n = 1

1.  We love to talk about 'hiring for cultural fit' but have no idea if we really know how to do that, and if it really matters.

2. You don't really have to be glued to your email 24/7. People who are emailing at all hours are mostly competing on responsiveness instead of on talent/skill/ideas. You can try to do compete on responsiveness for a while, but eventually, maybe soon, you''ll burn out and won't have enough talent/skill/ideas to fall back on.

3. The number of people you can trust, who you can count on, and who really do have your best interests top of mind is fewer than you think. Maybe a lot fewer. But that is ok. One true ally is worth more than twenty impostors.

4. Not everyone in the 'gig' economy is all that thrilled to be chasing gigs all of the time. You might be able to lock up some of your most talented and productive contractors or temp workers for much less than you think.

5. It's probably too late to panic. Just get on with it.

6. Incomplete or incongruous information about prices and salaries make so many of us leave money on the table. Whatever you are thinking of asking for, ask for 20% more.

7. Stop working for free. Truly. You are devaluing your own skills and you are killing the market for everyone else. And to those big, giant companies that continue to want to compensate labor with 'exposure?'. Shame on you too.

8. The single greatest disruption in the 'robots are going to take all the jobs' dynamic might be when self-driving trucks put a million drivers (in the USA only) out of work.

9. Listen to the input of the (few) people you can trust, but always make your own decisions

10. Once your network hits 150 or people, you can't really know them all that well, or meaningfully engage with any more. But you can let them think they know you by sharing just enough information,  in the right places at the right times. It isn't about being fake, it's about recognizing the limits of our capacity to engage. And also about making sure you give yourself the time and space to work on your own ideas, and not be too influenced by what everyone else seems to be fascinated with at the moment.

11. I had a weird dream where I directed a movie. It was like a 'Planet of the Apes' except instead of apes, they were dinosaurs that walked on two legs. Million dollar idea!

To be continued...

Have a great weekend!

Leading vs. asking for a show of hands

I am way more invested in this year's Academy Awards show coming up on Sunday than I have been since, well probably since ever.

I have seen 7 of the 8 films that are up for Best Picture, and have tried to catch as many of the other films that have actors up or the main acting awards as well.

On a long flight home yesterday I finally caught the Steve Jobs movie that features Oscar nominated acting performances from Michael Fassbender as Jobs, and Kate Winslet as Apple's marketing head Joanna Hoffman. I loved the movie, probably more than most, and I would not be surprised at all if Fassbender gets the upset and wins Best Actor over everyone's favorite choice this year, Leonardo DiCaprio from The Revenant.

There was a great line in the Jobs film that stuck out for me as being one worth remembering. In the most tense scene of the film which showed the Apple board meeting and showdown between Jobs and then-Apple CEO John Sculley (which culminated in Apple's board voting to oust Jobs), Fassbender (as Jobs) hits Sculley with this killer burn:

Artists lead, and hacks ask for a show of hands.

Jobs was clearly trying to paint Sculley as a non-innovative, non-creative, corporate suit - and not the kind of person from which amazing ideas and products would stem.

Two minutes later Sculley does indeed ask for a show of hands, (the Apple board vote), and Jobs is shown the exit door from Apple. We all know the rest of the story of course, with Jobs retuning to Apple several years later and saving the company from near insolvency.

Jobs had plenty of flaws, and the film does a decent job of bringing some of these forward, but there can be little argument about how important he was to Apple and more broadly, to our relationship with technology today.

Ok, that is it for me on the movies this year. Go check out Trish McFarlane and I on the HR Happy Hour Show with our Oscars preview where I sadly do not tap Fassbender for Best Actor.

Have a great weekend!

10 reasons why you should quit the NFL for the Premier League

I am up early on a Saturday taking in Barclays Premier League match between my beloved Liverpool Reds and Chelsea, the defending Premier League champions currently mired in a slow start to the new season. I watch a fair bit of sports on TV, (I have pretty much no life), but after many years of increasing interest and appreciation of top-level soccer, I have mostly given over my Fall and Winter weekends to the Premier League, and have pretty much lost interest in the much more popular, (here in the US anyway), American football games (both college and in the NFL).

Why is that? Why have I basically given up on American football, with only a passing interest in the country's most popular sport? Here are 10 reasons, just off of the top of my head. And if you are saying to yourself, 'Who cares what sports Steve likes?', I would answer, 'Probably no one. But it is my blog. And I am up early on a Saturday and this is what I feel like writing about.' So there.

Ok, here are 10 reasons why I, (and maybe you too), should quit the NFL for the Premier League:

1. Soccer has about 3 rules you need to understand in order to appreciate the action. Sure, there are more rules than that, but the essential ones are very few, they are pretty simple, (we teach 4 year olds how to play using these rules), and you can grasp them in about the first 15 minutes of watching a game. American football, and the NFL in particular, has about 3,593 rules, many if not most of them are incredibly complex, vary in their application, and even 'experts' of the game often fail to understand them. NFL football is akin to the worst of governmental or corporate bureaucracies - hopelessly dense, complex, and often unexplainable.

2. Because of this complexity in the rules, NFL games are interrupted dozens of times (and on EVERY punt or kickoff it seems), by penalty flags, interminable on-field conferences amongst the numerous game officials, and delays in the game for video reviews, often frame-by-frame, of controversial plays. Again, the NFL resembles the worst in big corporations in that the games are really just a few seconds of actual things happening that are interrupted by meetings of paunchy, middle-aged men discussing and attempting to explain what just happened. 

3. Let's talk about the actual game action then. A Premier League game consists of two 45 minute halves with the clock running constantly, with a few minutes of 'extra' time usually added for injuries and other delays. Add in a 15 minute halftime break, and the normal (meaning EVERY one), Premier League game takes a bit under 2 hours to complete, start to finish. It is a perfect amount of time to dedicate to a sporting event, a movie, a dinner with your in-laws  - pretty much anything. NFL and especially college football games regularly require 3 to 3.5 hours to complete. And for the amount of actual action that occurs in a game, (see Point 4), 3.5 hours for a sporting event is just insane.

4. It has been estimated that the average NFL game, the game that takes about 3.5 hours to complete, and has 60 minutes of official game time, actually has only between 7 - 8 minutes of action, i.e., where the players are actually PLAYING football. The rest of the time consists of players walking back to the huddle, standing in the huddle, walking back to the ball from the huddle, and waiting for the quarterback to scream a series of incomprehensible commands and making wild gesticulations. The ball is then put into play for a few seconds, (the average NFL play lasts about 7 seconds), and the entire process is repeated. Unless it is interrupted by a penalty flag and a corporate board meeting by the aforementioned old men. Football is 3.5 hours of almost nothing happening.

5. Premier League soccer (and all soccer really), consists of 90 minutes of almost constant action. There are no 'time outs', there are fewer delays for penalties and fouls. When there is a foul the one on-field referee in charge makes the decision, and the ball is put back into play quickly. There are no meetings to talk about the fouls, there are no lengthy delays to 'check the video replay', and there are no 'coaches challenges' like in American football. Soccer realizes, correctly, that it is a GAME, and not every tiny decision needs to be examined under a electron microscope.

6. While the rest of this post is a little cheeky, this point is pretty serious. While injuries happen in all sports, and sometimes they are serious injuries, for the most part soccer at all levels is much, much safer than football. Despite all the advances in protective equipment, the nature of football leaves almost EVERY player injured at some point. While NFL players are grown men, and are compensated well to accept these risks, the culture of American football extends much further into society, where the participants are neither grown men or compensated at all for these risks. This season alone 7 high school football players have died from direct football related injuries. Read that again. SEVEN high school kids have DIED from playing football. I find it incredible that 99.9% of American society is ok with that. 

7. In the US, Premier League games (that last a total of 2 hours like I mentioned), are played in the morning across all US time zones. That means you can wake up early, take in a couple of matches, and still be free by Noon or so to do whatever it is you SHOULD be doing on the weekend instead of sitting on the sofa watching sports. You can get your fill of game action and still not be a jerk to your family or friends who don't care about your fantasy team and want you to be an actual contributing member of society on Saturdays and Sundays, and not some loser who is constantly checking his phone to see how many receiving yards Odell Beckham Jr. has racked up. 

8. The match commentators for the Premier League games are exceedingly better and more entertaining than their NFL counterparts. Premier League commentators use words like 'comprehensive' and 'beguiling' and describe players with phrases like 'He is a wily campaigner'. NFL game analysts mostly like to talk about what team coaches said to them in meetings the day before the game. When NFL commentators try to move past the obvious 'The team that makes the least mistakes will win today', and get into the intricacies of the game action, 'Tampa rolled their high safety over to the weakside to guard against the naked bootleg action from Seattle', almost no one watching the game has any idea what they are talking about.

9. And speaking of TV coverage, in the US anyone with a decent cable sports package has access to EVERY SINGLE Premier League game on LIVE. Every game is on TV. In the NFL, America's most popular sport, the only way you can get access to every game live on TV is to subscribe to the satellite TV provider DirectTV and order a premium NFL package to get access to all the games live. There are a couple of ways to get access to streams of NFL games as well. But in 2015 the fact that I as a subscriber of Time Warner Cable, one of the largest cable companies in the US, can't order up or subscribe to any NFL game that I would like to see on my TV is absolutely insane.

10. (I promise this is the last one. If you have made it this far well, bless your heart). The pinnacle of the NFL season, the Super Bowl, is primarily enjoyed by millions not for the actual game, 'Who is playing again?', but for the TV commercials. The actual game is just a side note for the commercials, the halftime show, the endless tweets and columns about which big corporation 'won' the game by having the best TV spot, and the discussions of what kind of plausible excuse can you come up with to call in sick to work the next morning. Aside for the fans of the two teams playing, and the people who have bet on the game, no one really cares which team wins the game. Let's talk more about that Doritos spot instead.

That is it. I am out. Thanks for indulging me. 

And by the way, Liverpool 3 - Chelsea 1 - Full Time. Go Reds.

Happy Halloween.

If you could pass a new (workplace) law, what would it be?

Note: This week on the blog I am trying out a little experiment - writing on the first five (or so) subjects that popped out at random from a cool little app called Writing Exercises. The app provides suggestions for topics, characters, first lines - that kind of thing. I tapped the 'Random Subject' button a few times and will (try) to come up with something for each subject I was presented. It may be good, it may stink - who knows? But whatever the topic, I am taking like 20 minutes tops to bang something out. So here goes...

Today's topic: If you could pass a new (workplace) law, what would it be?

Quick disclaimer, the Writing Exercises app actually didn't include the work 'workplace' in the topic suggestion, but since I have been really running off the rails this week with these posts and I have no desire to wade into any kinds of issues that actually are important and that stir people up, I will keep my answers to this question limited to work and workplaces. I can think of three workplace 'laws' that I would enact once I am granted the title of Czar of Work. Here we go...

1. Email use would be subject to some strict conditions - I have an entire laundry list of edicts I would lay down with regards to workplace email use and practices. Just some of my proposals: No email on the weekend, designated 'email free' blocks of time during the week, and the auto-deletion of any incoming messages that you receive when you are out on vacation. And one more thing, any email that is flagged as 'Urgent' is immediately returned to sender with the question 'Really?' in the subject line. Under a Steve Boese administration, email would be dramatically different.

2. Meeting and Conference Call 'start' times would be taken much more seriously - Showing up late for a meeting or a Con Call would be just cause for termination. Maybe not on the first offense, but once a pattern of 'my time is much more important than your time' is established, then that person HAS TO GO. Show up on time, or decline the meeting in advance. Media outlets love to report on how much productivity is lost in workplaces from silly things like March Madness office pools. I bet the sums wasted on the combined amount of time people spend sitting around waiting for meetings and calls to start would dwarf whatever is wasted by workers chatting about their NCAA brackets.

3. Where, when, and how people work would be (mostly) up to them - Saving the obvious occupations (ER nurse, elementary school teacher, NBA point guard), who have to work at a specific place at a specific time, under Czar Steve's benevolent rule, most employees would be granted the flexibility to work where, when, and how they feel the most productive. We would stop 'asking' to work from home on Tuesday since the plumber is coming to the house or if could we pretty please have a couple of hours off on Thursday to see little Joey in the school concert. Workers would be free to make choices, like adults, and be held responsible for their performance and outcomes, (like they are anyway). 

Ok, that's it. Those are Czar of Work Steve's three new workplace laws. What laws for the workplace would you enact if you had the chance? 

Loss

Note: This week on the blog I am trying out a little experiment - writing on the first five (or so) subjects that popped out at random from a cool little app called Writing Exercises. The app provides suggestions for topics, characters, first lines - that kind of thing. I tapped the 'Random Subject' button a few times and will (try) to come up with something for each subject I was presented. It may be good, it may stink - who knows? But whatever the topic, I am taking like 20 minutes tops to bang something out. So here goes...

Today's subject: Loss

Wow, the fun never ends with these random subjects. Check the earlier posts on Regret and Fear. Is seems like the Writing Exercises app wants to make sure I stay in a funk all week. Ok, well I committed to this nonsense and today's post gets me over the hump for the week so carry on we must. But I am not going to get too heavy on Loss, as no one needs to be bummed out any further, especially on a Wednesday.

When was the last time you lost something really important to you? I am not talking about misplacing a set of keys for ten minutes or not being able to find your favorite T-shirt on a Saturday morning, but rather actually losing, (gone, disappeared, never coming back...), something you truly cared about or even loved?

It probably doesn't happen all that much, as we usually do eventually track down most of the things that mysteriously go missing. Maybe your roommate or one of your kids borrowed the thing and didn't tell you or didn't return it to its normal place. Or maybe you're simply getting old and more forgetful yourself and then all of a sudden - Oh, now I remember I left my lucky sweatpants back at the tailgate last weekend (illustrative purposes only, I assure you).

Well, I know I have lost a few things over the years that I still am pretty peeved about.  Here are the three things I wish I still had, please feel free to share yours (lost or just moved on from), in the comments:

1. My Camel Saddle Seat - Yes, I once had a camel saddle seat and yes it was exceptionally cool. I acquired it while working in Saudi Arabia a lifetime ago and after about 20 years and a dozen moves somehow I no longer have the saddle seat. And that stinks.

2. My 1976 Buick Century - This car was slow, unwieldy, ugly, with ponderous driving characteristics and I loved it. I didn't so much lose it as it just went missing. I think. I actually don't really remember what happened to it. But I might have to get another one. 

3. My Superstar Baseball Board Game - Superstar Baseball was a kind of strat-o-matic style board game that essentially kept my core group of 10 - 13 year old kids busy on summer nights in the late 70s. This was basically Fantasy Baseball before anyone had dreamed up the term Fantasy Baseball. Nothing better than watching two 7th graders argue over whether trading Arky Vaughan straight up for Pie Traynor was a fair swap. Where is my game today? Who knows.

So that is my take on Loss. What have you lost that you would love to get back?