Something Worth Doing
November 22, 2006
I know I have quite a few readers from the Toronto area (at least according to Google Analytics – if you’re in the Toronto area right now, there’s a seminar that you should check out.
The seminar is the Directions To Success one-evening seminar run by a good friend of mine, Gregory C.N. Smith. Greg’s one of the most powerful speakers I’ve met in the past few years, with a razor quick mind and a great sense of humor. Best of all, he’s a hell of a teacher – the man knows his stuff.
But don’t take it from me – here’s Greg’s promise: “Give me 5 minutes with anyone and I can tell them how to achieve their goals and aspirations and what limits them from succeeding in life.”
And he’ll do it, too.
And even better about this seminar – it’s free. Doesn’t cost a thing. Greg’s doing it just to get his message out there – I’m sure that once you hear him speak, you’ll find yourself wanting to improve your life.
As I said, Greg’s a friend, so I’m biased, but I know you’ll get a lot out of it if you go. It’s at 401 & Dixie, Thursday night, November 23. If you’re within 100 Km of Toronto, you should make sure that you get yourself there.
Go here to check out the seminar and let Gregory know that you’re interested in attending.
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The “New Math” of Marketing
November 21, 2006
“there’s a real need, almost a desperate need, for the 999,000 vibrant webpages that aren’t in the top 1,000 in traffic to find a way to get there.”
Unfortunately, that’s the problem that most marketers have. They’re trying to stuff 1,000,000 sites into the top 1000. This is what leads to a real distrust of brands and marketing out there – not every product in the world can be “the best”, “the cheapest”, “the coolest”, etc.
This is what branding and positioning is all about – it’s about realizing that not every blog needs to be in the Top 100 to be a massive success – perhaps it only needs to be in the “Top 100 Bonobo Chimpanzee Sociology” blogs. Or whatever your market is. The key is market segmentation.
For whatever other faults you may think the book had, this is the point that The Long Tail
Interview at “Business Networking Advice”
November 21, 2006
One of my newest favorite sites is Business Networking Advice – over there, Josh interviews all kinds of really interesting people about their views on how to be a better networker. It’s a great window into the thoughts and minds of all of the great networkers out there in the world.
Today, Josh interviewed me. While networking isn’t something that I talk about a lot on here, it’s a vital skill (and one we’re going to talk about in depth at the teleseminar series.
Click here to check out the interview.
Teleseminar – Integrated Thinking for IT with Linda Ferguson
November 21, 2006
The first episode of the Episteme IT/InfoSec Career Portfolio Teleseminar & Podcast Series will feature my brilliant colleague and fellow blogger Linda Ferguson.
I have trained with Linda (and her business partner Chris Keeler) for almost 3 years – I first met Linda back in 2004 shortly after I had arrived in Canada to open the Toronto R&D office for nCircle. I had long looked for someone who really “got it” as far as training in NLP goes – there are a significant number of people out there who are simply training a lot of regurgitated material from the 1970s and 1980s. I was looking to work with trainers who were willing to go looking outside the traditional “NLP” literature and incorporate all of the newest information from science and business communication to create something completely new. And I found that in Linda and Chris.
In the time that I have worked with them, they have completely surpassed the “old” ways of NLP, advancing the research beyond the original skills to bring in elements of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and new ways of understanding the way that we communicate, emote and think in order to create a course that is called “Integrated Thinking”.
And, having gone through the course, I realized that Integrated Thinking is a skillset that most IT people are lacking most of the time. While I know that you can probably remember a time when you looked at a problem and saw all of the facets… and the answer just clicked for you and you knew exactly how to get there, it probably doesn’t happen often enough. One of the things that Linda has been great at teaching is that you can realize that there are multiple perspectives, multiple views, and multiple ways of creating a more rich and elegant understanding of the tasks that you’re attempting to perform on a daily basis. And how to make that sense of knowing just seem a little more effortless.
So, I asked Linda to kick off the teleseminar series with me, because I know that she’s going to have some brilliant thoughts to share with us. For examples of her thoughts, check out her articles on “What’s Stopping You?” and “Making Tough Decisions”.
The teleseminar is going to take place at 1PM PST/4PM EST on Tuesday, November 28. Click here to sign Up For the Mailing List to get the call-in info.
If you have questions that you would like to see Linda and I talk about, please leave them in the comments below.
The Decline of Hardball
November 20, 2006
I was sitting in a cafe inside a Barnes & Noble recently, and a woman left a pile of business books on the table next to me. The one on the top of the pile was entitled Hardball For Women: Winning at the Game of Business
So, I reached over and picked up the book, and read this in the introduction:
“Society has shifted. The first edition of Hardball for Women was angrier and more polarized than this one… In the past, organizations have said, “Okay, you women, if you want to succeed in this business, you need to figure out how to fit in because our culture is what it is.” Today, organizations are realizing that they can no longer steadily afford to lose women, especially those who are successful…”
I’m glad to know that even the author finds the concept archaic. It seems to me that, rather than learning to play hardball, we all need to spend more time learning to play softball – to build relationships and create connections that allow us to collaborate rather than to compete. The benefits of a relationship-based, collaborative strategy have never been more clear to me as they have been since I have started blogging. All sorts of relationships and collaborations have formed around this blog and my efforts here that I never would have believed, and I am developing friendships with those out there who, in an age of “hardball” would have likely been viewed as competition.
How well would this blog work if I spent all of my time “playing hardball” with the other people who might be “competing” for your attention? Rather, I find that it creates more value for you, the reader, as I provide links to my friends in the blogosophere who you might find interesting and worth reading about. And all of us benefit from that – as the supply-side economics people suggest, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
We have truly entered into the age of Coopetition – and those without the skills to create those relationships, who know hardball and bullying only, are going to be left far, far behind.
The Question
November 18, 2006
Over at his brilliant blog, DavidCo’s Jason Womack talks about “the” question:
“What do you do?”
This one has been a tough one for me over the past couple of years, mostly because I do so much. I work in information security. I do NLP and hypnosis. I teach. I coach. I help people be more who they really are. I work for an insurance company.
In entrepreneurial circles, they talk about having an “elevator speech” – the 30-second answer to the question: “what does your company do?”. I think there’s no question that we need a personal version of an elevator speech.
Sometimes, the hardest thing about that speech is having the courage to give it, though, especially if you’re not sure how they’re going to react – as Jason describes his experience:
“The more I refer to this role, especially with people I meet for the first time, the more I notice it does one of two things…
(1) They look away, laugh, and we don’t talk much anymore, or
(2) they look at me, and say something like, “Really?” (By the way, I’m noticing more people are doing #2 lately.)”
Especially in a world where the “normal” answer to the question isn’t one that contains a great deal of passion and intensity, response #1 can be common when you talk about your true calling and what you’re bringing to the world.
So, what’s your elevator speech? How do you answer “The Question”… What do you do?
Metrics and Incentives
November 17, 2006
There’s a great discussion going on in the security blogosphere about the importance of metrics – Mogull, Amrit and Rothman are talking about them.
I’m going to fall on the same side as Amrit on this one, as metrics have always been one of my favorite things to play with. The problem, as Mike points out is that the wrong metric is always worse than no metrics at all. Anybody who has known me a while has heard me rant about the over-simplistic metrics that we use in technology, and the importance of finding metrics that can really help solve problems. And, as is evident in the articles that started this whole discussion over at Joel on Software (here and here), metrics have been given a really bad name in technology. From the articles:
“Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place.”
And:
“The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game.”
Joel seems to think that the reason that this is the case is because there’s some inherent flaw in what you’re trying to measure. I would argue that the problem isn’t the measurement, but the incentives that the metric creates that are the real problem. Each thing you measure and reward (or discourage) creates a behavioral incentive – in the case above, measuring only the creation of volume of code (without quality) and remediation of bad code (without proactively avoiding bad code in the first place) creates a situation where the metric is, as Joel points out, “trivial to game”.
This is why metric development has to end up as an iterative process. What most companies do when they realize that they’ve incentivised bad behavior is the same thing that Joel suggests: dump the metrics altogether. Unfortunately, that’s actually the wrong approach – the point of creating metrics is to measure and incentivize, and proving that people are gaming the system proves something quite simple:
Measuring things works to modify behavior. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t be gaming the system.
The problem at this point is to ask yourself the hard question: what is it that I want to incent my people to do? Where are we now? And how can we alter the metrics to incentivize the correct behavior? How can we correct the metric?
Let’s take the rather simple example Joel gave us: what if we took the metrics a) and b) above, and added c) create few bugs? And created a composite metric something like the following:
Performance = ( amount of code + bugs fixed ) / (bugs created)
How would you game that? Let’s iterate through this process in the comments – let me know how you’d game it, and I’ll modify the metric (in case it’s not obvious, I’ve done this iteration before)
The Sham of Job Interviews
November 17, 2006
One of my favorite things about managing a team was interviewing candidates. Anyone who ever interviewed for a job for any of my teams got to know my penchant for asking strange questions and doing strange things – the main purpose was always to overcome the fact that most interviews are a complete and total sham.
For most interviews, the decision on whether to make the hire or not is made within the first 30 seconds of the interview, and has absolutely nothing to do with any of the rational parts of the decision-making process. While we may think that we’re completely rational, what research has shown is that the interview process is mostly a matter of the interviewer having a first impression, and then spending however long the interview lasts gathering evidence to back up that first impression.
I remember a particular story from my past where this became all too clear to me. Early in my career, I was on a team that was interviewing for a trainer who would be responsible for all customer-facing training. We saw a few mediocre candidates, and then we interviewed a relatively attractive woman. The woman had no training experience, and was absolutely terrible in the group interview. When the interview ended, we all re-grouped around my then boss’s office while he saw her out and started discussing. It was clear that we all thought she wasn’t a fit – we all thought she was too much trying to rely on her looks and had very few skills.
That was when my boss returned, and started extolling her virtues. I argued with him for a few minutes, until he uttered the line that those who were on the team make jokes about to this day: “She will be our trainer.” Suffice it to say, she didn’t exactly set the world on fire with her performance after she was hired. And, after making some pretty big mistakes and generally being a disruption at times, she was eventually let go.
What was most interesting to me that day was that it was as though my boss (who was normally quite sharp and a decent senior manager) was in a completely different interview than the rest of us. Gladwell reported on this research in the New Yorker, and again in his book Blink
“She took fifteen seconds of videotape showing the applicant as he or she knocks on the door, comes in, shakes the hand of the interviewer, sits down, and the interviewer welcomes the person,” Bernieri explained. Then… Prickett got a series of strangers to rate the applicants based on the handshake clip, using the same criteria that the interviewers had used. Once more, against all expectations, the ratings were very similar to those of the interviewers. “On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,” Bernieri says. “The strength of the correlations was extraordinary.”
The difficulty with interviews is that we end up having our unconscious mind hijack the interview process – we end up in rapport with the person, and our unconscious tells us that we should like them and that they’re worth hiring because of it. Or, we don’t develop rapport (or even actively dislike the person) and choose not to hire them because of that.
Almost everyone who has ever interviewed for a job can think of a time when they were completely qualified and the opportunity was absolutely perfect, but they didn’t get the job. And almost everyone who has ever interviewed someone has been hijacked by their unconscious this way.
The only way around this is to set up a process that ensures that your conscious and unconscious mind can work together on the process of interviewing.
Announcement – Episteme IT/InfoSec Career Portfolio Teleseminar & Podcast Series
November 16, 2006
I have foreshadowed in a couple of previous entries that I’d be making an announcement about something cool soon. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past couple of weeks running around getting this ready, and we’re finally ready to announce the first (of hopefully many) Episteme Teleseminar Series. Over the course of a few weeks in late November and early December, we’re going to put on a few teleconferences with some really cool people, and talk about some cool stuff.
This series is going to be focused on the portfolio of skills that will make you a better IT/Information Security professional and help you manage your career. To that end, the lineup is going to feature life coaches, consultants, information security executives, and even one of the best recruiters in the industry. We’re going to talk about career skills, social intelligence, networking, and anything else that comes up in the course of interesting conversations.
The Roster
Linda Ferguson of NLP Canada Training on Integrated Thinking for IT Professionals Linda and I are going to talk about the key social, emotional and thinking skills that make a successful IT career. We’ll explore the different types of intelligence: social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and those thinking skills that can make you a successful individual contributor and manager. We’ll explore the most fundamental question: What resources do you need in order to have a wildly successful information technology career?
Scott Blake of Echelon One on Being a CISO Scott is responsible for managing and executing Echelon One’s CISO roundtables – beyond being a former CISO, he works with CISOs as part of his day to day job. Scott and I are going to talk about what CISOs are all about – what they expect, what they need, and equally important – how you become one.
Tim Keanini of nCircle on Managing Creativity, Technical Skill and your Network As CTO of nCircle, one of his biggest tasks is to bring together groups of really smart people and discuss, create and learn about new technology. Anyone who knows TK is amazed at his ability to bring together technical skill, creativity and synthetic thought, and an uncanny ability to bring together a network of really smart people. We’re going to explore TK’s mind and get some nuggets of brilliance from him.
Lee Kushner of LJ Kushner & Associates on Getting Hired, Getting Promoted and Building A Career. As president of LJ Kushner & Associates, Lee is a wealth of knowledge about what information security careers look like these days. We’re going to talk about the skills, traits and experience that make a successful career in information security. Lee has brilliant advice about what can make you a more successful internet security professional today.
The Career Coaches Panel – We will bring together three life and career skills coaches including Ron from The Geek Coach and Dan from FRACAT to discuss the trends that they’re seeing in IT careers these days, and the useful social intelligence and career skills that really matter in IT today.
Plus some special, surprise guests…
The Teleseminars
The teleseminar series will take place in a series of phone calls in late November and early December, 2006, and will be published here as a podcast shortly after the calls take place. Each of the calls will last around an hour, and will involve a discussion and some Q&A time with the audience at the end of the call.
You MUST be on the call in order to ask questions of this great list of callers!
In order to sign up for the call, enter your name and email address in the box below to sign up for the Episteme Teleseminar Mailing List
Being Too Grown Up for a Calling
November 15, 2006
A while ago, I made a post on the importance of finding a calling. In the comments there, Dan commented on the difficulty of finding that calling, and threatened to post about it. And, he finally did. And, as usual for Dan’s posts, this one was full of some brilliant nuggets of information. From the post:
“That is to say, if you just decide that you like one-legged wallabys, sitting and thinking about what professions deal with those big, hopping rats will only get you so far.”
He then goes on to talk about the importance of trying on all sorts of different jobs (in all forms, one can assume, of wallaby-husbandry). There’s no question that, when trying to find your calling, the importance of having multiple jobs can’t be over-estimated – as someone who has yet to be in a single job title for more than 18 months at a time in my career, I wouldn’t have nearly as much information on what I do and don’t like without that.
But that’s not where you find your calling. The true nature of a calling is deep within us – I would argue that I knew my calling when I was 12 years old. And that most of us, as 12 year olds, probably had a far better idea of what our calling in life is than we do as adults. Because as adults, we often allow ourselves to be too practical to allow ourselves to most fully express why we’re here.
I was having this dicussion with a friend recently, who told me of a conversation with a friend of hers, who said:
“[he told] me I just need to concentrate on my career and “running off and joining a circus”… is not the way to buy a home or save for my future.”
That’s the way that most of us think as we get older. The truth of your calling is found in your unconscious mind, where your skills, temperment, and long-held dreams and desires come together in a pattern that is deeply yours. It’s located at the same level as what the GTDers call the “50,000 foot level”. And what some others call a “Life Vision”. It’s the answer to that question which is often the scariest of all to many grown-ups (though most kids would probably have a ready answer):
What am I here for? What is it that I should do that only I can really do?
I’ll post an exercise here in the next couple of days that will help anyone who wants to find out a bit more about their calling…