Roman's miles

Why to work at MSFT?

It's another vivid example of the same old adage - work with pros. The first and foremost criterion of accepting a job offer - will you be learning something from people you'll be working with?

Microsoft is undoubtedly such a place and here is another reason, personalized with veryknown and bright names. I guess that any big, known, and successful company provides great chances of meeting such folks. Maybe it won't happen on your first position but as time goes by you'll, most likely, be able to drift towards internal talents.

At SAP there are many genius people in every division too and I'm an absolute adherent of the philosophy that the talented folks should be the only force, gravitating you to the next position.  Talented bosses, colleagues, and people reporting you must expose new ideas, practices, and  experience for you to learn and grow. Then it becomes an investment. If you pick up a job only because of money then sooner or later your professional inflation will swallow it.

Technorati tags: microsoft, career, talent

How do you beget "what if" questions?

What-if quesions are the fuel of the engine of innovation and progress. Great companies rever it the most. Madan Birla in his FedEx Delivers at a great length describes how a real hunting environment for "what-if" questions is set up in the company and why it is the only way to remain on the edge of innovation.

Does your company/division/team encourage the employees to ask "stupid" what-if questions? Are you ready for disturbing suggestions? Who answers those questions and evaluates the answers?

Good companies make their best to minimize employee turn-around but the flip side of the coin is more and more employees know less and less about the outside world (at least from their own experience). How to get "new blood" from the external (to the company) world?

Somewhere I recently read that one company had an official policy for newly hired employees to provide their feedback in 10 and then in 100 days on what they'd change if they were a CEO. What's a great idea! But again, how to accumulate the feedback and adopt it?

What doest your company do with what-if questions? Do you encourage the employees to challenge the status quo? If there is no global official policy what do you do in your team? As a lead? As a "simple" employee?

Different (often opposite) alternatives sometimes reveal new opportunities. A personal example, though not from the office life, is a bit funny and hopefully happy for the players.

We have a 3 year old dog (Tracy) whose periodical natural sessions were bringing some problems in "maintenance". The only idea to fix the problem was to fix Tracy. An unexpected alternative to this solution emerged as an idea of finding her a husband. The "what if we find a husband for Tracy" question implies if not eliminating from the problem but at least real benefits of experiencing it. I won't change the topic here - simply wanted to illustrate how an absurd, at first sight, idea can become a real solution.

If it's implemented in near future I'll publish the continuation and you could buy some of the benefits (hope they'll be after Tracy:-)

Our schedules are soccerized:-(

- when do we meet?
- any evening, just when not the games are.
(planning a meeting in Israel)
...
- when can we organize a webex tomorrow?
- let's do it afternoon, between the games.
(scheduling a presentation in US)

Thomas Otter writes about admiring sunset during time-breaks in Germany yet in US our working day is screwed up by the Mondial. The cup has reached its culmination (at least in the ratio of the number of games to the games' importance) and all here (at least those who would expect the word "footballized" in the title) are aligning the schedules where possible or record the games to later watch and go through the tension and excitement (a hint: don't tell anybody how great a game ended unless you checked (s)he knows the result:-)

Is your schedule affected by such rare and great events? Your family?

The good news for me is I'll see last four games when I'll be on vacation. Somebody can recommend a good pub for that in Singapore?:-)

Technorati tags: mondial, job, schedule, GTD

I'm a CTM!

Today I've given my 10th speech and completed my CTM (competitive toast master). It's a first basic level of a qualified speaker consisting of 10 speeches.  I've done it just before my long travels when me and the family will be out of the States (and I'll miss all the meetings of the club) until August, the 14th - we're flying to Israel this Thursday.

I really love the club and will be missing it those days. Today, though, I wanted to take this opportunity and explain why I love it.

I found the club when last year I identified public speaking as a skill of mine needed additional development. I seriously decided to invest into it, meaning I was after a program or a plan to achieve something tangible and practical. Merely reading articles and someone's piece of advice on how to present, speak, and deliver messages didn't work for me. I was looking for an environment to immerse myself into and qualitatively grow.

Particularly I needed:

• A playground to practice regularly;
• Coaches (or at least reviewers) to address weak areas of my speaking skills;
• A methodology to study and follow;
• A road-map with detail steps and objectives;
• Live examples to learn from;
• Convenient meeting time and location;

I have to confess that Toastmasters International satisfied all my requests 100%! Here is how and why:

• Every toastmaster meeting takes an hour and planned deliberately with a minute granularity. A typical meeting consists of a number of prepared speeches (about 5-7 minutes each) that lately are being evaluated (another series of short 2-3 minute speeches). Besides that if the time permits there are, so called, table topics when somebody prepares a theme and invite spontaneously the club members to participate in a topic exposing their opinion on the matter. There are also many other opportunities to have a small (unprepared) speech that may vary from club to club but the bottom line is it is a place where you come to speak and learn to speak. There is nothing but speaking during this hour;
• As I said every prepared speech is evaluated by a club member. An evaluation takes 2-3 minutes and addresses positive aspect of a speaker as well as traits to improve. Anything from speech structure, opening and closing, body language and posing, eye contact, vocal variety, message clarity, proper English can be addressed and estimated. It is a very practical and efficient experience for a learning speaker;
• The program methodology is embodied in a kit you get for every program. It consists of a working book and a number of guides for specific traits that are evaluated from the above. Each of the speeches has its own objectives that you have to achieve and pay more attention. Again quite the same basic traits every professional speaker ought to possess but targeted separately with a great piece of preparation and studying materials. Speech organization, getting to the point, body language, convincing the audience, inspiring it - just a few of them. So every next step you take has clear target and plays its own role on the way to the finish line;
• A good club with a sound history and actively participating members definitely has a few masters to learn from. At my club we have usually 3 speeches but sometimes there are more. We don't lack of people to learn from;
• If you go to the site of Toastmaster Internationals and look for a  nearest club you'll be stunned how many options exist there (at least in the States). There are more than 10.000(!) clubs globally and I had a plenty of options to choose one depending on location and time;

The last point I was pleasantly surprised when I joined it was the environment in the club is very friendly. People are eager to give you pragmatic criticism (at the end of the day we come there to practice and hear the listeners' opinions on how to improve). It's not only true for my club but a general approach of the organization. It's a very friendly environment where you immediately feel safe to try, make a mistake, fix it, and try again. You can attend a club as a guest (which is free) as many times as you want to get a feeling on what's going on inside (in a particular club) and then make a decision whether it works for you or not. For me it works great and I'm waiting for my future programs to further improve my skills.

Technorati tags: toastmaster, career, speech

Email culture

How cautiously do you use emails with your team, company, customers? Do you think on how to help them make their life easier? Email today is the means of collaboration, even if you organization is happy to work with a wiki, an internal portal and uses (unfortunately a number of) instant messengers. Some of us get hundreds of emails daily and saving half a minute per email is a benchmark that very busy people are after. I know few that were so overwhelmed by emails that stopped answering/forwarding them  - they simply didn't know how to manage the growing snow-ball.

Here are a few simple tips of mine (the list is not exhaustive at all) that I found useful:

• Always fill the subject field. Make it as meaningful as possible. An internally accepted naming convention for what to put to the subject may seriously improve quality of rules and filters. It can be a branch name, a customer, or a product label.
  
• Put a recipient in the TO only if you expect him/her answering the email. Otherwise use the CC. It helps the reader to pre-estimate the email's importance before reading it and use filters/rules to sort it out.
• If there is more than one recipient and you question something or expect particular action from one of the recipients address  this part of the email to the recipient directly to help him/her not to miss it  (@John: or @DB team:).
• Answer emails in the reverse chronological order. When you get a chance to answer in an already quite going conversation don't take the participant back to the first email you got. They already have advanced in the discussion and you'd better off get yourself to the picture and read the latest answers (especially because the first emails are typically trailed at the bottom of every answered email anyway).
• Use the low priority for jokes and emails not related directly to the duties. Again, the same intention - help your recipients to draw attention to really important things.
• Use the high priority only if it's totally urgent. Otherwise it confuses the recipients and what's worse - you'll be known as a wolf-crier, so when the case will be really urgent nobody will pay attention to the small red exclamation mark on an email from you.
• Use OOO (out-of-office) auto-response if you can't return direct emails in a 24 hour interval of working days. If you don't use it and leave to vacation not only you'll find your boss unhappy with all the emails reminding you to answer, where (s)he, all of a sudden, became CC-ed. Your (and your team's) reputation and image will be damaged (let alone the fact that the senders may get stuck in the unknown).

The flip side of the problem is how to read and manage incoming emails. Dave Lorenzo writes about his experience in getting rid of the Blackberry and checking emails barely a few times a day. We're watching closely his experiment and impatiently waiting for the long-term results. It's the same problem - emails eat too much time of ours. I think we should address it from both sides - the recipient side and the sender one.

Waiting on your tips and experience on how to cultivate the email culture.

Update: David went farther and started deliting emails CC-ing him. Advocate emails (and Blackberry) is my comments to this approach.

Technorati tags: email, GTD, productivity, culture

Brilliant Guy!

To all, interested in innovations, entrepreneurship, new ventures, and great examples of  public speaking and presenting here is a link to Guy Kawasaki's presentation "The art of innovation" he gave on January 24th, 2006 at the Tech Coast Angels “Fast Pitch Competition”. As usually, crisp content, clear ideas, ingenious jokes , an amazing presentation, and, as always, brilliant Guy. Just watch it!

p.s. it's worth of seeing the after presentation QA session too.

Technorati tags: Kawasaki, VC, innovation

Projecting ROI to yourself

I was thinking whether the position I'm an ideal candidate for is the ideal for me. Am I satisfied with my own (professional) profile and what skills should have I had to satisfy the dream job of mine? I've looked at my 10-year career and tried to analyze my strongest and weakest skills. The first candidate to dig for the strengths was the professional spot - what I've been doing for living for these years - the professional (in my case -  the technical) skills. The weakest ones presumably might be found in areas where I've had a little exposure according to my professional charter - marketing, business development, sales, management of big groups and budgets. Categorizing the existing skills is not a problem on a scale of "strong-weak". More interesting task is to analyze the weaknesses and strengths from an investment perspective. Have the investments in the strongest been justified and which one out of the weakest to pick up to increase ROI? If I were in the beginning of my career now would have I invested in the same skills?

I describe here the skills relevant for a hi-tech guy on dawn of his career. The set is fictitious and but even this set will change as time goes by. But I'm sure that the idea is simple and the example is illustrative.

I found useful to characterize every skill by these parameters:

• Applicability. Whether a skill is applicable to what you're doing (now - for a short-term return and in the future for a long-term investment). The more the skill is applicable the more attractive it becomes to invest. For one knowing C++ it may be Java or for one moving to Germany it may be German language;
• Longevity. How long will you use the skill in the future. COBOL was applicable and in high demand 25 years ago but today? German makes less sense to invest if you relocate to Germany only for a year. Speaking skills, though, will be in use as long as you live (or at least speak);
• Precocity. How long does it take to grow the skill. Mastering public speaking takes a bit longer than learning HTML. Mastering playing cello takes much longer than playing poker.
• Complementarity. Whether a skill complements other skills to make you more professional as a possessor of the combined skills as a whole. Java, networking, security - together make you a good software architect with wide vision. Although if you're a Java developer not targeting an architect role learning security may not be in your focus.

I depicted an imaginary set of skills where the longevity and the applicability are chosen as the axes and the circle diameter denotes the precocity (time to master the skill), colors represent clusters (a kind of complementarity).

Looking at the diagram we see that to grasp HTML skills is simpler than VB or project management but easier to find application. Obtaining negotiation skills is much harder than presentation skills and can be practically applied (or paid for) after quite a long.

I hope the idea is clear. When choosing a next skill to pick up and grow we should analyze it from a complex perspective taking into account a number of aspects. We also should pay more attention to strategic (long-term) skills that maybe not bring immediate return but will be repaid hundredfold with the time. It seems that the soft skills are, actually, harder than some of the hard skills. Public speaking, presentation skills, team management are ones that harder to master but which remain with us forever in their relevancy. You (most likely) won't want to be a programmer for 40 years, one day your preferences will change and the skill set is better off be ready. In your forties you (most likely) won't play basketball (at least to enlarge the network). Isn't it better to invest in learning golf than poker?:-)

Technorati tag: skill, career, roi

The worst things you can do to fail your job interview

Usually I don't repost someone's blogs but this one is exeptional.  How Not to acti in a job interview is hilarious! Just a couple of quotations of what limits people stupidity can reach:

• Applicant challenged the interviewer to arm wrestle.
• Applicant removed a hairbrush from the interviewer's purse, brushed his hair, and left.
• Applicant pulled out a Polaroid camera and snapped a flash picture of the interviewer. He claimed to collect photos of everyone who interviewed him.
• Applicant arrived wearing only one shoe, and explained the other was stolen off her foot on the bus.
• Applicant asked who the lovely babe in the picture was. When the interviewer said it was his wife, applicant asked if she was home now and wanted the interviewer's phone number. The interviewer called security.
• Applicant hrew up on the interviewer's desk and immediately started asking questions about the job, like nothing had happened.

The list is long and I won't break your fun:-) Really nice!

Tehcnorati tags: career, interview, job

Another NOBS book - a candidate for the best book of 2006

I read quite a lot (still not fast enough) and though it's only mid of June I have another candidate for the best book I've read in 2006. "Never eat alone" by Keith Ferrazzi surely will appear  in my NOBS (No BS) list.

I greedily swallowed a library's copy in a couple of days and was so excited and impressed that ordered own copy at Amazon. This book should be a table book until you practice the ideas it preaches so deep and often that they become organic part of you.

As you may see from the title the book fights isolation and loneliness during a meal. It's not a metaphor though not the gist either. The essence of the book is "your network and connections are the pledge of your success; build your network via becoming useful to people, become a hub of connections, eagerly seek opportunities to help others, and never keep score".

It may seem that the ideas are not very innovative and it's true - they're not. But Keith succeeds to deliver such a simple message to readers' brains and hearts. A mix of bright and descriptive problem explanation, concrete and pragmatic advice (the book is organized as a set of such), and real life (actually Keith's life) examples makes reading experience gripping and inspiring.

I was quite sceptic when I took this book in my library. It's definitely a challenge to teach somebody on a very basic topic such a network building and nurturing relationships. Readers may soon find the content boring, repetitive, and obvious to keep reading. The problems are known, there is a variety of networking-101 tips published in magazines and the net, and illustrative examples of how right networking changed so-and-so's life. Still Keith amazingly broke the ice of scepticism with the very first pages turning the 'another-business-book-reading' exercise into very pleasant conversation (yes, while reading the book a strong feeling of a dialog doesn't leave you).

The books makes you look at your life's values again from another point of view. I won't re-tell the book's content and ideas here but strongly encourage you to find the book and read it. I wish I found it 15 or 20 years ago but happy that even today I ran across it. I'm sure I'll meet Keith in person one day and we'll eat together:-)

Building your network. The right tool.

Nothing has ever been as important as right connections. Today, in the Internet era it's impossible to overestimate the meaning of networking. Everything is changing rapidly and you barely hope (but don't know for sure) what you will be doing in a couple of years and whom will be working with.  Fortunately there is a number of tools helping us to manage our connections and I want to share my experience on the one I particularly love - LinkedIn - since a few friends of mine were asking me about it when I tried to join them.

The idea of the tool is simple - build your profile (a kind of an on-line resume), join other people you met, and be a connector of your network. Very simple and very efficient.

Why do you need it, what benefits do you get from it? One may say that Outlook is sufficient to store all contact information. But in LinkedIn by putting your contacts to your network you, actually, establish a connection with alive people; whatever they change in their data becomes immediately visible and accessible to you. You link them to you as opposite to storing a snapshot of their profile in your Outlook.

You get additional means to manage the connections like "shared connections" or "added connections". The former lets you see other colleagues that you and your connection share so if somebody changes her data you have other common contacts to reach the person. The later allows you to see what other contacts your connection has recently added and you may want to add them as well if you know them.

To sing-up you need to make just a few clicks and your virtual incarnation is given birth. It has a number of mandatory fields such as locations, industry, and company. You can control visibility and accessibility of your user (and its data) but the mandatory fields are always available for searches.

This is, probably, the best feature of the system since it helps you to establish connections with people you don't know in person but have an opportunity to reach them via your common network. Let me demonstrate it to you on an example.  Suppose, I want to meet Keith Ferrazzi. I don't know him (yet) in person but it happens that he already has registered at LinkedIn. When I execute a search there I see that he's only 3 degrees form me: meaning I have somebody in my direct network who has somebody in her direct network who knows Keith in person! Of course, I can try to contact Keith directly (if I know his email) but with LinkedIn I see a way (or a few) to be introduced to Keith via people we both know! Guess what my chances are to be accepted. By the way, Keith has a great article on LinkedIn and he also promotes the system in his amazing book.

Another advantage of the tool (or, rather, another aspect of the very same advantage) is you can find people from your big network (2nd and 3d tiers) based on the mandatory fields (location, company, industry). Looking for somebody in a certain company? Just put its name to the advanced search. Seeking an insider's view for an industry you have nobody in - the same receipt. You can use the network for anything - it gives you always the same resul - builds a chain of trusted (read: personal) connections to the target.

People often ask me whom should they invite or whose invitation to accept. There were two polar ideas: only people you can recommend personally or anybody you happened to know, even virtually. My opinion is you should add anybody for whom you'll be feeling comfortable to serve as a connector between her and your network. At the end of the day it's free but you don't want, probably, to have hundred people in the network whose names tell you nothing. So be selective but not greedy.

Membership is free at LinkedIn for a basic profile but there are options to upgrade to professional service from the network. I think you need it only if you're in an active job seeking position and am very happy with the level of free membership.

Last comment is building a network takes time and right contacts is something you want to have ready right when you need it. So don't shelve it - register today!

Update: Guy Kawasaki has a great post on how to use LinkedIn

Technorati tags:  social networking, linkedin, team