program often looks at the same organizations through the different disciplines (financial accounting, microecon, macroecon, finance, human capital/HR, etc) so there is a synergistic effect (15%) to a curriculum (and trust me, I hate the misuse of the word ’synergy’) that just can’t be matched by reading unrelated books. Guidance from and access to professors contributes the final 20%.
So while it’s a great initial effort, I’m afraid the PMBA only can claim to cover the 20%, not the 80%.
[Yes, I realize I just quoted myself. No, I do not take myself too seriously.]
More...
BusinessWeek: Is the MBA Overrated?
That Kid In The Corner: The 3 minute 17 second MBA
(Disclaimer: I haven't read The World Is Flat. Everyone raves about it. That makes me skeptical. I will read it when someone loans it to me.)
But as the Hardvard Business Review so eloquently put it, "The World Is Round". The main theme of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat is that worldwide the global playing field is being leveled due to technology (connectivity) and political forces.
Not so fast, says HBR.
The playing field Friedman describes is, of course, level—flattened by the unfettered flow of information. “Bill Gates has a nice line,” Friedman continued. “[Gates] says, 20 years ago, would you rather have been a B-student in Poughkeepsie or a genius in Shanghai? Twenty years ago you’d rather be a B-student in Poughkeepsie. Today?…Not even close. You’d much prefer to be the genius in Shanghai because you can now export your talents anywhere in the world.”
Yes, we are interconnected on a truly astonishing scale. But Gates, Friedman, and many others make a fundamental error when they argue that brute connectivity will level the playing field, giving that twentysomething in Shanghai the ability to compete head-to-head with anyone, anywhere in the world. Their mistake is that they’re confusing information with knowledge. [link]
Their article opens with the idea that in 2005, someone somewhere was the one billionth person to "log on" to the Internet, and that statistically they are most likely to be a 24-year old woman in Shanghai. Access to information is not the great democratizing force, converting information to knowledge is.
The same mentality exists within our borders -- there seems to be this idea that if only America can increase the level of broadband Internet coverage, or get more computers in classrooms, that we will somehow propel more of our population into the Knowledge Economy. But without context and guidance, the torrent of information will not be anything that can be converted to useful knowledge. My expectation is that more people will turn to the net to satisfy America's core competencies: consumerism and entertainment. Unfortunately.
There is enormous potential for both information and knowledge, no doubt, but to assume that knowledge immediately follows access to information is naive.
Tags: HBR, world, flat, friedman, information, knowledge, pmba
Supply chain management not only reaches back to all of your suppliers, and possibly their suppliers, it also looks forward through your channels to your customers and the end-users (the demand chain). It seems that Micosoft underestimated the effort required by their OEMs (original equipment manufacturers -- Dell, HP, and such) and that's why they publicly delayed Windows Vista.
Apparently, the Release To Manufacture (RTM/Gold?) date for Vista hasn't slipped, meaning the date that they plan to create installation CDs and even OEM installation packages, but they are delaying the public release of Vista because the OEMs need more time to test the new operating system before they install it on their hardware. After all, if you purchase a Dell computer and it doesn't boot or recognize all of it's hardware when it arrives at your house, it's Dell's problem -- not Microsoft's. Dell has stringent testing programs to guarantee that doesn't happen -- all the top-tier computer manufacturers do.
As Cringely wrote:
The only shocking thing here is that this seems to have somehow taken Microsoft by surprise. If they didn't realize internally that shipping a new OS for Christmas means getting final bits to the OEMs in July, they have problems in the Windows division far beyond just their ability to ship.
If I recall correctly, none of the previous Windows releases have attempted to coincide with a Christmas sales season. Microsoft dealt with last year's XBox360 deployment, and whether it was a console shortage or marketing genius is probably still up for debate. For them to miss the mark on Vista and Christmas/06 is significant. Maybe they were too distracted by Origami.
The Smith School of Business is hosting their sixth annual Netcentricity Conference April 28th from 8:00am to 4:30pm.
Welcome to the Sixth Annual Netcentricity Conference. Characterized by global connectivity, real-time collaboration and rapid, continuous information exchange, netcentricity is reshaping every facet of our lives. Please join the Robert H. Smith School of Business as leading researchers in information systems, operations, supply chain management, and electronic markets gather to assess and predict "The Future of the Digital Enterprise." This event offers participants a vision of the future of digital business from multiple perspectives.
I have not yet been to one of Smith's conferences, but I expect great things based on their Executive MBA program. The conference is open to the public -- click on the link at the top for more information.
Tags: Smith, Maryland, conference, netcentric
Seth Godin mentioned Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA today; I wonder what he would think of my concept of the Perpetual MBA?
I was thinking about it today, and "Perpetual Master" of something doesn't sound right, so maybe I should refer to it as the Perpetual Personal Pursuit of Mastery in Business Administration -- the P3MBA. But then "Administration" sounds like it is just tacked on the end. How about Perpetual Personal Pursuit of Mastery in Business, Eh? -- to reflect my Canadian roots?
The P3MBeh?. Nah, I'll stick with being 'the other' PMBA.
"Hope is the raw material of losers"
Whenever I hear someone start a sentence with "I hope...", I am reminded of that quote. Usually it's OK because people are "hoping" for pretty weak things, like "I hope I win the lottery", "I hope I get a raise" or "I hope I did well on that exam". Hope can't help you there.
He may not have originated the quote, but I first heard it in an article about Fernando Flores in Fast Company back in 1999. He's blunt, but he has a right to be hostile -- he has (quite literally and personally) been persecuted, as a political prisoner under Augusto Pinochet.
Flores knows about words and how they translate directly into deeds. He knows that talk is never cheap -- he often charges more than $1 million for his services, a fee that is linked directly to specific promises of increased revenues and savings. He also knows that talk is the source of these executives' failure. Their words work against them -- which is why they can't get anything to work for them.
Talk all you want to, Flores says, but if you want to act powerfully, you need to master "speech acts": language rituals that build trust between colleagues and customers, word practices that open your eyes to new possibilities. Speech acts are powerful because most of the actions that people engage in -- in business, in marriage, in parenting -- are carried out through conversation. But most people speak without intention; they simply say whatever comes to mind. Speak with intention, and your actions take on new purpose. Speak with power, and you act with power. [link]
His method of transforming organizations looks like tough-love or humilation, but it seems to be able to break through the paralyzing power of weak words and build trust and openness.
Flores is making a larger point about the real source of strength in business. "In the western mind, there are two notions of compassion," he explains. "One is, I'm going to be a good Samaritan and help this guy. But that is the compassion of the weak. The compassion of the strong is in waking people up to their blindness. For that, you need to be a warrior. I am tough and sweet. I show you your bullshit, but I'm also infinitely patient with you." Flores stands up very straight and addresses the group. "Know this," he announces. "We aren't aware of the amount of self-deception and self-limitation that we collect in our personalities. I'm fighting for freedom, for breadth of being. I want to open up people's moral imaginations -- which will give them a strategic advantage in business, in politics, and in their personal lives."
Transforming words. The Fast Company article isn't long -- give it a read.
Tags: hope, losers, transformation, power+of+words, pmba, compassion
"You can and should shape your own future; because if you don't someone else surely will."
And for leaders, "No one will thank you for taking care of the present if you have neglected the future." -- Joel Barker
Today our Mastery class introduced us to the Implications Wheel, a tool/process developed by Joel A. Barker ("The Paradigm Man") that help organizations understand the wide range of possible implications of events and actions.
There is a real difference between specific implications of individual events and the end result of several events. All too often, a conclusion is predicted based on a single event -- the classic example seems to be "if Wal-Mart moves into town, small businesses will fold." Jumping to that conclusion a huge leap, and there are many intermediate implications that need to be considered before giving such a prognosis. Alternate decisions or actions at the intermediate steps could result in dramatically different outcomes.
While the Implications Wheel is intended to build out from the originating event ("Wal-Mart is moving in; one possibility of Wal-Mart moving in is that our sales will decrease 30%"), it seems that you could also back into the first and second level implications from generalized end-results. Why might you go out of business? (Revenue may not cover expenses.) Why not? (Because sales may decrease by 30%). Why? (Because Wal-Mart can price items below your prices, and possibly below your costs).
That's a pretty simplistic deduction, but the real power of the Implications Wheel is that participants need to look at each intermediate implication and consider it on it's own. What are the alternative implications of sales reducing by 30%? Perhaps your business can focus on a different product offering. Perhaps you can focus on high-margin products that won't be as immediately affected by Wal-Mart's low-cost strategy. Those higher-end products require more specialized employees to sell and service customers - a cost to you but a benefit to employees and the community. Wal-Mart was actually the example we worked through (considering implications of Wal-Mart moving into urban locations), and there were many potentially positive implications -- far from the doom-and-gloom predictions that Wal-Mart generally generates from the media.
Our class was just an introduction to the Implications Wheel, and we struggled through our initial excercises because it was unclear how specific each implication should be, and it not always clear if our ideas were direct implications or conclusions that were several implications away. Generally, I found we tried to come up with the final outcomes, and it was difficult for us to identify the steps between -- proving exactly how the exercise can be so useful.
Tags: implications, future, paradigm+shift, wal-mart, pmba
Our professor today related this story in our Supply Chain Management class:
In the mid-90's, a car manufacturer found themselves with excessive stock of green cars because consumers didn't desire green cars anymore. To move the excess inventory through the system, the sales department authorized attractive incentives to dealers to sell the cars. The incentives worked, but nobody had communicated the promotion plans to the manufacturing department. Manufacturing saw sales of green cars increasing and subsequently ramped up production. The result: even more green cars that consumers didn't want.
It's not really related, but I keep hearing that one of the ways RFID will improve the supply chain is by tracking retail product as it is lifted from the store shelf. So once you take the ketchup off the shelf at the grocery store, the distributor and manufacturer can modify their decisions. I question the usefulness of that data -- surely the elapsed time between the shelf and the checkout (where consumer demand typically enters the supply chain system today) is on the order of minutes, not hours and certainly not days. Frankly, taking the product off the shelf is not a transaction -- not until we integrate checkout features with the shopping cart, and I suppose that could happen soon. Of course, whenever I object to RFID I feel like the guy who didn't think that the integrated circuit was going to be a big deal... so I accept that I might not be seeing the whole picture.
I was having a hard time relating to some of these SC constructs to consulting, but something just became very clear when our professor asked for examples of SC issues from our experiences. In IT consulting, our raw materials are people. Our inventory holding costs equate to bench-time (beach-time). Our demand signals are probably our weakest link -- do we need someone next week or next month, and do we need someone with 5 years of experience or 10 years, and in what skillsets? So it's much more related to professional services than I previously thought.
Tags: supply+chain, demand+signals, RFID, consulting
Matthias Gelbmann says he has written "a satirical approach to software project management" -- but it didn't seem all that satirical to me, it seemed eeirily familiar. The lessons include:
Each lesson has a complete description and examples; read the whole thing. Probably more important if you're a customer or higher-level management, but if you're on the project team you'll want to know the dangers to watch out for as well.
Tags: project+management, satire, pmba
Management Issues has an interesting article on the desires of many employees to be agile and work under new arrangements, and employer's reluctance to accomodate the changes.
In a survey of over 2000 people from 32 countries, Ci found that almost half (45%) are either "Flexers" or "Agile Performers", groupings which describe people who are seeking new ways of working.
Their frustration is so great that around four out of 10 of these two groups say they are planning to leave their employer within the next 12 months, and almost half of them would be willing to give up some of their pay to achieve a more flexible working arrangement. [link]
I thought this sounded like the most interesting idea, and then I realized it's because it sounds like the consulting relationships I'm comfortable with -- but imagine applying it to more traditional job functions:
Ci also suggests bringing together managers and staff to try out ideas such as "semi-employment" – payment of a retainer to employees for specific work, who may be paid more for additional projects when needed. This leaves them free to pursue other activities and to work for other employers. [link]
I've proposed different "semi-employment" arrangements over the past few years -- it sounds like a good idea to me. This might help America remain globally competitive, since apparently we're not even as productive than the French (we work longer, not smarter or harder -- and you don't know how much it pains me to say that). It appears that Canadians may be leading the way in "spurning the grindstone".
Tags: agile+workforce, productivity, flexwork, free+agent
A friend of mine is considering a new job. Drew has gone through a phone screen/interview and a face-to-face interview. They didn't post a salary range, and he forgot to ask, so he emailed the recruiter he's dealing with and she said:
I'm sorry not to answer your question, Andrew. Our salary and benefits packages are competitive to the industry market. Give me your current salary expectations and I can run that number by our CAO and see if it's even worth your while to come in here on Thursday.
Best Regards,
A.D.T.
He asked me what to make of it, and frankly I don't have a clue. I told him something I heard in class last weekend regarding negotiations -- never make the first offer. If you come in lower than their upper-limit, then you've just set the upper threshold. If you just sit and wait, their initial offer may be better than what you thought you could negotiate and it becomes your starting point.
Still, it doesn't make sense that the company would be recruiting for a position and they don't have an idea what the salary would be. Anybody have any ideas?
Tags: salary+negotiations, career, pmba, recruiting, job+search
