September 2007

I recently finished reading Mass Career Customization, the newly released book from Deloitte’s Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg (published by Harvard Business Press).

The Quick review: Great book with some excellent ideas.

The long review (well…not real long):

The authors do a very good job of outlining the issues and trends that are pressing employees today. The main issues, according to the authors, are:

• Knowledge Worker Shortfall
• Changing Family Structures
• More & Better Educated Women
• The changing expectations of Men
• Generational Maturity (Gen X & Y)
• Technology

These issues are definitely affecting organizations and employees and there has been little thought put into how to allow employees to structure their lives and careers to address these issues.

The authors provide a framework, which they’ve called “Mass Career Customization” (MCC) that allows employees and organizations to customize a career. This framework provides four dimensions that can be used to customize a career at any given point in time. These dimensions, Pace, Workload, Location/Schedule and Role, are well thought out and well crafted ways to customize a career. According to the authors, these dimensions are defined as (taken from page 84):

• Pace - options relating to the rate of career progression
• Workload - choices relating to the quanity of work output
• Location/Schedule - Options for when and where work is performed
• Role - Choices in position and responsibilities.

Let’s consider an example of how MCC works:

Assume you are a person just out of college. You take a job with a large company and want to get on ‘the fast track’ to career growth and experience. You, along with your manager, would use the MCC framework to increase the dimensions of Pace, Workload and possibly Location/Schedule so that you can gain as much experience in the business as you can. The Role dimension would be at its lowest level since your role would be as an individual contributor.

Now, assume you’ve worked for 3 years with this same MCC model and are getting tired of the pace of life and want to settle down a bit and go back to school for your MBA. At this time, you and your manager would sit down and develop another MCC model for your career to possibly reduce Pace and Workload while increasing your role to a position that moves you into a managerial role.

Further along in your career, you can use the MCC framework to structure your work-life balance in order to do what you need to do.

The overall goal of MCC is to provide a method for allowing employees and organizations to utilize the talent pool in a more effective manner. I can’t help but think of the books by Ricardo Semler (Maverick, Seven Day Weekend) which discuss the need to treat employees like adults and allow them to do their job in whatever way they feel most comfortable with. I think the Mass Career Customization framework is getting us closer to that type of organization.

This book is a very interesting book…I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the art/science of making organizations more effective and employee friendly.

NOTE: This book was provided by the publisher as an advanced review copy.

[tags] Mass Career Customization, books, culture, organization, Human Resources [/tags]

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Have you ever walked into an interview with a preconceived notion of the job you were interviewing for and after during/after the interview you felt that the job you were told about wasn’t the job you interviewed for?

In a previous article titled “Interviewing Tips for Interviewers,” I gave interviewers five tips for interviewing. These tips are:

1. When interviewing candidates, be personable and professional.
2. Be prepared. You expect the candidate to do their homework, do yours.
3. Don’t read from a list of ‘canned’ questions during an interview….probe into the background of the candidate.
4. Have a conversation with the candidate…don’t talk ‘at’ them.
5. Understand the role that the candidate is interviewing for.

I think I need to add one more item to this list due to a recent experience.

I’ve recently had an experience where I flew across the country to interview for a position that I thought to be a senior level position within the company. What I thought the job was was much different than what it actually was….and to make matters worse, the people interviewing me (all eight of them) had different ideas of what the position was that they were interviewing for.

Let me reiterate…each person had a different idea about what the job was…eight different people interviewing me for basically what felt like eight different positions. One person asked me about my leadership abilities and how I went about business development. The next asked about my knowledge of J2EE and the next about my project management skills. The following person asked me about my .NET development skills. Another asked about my network architecture background. At the end of the day I felt like I’d interviewed for eight different positions.

Now…I really hope they didn’t expect me (or anyone else) to have all the skills they asked about. If they were trying to hire a Managing Director who also developed software in both J2EE and .NET and who also was a network architect…more power to them.

So…time to add another tip to add to the list:

6. Be crystal clear about the role you are trying to fill. A high-level description should clearly state the what/why/how/when for the role. After describing the role, make sure your interview team understands the role too.

Most positions today require employees to wear many different hats and to be very flexible in their assignments. This flexibility and multiple responsibilities can make it difficult for interviewers to communicate the essence of the position they are trying to fill but some basic understanding of the roles/responsibilities is necessary before interviewing.

Before posting a job opening, be very sure you know how to describe the job and be especially sure that the team members doing the interviewing understand the job and the role that person will play in the organization.

[tags] Human Resources, organization, Management, Leadership, Interviewing Tips [/tags]

This post is a follow up to my post titled “Employee Onboarding“.

Research reported on a recent Management Issues article titled “How to lose half your hires within a year” provides a bit more insight into the Employee Onboarding problem in the US. They report (bolded text is my emphasis):

A study by consultancy Novations has found a third of employers report that a quarter of their new hires leave within the first year, while more than a fifth carelessly lose nearly half of their recruits within the same timeframe.

The research, reported by SHRM Online, the website for the Society for Human Resource Management, found fewer than half of employers have a structured programme to help new recruits settle in, or “onboarding” as it is called.

Under a third of employers train their hiring managers in onboarding techniqures, with 15 per cent even leaving it up to their hiring managers to sort out all the paperwork.

Similarly, fewer than half give candidates a realistic job preview or provide interviewers with tools to help them evaluate a candidate’s skills.

While six out of 10 do follow a structured selection process, just 46 per cent establish objective hiring criteria for all open positions.

Can you imagine?

How much money is wasted every year by organizations by selecting employees and then just ‘throwing them to the sharks’.

You can read the SHRM article on this research at “Many Employers Admit They ‘Wing’ Support of New Hires“. Some other interesting stats from the research report are:

• 57 percent of all those surveyed have never had a performance review, or, if they did have a review, they found it neutral or not useful.
• 79 percent don’t receive career mentoring.
• Only 12 percent said their employer offers them a career path plan.

Other articles you may find interesting:

• The Hiring Challenges
• Blaine Collins on New Team Members
• Organizational Culture
• Follow-up to Organizational Culture

[tags] Organizaitons, Hiring Challenges, Employee Onboarding, Onboarding, Culture [/tags]

Articles and books about Innovation are everywhere. Every organization talks about increasing innovation…and they talk…and they talk.

Instead of talking about ‘how to innovate’ and trying to implement ‘innovation groups’, perhaps organizations need to just let their people work on topics that interest them. There are many organizations touting their ‘innovation networks’ and ‘processes to improve innovation’ but these same organizations show very little innovative output (at least any that is visible).

Innovation and invention doesn’t come from a process…it comes from hard work and luck. As an example, look at the recent news article about John Kanzius’ attempts at finding a cure for cancer which turned into the amazing discovery of how to burn saltwater by sending radio waves through the water. The resulting ‘burn’ provides flames hot enough to melt the glass test tubes (some reports show the flames at 3000 degrees F.

I’d bet money that Mr Kanzius didn’t write a bunch of articles nor read a bunch of books about ‘innovation’…I bet he went to his lab day in and day out and worked his butt off. With the hard work (and a bit of luck) he was able to do something that many researchers with doctorate degrees and many ‘innovative’ organizations haven’t been able to…provide a new scientific break-through that might have significant repercussions for this world. The only question for Mr Kanzius now is how much energy does it take to get the saltwater to the burning point….if its significantly less than the output heat than he’s got a winner on his hands.

Innovation is a great thing for organizations and is vital to their long-term success and stability but I think some people are losing sight of the fact that talking about innovation isn’t going to cut it…you need to actually do something. Oh yeah…and have a little luck on your side too.

A few more blog posts about Innovation that I found interesting:

• On Measuring the ability to Innovate at The Webquarters
• Apple and the cost of Innovation at BusinessWeek
• Google’s API Greed is bad for Innovation at Micro Persuasion

[tag] Innovation, Invention, Google [/tags]

I’ve moved my blog to the new domain (http://ericbrown.com) and have changed the name to “Aligning Technology Strategy People and Projects’…although I’m wondering if that name is too long.

The RSS Feed should still work (I use feedburner to manage and they’ve already handled the transition)…if anyone has any trouble with the new blog please let me know.

[tags] New Blog, Move Domain, Blog Changes [/tags]

I’m always amazed how to hard it is for some people/firms to understand that communication is a major reason for project success or failure.

For example, on one of the projects I’m working on now is a content management system implementation. My role is as overall program manager responsible for managing internal and external resources as well as managing the vendor relationship.

The vendor was in town a few weeks ago to work with the client to develop requirements for the initial phase. Their plan was to return to their office and get a proposal (including project plans) to the client the following week. When the vendor left, everyone was quite happy with their work and felt very comfortable with their ability to do the job at hand.

The following week we heard nothing from the vendor. Not a peep other than the occasional reply to an email sent from me or my client.

The end of the week came and went with no proposal or project plan and no communication from them. The client started getting very nervous and started asking questions like ‘are they doing anything’ and ‘did they forget about us’. Phone calls and emails to the vendor were left unanswered.

After a few days the client decided to make the call to the vendor’s VP of Sales to find out what was going on. She said ‘we got busy with a few other projects but we are making progress on yours’….this small simple explanation was all it took to ease the mind of my client.

The moral of the story:

The simple act of sending a quick email or making a short call to your client can really do a lot to set their mind at ease. This simple act makes them understand that you are working on their project and progress is being made.

I don’t understand why more people don’t do the easy yet critical step of keeping in regular contact with clients.

[tags] Communications, Project Management [/tags]

Recently I was asked this question by a potential client and was at a loss for words for a few minutes…I’d never really thought about this before. My values have always been my values (for the most part…a few have changed).

My answer to him was a quick one: I learned my values from my family. I’d like to take a second to expand that answer a little bit and then to ask my readers where their values come from.

I learned my values early in my life. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma whose population was barely a thousand people. Both sets of grandparents farmers, dairy farmers raised beef cattle and most of my extended family lived in the same general area. The majority of my family still lives in the same town they had grown up in.

Growing up, I learned how hard it is to make a living from the land…it is hard hard hard work. It can also be very rewarding, but most times not in the financial sense. While growing up I learned what it meant to work hard, be trustworthy, be honest, have integrity and to be selfless.

As a child, you never really think that you are learning ‘values’ but you are. These values extend into your adult life and provide you with a ‘compass’ to navigate through the various trials and tribulations life has to offer. These values may change a bit during life but I believe the core values you learn as a child stay with you for the rest of your life.

An example I like to use when telling people about my values and where they came from involves my grandfather, Claude Levisay (who we called Grandpa). He was a great guy but one who I misunderstood for a significant portion of my life. I thought he was a ‘mean old guy’ who never never really talked to me and never really enjoyed life. I realize now I was wrong about him.

My grandfather had many different jobs over the years; Dairy Farmer, Bus Driver, Handyman, Carpenter. The most memorable to me was when he worked as a carpenter built and remodeled homes. I helped him occasionally during the summer and soon realized that my grandfather was not the ‘mean old guy’ I thought he was. He was a kind hearted man who was as one of the most intelligent and hard working men I’ve ever met (I’d have to include my father Dwain and uncle Jerry in that list too).

Grandpa was also one of the most honest men I’ve ever met. One summer while helping him build a home, I learned a valuable lesson about integrity and doing things right. We had just finished framing out the house (e.g., using 2×4 studs to build the walls) and somewhere during framing we had gotten off plum and level and the walls had become slightly off-level.

When my Grandfather noticed this he wasn’t happy at all…but thankfully it wasn’t due to some stupid mistake on my part When I looked at the level, I could barely tell that the wall wasn’t plum but he felt it wasn’t ‘right’ so he said we needed to ‘do it over’. We were going to tear half the walls down and re-frame them…another half-day worth of work due to what I thought was a minor issue. We tore those walls down and rebuilt them and didn’t charge any additional fees for that extra work.

I learned an invaluable lesson that day. We could have hidden the fact that the wall wasn’t plum/level but that wasn’t the right thing to do. The right thing to do was what we did…tear the wall down and start over. I doubt you’d find many contractors who would do that these days.

Needless to say, I learned a great deal from my grandfather and other family members. Hard work, integrity, honesty, selflessness, family and duty are the ones that have stuck with me.

My personal values have changed a bit as I’ve grown. For example, my family eschewed alcohol…but I love good wine (and an occasional Wild Turkey & Coke). The family also didn’t smoke…but I love the occasional cigar. Some values have changed over the course of my life but my core values remain the same to this day.

Where did your values come from? I’d love to hear your stories.

[tags] values [/tags]

As some of you may have read in my previous post titled “I’ve been tagged…8 Random Facts“, I used to lift weights and compete as a powerlifter while in high school.

Being a competitive powerlifter (or any competitive athlete) takes a lot of hard work and ‘practice’ although powerlifting doesn’t really require practice like football or baseball, but does require a considerable amount of time in the gym to increase your strength.

When I started lifting weights I didn’t know what I was doing and did what everyone else did. I did a lot of different exercises for different body parts but there wasn’t any focus on an outcome (e.g., get stronger, more agility, etc) …sounds familiar to most organizations these days doesn’t it?

I continued with these unfocused workouts for about a year and never really gained much strength or size and didn’t seem to get any quicker or faster either. I though about it a bit and decided to start studying the science of building muscle and see what it took to build strength and increase speed and/or quickness.

After considerable study, I realized strength didn’t come from overworking all your muscles..it came from a very focused approach to exercise each muscle. I started reading and talking to people and soon realized that spending hours in the gym going from one exercise to the next wasn’t doing what I needed it to do, which was build strength.

After a few months of studying, talking with people and experimenting, I came up with a routine that worked very very well for me. I drastically cut the number of exercises down to just the basics for each type of powerlifting movement (bench press, squat, deadlift) and came up with the following ‘workout rules’ to help guide me in developing my workout plans:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Keep it focused.
3. Constantly Change.
4. Keep learning.
5. Keep it short.

After changing my routines to follow these rules, I started seeing a significant increase in my strength and muscle mass. I also went from spending hours in the gym to spending less than an hour working out.

What were the results?

I went from being one of the smallest kids in my class to being a 220 pound ball of muscle. I won two national championships when I was sixteen years old by bench pressing 350 pounds, squatting 575 pounds and deadlifting 500 pounds. In addition, all of this was done without steroids or any other performance enhancing drugs.

Why am I sharing this story?
I’ve used these same ‘rules’ throughout my life with similar success. I’ve adopted these rules to my life and my career to help guide me in the jobs and engagements I’ve been in. They have helped me to keep clients happy and helped me change when I needed to. The rules and reasons to consider using them are:

1. Keep it simple
   There’s a well known principle in engineering called the KISS (stands for Keep It Simple Stupid) principle. This principle, which states that you should always do the simplest thing possible and avoid complex solutions, has proven invaluable to me during many consulting engagements.
2. Keep it focused
   Focus is a significant factor in success for a person and organizations. Focus on the customer. Focus on the team. Focus on the project. Focus on the results. When you focus, you bring more energy to the issue at hand.
3. Constantly Change
   Change is good. While lifting weights, if you continue to do the same exercise over and over, your muscles start to get used to the movement and stop responding to it. You must change to keep your muscles growing. The same is true in all aspects of life. Like most people change does scare me sometimes but I’ve learned that it is a good thing. Change keeps you uncomfortable, which helps you grow.
4. Keep learning
   I love to learn. When lifting weights, I constantly read everything about weightlifting and working out that I could get my hands on. I read scientific material as well as magazines such as Muscle & Fitness. I love to learn new exercises and new techniques. The same holds true today in my career. I devour books and am usually reading 3 or 4 at a time plus I’m always talking to other people to learn from their experiences. Of course, nothing is as good as experiencing something first hand (e.g., reading about how to fly an aircraft vs. actually flying one) but learning keeps your mind sharp and allows for continuous growth.
5. Keep it short
   Unlike this blog post (and many others I’ve written lately), I tend to like to keep most things short and to the point. I’ve found that short and sweet is much easier for people to read and comprehend and there is less room for misinterpretation.

I’ve used the above rules to my advantage throughout my career…I like to think they have helped me become the person I am today. I’d be interested in hearing other’s ideas on how these rules (or any others) have helped you in your career.

[tags] powerlifting, focus, learning, simplicity, KISS [/tags]