David Maister has posted a commencement address delivered by Stephen C. Ellis, the managing partner of a successful mid-sized law firm.  While he’s focused on the law (the address was at Case Western’s law school), it’s great advice for any professional, and I’m circulating it within my own firm and clients.  He has some great nuggets in there, including this interesting assessment of why the law can be such a miserable profession today:

The fact is our profession has become increasingly unhappy over the past couple of decades. I am convinced the vast majority of that unhappiness derives from a singleseemingly innocuous event in the late 1980’s: The American Lawyer magazine began publishing the AM LAW 100, and listed the profits per partner of the 100 largest firms. Virtually all of the firms in this country immediately bought in to that statistic as the only credible measure of success. The game was on - we lawyers would now take our measure almost entirely from money, at least in terms of what was publicly discussed. Without question, integrity, service and professionalism were important, but how we measured ourselves was money.

There’s also this great advice for aspiring lawyers:

If you’ve decided to become a lawyer solely to make money if to you it’s simply a job I fear you’ll hate it. As a career and a calling it’s great, and unbelievably interesting, but as simply a job, it’s way too hard and stressful. It’s the people, the pace and the endless puzzles of the law that make being a lawyer fulfilling. If you want tons of money for working twenty hours a day and nausea-inducing stress, Wall Street investment banking may be just the thing . In that business the grand old men are burnt out at 45.

I’ll frequently refer to investment banking as selling your youth - they pay you a fortune, but you spend the time in you have in your 20s and 30s working, and for many, large law firms have taken on the same climate.  But the people who don’t love it and just want the money won’t be able to work as hard or effectively as those who are passionate about their field, and subsequently, will never grasp the same rewards.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Law
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Other answers to the question “What is your formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?” From the Edge World Question Center.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Equation of the Week
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The best way to land a job or promotion is to work for free. It seems counter-intuitive, because we usually try to find new jobs or earn promotions to make more money, and working for free means not making any money (and has an opportunity cost), but working for free solves one of the biggest problem in the employment process: determining whether or not a candidate really is a good fit for the new role.

Most job seekers say the same thing “I’m a hard worker, I’m talented, and I’m motivated.” Of course, since everybody is saying it, managers have no way of knowing if it’s really the case. For most jobs, they can look at your past history and see if you’ve done the job successfully someplace else, but if you’re new to the job market, new to the industry, or looking for a promotion, you don’t have a history there. The manager is left with nothing but your word, and quite frankly, that isn’t worth much.

When you work for free, you show two things. First, you build a record of doing the job successfully. Second, you demonstrate that you’ve got a passion for what you’re doing. If you’re willing to work hard for no money, imagine what you’d do if you got paid for it. Employers are desperate for people passionate people who can do the job, and when they hire you, they’re usually taking a risk on whether or not you’re really as great as you say you are. The more you can prove it, the more likely an employer is to hire you and pay you a lot.

So how does this work for promotions? If you’re already in a job and you want a promotion, you could go up to your boss and explain that you’ve been a very successful worker, how you’ve been at the company a long time, and blabber about how great you are at your job. If your boss is smart, they’ll shoot right back and say “I know you’re great at this job, but that doesn’t mean you’d be great at the job we’re promoting you to.” A promotion usually requires added responsibility, and if it’s to management, a different set of skills. Instead, just start taking on extra responsibility. Take on leadership roles on projects, succeed, and then take on more. Don’t do it so much they start to take advantage of you, because at some point, you’re going to go to your boss and say “I’ve been doing the work of a manger for the past few months, and doing a great job, I think I’m ready to become one.” Even if they disagree, you now have proof that you can take to another company that you can do the work.

This isn’t just speculation that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Every job that I’ve ever held, whether as a computer programmer, consultant, or web designer, was tied to some activity I had previously done free of charge for friends, family, non-profits, and myself.

While at a conference in Seattle last year, I saw a presentation by a woman who handled marketing and promotions for video games - a dream job.  While in high school, she started writing a music newsletter, with opinions about the industry, stories about local bands, and reviews of CDs.  She’d print off copies, take them to music stores, and leave them there for shoppers to look at.  Eventually, someone in the music industry found it, liked what she saw, and hired the presenter for a dream job in the music biz, from which she transitioned later to video games.  Through the newsletter, she demonstrated not only that she could write, but that she had a passion for the work.  It’s something that employers love, but that’s hard to screen for in interviews.  If you do the work for free, you prove both right off the bat.

If you only do exactly the work you get paid to do, you’re never going to grow.  Nobody is going to take on your risk for you, you need to do it yourself.  As long as you think of it as an investment in your future, and manage it accordingly, working for free can bring massive returns.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Information Asymmetries
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Looks like Warren Buffet is picking a successor. Too bad an expert in Incentive Design didn’t help him come up with his selection criteria:

When I heard about this, the romance died. For all of Mr. Buffett’s reputation as the ultimate nonmutual fund, he may have just fallen into one of the biggest mutual fund traps of all — forgetting how incentives affect fund managers’ behavior.

Winner take all stock market games don’t reward the best investors, they reward the luckiest. It’s a spin-of-the-wheel that determines just which high-risk high-return investment hits pay dirt. Long term success doesn’t matter. The article also discusses the inventives investment managers face to screw their clients.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Managing
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Good writing is one of the most underestimated aspects of professional success. That’s why TheHeadHunter says that you can leverage that Liberal Arts degree into a great job: most people are horrible communicators, especially in writing. I see it every day in e-mails that I get, both personally and professionally. To help solve the problem, Penelope Trunk offers some great tips for professional writing. My favorite is #2:

2. Think on your own time.
Most of us think while we write. But people don’t want to read your thinking process; they want to see the final result. Find your main point in each paragraph and delete everything else. If someone is dying to know your logic, they’ll ask.

I remember reading an e-mail a few weeks ago from a C-level executive that sounded like he sat down at a computer and typed every thought that popped into his head. It was scattered, loopy, and disorganized. Not only did it make it difficult to follow, but it made his ideas seem less credible, no matter how persuasive he tried to be in the e-mail.

Because of that, I have to take issue with her title for number 4:

4. Write like you talk.
Each of us has the gift of rhythm when it comes to sentences, which includes a natural economy of language. But you must practice writing in order to transfer your verbal gifts to the page. Start by avoiding words you never say. For example, you would never say “in conclusion” when you are speaking to someone so don’t use it when you write.

Writing and speaking are different forms of communication, and some people aren’t great talkers in the first place. The key idea here isn’t making colloquial writing, it’s the “economy of language” - keeping things succinct and fluid.

She also advises to keep paragraphs short, maybe 4-5 lines, which I think is great advice for speaking as well. I coach people on what I call the “Three Sentence Rule.” Any time you’re speaking, make sure you solicit some sort of feedback from the audience, whether it’s laughter, nods, suggestions, or input, before continuing on. Preferably, you should let them talk for a bit at that point. People have short attention spans for things that aren’t about themselves, so keeping them focused beyond sentence three is tough, no matter how engaging you are. The three-sentence break gives them an opportunity to recenter the conversation around themselves.

Categories: Careers, Managing
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Joanne Jacobs offers this as a reason why teachers quit:

Smart, motivated people — the sort we want teaching — won’t stay in jobs if they can’t make a difference.

Except it isn’t just teachers. Everyone wants to make a difference in their job, and millennials twice as much so. Your employees will be successful if you let them and empower them, and they’ll leave if you don’t.

Categories: Careers, Education, Employee Engagement
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Some valuable advice from Microsoft recruiters over on the SI Career Services Blog:

1. Students over-emphasized their skills with regard to methodology/techniques. It’s very important for students to convey and demonstrate that they are well-trained and experienced in the core research techniques/tools. But students should keep in mind that this only meets our expectations. We have such respect for the SI program that we would expect all students to be well-trained. What students also need to convey is how they have applied the skills/techniques, how they used them to achieve some benefit, and their insights and lessons learned from their application to real-world problems.

2. Students over-emphasized group work. Working with teams is a critical part of ‘real-world skills’ and we recognize that many classes emphasize group projects. But students should always be prepared to articulate what their individual contribution was to any project. We (as interviewers) recognize the value of the group project, but we hire individuals. We can only make a positive hiring decision when we get a strong sense of who the individual is (their individual skills, strengths, expertise, passions, and insight/perspectives). (SI Careers Note: We strongly emphasize that demonstrated teamwork is important in interviewing, but that while discussing your group work, students should specifically talk about the role they played in the project (less “we” and more “me”).

More in the full post. Most job hunters don’t realize how much those little things really matter.

Categories: Careers
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Via ConfessionsofaCommunityCollegeDean, a Chronicle article on the importance of shared governance in universities:

Shared governance, especially in the context of a search for a top administrator, means that professors, staff members, and sometimes students get to participate in the process — unlike the bad old days when a university official could hire whomever he (and it was invariably a male) wanted without any input. “Shared” means that everyone has a role…
…
“Shared” doesn’t mean that every constituency gets to participate at every stage.
…
Clearly, the main reason why a search — especially for an administrator — cannot be a simple matter of a popular vote is that someone must remain accountable for the final decision, and committees cannot be held accountable.

Many governance institutions break down because they are a committee structure that is charged with decision making, rather than oversight, and no single individual is responsible for outcomes. At the same time, individual committee members will invariably cry foul when their own brilliance is dismissed by the group or the decision maker.

Categories: Careers, Governance, The Academy
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New York Magazine has an excellent piece on organizational psychology, fitting the right personalities with the right roles, and what makes managers successful. One nugget:

In the same vein, another researcher reports that one law firm deconstructs its HR needs by personality traits. It insists on extremely bright employees who are also extremely insecure. “They want them to think that working really hard matters,” he explains.

Here’s the short version: managers shouldn’t be narcissistic assholes, except when they should.

As an aside, New York Magazine seems to have one or two awesome pieces a month, and then the rest is only OK. Once they get up to 3 or 4, I’m going to become a regular reader (and maybe a subscriber).

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Employee Engagement, Law, Managing, Matching Mechanisms
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An article on workforce.com says we need to ditch the HR Generalist:

They resist measurement. If you look within your firm, you’ll find that your generalists have no output or results metrics of any kind. They resist corporate-wide HR metrics and technology because once those are instituted, they’ll no longer be allowed to hide in their well-protected enclaves.

Most of the complaints seem to revolve around the same thing: Generalists protect information. Never mind the importance of transparency for governance in general, within a company, it is paramount. By hiding information, HR Generalists become the siloed barriers to change. At the same time, the more their role becomes “information conduit,” the easier it is to replace them with technology.

In all fairness to the HR generalist, people in all sorts of roles try to protect information and serve as barriers to change. I’ve seen companies where every single one of those complaints can describe anyone there, including senior management. It just so happens that HR generalists have these problems structurally built into their role.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Information Asymmetries, Managing, Metrics
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From Nick Corcodilos:

Offering to solve problems without being asked would pay off for me again and again throughout my life. It also earned me friends in higher places. But when I first tried it, I was lowlier than anyone reading this blog. The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers
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The not-so-weekly Equation of the Week returns with a formula for determining whether or not a person will engage in prostitution:

[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w - [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]

Where U=utility, L=leisure, C=goods and services consumed, S=quantity of prostitution sold, w=wage for prostitutes, and r=your reputation.

In other words:

An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.

Reputation, or more broadly social costs, may be one thing that individuals consider when selecting a profession, but to say it’s the only thing?

The full paper is here, via this Improbable Research Column.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Dating, Equation of the Week, Funny, Incentive Centered Design, Matching Mechanisms
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After an experience at a restaurant, the Evil HR Lady says:

We don’t train our managers correctly. We don’t teach them what they, as the manager, should fix and what their employees should fix. Managers are scared to let employees have any power–for fear they’ll make the wrong decision. If your employees are poor decision makers, you should not have hired them in the first place. Hire good employees and let them do their work.

Customers want the person they’re dealing with to be able to fix their problems, not have to pawn it off on someone else. If your employees need to get management approval to improve customer experience, they’re wasting everyone’s time. Better to hire talented people, focus them on the customer, and trust them to make the right choices. Let managers manage, and trust the employees who handle your most precious asset, your customers, to make the right decisions, because if you don’t, your customers will leave for a company that does.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Governance, Managing, Marketing
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Also, if faculty governance actually means something, then faculty unionization makes no sense. You’re either management or labor; not both. If you really run the place, then you’re management. If you claim to run the place and you unionize to negotiate against it, I’d call that ’self-dealing.’ It’s a flagrant ethical violation, and of dubious legality. You can’t have it both ways.

From this blog that I just discovered, featuring the musings of an Anonymous Community College Dean

Categories: Careers, Education, Governance, Law, The Academy
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When I interviewed 1,000 people for What Should I Do With My Life?, it was plainly apparent that so many of our smartest college students from our best schools are actually very risk averse. Coming out of college, they took jobs where the “track to success” was spelled out and clear. Wall Street, law school, corporate America - there was no imagination or creativity in these choices. And nothing daring about it. Ten years later, many of them were unhappy and unfulfilled. But quitting - even though they had lots of money in the bank - was absolutely terrifying to them. The loss of status scared them; the idea of jumping off a track and freestyling their career was frightening. They didn’t want to look not smart. They were afraid of taking a job that didn’t broadcast to the world how smart they must be to have that job.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s blog has some great posts about self esteem (start with that one, then look more recent) and the insane science and practice around promoting it.

I’m also shocked with the risk aversion among my peers, but it gets worse than Po sees. So many people graduate college and skip the job search because they fear getting rejected, or don’t apply to graduate school because they think they need more experience. The worst thing that happens - they say no and you try again in a few years. What I worry about the most, though, is the tendency for people not to pursue a career because they might not like it, so instead they languish in jobs they already know they don’t like. The best way to find out if you like a job? Try it! It’s OK to quit and try something else, but they are so afraid of success, or of leaving, they don’t even give real employment a chance.

Categories: Careers, Education, Graduate School, Matching Mechanisms
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