High Tech Connect

The High Tech Connect World Headquarters is moving for the first time in 11 years. Whoo hoo, right? Very exciting and certainly a reasonable endeavor with proper planning, yes?

And then, Murphy shows up..

Here are five things we learned this week while preparing for our Big Move:

It’s who you know.

Sure, you can do it all on your own, but you really don’t want to. Over the years, you’ve probably built relationships with people who know more than you (if you haven’t, get cracking!), and these people will be worth their weight in great advice. From painting to cabling to finding a new location that best suits your You-ness, these outsourced resources will SAVE YOUR SANITY. If for no other reason, they will stop you from trying to reinvent the wheel and realizing with horror that you actually didn’t need a wheel in the first place.

Anybody home?

There may be phone jacks in the walls, but that doesn’t mean they’re connected to anything, anywhere. Power outlets don’t always provide power. It’s so simple and obvious you might just overlook its importance.  It’s far better not to assume. If necessary, get on the phone with your telecom/data service provider and ask a technician to walk onsite and confirm everything before the service cut-over. Really, who would assume all the cabling was removed by the last tenant when they vacated? When it comes to preventing last-minute, unexpected costs, basic utilities should be at the top of the list.

How many cooks in the kitchen?

There is a fine balance between asking your team for their input, and asking for the opinions of the ENTIRE team. Yes, it’s tempting to post “Kelley Green or Forest Green accent walls?” on Facebook, but you will find yourself rapidly having to (rightfully) rebuke your friend’s suggestion of “Company X’s Aquatic Dreamscape Blue,” and possibly losing what other help they might offer! Every aspect of a move does not require universal consensus. Recognize that sometimes it’s just your job to make a decision whether others like it or not.

Start early, steady pace

When you’re moving, everything seems to take FOREVER to get started and then suddenly you’re moving TOMORROW. Make a simple calendar of target dates and benchmarks and drive that sucker hard. If your move is well-planned and you’re doing it right, you will actually be a little bored. That’s great! That means you can still do your actual work instead of panicking over those three file drawers you haven’t packed up yet. Stuff happens, movers are delayed and contractors are confused. Point yourself in the right direction, keep steady yet flexible and you’ll get there with minimal drama.

Breathe deep and roll with the punches

Even if you plan everything, something’s almost guaranteed to go wrong. Yes, we go through life with that motto, but when you’re paying three or four per hour, every minute counts. The absolute worst thing you can do is panic. If you’re watching the world crash down, take a walk around the block or count to 10 and breathe. You need to move past “How the hell did this happen?!” and dive into “Let’s figure out how to fix this.”

May your own move be drama-free!

I’ve written here before about the power of thank you notes but it’s time to revisit the topic because I just opened one of the best follow-up thank you notes I’ve ever received.

Working with some of the nation’s top marketing communications professionals, you might think I receive a constant stream of well crafted, even artful follow up correspondence. Or maybe just thank you notes that are spelled correctly.

If only it were true.

It’s truly scary how many notes I receive with typos and grammatical mistakes from professionals in a line of work where perfect copy should be table stakes. This doesn’t build my confidence in them and probably gets in the way of me connecting them with one of my clients. But, what about that thank you note I just mentioned?

My son is a freshman at USC and one of his fraternity brothers is interested in a marketing career, so — like mother, like son — my son introduced him to me. I looked at his resume, gave him some tips and then introduced him to someone I know who’s experienced in sports marketing, the area of marketing he wants to pursue. In return, I received a lovely voicemail message and a five paragraph thank you note that covered…

1. The thank you
2. How he wants to stay in touch with me
3. A reminder of his amazing experience and qualifications
4. Appreciation for the introduction I made for him
5. A compliment about my son, the quickest way to a mother’s heart

I’m sure I’ll hear from this young man again and when I do, I’ll remember how he’s smart — and savvy — and I’ll be happy to give him a hand.

Do not underestimate the power of a well-crafted thank you.

“A soul-destroying defeat.”

Ever have a day like that? Some days I wonder why the heck I ever started my own business. Clients don’t want to pay. Consultants miss the mark. Taxes and insurance claim cash flow faster than we can make it. And some days are far worse, where your personal character and integrity suffer direct hits.

How do you get up AGAIN after another brutal defeat?

Irina Krush is the three time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion and won her first title when she was only fifteen-years-old, so she knows a lot about winning — and losing — and how to deal both success and failure.

I think that one of the main things that chess teaches you is how to be resilient in the face of defeat because a chess player faces so many defeats throughout their career all the time. So I must be really able to bounce back and know how to deal with that or you’re not going to get very far in chess. And obvious, you know, that’s a quality that’s very useful in life in general.

The trick for me actually was realizing that, first of all, beating myself up really hurt my subsequent results and basically I was jeopardizing my whole tournament because of one game. … Nine games is a normal tournament, so you can’t really sacrifice your whole tournament than because of one lapse; one low moment.  You have to value your endeavor. You have to put yourself in a position where you can do your best over the course of nine games.

So once I realized that if I wanted to beat myself up about this result, about what I did, I can do this after the tournament. I would allow my ability to do that afterward, like when it no longer matters. If I beat myself into a pulp psychologically after the tournament that’s okay because I have no more games to play. But of course, I mean, that’s a trick because once a few days pass, you’re never going to do that anyway. So even if I was going to, even if I wanted to basically after a few days pass you’re just not really likely to be in that state anymore.

How does wine figure into Irina’s winning formula? Watch this video:

There is no such thing as a “permanent job” any more and we knew this change was coming long ago.

In fact, I started High Tech Connect in 1997 to match independent contractors all over the world with the high technology marketing teams that need expert help. The best person for the job may now be a part-time project manager or a remote writer with exactly the right subject matter expertise.

Bob Lankard of CTW Features describes and defines the Flexible Jobs market:

Other ways to work: Employment arrangements you may not know exist

Workers thrown out of jobs and unable to land another fulltime position in their field sooner or later run into employment arrangements they never knew existed. It’s important to understand how these different employment arrangements work.

Negatives define these so-called “non-standard jobs.” Typically, they are not full-time, not permanent, they have no benefits and no job security. These positions can include independent contract work, temporary employment, part-time work and freelancing.

Independent contractor

An employer typically controls where and how a full-time employee works. But an independent contractor calls the shots about how to get a job done, sets his or her own hours and is free to work with a number of businesses.

A contractor may go to work at an office every day, but his or her relationship with a company and the terms of employment are different from a regular employee. The company a contractor works for does not withhold income taxes or pay Social Security Medicare taxes or unemployment tax on a contractor’s wages.

Temporary

A temporary worker works alongside regular employees but is not on that company’s payroll. Staffing firms such as Kelly Services typically employ temp workers. An unemployed person interviewed by a staffing firm may not find out where they will work until they are hired. Their paychecks will come from the staffing agency. An up tick in temporary employment is considered one of the first indicators of a rise in overall employment. Businesses that cycle through busy seasons and down seasons typically rely on temporary workers.

Part-time

By custom part-time work is 35 hours per week or less. Company policy rather than government rules set standards for these workers. The ranks of the involuntary part-time workers – those who want full-time jobs but could not find them – swelled during the recession. In February 2011, the number of involuntary part-time workers stood at 8.3 million, unchanged from the previous month.

Freelance

A freelancer hires himself out for a specific project. A graphic artist may design only one ad for a business. Freelance work has exploded during the recession. Dislocated workers struggling to find full-time work can make money by doing jobs on a freelance basis. Freelancers are paid a negotiate sum per project. Online markets for freelance workers, such as elance.com, offer freelance workers global opportunities at the click of a mouse.

You have a great relationship with your manager, right? You have a solid line of communication. You even socialize every now and then. You think every thing is OK. But what’s going on in the subtext?

SmartMoney (a Dow Jones publication) recently published a great story, Ten Things Your Boss Won’t Tell You. Here’s a doozy:

4. “Your kid? Your problem.”

By now it’s common knowledge that women earn less than men – about 81 cents for every dollar. Having a kid hurts women’s earning potential even further. The so-called “mommy penalty” may manifest in many ways: A mother may get passed over for a promotion because the boss thinks she takes off too much time to care for her kids or that she’s more concerned about the family than her career. A mom may get overlooked for high-profile projects because the boss fears she won’t devote enough time and energy.

Those are hard slights to quantify. Not so for the penalty faced by women who take time off to raise a child – even for a period as short as 18 months. Women with M.B.A.s who left the workforce for a year and a half to raise children make 41% less than men with the same degree; female Ph.D.’s make a third less; lawyers, 29% less, and doctors, 16%, according to a 2010 study by Harvard economics professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz. “Business occupations place heavy penalties on employees who deviate from the norm,” Goldin and Katz write in the study.

I’m not saying this is fair. I am saying this does exist and goes unspoken in many environment and can work against you.

Please take the time to read all 10 and think about what your boss is — and isn’t — telling you.  –And let me know what you think.

If you aren’t following Om Malik, you need to start…NOW. Not only does he bring a ton of insight to the world of high tech, he’s a savvy business man and has build a small publishing empire that includes one of our favorites, WebWorkerDaily.

Earlier this year, he published an article by Celine Roque on how you can become more productive, or, as she defines the problem…

On days where our tools, skills and energy come together, our output seems to flow seamlessly. On other days, though, no matter how many tools we use or how many cups of coffee we consume, something seems to be blocking us from getting anything done. On our worst days, we can’t even get our work started.

In other words, anyone who’s a knowledge worker spends their working moments somewhere between two states: choke and flow.

What’s so great about Celine’s post is that is draws from a variety of different sources and then fits them all together like puzzle pieces revealing an unexpectedly beautiful picture.

A simple way to put it is that if we waste our brain’s resources over-thinking how we’re going to do something we normally do well, we don’t leave enough brain power for the creative act itself. So instead of dwelling on unnecessary details, maybe it’s better to remind yourself that you’ve done this work before and trust the instincts that you’ve honed over the years.

But getting to the flow state requires more than alleviating pressure. It means we should sit down and work long enough to get to the point where our vision of the work is clear and we’re not distracted by anything else. But working on the web gives us easy access to hundreds of distractions. How do we avoid giving in, especially when being distracted has become a habit? [more]

I highly encourage you to take a look at the article. She cites at least a dozen different sources and attaches at least three different reports to her post free to download.

Think flow. Go with it.

Many of our clients ask High Tech Connect to find them writers, people who have a particular knack for lining up one word after another into sentences and paragraphs that explain and persuade. It isn’t easy work, especially when when most of our clients are inventing new technologies never before seen and scarcely imagined. It’s hard work and it takes a particular talent.

In a recent post about Francis Ford Coppola, we learned that he believes time — taking time — is an important element of the creative process.  According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, there are different lines of thought about how much time and effort Shakespeare spent on his writing.

According to the editors of the first folio, “What he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” The author of the article in the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Greenblatt writes,

The notion that Shakespeare rarely revised his work makes perfect sense. Here, after all, was a man who wrote, on average, two plays a year, acted in his own plays and those of others, penned sonnets, and helped to run a theater company, to say nothing of his many other business interests. The original manuscripts have all long disappeared, but biographers have endlessly repeated the claim that they were “unblotted.” After all, where would Shakespeare have found the time for rewriting?

Greenblatt explains that scholarship reveals Shakespeare was a compulsive reviser, ever in search of the more perfect turn of phrase.  And he concludes that one of Shakespeare’s other gifts — beyond mastery of the language and a narrative genius — was his ability to make it look as if writing was easy for him.

In business, the creative process is almost inevitably a collaborative effort and, when a team is at work, it’s important to know — and believe — that certain positions and assignments are covered by the best possible talent.  The writer who appears to be struggling is … struggling … and is probably pulling down the vibe for the whole team. So, for all you writers out there: sweat out the details, but never let your clients see you perspire.

Marc Cendedella, founder and CEO of TheLadders.com, probably thinks more about job hunting and interviews than most people currently drawing a breath.  Before he founded TheLadders, he was a senior vice president at HotJobs. (And, he’s a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale — just saying.) Cenedella was recently interview in The New York Times about the art of the interview.

Here are some of my favorite snippets:

It became a matter of figuring out how to build a team and share with them what inspired me to start the company. There’s a quote from the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that really spoke to me. It says, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” So the management style that I have is first, share your passion.

<snip>

Being a manager also isn’t about trying to become perfect. You’re not going to stop making errors. But it’s about having a mature appreciation for the fact that you’re a flawed human being. Probably everyone around you is a flawed human being. What are your flaws and how are you going to manage around them? What are your strengths? How are you going to optimize those?

<snip>

When we do something good, we come together and we celebrate. In baseball, a guy hits a home run, goes around the bases, and all his teammates come out and they give him a high five, and that’s awesome. And then every time somebody hits a home run, they do that. In business, people tend not to do that enough, so when we achieve a goal, we have to go celebrate. And there are two reasons why we need to do that. As human beings, we’re not emotionally and anthropologically different from who we were on the plains of Africa 100,000 years ago. We need to feel that hey, I’m in a community.

<snip>

Having to work through college and then waiting tables my last two years of school was hugely helpful for me in terms of understanding that O.K., maybe theoretically you delivered the plate on time, and maybe theoretically you did what was right. But at the end of the day what mattered were the tips and how happy people were and how much you entertained them or didn’t depending on what they were looking for. That’s what’s important.  [more]

What lessons have you learned from being a leader?

One of my favorite Silicon Valley figures is Guy Kawasaki, founder of Alltop.com and the original developer “evangelist” for Apple’s Macintosh. Here’s a clip of Kawasaki explaining Steve Jobs’ vision of an entirely new computer platform and how consumer research and market experience had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Did you watch the Academy Awards?  Then you probably noticed Francis Ford Coppola accept the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the award given to “a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”

Beside creating some of my favorite movies, Coppola is also a source of personal and business inspiration for me. I just finished reading an interview with Coppola and want to bring it to your attention.

The interview is in a new blog called The 99 Percent, a blog that describes itself as “It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” (My type of motto.) Coppola has learned a lot about a lot of different things: making movies, making wine, publishing a magazine, running a restaurant and so much more.  Throughout all his different endeavors runs a bright red thread of quality, one of his trademarks.  Here, he reveals how he weaves quality throughout all he does:

What I learned, which is a simple idea, is that if you hold out with your vision a little bit, it’s like a cake being put in the oven. The scene doesn’t work immediately, you have to bake it a little bit. It’s unfair, when you begin to create a shot, say, or a scene, that it’s going to immediately be like those beautiful scenes in the movies. It needs a little bit of time to mature. It’s like taking the cake out without letting it be in the oven for more than a minute. … So you have to be patient, and then slowly everyone starts to see that the ideas are right, or make the corrections. You have to battle the lack of confidence by giving the scene the chance to solidify. [read the rest of the interview here]

This is the insight:  Time. Taking time. Using time. Throughout history, time has always been one of our scarcest resources, but, in our current age, we seem to be traveling at an unprecedented velocity with ideas and innovations circling the globe literally at the speed of light and feel pressed to perform faster and faster.

But whether we’re sending an idea over the internet or written on parchment and entrusted to the captain of a clipper ship, the important thing to remember is there may be a very important difference between the speed of ideas and their quality.