Notes From the Road #7 - On Chatty Cab Drivers

Quick dispatch from sunny Las Vegas where I am attending and presenting at the Oracle HR User's Group, (OHUG), annual conference.

On the cab ride in from the airport yesterday  I was either lucky or unfortunate, (depending on your point of view), to have a classic chatty cab driver. The kind of guy not only interested in sharing a few choice nuggets about his city, fun things that might be happening in town, the most recent and noteworthy local news items, and whatever else is on his mind. The chatty cab driver scenario usually ends badly, particularly if you've been traveling all day and just are not in the mood for small talk.

Yesterday my cab driver, a man of about 55 or so years old I'd guess, somehow, (I am really not sure what set him off, I only said something incredibly mundane and boring like, 'Wow, kind of windy today'), got set off on a little monologue about the value of hard work, the need for more people to suck it up and just quit complaining, and simply find something, anything valuable and positive to do with their time, and just do it and shut the hell up.

I believe his exact, (or near enough), quote on the topic was something like -  

People need to drop the ideology that you have to get your dream job. There's no such thing. And even when you think you have it, in 2 years you'll just want to chase some other dream. Look at me, you think I dreamed about driving a cab in the desert? You do what you have to do.

It was an interesting and realistic take and whether or not you agree with the folks (mostly life coaches, I think), that proscribe chasing your dreams or doing the work that you are passionate about, every time you talk to a real working person about their careers and their choices it always provides some great perspective. 

You think I dreamed about driving a cab in the desert?

No, I don't think you probably did. Probably hardly anyone does. But as you said, Mr. I-did-not-catch-your-name Cab Driver, and as you rightly conclude, sometimes, maybe more than you hoped for, you do what you have to do.

And honestly, lots and lots of people doing what they have to do make life a heck of a lot easier for those of us who feel like chasing (often elusive) dreams. So thanks for the ride and the conversation.

Back to Vegas. I have the Heat minus 3.5 tonight.

And Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak likes Michigan State to win the Big 10 this Fall.

On Gates and Gatekeepers

A week or so back I had a post titled, 'The Skilled Trades Need a Famous Commencement Address Too', in which I whined for 500 words or so about the prevalence of actors, politicians, ridiculously successful internet gazillionaires, and the other non-relatable types that seem to deliver just about all of the annual college commencement addresses, or at least the ones we hear about. My point was more or less that in a tough economic climate, and with an enduring and worsening need for talented people to enter fields such as the skilled trades, teaching, and other not-as-glamorous-as-acting-or-being-a-social-media-consultant, that the consistent set of messages stemming from the annual round of typical commencement speeches, ('Just go out there and be fantastic', 'You can save the world', 'Borrow $20k from your parents and start a business'), were all just getting tiresome.  If the nation truly needs more machinists or nurses or accountants, then could we at least start acknowledging that more openly and with more conviction?

So as I said, I don't really give two shakes about 99% of the latest round of commencement addresses. But once in a great while there is a talk worth talking about, and worth sharing, even if it does bear some similarity to the hacky, same-old same-old advice that gets recycled each spring.  The speech I wanted to call out was given on May 17th at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia by the author Neil Gaiman, famous mostly for The Sandman, a series of comics written between 1988 and 1996.

In the speech, (text here, embedded video below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), Gaiman, speaking to a graduating class from an art school, offers advice and wisdom gained over his career as a working, and certainly, highly successful creative. While the entire speech is interesting, I wanted to call out two passages that speak more broadly to issues about career planning and management, and to the pace of change impacting not just the creative industries, but almost all organizations these days.

On career planning and management:

When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.

This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not.

Value in the real world - In your organization, the people making the rules, setting the boundaries, (maybe that's you?), are inherently limited by their tendency to fail to envision a world outside those boundaries. Having a job setting rules, well it seems that is a path to a long career setting rules and enforcing boundaries. Maybe you are ok with that, maybe not. 

On organizational and business model change:

I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

Value in the real world - In the arts, and probably your business too, the landscape two, five, ten years out is entirely unpredictable, and it is likely what works today will not work tomorrow. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. 

Don't allow yourself to use that as an excuse to over-analyze or hesitate. The winning organizations are not waiting to 'see how things play out', by that time, it's likely that you'll be too late to adapt once the new landscape is revealed. Better to set off on the course you think will be successful than wait for some kind of signpost from beyond.

Anyway, that's it for me on commencement speeches, at least until next Spring. 

The video of the full speech is below, and I think definitely worth your time over lunch, or at night when you have a spare 20 minutes or so.

Regrets of the retiring

There is a pretty internet-famous post titled, 'Regrets of the Dying', written by Bronnie Ware a long-time nurse who worked with serously ill and terminal patients. Her 'regrets' post was really a summary and distillation of what she had heard over the years from patients, most very ill and dying, when they talked about what they might have regretted in their lives.The article, and the five most common regrets are not that really surprising or hard to guess, ('I wish I didn't work so hard', interestingly made the list), and is worth a read.

I'm not sure what led me to stumble upon the 'regrets' piece, but after reading it I had to wonder if there actually were some parallels to people's lifetime regrets and their workplace or professional regrets, besides the stated regret of wishing they had not worked so hard. After all, for many, work is such a massive part of life, and often, ones happiness or at least contentment can be profoundly influenced by their feelings (and regrets) about their life's work.

In case you didn't click over to Bronnie's piece, here are the top five 'Regrets of the Dying':

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one that was expected of me

2. I wish I didn't work so hard

3. I wished I had the courage to express my feelings

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

5. I wish I had let myself be happier

In a way, most of if not all of these regrets can have direct equivalents to the choices we make, or feel we have to make, in our professional lives. How many of us took a college major in a 'safe' subject like business or economics, rather than what we might have been more interested or passionate about? It might have been the 'right' decision but it could have and often does send people down a path they never wanted to head. Or how often have we worked ourselves silly because we thought we had to, and perhaps missed out on fleeting moments in our families or children's lives? And if you are like me, no doubt you've lost touch with lots of your earliest workplace colleagues and mentors that sometimes you wish you could re-connect with today. And lastly, even though in these really tough economic times, being 'happy' at work can be considered a luxury and not a necessity, for how many of us is there nagging feeling that our best years that should be filled with our best work are slipping away just a little bit more every day.

I don't mean this post to be such a downer, (after a quick scan it seems pretty darn depressing I think), but I would rather just draw your attention to the list from Bronnie Ware if for no other reason to make anyone who takes a few minutes to read the piece, and think about the list of regrets, to consider if there is something missing in their work lives, and if truly, something should be done to make some, even small, changes.

I just think while it can be very hard, incredibly hard, it is probably even worse to call it a career someday and wish you had really been true to yourself, even just a little bit more.

How many bad decisions can you get away with - motorcycle crash edition

How many bad decisions can you get away with and hold on to your job?

My working theory right now is that there is an inverse relationship between how many bad, foolish, or reckless kinds of decisions one can make and one's relative position on an organization's hierarchy and pay structure, with a 'success' corollary and an 'ease of replacement' factor baked into the equation.

What am I talking about?

Just the latest episode in the ongoing 'Powerful, successful, rich men behaving badly at work' saga, this one from the world of sports, (shock), the news of University of Arkansas Head Football Coach Bobby Petrino's recent motorcycle accident, and the subsequent string of deception, fabrication, and simple bad judgment that has subsequently been brought to light.

In case you missed the story this week, the gist is as follows: (with my snarky comments in bold)

• Last Sunday, Petrino is taken to the hospital following a mototcycle accident. He suffers four broken ribs and a cracked neck vertebra. Ouch
• Petrino fails to mention to his boss at Arkansas, Athletics Director Jeff Long one key detail about the accident, that he wasn't alone on that motorcycle. He had in fact lied to Long about this nugget, and the athletic department put out a press release on Monday morning repeating that lie on Arkansas letterhead. Not good.
• Petrino's passenger was a woman. So what?
• She was not his wife. Uh-oh.
• The woman, Jessica Dorrell, is an employee of the Arkansas athletic department. What is the number for the HR hotline?
• Petrino hired Dorrell, who had previously worked in the athletic department's fundraising arm, to the football staff last week. Get my lawyer on the phone.

Now, as you would expect, the AD Long has launched a 'review' of the situation and the circumstances surrounding the accident, the deception by Petrino immediately following the accident, and (let's hope), the details surrounding the hiring of Dorrell by Petrino, who it would seem were conducting some kind of relationship while maybe not illegal, was almost certainly inappropriate. 

Complicating matters for Long is the recent success of Petrino and the Arkansas football team, with a 21-5 won-loss record in the last two seasons, and the team's best finish in the football rankings in ages.

Petrino, now with no other realistic options, has basically thrown himself at the mercy of his employer, and has apologized for his actions, issuing a statement that read in part - "I will fully cooperate with the university throughout this process and my hope is to repair my relationships with my family, my athletic director, the Razorback Nation and remain the head coach of the Razorbacks".

It will be up to Arkansas, and AD Long to decide what to do with their highest profile employee, (and highest-paid state of Arkansas worker), and to determine if success on the job weighs more heavily than a series of bad decisions off the job.

I have no idea how this will turn out, but the realist in me thinks that twenty-one wins in two seasons in the most competitive college football conference in the nation has a way of glossing over even the most obvious flaws in judgement and character.

What do you think - should Petrino be shown the exit?

Have a Great Weekend!

Value, Pricing, and Early Retirement

When this piece, about Chicago Bears running back Marion Barber announcing his retirement from football at age 28, popped up recently I decided to bookmark the story, although I was not entirely sure why. After all, while Barber was considered a solid NFL player for just about all of his seven year career, his particularly bruising style of play, combined with the typically short useful life span of NFL running backs, make his retirement from the game at what is a young age for just about any other vocation not terribly unusual or surprising. NFL players don't last long, and only the most durable and successful NFL running backs have careers much longer than Barber's seven years.Marion Barber, retiree

NFL and other professional sports teams talent management professionals have long learned to adapt their practices and talent strategies to the short careers of their players. Team depth charts showing three and four levels of potential (and often needed on extremely short notice) successors, detailed scouting reports of potential college hires (draftees), and a constantly updated assessment of replacement talent either currently employed by other teams, or on the open market are all staples of the professional sports team's head of talent. Although even I would admit not all sports/business/talent management comparisons hold water upon closer examination, even the most skeptical observers would have to acknowledge that the manner in which professional sports teams are constantly planning for the departure of their most important players, whether through injury, retirement, or even at times a sudden, and almost unexplainable drop in performance, is something to be learned from and even copied.

In that light, in addition to a constant vigilance towards succession planning, pro sports talent managers have another skill (mostly) down cold - namely maintaining a keen understanding of when they need to overpay for talent and where they don't, and that to me is the more interesting aspect of the Barber retirement, (even if in this particular case the issue did not appear to be money).

In the NFL while running back has been a traditional high-profile position, over time and due in part to a heavier reliance by teams on the passing game, the difference in production between the top few running backs in the league and the average performers at the position has been diminishing in statistical terms, as well as in overall value to team success. And time and time again it has been shown that rookie or second-year backs can perform to acceptable levels, while being paid significantly less than more experienced players. Essentially the league, and the talent managers from the teams, have determined that running back is a position where value usually trumps longevity, only the very best performers are worth rewarding with above market contracts, and replacements are readily found.

So Marion Barber, a seven-year vet and for the most part an above average performer for the majority of his career hangs it up at age 28 and the Bears, the rest of the league, and the average NFL fan barely notices. The Bears can and will easily find at least a half dozen viable replacements.  And that is I suppose another talent management lesson that we can learn from the NFL. That even the seemingly most easily replaceable elements of the team are indeed, easily replaced.

And when you can say that about your talent management plans and succession bench strength, that you have the answer and plan ready to go for every spot on the team, then maybe you'll be ready when your next 28 year old, in a high profile spot, and a solid performer decides to walk out the door.