A generation ago, our employers provided a second home. A second family. A second school. We’d get a full time paycheck, with benefits. We’d have a choice of career development, and almost guaranteed employment. Our co-workers were our neighbors, and our friends. They were our extended family.

That’s changed. Many jobs go to freelancers. People who don’t get benefits. People who don’t cost the company much more than the hourly wage they’re being paid, unlike you and I who cost the company approximately twice what they pay us in salary.

While some companies offer career development opportunities, it’s not nearly what it needs to be. We, “the people”, need to be careful. Unlike in the past, career development has become our responsibility. It’s on us to go get training, to get further experience, and to network. And, not only is it our responsibility to make time, more and more often it’s our responsibility to bear the costs of our own career development.

Enter Apple’s new university / education push. They’re targeting traditional schools (K-12 today), but there’s a huge opportunity here. I can go to iTunes and take a class. May not seem like much. In fact, we’ve been able to do it for quite some time now. I believe that Apple will finally start to improve this platform for education. I hope that their passion around this topic infects some creative minds to start bringing some innovation around career development into the iTunes community.

There’s a lot happening here. MIT recently announced a whole lotta free online courses, but there are commercial and “open-source” opportunities too.

Don’t believe that Apple’s announcement yesterday was only relevant to people with children in school. This is another opportunity to get mind-share in the enterprise as even people with paychecks realize that we need to take responsibility for our own career development, and need a community to helps us do just that.

Imagine that you are responsible for your company’s telephone infrastructure and are tasked with buying a whole new system. You’re given just one criteria on which to evaluate your choices, cost.

What sort of telephone system do you buy?

I’ll get to the answer in a second (this is called “building anticipation”).

There are two characteristics of typical IT staff that really impact the perceptions we have of IT. Forgive the profiling; let me remind you not to hate the player, rather hate the game if you must hate something about what I’m saying.

1. The IT people that typically come into contact with people¹ in your company often lack communications skills. They often don’t know anything about the business, and may not even really care what company they work for. They view their job as distant to the company’s mission itself. I remember I was walking around the Port of Newark designing a Frame Relay network (have you ever needed a weather-proof computer rack/enclosure?) and I asked the guy how things worked at the port. He proudly replied that he had no idea, he just kept the network up and running.
2. Non-IT people don’t understand and are frustrated by technology. When IT people don’t communicate well, these non-IT people respond with frustration and fear, which leads to them fall-back to what they know, what comforts them. Cost/benefit. Accounting. Money. “I can’t judge the value of what you have given me, so I’m going to determine it’s value by how much you spent.”

In a conversation the other day, I showed a friend a new travel website that I think has a fabulous user interface. He took a look, said he couldn’t find a flight to Hong Kong. I told him to fly somewhere else, and then made a joke that I’d be a good IT person. He knew immediately what I was talking about. This is the sort of communication that happens all the time the contributes to the frustration.

And, the answer to the riddle? Which phone system would you buy if you were making the decision solely based on cost?

You’d buy none.

If the sole criteria for your decision is to minimize cost, minimize it by not buying a phone system. Your total cost: $0.00. Job well done. [snark]

Clearly there is an implied value to expect from a phone system, and most likely your directive is to get some amount of functionality for the best cost possible. Not to minimize cost absolutely.

We all want to reduce IT costs, but still want to keep the lights on and do business. How do we do a better job at using IT to do better business? We need to reevaluate how we understand and allocate IT costs.

And, here’s the original point of my post.

The difficulty with this situation is that, if viewed as a COST center IT only owns half the “situation”. The VALUE side of the situation is owned by someone else. In English, that means, IT bears the COST of the phone system while the business gets the VALUE of having a phone. If IT is judged purely on cost or cost management, it’s not necessarily in alignment with the business’ objectives of doing more/better business.

If you want to read more about this from an IT perspective, you must read this post about how IT costs are allocated at a big financial firm.

What can we do about this? Well, in my situation as someone who evangelizes the value of technology for solving problems it’s important to pitch the right value to the right person. And, to make sure the value and cost align with my audience. I build credibility by deeply understanding my customer’s challenges. Though that understanding I build credibility. That credibility bleeds over to the solutions I propose. I’m not going to sell better by explaining my products better. I’m going to sell better by being the person who best understands my customer’s needs.

As an IT person, I think a way to get started is to work more closely with business people to break down the communication barriers. Work your communications skills, and educate your counterparts. Not so much so that people can fix their own computers, but so that they trust that you understand their business. If you can articulate their story back to them and empathize with their IT experience, they’ll trust that that the solution you provide is one that’s going to meet their current needs and anticipate their future needs.

Imagine if IT valued communications training as much as technical certifications?

Imagine, instead of having 20% of your time to work on “new and innovative” projects, IT support individuals spent 2 hours a week with their company’s people, to see and listen to their experiences?

I’m going to break this into two posts. Next, we’ll talk about a backup solution as a practical application of the value of IT not being in alignment with the cost, and how it affects us all. We’ll also look at the IT process, and see how ignoring what I’m talking about is like pumping pollution into the Hudson River. Stay tuned.

1. I abhor the use of the word “users”

I’m working on a new project around regulatory compliance in the healthcare space. Just so happens the topic’s on the front page of the NY Times Business section today. Article titled “Conflicts on Heath Guideline Panels”.

Suffice it to say, the government is enforcing compliance with rules to prevent cronyism in the healthcare space. I applaud the attempt, it’s important.

However, as we were going over the processes and rules around the project, an interesting thing came up.

Let’s say you’re having a healthcare conference in San Diego and you want an industry expert to speak. You have an expert in NYC, and you fly them to San Diego for the conference. Part of the fee the healthcare expert receives includes travel arrangements. And, for argument’s sake, let’s say the conference is in February — a time when all NYers love to get somewhere warm like San Diego for a few days.

The government could find that company in breach of compliance for using an expert from NY if there is an “equivalent expert” located in San Diego.

How do they define “equivalent expert”? By resume. There are de facto standards around classification — including items like number of articles published, or education, or specialty, etc.

This idea that two people with similar qualifications are interchangeable pisses me off. People are not “resources”, people are people. I know I can be hard to work with sometimes. That said, I’ve developed some fantastic working relationships over the years. And, as a professional I cultivate relationships so that I can win business. So that I have a reputation that puts me in play for the best projects out there.

It’s the relationship that matters. It’s the person. Their personality, their context, their actual experience that’s often built up over time and represented as TRUST.

Sure, in my example it would be great if they had working relationships with two experts, who were both available, and both interested in the conference — and they picked the one that minimized travel costs for the event. However, sometimes it’s worth paying just a little more to continue to build a relationship.

What really burns me up about this, is that it’s so indicative of what’s going on in the corporate world too. The “company” used to provide a social infrastructure to connect people around a common purpose. We’d develop relationships within the organization that help us do our jobs better.

There doesn’t seem to be as much of this as their used to be. I’ll share a story to illustrate the point, just in case you’ve got your head in a hole and don’t see this. A friend used to be in management at UPS. Every year, management would run the Thanksgiving turkey give-away. Employees would stop by and pick up their holiday turkey. Management would chat with them, be able to put a face to the name, check in on how they’re doing.

To “save money” they don’t do that anymore. Now, people get a check in the mail. No more bonding. No more “feeling the pulse”. Same turkey. Less cost. Fewer connections being built within the organization.

This is what’s killing satisfaction at work. This is what’s killing the organization. We’ve turned people into resources, and totally devalued the “relationship”.

First rule of sales — “People buy from people”. OK, maybe not the first rule, but it’s a rule. People help people. Relationship building builds trust. Trust makes people go the extra mile. You never know when you’ll need it, but when you do, it sure is nice to have.

It’s important that the government regulate out cronyism. On the other hand, it’s not as easy as it seems. And, I suspect we’re going to go in the wrong direction for a bit, before we realize what we’ve lost. A shame really, because personally, I know I work much better when I like the people I’m working with and I work hard to get to know them to build fun-combined-with-professional relationships.

Relationships I have with people, not with resources.

You get what you measure.

Any sales manager knows this.

I can’t help but make this obvious comment after reading an interesting article about a new school program in Arizona. (This link is to their mobile page, which is great if you use Instapaper to read it later.)

This program is failing, because they’re using all this new technology and methodology to involve kids in learning in a whole new way… but then they go and measure the same old “reading and math scores” to see the result.

Whether it’s education, politics, or business you need to measure for the results you want. Business analytics is kinda a hot topic these days. IBM’s just made a couple of acquisitions, and my new company (Software AG) has a very interesting approach to KPI management of business processes (Process Intelligence) to manage the way people experience your business — a great way to measure effectiveness both for internal and external people who interact with your company.

It’s not an obvious problem. Take the education example above. The math and reading scores are important. Maybe, they’re even relevant. But, they’re not necessarily a good judge of the effectiveness of the new education. I like the things the students are doing, but they seem to be more about developing creativity and integrating modern computer skills with education than about improving reading and math scores.

In fact, companies can learn a lot from this… in that this classroom is adopting the tools that students use at home to build new skills and see what happens… instead of blocking them, and then forcing antiquated technology on workers while expecting modern results.

Want to know more? I’m going to plug Software AG with two followup links with great information:

1. Our Process Intelligence community. It’s a huge community (over 100,000 users), and you can discuss two of my favorite technology topics — business process (which I have started referring to as the “experience of a solution”) and results/insight.
2. A landing page around Key Performance Indicators and becoming performance driven in your business. There’s general information there, as well as Software AG product information. So, it’s useful as a place to get some education even if you’re not a customer.

I love Apple. Clearly they define their market very differently than Blackberry. This definition drives their strategy. In fact, it drives both companies strategies. And, like Rush used to sing — Not making a decision is still a decision. (or something like that)

Let me ask a question, and keep this as possibly my shortest post ever…

With the incredible innovation going on in mobile banking and payments, why isn’t any of it being driven by a retail bank?

If you like this post, check out “2 Ways for Retail Banking Innovation to Capture Profitable Customers and Reduce Customer Churn”.

Seriously though, HP’s killing the TouchPad demonstrates an inability to think and act strategically over a long period of time.

In fact, I think it is even deeper than a choice to demand short term results because investors/markets demand them. It makes me wonder if HP’s people even know how to execute over a long time horizon anymore?

He has four key recommendations to help adapt the workplace to the millennial generation. They are:

1. Offer Real-Time Response
2. Support a “Bring Your Own Devices” IT Equipment Strategy
3. Enable Anywhere Access
4. Foster Collaborative Communication

He states boldly:

“to recruit and retain top talent, businesses have no choice but to adapt”

I couldn’t agree more. And, I think it’s an impossibility for this to occur on any large scale at big employers within a reasonable time. It’s too hard to manage in the procedural way most organizations work, and they’re too far behind.

This “state of IT” is accelerating the changes to the makeup of this thing we call work. It’s blurring the lines between work, play, home… and we’re going to need new tools to manage our career-life balance going forward.

If you’re interested in my ideas around creating a more fulfilling career by learning to balance these different areas of your life, sign up for my newsletter and we’ll let you know when I have my first seminar (it’s in March, so it’s soon).

I value your privacy and your time, your email will remain private and the newsletter valuable to you. You can unsubscribe at anytime.

Clicking on “subscribe to newsletter” will take you to Infinite Probabilities, the company I’ve recently founded. I apologize, it was just easier to do it this way.

Well, not really. Just feel disorganized. I launched davidbressler.com a few years ago when sleepless in a hotel as a platform for posting on more diverse subjects, with a bit more of an edge than was welcome on my corporate blog at Progress.

A lot’s happened since then, and davidbressler.com has become an amalgamation of my various interests both personal and professional, which is not good. It’s not good form, it’s not good strategy, and it’s not good for you (the reader). I’ve put some thought into things, and here are four foundational elements to a social strategy:

1. Develop a Clear Purpose. Be as specific as possible. Best if phrased in terms of your audience/market and not yourself!
2. Stay On Topic. I don’t believe you need to stay neurotically 100% on topic, it’s the off topic stuff that adds personality. But, really try to stay very close to topic.
3. Pick Your Tools. You simply can’t pick them all. Create a story with your tools, and expand when necessary. Personally, I’m having trouble keeping up with my various blogs, two Twitter accounts, Linked In, and Facebook. Use the right tools for the right purpose, which leads to the fourth and final point…
4. Set Objectives. Objectives for the tools you’ve chosen. Objectives for the overall strategy. Is your objective to grow your client base? Satisfy your existing clients? Do you want to write a book? How about an e-book to make you the “expert”? How about becoming a thought leader? Or, demonstrating a broad set of skills that doesn’t come across in a typical resume? Or, participating in the community to build your personal network and brand? Or, a showcase for your creativity? There are just so many objectives, and they’ll guide your selection of tools and your behavior.

Be sure to write this down. One page is plenty, but having it written down is a great way to manifest a real clarity. Go ahead, try it. See how difficult it is to actually articulate one sentence on each of the above points (or 1 sentence per tool).

When you set objectives, set measurable ones too. Have a guiding strategy, and measure your way there. Here are a few suggestions:

• Blog once a day (week).
• Respond to every comment personally (via the comments — I don’t like sending an email without clear permission).
• Comment on other blogs 3x per week.
• Respond to every @djbressler tweet with a personal note. Send thank you @replies for retweets.
• Connect with people when connecting… this is a pet peeve (yeah, it’s a long list). I get connection requests on LinkedIn where people can’t even be bothered to write a personal note and  use LinkedIn’s default. If someone connects with me, especially when I haven’t seen them in a while, I always write a note and try to speak. It’s great catching up with people who you’ve lost touch with, for both of you!

It’s OK to break rules. It’s also OK to experiment. Just move with a purpose and you’ll have great success over the long term.

Do you have your own “rules”? Care to share them below in the comments? I’m interested in what works for you guys…

Something so powerful, I think about it all day.

Something more addictive than Facebook & Twitter combined.

And, it’s something I (and you) can make money doing…

Freelance web sites.

In particular I find myself using Elance, though I also evaluated vWorker (formerly Rent-a-Coder) and use oDesk for comparison.

It’s like EBay, but for a services economy.

For real.

You think your brain has something to contribute to the world. Simple. Join the revolution. See “Freelance Workers Reshape Companies and Jobs” (USA Today) and “No Jobs? Young Graduates Make Their Own” (NY Times).

Seriously.

It’s like crack. It feels great, and you connect with others and have fun doing it.

And, it doesn’t matter if you’re looking for work or looking for workers. Have an idea for a mobile app? Get someone to build it. Stay at home mom whose kids are grown? Why not start a marketing consulting business (or make use of whatever skills and talents your MBA degree and career-before-children gave you — online, no one cares if you’ve taken 10 years off to raise your kids!)? Student? What better way to learn the latest programming language with a real project for your portfolio? Have the next great business idea? Put your money where your mouth is, and fund it. As this professor observed, everyone has ideas… it’s really all about execution.

You see how many people have built “EBay Businesses” selling stuff? I don’t really know how they do it, but they make money. Me, I’m a product of the information age. I don’t make anything… I just talk about making things. This is my opportunity to easily connect with people who are looking for what I can do… and a place for me to manage that business, so I can focus on the fun stuff. In fact, I can now do more because I can easily find people to augment my skills, build a team of people I trust, and manage those relationships and that business — all from one place.

Seriously. I went to the three sites because I was looking for something simple done as a way to try out this way of working. I was inspired by the following two articles on how to get started with freelance web sites effectively. I highly recommend reading them, “How to Hire a Programmer to Make Your Ideas Happen” and “How to Build a Quality Website at a Fraction of the Cost”.

I was an employer. I wanted a widget that put some live stats up on a web page based on information I gathered through web forms created by Wufoo. Wufoo has an API, and the work was very straight-forward. It was a great experiment.

You can see the results on Bleed for Your Cause™. Look at the widgets between the actions and the graphics (sponsor and donate). It was fun, and I learned quite a bit at the same time.

I’ll share what I’ve learned in future posts… stay tuned!

I thought I’d share some ways that I successfully prepared for my interviews.

When I started the job hunt I knew I needed to figure out what I wanted to do. I sat down, wrote my resume, decided what I was good at, what I wanted out of this job change (which defined the type of company to look at) and what technology I was interested in. But, still didn’t think I understood what I was looking for. That is, until a friend who I was reviewing this with (I had asked for some coaching in preparation for an interview) said “it sounds like you know exactly what you want to do.” (Thanks Bill)

Once I knew what to do, and found an interview, there was a lot of preparation to be done. First, I’d just discover stuff. It’s amazing what you can find online! If it’s a software company, they probably have an annual user conference. Watch it on YouTube. Know who you’re interviewing with? Find them (and their friends) on LinkedIn. Absorb information. Just read. See what pops up.

I would write down the answers to questions I thought would be asked, or wanted to answer, and then would go over the answers. I didn’t quite memorize them, rather I embedded them in my conversation so that the key points I wanted to get across would do so (over and over again).

So, between my own questions and those I got asked on interviews that I thought were really good ones (remember, if the interviewer doesn’t ask you what challenges you, you might start a discussion by saying… “what challenges me are…” if you’ve prepared a powerful answer), here’s the list I’d use again:

Why do I want the job?

What would I contribute to the role?

How do I think the interviewer would perceive me, and how do I need to re-align or reinforce that perception to improve my chances?

How would I start? (If I got the job, what would I do?)

Why should I be selected for the role?

Why am I leaving my current job?

What challenges me?

Explain the role I’m interviewing for?

Of course, if these questions don’t come up, by preparing you can also use them as discussion points… “Mr. Interviewer, what do you think I would/should do first once I’m hired?” or “What makes a person successful at X company?”

Anything you think I missed? Please leave your advice in the comments.