Labor Manual

 

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How to Get My Job

When I was in college, I used to get really irritated when I or a fellow student asked a visiting professional or journalist how they got where they were in their chosen career—and they answered that we probably couldn’t get where they had gotten following the same path any more. They’d tell their career path story, sure, but that caveat always seemed to cheapen and weaken the career advice in terms of its perceived applicability, and it felt like a cop out. It used to annoy me greatly.

Now that I’ve been working for several decades and I’ve had as many jobs in as many organizations as I have—even having changed careers and industries, for gosh sake—I can tell you this: That caveat is not at all a cop out and usually is not offered as a hedge or a dodge; it is 100 percent true and reasonable.

So when people I coach and mentor ask me how I got started in my industry or career, similar to those professionals who exasperated me in college, I know how I got here… kind of… but I’m not sure you’ll be able to follow the same path. My path will not be your path. My path then would not—most likely could not even—be my path now. I’m actually not really sure how helpful or useful my career path is as a model. Regardless, here are some ideas and lessons for folks just starting their careers that might be applicable for you, too, even now.

Seven Business Books Worth a Look

Any business leader or marketer worth their salt should be reading frequently—heck, constantly—be it local business news, trade magazines, academic journals, practitioner blogs, or business, personal and professional development books.

Brian Tracy suggests that you read at least 30 minutes a day for personal or professional development. Garrett J. White proposes that you should read until you get an idea or an insight—and then immediately document how you can apply it in your life. And Peter Voogd recommends that you continue reading and exploring a given text until you have mastered it fully… in practice.

With the ongoing pandemic and stay-at-home orders, you might have found yourself traveling less for work—and spending less time browsing airport bookstores, which are sometimes the best and most convenient places to learn about new business, sales, and marketing books. So, what to read?

Because health-related travel restrictions might continue well into this year, I offer Media Dieticians this short list of business and related books that I recommend. Some are new, some are old. All are recommended.

The Greatest Salesman in the World

The first book I read in 2010 was a slim volume, the 111-page 1968 parable written by Og Mandino. I first -- and last -- read the book about eight years ago, near the end of January 2002, on the recommendation of a friend who sold faucets and fixtures for Kohler. I often pick up books on the suggestions of friends. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. With Mandino's classic motivational tale The Greatest Salesman in the World, even though I've read it twice, it's a mixed bag.

As a book, pure and simple, it's a quick read. I read it in one sitting yesterday evening before going to bed. It's a clear and clean story about a successful merchant more than 2,000 years ago -- and the lessons he learned that helped him become a success. The major themes are pretty basic Positive Mental Attitude stuff, with a Christian corollary (and Christmas tie-in!) thrown in for good measure. The main thing (though a minor thing) that rubs me the wrong way is the text's focus on business and sales as the vehicle for success. Readers should feel free to replace "salesman" with whatever they're striving to be the best of: father, husband, son, brother, worker, friend.

Mandino, who went on to author other similar books and become a sought-after motivational speaker, overcame a struggle with alcoholism by diving into some of the best PMA writers of the early 20th century: Napoleon Hill, W. Clement Stone, and Emmet Fox. In fact, this book so impressed Stone that he hired Mandino as editor of Success Unlimited magazine. Success Unlimited continues today in the form of Success magazine. You can learn more about Mandino's ideas thanks to Dave Blanchard's work.

Also of potential interest is the book's relationship to other business parables such as Animals Inc., Miller's Bolt, The Radical Edge, Sandbox Wisdom, and Who Moved My Cheese? I'm not the biggest fan of the subgenre, but if you're going to read one, go to the source.

Happy Birthday, E-Commerce

The 25th anniversary of online retail almost slipped by me quietly and unobserved. Thanks to Alex Randall, a professor of communication at the University of the Virgin Islands, these birthday wishes are belated. I would have had no idea of the importance of Tuesday, March 4, 1983, were it not for an email Randall sent the Air-L discussion list.

25 years ago yesterday, the proprietors of Boston Computer Exchange -- including one Alex Randall -- sold a computer online via Delphi, a BBS of the time. The buyer was dialed in from Chile.

While it's arguable whether this was the first online sale -- surely, sales had been arranged via email -- the date could very well mark the first time a database of products was synchronized with an online network. And that's notable.

You can watch Randall tell the tale himself.

Any other notable online business milestones? This is fascinating stuff.

Off the (Business) Books

In the interest of saving time and money in terms of trying to keep up with current business and technology books, I subscribe to several book summary services. In recent days, I've been impressed by several such summaries -- and the ideas they (as well as the books they're about) contain. Here are some highlights:

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts, and if that's not a cool academic title, I don't know what is. I'm sure the 400-page book is well worth reading, but GetAbstract's five-page summary turned me on to several fascinating concepts. They include the Ludic fallacy, confirmation bias, and the risks of Gaussian curves. This was my first exposure to GetAbstract, and I was pretty impressed. We'll see if every five pager is as jam packed with ideas!

Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business (via Soundview Executive Book Summaries)
Soundview's summaries are a tad longer, but at eight pages, this is still a quick read, and you're able to get the main ideas behind the book in pretty short order -- I read this one last night in bed before falling asleep. Key topics addressed in this summary include the paradox of public goods, how economists view IP as inexhaustible while businesses view them as scalable, and the current state of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law. Several cool examples were briefly considered, like the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, landmark cases in patenting plants and vertebrates, and McDonald's v. Quality Inns (which is touched on in Language Log). A useful primer.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (via Audio-tech)
I've had a copy of Chip and Dan Heath's book on my reading pile since it came out, and I've even exchanged emails with them. But I've yet to read the thing. So it's high time I checked out this 16-page summary. While Audio-tech tends to summarize on the long side, this is still a relatively quick read and stays a little more true to the original text. Among the highlights in this summary were the debunking of the dangers of Halloween candy, the Curse of Knowledge, the commander's intent statement (something I plan to start using when appropriate), forced prioritization, the gap theory of curiosity (discussed in Trusted.MD), and the origin of the phrase "sour grapes." I'll have to make a note to go through the book in more detail when I hit it in the old reading pile.

People Hour Power

When working on projects, I often calculate how much time a set of tasks will take me personally -- and how long I've worked on something. But I don't always keep in mind the time that will need to be spent by other people involved in the project, either in tandem with me or separately.

At work, we use a conference call service that, after every call, sends you a report indicating what phone numbers dialed in, how much time each participant spent on the call, and the total time spent by participants in the call. After a half-hour conversation this morning, I received such a report.

I spent 36 minutes on the call. Five additional people dialed in, ranging between 23 and 36 minutes per call. The mean time spent was 31 minutes. The median was 35. The mode 36. But another number is even more interesting. The total time spent by those six people (including myself) ended up being 186 minutes. More than three people hours!

What I considered to be a relatively low investment in terms of my time and work energy in fact cost six times the time I spent on it. Were there any people who didn't really need to be on the call? Did I need to be on the call?

BusinessWeek recently turned me on to PayScale.com's Meeting Miser, a tool you can use to determine not just the time cost of a meeting, but the actual salary cost of a meeting. Just plug in the titles of the people participating, and it'll tell you how much the meeting costs by the second and minute. And you can even start and stop it during a meeting to determine how much a work session is taking.

The call this morning, if I have the title mix right, cost a nickel a second, or $3.23 a minute. At a mean time of 31 minutes, it cost just more than $100. Was it worth $100?

A new way to think about how you spend your time at work!

Optimal Subscriptions

According to Advertising Age, Paste magazine is running a subscription promotion in which subscribers can set their own price.

While traveling recently, I picked up an issue of Paste, primarily to gauge its range of music coverage -- and to take advantage of the sampler CD included in the issue. This might be the best part of this subscription promo. Every issue of Paste comes with a sampler CD so you can listen to select musicians and bands featured in a given issue.

That means that whatever price you pay, you get 12 issues of Paste, as well as 12 CDs. That's attractive. So I just signed up. They've set the floor at $1, and people who pay full price will supposedly be named in an upcoming issue. I split the middle and ponied up $10, which is more than fair. I was tempted to pay full price -- I did, after all, have a subscription card filled out and ready to mail that I ended up not sending -- but I didn't want to inflate the expectations of experiments like this.

A good number of people will pay full price -- $19.95 for 12 issues and 12 CDs. And a good number may go for the $1 steal. I'd be curious to see what the bell curve ends up looking like. What's the average price going to be?

Best of luck, Paste. It's a neat thing to try.

On Records as Physical Objects

In the last month or so, Rhino Records went through a round of layoffs. A friend had to let go a couple of members on her team, and another friend working there (who had been nominated for an important award for package design) lost her job. A friend who doesn't work there -- but who designs record covers -- is teaching himself Flash because he's not sure he'll have work in the future. And one friend (OK, one of the previous friends) posits that the decline in record sales in the face of digital downloads is largely a construct of record company executives, who have an interest in music being largely intellectual property -- not a physical object. If music is a digital file, it removes the need for packaging, for presentation, for representation. And costs decline.

When we saw the transition from record albums -- LPs -- to CDs, we saw packaging take a hit. As physical sales continue to decline, we see notable record stores closing. And in a recent attempt to help preserve the presence of record packaging, even in the form of CDs, I bought two records physically -- not online... and found them wanting.

Is the record industry killing itself? Today, New Record Day, I bought two CDs, the new Beastie Boys instrumental record, and the first Bad Brains record in ages. (I wanted to get Tim Armstrong's solo album, which came out awhile ago, but none of the two stores I went to stocked it. I'll buy it online, perhaps digitally given the outcome of this experiment.) I bought the CDs for at least $4 more than I could have digitally online -- the Beasties CD ran $7 higher (Both sold for $9.99 on iTunes, and I paid $14.99 and $17.99, respectively.). What did I get for my financial troubles? A piece of plastic that I quickly digitized in order to listen to, catalog, and document.

Neither CD came with a booklet, or liner notes of note. The Beasties CD included personnel and production credits, and the Bad Brains CD included same, as well as a thank-you list. So I turned back to my online options. In iTunes, the Bad Brains record came with a "digital booklet." The Beasties record did not. I bought the Bad Brains record again -- for $9.99, making my total purchase of the recording $24.98 (for the physical and digital versions).

What did I get? Nothing. The "digital booklet" was a four-page PDF document that consisted of almost exactly the same information that I got with the physical CD. (I'll upload it and when I have time.)

What did I learn? Two things. One, Digital booklets in iTunes are neither a value add nor a differentiator. If you buy online, you'll either get no information, or the little info included in the physical product. Two, the record industry continues to move online clumsily and to its own detriment.

The point of moving online is that you can offer more... and better. File compression and audio quality aside -- which I believe remains a big issue -- online, you can offer more information, more design, and more context. More of a product. Yet labels do not. That leads me to wonder whether the business concerns are less about costs of production and sales declines due to file sharing... and more about IP in general. If the music is reduced to file-level IP, and other content is removed, what do we lose? Information, design, and context. Limiting the amount of content available with digital downloads and physical CDs isn't about the cost of producing atoms and matter -- it's about the costs of producing content after the recording is made. Limit content, limit brain power and people hours. Then let the staff or contractors go!

I've recently begun to document the VHS tapes I'm transferring to DVD for personal and archival use. The fact that I have to put this text content somewhere -- all gleaned from physical packaging -- irritates me. Today, there's no reason it can't be included in the physical CD or DVD... or online file -- in an easily readable, transferrable, and usable format.

The fact that we collect album cover knockoffs (Full disclosure: I sang in the Anchormen, the first knockoff featured on that site.), and celebrate classic album cover design (Thanks for the tip, Bud Plant!) indicates that it's important.

Why is the album cover -- package -- going away?

And so I have the following recommendations. If, record industry, you want me to buy records:

• Help musicians make music I want to buy.
  
• Offer it a variety of formats.
  
• Make physical records that are worth buying more than digital files.
  
• Make digital downloads that include more information, design, and content than their physical counterparts -- or the same amount as.
  
• Allow transferral and annotation -- and other user-generated content-oriented opportunities.
  

If you don't, chances are that I won't buy a physical record again. I'm not sure that's what either of us wants.

History Bits

It's a big day in media and technology history:

On this day in 1970, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) was signed. In 1934, the Communications Act of 1934 established the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In 1914, a radiotelegraphic link was established between Germany and the U.S. and German Emperor Wilhelm II and US President Woodrow Wilson marked the event by exchanging telegrams. In 1912, the eight-hour work day was established in the U.S. ... And in 1846, the first baseball game under recognizable modern rules is played in Hoboken, New Jersey. Happy Birthday ... Guy Lombardo (1902), Moe Howard (1897) and Blaise Pascal (1623).

[via IDG Connect's email newsletter]

The Selling of Soft Skull

Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull, transmitted an email today indicating that Soft Skull has been been acquired by Winton, Shoemaker LLC.

This is certainly a paragraph in a key chapter in the history of American publishing, a chapter prefigured by the sale of PGW to AMS in 2003, and one that begins with the sale of Consortium to Perseus in the summer of 2006. I do not believe this chapter is over--for reasons which have to do with a difference between how PGW and Perseus account for returns, the full cash flow impact of the AMS/PGW bankruptcy will not be felt until July.

There are any number of regrets--that I was not able to keep the staff is a big one, and there are others that shall remain private--but I beg the subscribers to this list not indulge in apocalyptic thinking about independent publishing. The process of consolidation is, yes, relentless, but it is not eternal.

True, it is hard, in some respect, not to feel elegiac. As I've been preparing materials for a process known to those who buy and sell companies as "due diligence," it became clear how many people have contributed to allowing Soft Skull to publish the truly important books it has published over the years--my thanks to you now, my thanks to you eternally.

Yet Soft Skull is not over. As our wonderful author Sparrow said when he heard the news: "Soft Skull is dead. Long live Soft Skull." Soft Skull continues as an imprint. Soft Skull is *not* no longer independent. Had I won the lottery and bought Counterpoint from Perseus, instead of Charlie Winton buying Counterpoint and then Soft Skull, we would not have ceased to be independent.

Especially given the recent announcement by Perseus that it was closing Carroll & Graf and Thunders Mouth, it seems to me quite culturally valuable for Shoemaker/Counterpoint/Soft Skull--a group clearly embracing the imprint idea, clearly also eclectic and idiosyncratic--to be operating from a more solid financial foundation that hitherto. Allowing Soft Skull at least, to be more reliable and consistent for our authors and for our readers, which are the two communities we serve.

One little bit of hell right now is that we are seriously b-r-o-k-e for the next 6 weeks because this deal is not scheduled to close until June 30th. So, as a result, 40% off virtually everything on the Soft Skull website www.softskull.com! Buy early, buy often! (Believe it or not, we need the ducats now far more than we did during the days of the PGW bankruptcy, this is one crazy-assed business...)

Personally, I think this might bode well for the imprint. It's going to be in good company, and if the new group operates in the spirit of its imprints, it could still be fiercely independent. Raise a toast to the old Soft Skull, and ring in the new Soft Skull. (Cheers, Richard.) If you want to take advantage of the discount, get thee to the Web site.

The Dip

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin.

I've known him since the earlier days of Fast Company magazine; I've read his books, columns, and blog; and I worked with him for the first year of Squidoo. He's a wonderful example of the self-made man in the knowledge economy. And he's a bright bulb.

So when I learned that his new book The Dip, was coming out, I knew I had to check it out. It's the first book he published since I left Squidoo, and the initial coverage -- particularly in Ad Age -- left a little to be desired.

When I was in Boston last Friday for a business meeting, I picked up a copy at a local bookstore. And I'm glad I did. Seth is a little like Bill Gross of Idealab in that he occasionally practices the art of spaghetti idea generation: You throw noodles against the wall and see what sticks. And while, at about 80 pages, The Dip is a one-trick, if not -idea, pony, Seth does what he's trying to do very well.

Here's my take. I could be totally wrong.

1. The Dip could be Seth's Who Moved My Cheese?. It's that short a book. It's that tight a package. And the book is designed to be shared. Every copy of the book includes a blow-in card entitled "Stick or Quit?" that encourages people to buy books in bulk for their team and company. You can do so at Get the Dip. The book also features a page in which you can write a list of people who need to get the book next. Consider it your routing list for group reading.

2. Multiple media matter. In the store display, accompanying the stacks of slim books were stacks of CD's. Each CD cost $5 and was an abridged audiobook of the book itself. Wait a minute: an abridged audiobook of an 80-page book? For $5? Brilliant. Add to that the book's mentions of Seth's Web site, blog, and company Squidoo, and you get multiple touchpoints in one tidy package. Sweet.

3. Seth involves and thanks his friends. One of the hallmarks of a good team member is that they recognize the people who help them succeed. Seth does this in spades. The illustrations in The Dip are all provided by Hugh Macleod, who's worth following in his own right. Cross promoting talent -- and projects -- can go far, and the book does that. In the text, Seth gives props to his copy editor, and in the Best in the World? end notes, he name drops the Squidoo team, as well as his editorial team at Portfolio. By doing so, Seth shares some love, sheds some light, and helps ensure that the people who help him help people might continue doing so.

4. Seth gives you tools you can use. You need to read the entire book -- not difficult -- to find them all, but if you're not already aware of Zipf's law, The Magic of Thinking Big (a book that changed the way Seth thought about success -- and a book I've already ordered), Zelma Watson George and Jacqueline Novogratz, you will be soon. All are worth some attention.

5. Simple ideas matter. In some ways, The Dip is a one-sentence book: If you aren't willing to go all out to succeed, don't even try. While that's easier said than done -- it could be misinterpreted as "If you won't jump the shark, don't jump." -- the idea is still worth some thought. In the meantime, the brief text is chock full of other pearls of wisdom. Among them:

• "Every time you switch lines, you're starting over."
  
• "Don't fall in love with a tactic and defend it forever."
  
• "The time to look for a new job is when you don't need one."
  
• "Quitting when you're panicked is dangerous and expensive."
  

This last point -- the beauty or ugliness of the simple idea -- is what some reviewers have latched onto, and that fact indicates that they've missed the point. Seth wraps his lessons up in other lessons you can learn from. Pay attention to the entire package.

Am I glad I read the book? I think so. Am I glad I gave thought to the book? Damn straight. When you throw noodles against the wall, maybe it's less important that you threw noodles -- and more important that you made noodles.

Throw away.