JT Pedersen » Professional

Time for You to Move?

JT — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:30:32 +0000

Remember? You started that new job. You were full of enthusiasm. Your curiosity was insatiable. And, your drive led you to overcome seemingly incredible hurdles. At the same time, you likely had periods of uncertainty, risk was everywhere, yet the exhilaration was almost like a narcotic.

Now, the clock has rolled forward a few years. Your curiosity has waned. You know where all the road’s bumps are, so hurdles aren’t quite so high any more. And, yesterday’s exhilaration has atrophied and become today’s ‘comfort.’

Your pay is likely comfortably high now. Risks are as low as they’ll ever get. And comfort is something you’re accustomed to as knowing your car will start at day’s end.

What a great life! You’ve arrived! Maybe you should Leave now, too!

Even given all the change many have seen in recent years, there are still a great number of people, both individual contributors and leaders, for which there’s been little or no change. You likely recognize yourself if, your job has not specifically changed, even though there are fewer people on your team, more’s expected of you, and your health benefits cost more. But, it’s basically the same old job you’ve come to know and love.

What happens if you need to change jobs? Perhaps it’s just an internal change. You go from a winning product team, to one that’s struggling, has few resources, and fewer team members. Could you handle it? Really? What if ‘change’ does finally knock on your door and you have to go find a new home altogether? Can you handle it?

Here’s the problem…

We work hard to achieve a level of comfort in our lives. When that comfort becomes too well-established, we begin to lose the very skills that will make us successful at our next stations in life. If you have not been required to think, create, or interrelate (or…) in new ways for some time now, just how flexible, how rusty, will you be in a new role?

Taking on a new role today may be a very rude awakening for you. Perhaps making a meaningful change on your own terms is a better idea than having it forced upon you at an inopportune time? You already know it: Today’s world of global competition at almost every level, in almost every industry, is moving at a rocket’s pace. Can you afford to have gotten stiff and inflexible?

(photo credit: Karl-Erik Bennion)

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A Key to Success-The Business Case

JT — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:43:37 +0000

Recently I was talking with a friend about some of the keys to success in our professional lives. One of these is the importance of building business cases.

In its simplest form, a business case is a written justification for doing (or not doing) ‘something.’ Classic examples include seeking funding to hire someone or to purchase something expensive.

Key reasons for developing business cases, are to:

Constructively think things through;
Avoid missing important details;
Be prepared to answer questions that will arise; and,
Clearly be able to define outcome and value.

Many times, being able to achieve the seemingly impossible simply came down to having created a business case.

Two examples. A major customer needed a software patch created to solve a major productivity issue. With millions of other customers using the same product, the likelihood of getting a patch done for a single customer was all-but unheard of.

The winning approach was to identify the number of people being impacted (directly and indirectly); the revenue $$ impact to ourselves and our customer; determine the level of effort required to address the problem; and, potential work-arounds (alternatives) and their impacts. Once I could clearly identify a multi-million dollar impact effecting 1,800 people, the justification had weight.

The second example is more straight-forward. I need to add team members to my organization during a hiring freeze. One thing that is almost always true of ‘hiring freezes’ is that hiring still occurs. Just the level of effort to get it done might be significantly higher.

Again, the same basic approach is needed. Identify what the need is, what the type of person is you need to solve the problem, the related costs, and expected benefits (such as improved customer satisfaction, higher throughput, or to launch new revenue-generating products).

At the end of the day, you will be using the business case to convince someone (your boss, VP, or the CEO) to let you do something that usually involves money. He or she will need to feel comfortable that you know what you’re doing, that you’ve thought through the risks, and what the benefit will end up being. The benefit may or may not necessarily be measured in hard currency.

One benefit may be saving yourself embarrassment; having concluded yourself something isn’t as grand an idea as you thought it was.

There are countless articles available on building business cases. One thing that should not be lost is that the person gaining the greatest benefit—is You. Because you need to know, and be able to explain, things like:

What will be achieved, or avoided?
What are the benefits, the risks?
What are the alternatives, how do they compare?
What are the costs, real, imagined, or unknown?
How will you be able to confirm success, or determine failure?

Even as simplistically as just discussed, being able to put together a basic business plan will demonstrate yours is a level of professionalism often head and shoulders above your peers.

More than once, I have seen very experienced managers return from meetings with their VP or the CEO, frustrated they couldn’t hire someone they felt was desperately needed. Only to wonder how, even in a hiring freeze, I managed to get more than one person hired. They’d ask, “Can you tell me how you did that?”

The answer: I didn’t just go in and ask. I built a plan that let me clearly convince them it was a sound decision…one that needed to be made.

We can all learn from each others’ successes (and failures). If you have examples to share, please, leave a Comment.

(photo credit: Svilen Milev)

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Need Work–Try Running an Ad Campaign

JT — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:02:13 +0000

Through 2009 and into 2010, I delivered a series of presentations, called, Job Search Brownbag, sponsored by Ann Arbor SPARK. The presentations discussed a series of tactics available to job seekers and how to combine them into a cohesive Search for Work strategy.

The original presentation (embedded below) discussed tactical items like business cards, resumes, dedicated websites, social media, and networking events.

Since then, a new option has become available. Actually it’s not completely new, but it’s increasingly acceptable for job seekers with the introduction of LinkedIn’s DirectAds. Using advertisements like Google AdWords anyone could run an add for themselves. Personally, I know of no one who actually has though. Until now.

This past week, I took advantage of a LinkedIn DirectAds $100 advertising promotional coupon. Already considering running a Google AdWords campaign, this let me try it in a more focused environment, basically for free.

Perhaps the biggest fear for those on a tight budget (e.g. ‘job seeker’), is how much this may cost. Not to fear. You can set a daily budget, say $10, and decide whether you want to pay based on CPM ($/thousand impressions) or on a per-click basis.

The first day, I ran the ad using a per-thousand rate. The add was delivered to over 8000 viewers in just a few hours at a ‘bid’ rate of ~$3.50 per thousand, or ~$28. But no one clicked.

Running the campaign for 4 more days, I opted to pay on a per-click basis of about $3.50/click. With a daily budget of $30/day, there were 80,772 impressions, 27 actually clicked, leading to 4 contacts (they reached out to me). That works out to about $3.47 per click, or about $23.40/lead.

A new tool you can use. Expensive? Only You can decide.

LinkedIn suggests a well-written and constructed advertisement should achieve 0.025% click through rate, or better, to your landing page. I was pleased to see a 0.033% CUR. When creating an ad campaign you are allowed to create up to 10 variations of your advertisement. Two of mine are included in this article.

LinkedIn rotates the advertisements letting you see which ones get clicked on more often (e.g. are more successful). As the statistics become clear, LinkedIn DirectAds automatically starts to show the more-successful ads more frequently, diminishing how often the less-effective ads are displayed. For the individual, this lets you see which ad copy is more well-received.

Running a personal advertising campaign may be an expensive proposition. Even so, it is yet one more tool available to job seekers. What impact the timing of my ad campaign may have had, running it the week leading up to a major holiday (Thanksgiving, here, in the US), I’m not sure . I’ll try again in about 10 days, then again in mid-January.

If you have run your own advertising campaign(s), with Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, or elsewhere, I encourage you to share your experiences. This is a new topic to most and published examples are few.

The Search for Work

View more presentations from JT Pedersen.

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Revenue’s a Terrible Metric to Determine Success

JT — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:44:17 +0000

As a manager you need to determine the appropriate metrics to use in gauging the performance of your business. The question is how do you pick the right variables? Are you using the right one(s)?

The question often isn’t even debated because contemporary management accounting principles have remained fundamentally unchanged since the 1920s. No one seems to question them.

We know accounting in various forms has existed for the better part of three millennia. Examples, going back to the Chaldaean-Babylonian Empire show some of the most basic business code. Basic accounting tables records, going back as far as 2600 B.C. were captured in clay or stone tablet.

Early accounting was straight-forward. Your business (quite often You = The Biz) was simple. You bought input materials (e.g. a cow), added value to them (e.g. butchering), then sold them to someone (e.g. steak!). How successful you were was as simple as the difference between what you sold the product for and what you paid for the original materials.

Starting in the late 1800s businesses began to grow dramatically. They remained focused on a single product offering, added ‘employee’s, started tracking costs, and developing “cost/unit” type measures. This allowed initial efforts to improve a company’s efficiency.

Moving into the early 20th century, much larger corporations started to develop. Think of companies like Ford, General Motors, Du Pont, and the railroads. These companies now started to face three core issues: decentralization due to sheer size; multiple products (or sub-businesses); and, hierarchical management. In response, they developed new methods of accounting to enable their leaders to effectively ‘manage’ their businesses. Management Accounting was born. (Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting by H. Thomas Johnson, Robert S. Kaplan, ISBN: 0875841384)

For the most part, management accounting remains anchored in its century-old origins. Even as businesses and their products have evolved, the fundamental basics of accounting have not. Thomas J. and Robert K. suggest a reason. When management accounting was developed, it was done so to enable leaders of the time to more capably manage their organizations: decide how to allocate resources; motivate and evaluate managers; and, evaluate success. Then came managers who led ‘by the books,’ (think Bean Counters), and over time the core understanding of what management accounting was intended to do, was lost.

Today, management accounting has a second focus, or a competing one at the least. For publicly traded companies in particular, the drive is to provide documentation so outsiders can evaluate the company’s performance. This in turn leads managers having tunnel-vision, driving their actions to meet annual, quarterly, and even monthly targets. (Let’s discount the significant productivity loss in reporting processes, validating, and defense thereof.)

The question becomes, ‘…did we make the quarterly numbers?’
It should be, ‘…have we made the company more successful?’

Quite often, the core over-arching metric used to determine ‘success’ is Revenue. Did the company ‘sell’ more this period than last? Yes, or No? Revenue, on its own, is an important metric, yet useless if used in isolation.

On the surface, growing revenue suggests greater success. Unfortunately the related increase in cost associated with the additional revenue is often discounted, misrepresented, or misunderstood. You also need to understand if it is Gross Revenue or Net Revenue (e.g. is there a lot of returned product offset against the gross?). For managers with even moderate P&L (profit & loss) experience, this is of course overly simplistic.

Look at a contemporary software business. Products take multiple accounting reporting periods to deliver. The resources (e.g. development staff) may also be shared across multiple products. The result is expenses spread over periods (accrued) and offset against future revenue.

In practice, it becomes more difficult to specifically identify costs belonging to specific products. Instead, some costs are simply ‘assigned.’ Let’s say your product is a SaaS (web-based software) offering heavily dependent on internet connectivity. The company may elect to simply assign all telecom costs to your product since it uses the lion’s share of network bandwidth. We begin to see how an understanding of ‘costs’ become fuzzy. This is hardly a one-off example within a company.

If clarity of cost becomes fuzzy, what does that say about using revenue as a measure of success?

Talking with Ian Sacks (Profit Makers) recently, he pointed out that revenue is the end outcome of collective efforts up to that point. As a result, “…revenue is an effect, not a cause!” This means that, if you are no longer seeing costs clearly, your input, then revenue’s value also becomes less clear, less useful.

In addition, we live in a time of financial accounting—designed for outsiders—taking a dominant role; with management value playing second fiddle. As a manager, if you haven’t already, you need to step back, look at the activity you’re responsible for, and ask yourself: Are the metrics we’re currently relying on really the best ones for driving our success? How am I, really, determining Success?

(photo credit: Cornell University Library)

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The Number 1 Thing Every Business Must Do?

JT — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:15:55 +0000

In a discussion earlier today, the statement was made that, “the number 1 thing every business must do to succeed is…have a logo.” Further comments indicated that, after doing some research, they’d found most small businesses (in particular) skip having a logo because they see it as too expensive.

While that may be true, subsequent comments failed to provide any support for the ‘#1’ premise. To be honest, I’d flat-out disagree it’s #1. There is value to a logo but it is not itself all-important.

While I do not agree with the claim, I do agree a logo has a role to play. But to simply have a logo misses the broader point. A company needs to develop, protect, and broadcast its -brand-. The logo is but a subcomponent of that overall effort.

First, a business needs to know what ‘it’ is all about.

The logo, along with typesets, color schemes, culture…and more…combine to clearly, consistently, represent the company to those who do business with it. I might argue, while logo ‘quality’ is important, more important is—consistent—application of the logo and it’s related brand.

Consistency and ease of identification is why I created my own brand (Thoughtful Business Leadership) and logo to support my search for work. Whether you work for a corporation, are developing one, or are a business of One, consistent self-representation is important.

Think of the logo, or corporate ‘icon,’ as a short-hand representation of the entity it represents.

So, what do you think? Do you agree with my own premise? Better yet, do you have a #1 thing for every business?

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Nasty Mudslinger: To Be or Not To Be

JT — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:25:44 +0000

What do you do if a competitor starting slinging mud at you, making outright false claims, or excessively stretching the truth about you? Should you descend to their level and start slinging mud back?

A company’s president recently faced this basic question. The topic made for perhaps one of the most interesting, fresh topic, posts I’ve read in a while. So, do you sling mud too, or, ignore it, push forward, and take the high road?

Here’s something to think consider

Personally, I agree with the sentiment to avoid slinging mud. But there’s a difference between participating in the same behavior and standing up for yourself. In today’s social media world of broad transparency, you cannot afford to ‘not’ say anything.

Borrowing from a Harvard Business Review post yesterday, a happy coincidence:

"Customers also want to hear from the CEO. They want to know your product is better than your competitors’. They want to know you’ll still be in business to service that product a year from now. And they want to know you’re listening. Especially if you’re in a B2B business where purchases are expensive and the product is critical to your customer’s success."

Today, not defending your position can be hazardous. By default, others will assume it’s true. If you use the ‘old’ reasoning, that (1) customer that called you might suggest (10) others that won’t take an effort to actively call. They’ll assume what they’re hearing about you is true and, just leave.

Defend, state your response, and then keep sprinting forward. Defend your honor but don’t let your team get bogged down in the process.

Final thought, this is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of social media. Whichever channel(s) you choose to employ, start building, developing, growing your customer relationships (B2B or B2C). There are numerous examples where, when someone has been egregiously wronged, those they have relationships with come to their defense or otherwise help in mitigating damage. Even if a claim is true, how you deal with it (hint: honestly) can serve to further strengthen your foundation, your relationships.

(photo credit: Anry Ermolaev)

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Why Should I Hire You? There Are Only (2) Reasons.

JT — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:34:01 +0000

With so many people looking for work, seeking answers to win the next opportunity, this question is all too common. At the same time, the suggested answers vary wildly but, for the most part seem to miss the crux of the issue. Why should I hire you?

Consider these common responses:

I am:

Accustomed to a fast pace and will hit the ground running
Will be a valuable asset to your organization
Able to handle stress and pressure
Think quickly on my feet
Am a team player

Great! Excellent! Not!

These are, all, generally assumed to be true statements. Can you imagine hiring someone who can’t handle stress? Someone who won’t be a valued asset? These are almost “necessary truths”. Otherwise they likely wouldn’t be talking with you. Let alone thinking of hiring you. Any ‘one’ of these might be optional, such as thinking quickly on your feet. Let’s face it, some jobs just don’t seem to require mental agility.

But, if you weren’t any one of these, why should they hire you?

The reality, boiled down and brutal, is that there are two reasons someone will hire you.

You contribute to $$ revenue growth (make more money);
and/or,
You contribute to increased productivity (lower cost).

If you’re not either helping them make more money ($$) or improve productivity, they don’t need you.

Depending on the role, answers might be more like:

Hamburger Joint:

I’ve read the typical burger-flipper averages 3 burgers/minute. I’ve tried timing myself and can regularly do 5 burgers/minute…. That’s a 66% productivity improvement.

Executive Role:

Based on my understanding of the role and mutual expectations, I believe there are ways to improve revenue at least 10% while keeping costs from growing more than 3%.

In a pinch, if you’re asked and don’t know the answer, as a mature professional, you should be able to reasonably say:

As a [My New Role], my key focus will be delivering productivity and revenue improvements.

These are the sort of answers that will catch their interest—especially if deemed credible. Everything else is just nice fluff in my opinion.

(photo credit: Konrad Mostert)

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11 Things To Do—If You’re Only Allowed 5 Hours a Day

JT — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:46:16 +0000

I was catching up on blogs today…been away from my reading awhile…and saw one of Seth Godin’s dozens of philosophical questions. The crux of his article was about doing indispensable work and cheating the clock. We face more distractions, greater demands, more complex lives than ever before—nothing new there at all. You also cannot work more than 24 hours in a day. Too many folks work 10-12 hours a day, or, at least they’re ‘there’ that long.

One of his questions struck me as being worth discussing with my readers: What If…you were only allowed 5 hours a day to do your job?

Here are some suggestions:

Shorten, the default time increment in your calendaring app from :30 to :15 minutes

Increase, the time between inbox refreshes to :30 minutes.
Make time to develop and share agendas for planned meetings
Review ‘recurring events’.’
- Reconsider which ‘regular’ meetings to keep attending, and why.
- Do you need to be there the whole time…
Focus on relationships, meet more people, preferably face-to-face, but through any medium possible otherwise
Practice saying No a bit more often. Or, rather than ‘no,’ let them know when you can help (perhaps 6 weeks from now)
Be pleasant, recognize the need for, but trim excessive pleasantries in phone calls
Manage email effectively – use filters (by color, by topic, by sender, by prioirty…whatever makes sense)
Stay focused. Multi-tasking’s a myth.
Take a break.
Go home. Seriously. At some point, putting in ‘more time’ simply doesn’t matter. And, no one wants face time with you if your cheeks can’t curl you lips upward anymore.

What do you think? I encourage you to add some of your own thoughts. If you had your work day trimmed to 5 hours, what would you immediately start doing differently?

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Leading Through Social Media?

JT — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:27:23 +0000

If you’re aspiring to move beyond your current role, you’re likely looking for ways to be seen as innovative, progressive, and ‘fresh.’ Which means, odds are, if you’re a business leader, event planner, meeting facilitator, or similar, you’re always watching for new ways to make them better.

If your life revolves around using PowerPoint or Keynote, how can you do better? Yes, you can add snazzy graphics, spinning tops, and whiz-bang animation. And if you do, you’ll likely just come across as someone using distracting, confusing, dizzying images. One way to avoid this latter problem, is to take a look at Garr Reynold’s book, Presentation Zen.

You’ve likely heard of this thing called social media. You’ve also likely noticed it’s just about ‘everywhere.’ Even if the majority of the country still doesn’t understand it (Fast Company found, ’…69% of U.S. adults still have no idea what it is.’), they’ve likely been exposed.

And, therein lies the opportunity—to begin showing the relevance to your audience, to your organization. Demonstrate the value.

Here’s one way to do it—and have some fun at the same time: Use Twitter during your presentation for dynamic feedback and for soliciting audience questions.

There are a number of solutions available. Just search on the string, “how to use twitter with powerpoint” in Bing or Google. Many of the results show solutions with a specific focus, such as how to do a live poll of your audience and display it in PowerPoint or Keynote.

The easiest solution I’ve seen so far, simply uses TweetDeck and a dual-monitor set up. Set up PowerPoint so it is using Presenter View on your primary screen (e.g. laptop display), and the audience display on the second screen. Next, narrow the TweetDeck window so only a single column is displayed visible and set it off to one side on the audience screen (see image below).

Here’s why you need to operate PowerPoint in Presenter View mode: If you advance slides by clicking on the audience screen, the presentation (like any application) will become the ‘active’ window, be brought to the front of the display list (on top of all applications), and hide TweetDeck. However, if you launch the presentation, then put TweetDeck on top of the slideshow, you can run the presentation via the Presenter View and it will leave TweetDeck displayed as in the image.

(If you don’t want tweets scrolling while you talk, then simply move TweetDeck to the primary screen, out of view. You’ll still be able to skim comments).

What else do you know for this to be successful? Create a hashtag specific to your discussion and let attendees know it exists. Then, using the #hashtag in their tweets, you can have your TweetDeck column set to filter out everything except tweets using your hashtag. Now you have a semi-exclusive discussion forum for your attendees. (Ideally, you’ll let them know the hashtag exists as soon as possible, but you can always do it right at the start of your presentation. Some conferences do this ahead of time enabling discussions to start even before the event itself is underway.)

This is just one approach toward more directly engaging your audience and building a stronger sense of community. Certainly, you need to practice, and you can only do it live. But you’ll be learning together with your participants.

What other examples, tying social media into presentations, have you seen (successful or not). Interested in hearing.

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Do You Have It In You…to be an Entrepreneur (Guts)

JT — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:56:31 +0000

This is the second in a four-part series asking, “Do you have it in you, to be an entrepreneur?” There are four key strengths that are must haves for an entrepreneur to be successful. Previously, I discussed the first of these, Passion. Here, we’ll discuss guts.

Passion
Guts
Team
Cash Flow

Passion. Guts. In past entrepreneurial discussions I have heard people use these two terms (or equivalents) interchangeably. But, really, there is a difference between passion and guts.

Here’s the difference. Passion is your love for what you’re choosing to do. It is what drives you forward, overcoming daily distraction, motivates you to stay up late (or get up early) to accomplish your dream. It’s the fire in your belly.

Guts, or call it fortitude, backbone, grit, perhaps even chutzpah, is the conviction underlying your efforts. When everything seems to be going against you; everyone’s telling you how wrong you are; the bank won’t give you money; or, you need to reconstruct your dream from scratch, guts is what keeps you on track.

Think of it as being firmly planted and the strength to keep from bending (too much) in the wind.

Do you have the Guts to stick with it?

Ok, so that sounds like something philosophical, detached from daily reality, that some guy at the coffee shop might tell you. So let me share a very practical example from my own life. Once upon a time…

My wife and I decided to do real estate investing and become landlords. Our intention were somewhat noble, as a means of making money and building our investments, we would provide good, clean housing to those who needed it.

The family we selected as our very first tenants were wonderful. We got along well and, for the first few months, everything worked as planned. And then, a month’s rent was late. No problem, she caught up in a couple days including the late fee. Then another month was late, and another, and each time the catch-up was later than before. We were bending in the wind…wanted to give the benefit of the doubt…but at some point it became a practical business decision: Do we let this continue.

Unfortunately, we had to evict our very first tenants. But the choices were simple. This was a business and we were not providing free housing. We had to know our limits, how far would we bend, and whether we had the strength to take the actions we knew to be necessary. Let me tell you, it takes some intestinal fortitude to evict someone, and then follow up in court.

So, yes, there’s a difference. Passion, you have to feel strongly about what you want to do. But you also need raw guts to stick to your dream and not let the wind blow you off course (or let customers/partners/others take advantage of you).

We’ve discussed Passion, and Guts. Next, we’ll talk about Team and Cash flow.

Photo Credit: Mitch Law