Alpha Mind Blog

Somehow four or five days elapsed between recording last week’s episode and uploading it, which happened only a few minutes ago. (The delay was mostly due to a lot of experimentation with post-production techniques, and some Vista hassles.)

In Episode minus 2, I introduce Peter Drucker as a guiding light of the Alpha Mind Podcast. I also introduce the alternating-episodes approach I’ll be taking in the ‘cast, modeled after Drucker’s career-long alternation of management books with ones on broader social issues.

I also compare Seth Godin and Christopher Penn to Drucker, and one of them comes out looking pretty good.

Drucker was passionate about management because he cared deeply about the human family. He had also seen (up close, very close) that perfectionist political systems were deadly. He believed that the organizations that make up a free and pluralist society can do much to further human happiness—if run well. And so he loved teaching us how to run them well.

Seth says forget the resume. Heather Hamilton says Seth is leading people astray. Neville Hobson, on the For Immediate Release podcast, says “Seth has a point, but we’re not there yet.”

I agree with all of them, but mostly with Neville.

I had a bit of a controversy with Seth on this blog once before. Twice, actually; here’s the second part.

Why is Neville the one I agree with most? Because…

The simple fact is that Seth Godin is all about the future. He writes for the bleeding-edge denizens of that brave world into which all of us, will we-nill we, are being carried by the Internet.

It’s a world in which monolithic companies and monopolistic brands are playing an ever-shrinking role. In which, as a direct result, there is more and more work to be done that won’t be done by people in jobs, as conventionally defined. And even less work being done by the kinds of jobs Seth refers to as being “a cog in a giant machine.”

So, my nutshell observations about all this:

1. Seth is right. If you’re outstanding, a resume will only serve as an excuse to reject you. “Look, it doesn’t matter that you learned Perl in a two-day weekend well enough that you were teaching it on Monday. We need somebody who knows Python.”
2. Heather is right. The vast majority of jobs, even some world-changing jobs, jobs people kill for, still require a resume. Heather’s company, Microsoft, is still changing the world in some wonderful ways. (Although I once scorched the inexcusable Word 2007 in this blog, I’m writing this post on Windows Live Writer, which MS executed brilliantly.) Most jobs at her company are still choice morsels, and if she says you need a resume to get ‘em, well, I trust her.
3. Neville is right, in that Seth will be more and more right, for more and more people, as time goes on. The world is moving Godin-ward.

Now, a bit of my own experience.

The most interesting job I’ve ever held, by far, I got without a resume. (It was also the best-paying.) A friend told me she’d given my name to someone who was creating a new position, and a few hours later, he called. It was 1997, when web sites were too new for most companies, and I had the nerve to walk into my interview without a resume, but with a web site for this prospective employer’s company. I’d created it the night before based on what I learned from a few phone calls.

A twist, though: I was asked for a resume, after the hiring decision had been made. “I just need to show the management team you’re a real person,” was how the owner and president put it. And that, I believe, is how many job seekers should be thinking during this period of transition to a more Godin world. Have a resume. But offer it last, and give it a lower priority than any of the items Seth suggests. Have it to meet the compliance requirements after you’ve already won the job. But, if you’re to stand out from the crowd, it’ll be by doing everything you can to win the job before you have to hand over a resume.

It used to be that “references available on request” was the last line on the resume, and checking them was a late step in the hiring process. Let’s turn that around. Let’s lead off with a blazingly enthusiastic reference that ends with the postscript, “In addition to the incredible talents I’ve mentioned, I hear Heidi has a good-looking resume.”

del.icio.us Tags: Godin,Seth,Microsoft,resume,jobs,Nevile,Hobson,forimmediaterelease,sethgodin

We hear lots about how to hire smart, less about how to fire.

But today, Seth Godin and Jim Stroup give us a perfectly matched pair of stories about just that. Please read both; each story strengthens the other in a big way.

In moving ideas towards realization, people are even more likely to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy than they are in economics. Bob Sutton’s post on “Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy” suggests two things:

1. people who are deeply invested in a single idea are likely to be touchy when the idea is attacked, and
2. this may, by extension, explain why generalists are happier than specialists.

This certainly rings true to my experience. Leaving aside specialists and generalists (about which I commented on Sutton’s blog), I think it applies to innovation processes in organizations as well. A company that has a regular and monitored innovation process is likely to have a healthy attitude toward ideas. It knows how to let a thousand flowers bloom and how to let nine-hundred-ninety-one of them die. Pathological emotional attachment to a single idea is unlikely in a true idea factory.

But when a company unused to innovating finds itself in need of a new idea, say because growth is stalled or a market is disappearing, it may only know how to work with one idea at a time. It can then invest far too much in that one idea, and ride it all the way to disaster.

I saw this at work in one of the consultancies I worked for in the 90s. We decided we needed a “signature analytical model” as part of our thrust into new practice areas. In two tormented brainstorming sessions, I was the only person who had come up with a viable idea, and I’d had only one, which I’ll call The Widget-Gadget Matrix. It wasn’t an earthshaking idea, but it might have worked. But only one day after the second session, I was shocked to hear one of the consultants say “We’re locked into the Widget-Gadget Matrix.”

Of course I was pleased that my idea had been accepted. But I was also dismayed that the company saw any need to lock itself into the idea. Maybe in a year or two, after we had published our book on Industry Analysis Using the W-G Matrix, we might have been locked in, in the sense that to recant or demote the idea might make us look silly. But before the idea had even appeared in a single article? We weren’t locked in nor should we have been.

I’d only been at the firm a short time, and I was pretty sure that with a bit more experience I’d come up with better ideas than the WGM, and probably several ideas, not just one. This was why I was personally so un-locked-in to my own idea. Not just because I wanted to leave room for better idea, but simply because I was confident there were more where that one had come from. I didn’t feel I’d invested much in it. The rest of the firm, though, was exhausted by the brainstorming sessions and felt that it had shot its creative wad. All its eggs were in that one basket.

Make no mistake, I liked my idea. Ten years later it still looks to me like an idea that could become a successful brand for a consultancy. But even if I had felt strongly attached to it, I would have felt a caution against the attachment, because to be locked into it would have been just the recipe for shutting off the flow of new ideas.

So you don’t manage software engineering projects. Then should you read Jerry Weinberg’s Overstructured management of software engineering?

Absolutely. Positively.

If you write, read it. Weinberg is a model of lucid and engaging writing.

If you manage organizations of any kind, read it. Weinberg understands what you face. (Weinberg is writing about “overstructuring” errors which software managers are especially prone to because they were once programmers. But they are errors one sees in every kind of organization.)

If you simply like seeing a true alpha mind at work, read it and anything else by Weinberg.

I took a course in software development management at MIT Sloan, and this article was one of my favorite pieces of reading for that course. Although it’s probably been online for eons, I’m delighted to have found it, and happy to share it with you.

There’s a fine post at Instigator Blog: Top 10 Reasons Why Proposals Fail, by Ben Yoskovitz. I’d like to add a few notes of my own.

Point 1. Killing pain is nice, but thriving is better.
Ben is very right to focus on the prospect’s pain, if and when he’s right that pain is the reason they’re asking for proposals in the first place. But desire for the absence of pain is a negative motivation. It’ll get you to take an aspirin and a client to take the consulting equivalent.

But every time an organization is in pain, there’s also an upside opportunity, either right in there with the pain, or lurking nearby. And it’s important to find that and focus on it.

Sometimes the client is perfectly aware of it. Very often the pain is simply a missed upside target. (”We only grew 12% topline last year, and the industry grew 11%. Barely beating the average is unacceptable; we want to double it.”) This organization is giving you some gain to talk about, and that’s a lot more fun, for you and for the client, than just talking pain. In many cases, though, the client won’t show you the upside, and you need to find it yourself.

Some organizations have the wisdom to call in help for upside reasons, but more companies need to do so more often. And you, as a consultant, should be looking for clients with that level of wisdom. If a client only calls you in because of headaches, look for a better class of client, one who’ll make you a partner in their success and not just a school nurse.

Point 2. A focus on gain allows you to offer a menu. Menus are good.
If at all possible, your proposal should offer a menu of options.

• Option A, plain vanilla, leaves the client headache-free. (For now. But you don’t say those words.)
• Option B, which costs more money, offers enough upside to make the client happy to have invested a little extra.
• Option C, the deluxe, will win the client accolades, bonuses, promotions, and dates with supermodels. Your immense final check will be written with a beaming grin.

Offering a menu provides several advantages, which I won’t list exhaustively (perhaps in another post.) But I’ll mention one: few of your competitors will offer precisely the same menu, and so your proposal will have to be considered separately from the pack. If the prospect allows you any way to break away from the pack, do so. Better yet, don’t even start inside a pack. Read on….

Point 3. A proposal that isn’t a recap is way too much like a cold call. Brrrr!
Ben seems to assume that you’re on a level playing field with a batch of other consultants. But if that’s the case for more than a third of your proposals, then you’re one of the following:

• very new in your business, or
• in a new practice area (nobody was consulting on corporate blogging two years ago), or
• practicing in a realm where there can’t be much repeat business, or
• in deep trouble.

After a couple of years in business, most of your proposals should simply be recaps of what you and the client, in private discussions, have already agreed needs to be done. Even if the client writes an RFP detailing what you and they agreed on, and your competitors respond to the RFP, you still have a leg up. Why? Because in the process of talking through the need, you’ve demonstrated your insight. The prospect will view you as able to perform what you, and only you, talked them into.

Ben’s points are good. But there’s a lot more to this proposal game, and the ultimate goal is to get business without writing proposals. With my last client, by the time we agreed on what needed to be in a proposal, we were also clear on what needed to be done and that I was the one to do it. The next paper transaction between us? He handed me a check while telling me to get started. It won’t work in every industry or practice area, but you’d be surprised how many it will work in.

(Cross-posted to Management Consulting Lore.)