Saying No to the Big Job

My father once said no to the big job offer. A job offer so big that a head of state has to call you to make the offer.

His reason for declining was quite simple. He knew he wouldn’t love the kind of work that he would have to do. He might be great at it. He might even like it. But, he wouldn’t love it.

And, my Dad had always taught me something fundamental – love what you do. Don’t just like it, and don’t just do it. Love it or……do something else. If you don’t love it, you’re just taking away the opportunity from someone who might. You are a space-filler.

You have to come to terms with the idea that sometimes, what you might love, might not be the biggest job. It might be being the #2. It might mean, God forbid, taking a demotion. It’s never been more important in planning your career to heed the creed of “careful what you wish for….” Today – once you plug in to a job, you don’t unplug. They have you at your desk, your phone, your Twitter stream. Every moment that you spend choosing to work, you take time away from other things in your life that have value and give life meaning. So, whatever you do with all of that time you are devoting to your work, you’d better love it.

Well, of course, that’s fine, Megan, but I don’t choose to work, I have to work. I would argue that point! Of course, you have to provide for your family. Of course, you have to work on your financial security. But, I think you choose almost everything in life. The few things you don’t choose (getting cancer, who your parents are, how often your husband plays Tiger Woods Golf on his ipad), you still choose how you react to. So, I argue, that you choose your work.

Think back to a moment when you met someone who, obviously, loved their work. For me, it was almost everyone on staff at “The Old Pancake House” in Boulder, Colorado. We used go get breakfast there about once a month when we lived in Boulder, because a) the pancakes were delicious, and b) every time we went in the place, we couldn’t help but notice how well-run it was and how happy the staff seemed. Now, I’ve been a waitress and let me tell you, the WORST meal service of an entire week is breakfast. For about 1000 reasons, but here are seven:

1. Condiments – breakfast items need a lot of them. Syrup, ketchup, butter, cream, sugar, sauce. That’s a lot of extra trips for a waiter;
2. Families – large families. Tthe children, the grandparents, the aunts, the cousins. They all come out for brunch, they all arrive at the same time, and they are all very hungry;
3. No Alcohol No alcohol means smaller checks. Smaller checks mean smaller tips;
4. Football Everyone needs to get home before the game starts. Everyone wants to leave at the same time;
5. Coffee You can’t pour enough of it, you can’t keep it hot enough; everyone wants an IV line of caffeine from the coffee pot straight in to their bloodstream;
6. Tea Heaven help the person that wants tea. Tea requires a lot of apparatus and it’s not something the kitchen will do for the waiter. Tea slows a waiter down during the breakfast crush;
7. Did I mention that no alcohol means much smaller tips? As soon as someone has a beer, the tip gets bigger.

So, when I used to watch the waiters at “The Old Pancake House”, I would stare in amazement. They were busy, but never rushed. They greeted everyone like friends. They actually smiled at their co-workers. They helped one another bus tables, bring food. They were never standing around. I used to think: either they are paying these people some kind of incentive for faked sincerity, or the manager of this place has somehow figured out how to hire people who LOVE working here. I considered it miraculous. Those waiters, if they were that good, probably could have found other places to work – in retail, food service, hotels, etc. but I really felt like they were choosing to work at the “Old Pancake House” as opposed to feeling forced to. I don’t think it was the “only job they could get” or I think I would have felt a very different vibe. Maybe, one of them even had the courage to decline an offer for a bigger job so that they could continue doing what they loved.

My Dad said “no” when a head of state called. I think it was the best career decision he ever made.

Talking to The Right Person

Wow. It’s the most important lessons that we need to learn over, and over, and over again, before they stick.

I’ve just spent a month working on a business problem: wildly gesturing with colourful markers against a whiteboard, building charts and pivot tables galore, even going so far as to come up with a catchy title for my strategy slide, called, the “Tip of the Spear” plan.

And then, something amazing happened today. Something that changed everything…….I talked to the right person.

What??!! What do you mean you talked to the right person? Haven’t you been talking to people, the right people, all along.

Well, you’ve been there. You know what I’m talking about. Every day you are bombarded by people communicating to you – trying to get your attention, trying to be relevant, trying to make you care. And, for some of those people you do listen and you do care and you think they sound smart, and whatever critical reasoning capability you have available in your frontal cortex, and you use what they tell you to try and make sense of the world.

But, sometimes – someone breaks through all of the chatter and says something that really sticks. Something that causes a visceral response. It’s almost emotional. Often, it’s the feeling that someone has put in to words something that you’ve always believed, but have never been able to articulate. Somehow, your mind has been read and a smarter version of yourself has just given voice to your most confounding thoughts and feelings.

Today – I had a simple phone call with a work colleague. Someone I hadn’t spoken to in over 3 years. She had some pertinent knowledge to my business problem so I thought I would reach out and give her a call. In 45 minutes, she gave me more insight, more direction, more chutzpah than I had gained from 28 days’ worth of talking to scores of people and pouring over mountains of data. She was, in effect, the right person.

 

Finding the right person at the right time can help you get at the essence of whatever your problem is and help your voice take shape. There is no shortcut to finding these people. The only trick to know is that once you feel yourself in the moment with that person, you have to listen really hard – and take copious notes.

Is Your Marketing Budget All Wrong?

It is, if any part of it looks like this.

Many marketers still fall back on old concepts of how to think about allocatting budget, paying agencies for creative and other services, and aligning budgets to business priorities and performance.

I look at this picture above of an agency statement of work schedule and think: Why would I pay for the hours you use to manage me? How does paying an agency an hourly rate provide me with the best strategy, the best creative, the best brand building (let alone encourage any kind of efficiency in the process)? The fees that drive me the most nuts are fees for “trafficking services”. Essentially, I’m paying you to manage my project through the labyrinth that is your agency. I actually used to tell agencies to just bury the cost of trafficking somewhere else on the invoice because, if I saw it, I wouldn’t pay for it.

About a decade ago, several advertising and marketing services firms started to link their fees to the performance of their clients’ business. This would seem, on the surface, to be the solution to the hourly billing model that is so irrelevant to anything. However, this model makes me uneasy as well. I think an agency’s job is to push a client. Push them out of their comfort zone, ask them to be braver in how they represent who they are through their brand, get them to really consider the world outside of their cubicle. An agency that is simply the order taker for the client should not call anything that they do “strategy” or “creative”. So, if an agency is paid on the performance of every single campaign, how risk averse will they become?

I believe in marketing failures. When I interview talented marketers, I always ask them to take me through their biggest failures. If I hear crickets, the interview is over. I ask agencies the same thing. I ask them how often and when they disagree with clients. I want every person’s brain at the table and I believe in building long term relationships with the agencies and others that you hire to help you achieve long-term success. I want to be inspired by everyone on the “payroll” – internally and externally.

So, I propose a new model for marketing budgets. Always - tie your budgets to customer outcomes and business performance. How many satisfied customers do you have? How many new customers are engaged with you and having dialogue with you? How does what you pay your agency align to customer relationships? Do you provide your agency with incentives aligned to your core business performance in the long-term so that you provide room for risk-taking?

I want to live in a world where you can look at a marketer’s budget to find out where their priorities are, not how many hours it took them to get somewhere.

Finding Your Voice

One of the challenges of authoring content in the Web 2.0 world is actually finding your voice. You are supposed to be authentic. You’re supposed to build your brand. You have to be transparent but, whatever you do, think hard before you post anything. It’s a lot of pressure. Even more so when you realize that you’re supposed to be an expert. An expert on what? Well – you decide – but you’d better lay claim to the ‘expert mantle’ quickly before your potential audience has moved on to the next tweet.

Think about the amount of time you actually have to make an impression. How many tweets do you read all the way through? You spend, maybe, 1.5 seconds considering the source, the topic, and whether you are interested enough to hit a link. If you click on a link – jackpot. The author just got at least another 15 seconds of your time. In this world, a 30-second TV spot feels like a luxurious amble to the point.

In this world, how do you find your voice? Here are some places to get started, according to a non-expert:

1) What do you think about in the shower?

2) What thoughts, problems, ideas, conversations keep you up at night?

3) What do your friends tease you about? When people tease you, they are usually trying to tell you something about who you really are.

4) What lights you up creatively? (what music, theatre, book, movement gives you energy?)

5) Though this may seem counterintuitive to being authentic, what is your persona? What part of your life and your thoughts do you want to amplify on the web?

6) Make a list of people that inspire you and a list of people that don’t. What people do you gravitate to and why? Who gravitates to you and why?

7) What are you good at? D’uh – but the trick is blending the many things you are good at to come up with new relationships and insights. Love sushi and snowboarding – write about the Zen art of Riding the Pipe. Are you a juggler and BackOffice technical God – write about how to multi-task on big IT projects.

8) Search on YouTube:

 Dave Stewart: “Flaunt your Imperfections and You will be a Star, my Dear”

9) If all else fails, and you can’t find your voice, write a blog post teaching other people how!

At the end of the day, people want to connect with other people – real, flawed, inspired, complicated people. So, you just have to find a way to be one of those.

Beyond the Blue Badge

It was a lucky accident. My last job before MSFT was waitressing. Since then, I’ve been ”megank” at work for the past 14 years, 8 months and 20 something days. I grew up at this company. In my first 3 months, I memorized the business cards in my boss’ Rolodex and would “drop names” from memory at Chamber of Commerce – all in an attempt to seem well connected to the movers and shakers. I’ve come a long way from that place.

Since then – a whirlwind. 5 cities, 10 jobs, 14 managers. I’ve only had a few simple rules in building my career: 1) Know the data (that’s a given at MSFT), 2) speak up often and become a great speaker, 3) Be good to everyone – janitor, receptionist, Corporate VP. Business isn’t so crucial to life and death that you can’t be good to people and give them your best, 4) Surround yourself with people that are smarter than you – they fill your gaps, they help you raise your game, you’ll never be bored.

And Monday is my last day. Why…….

I couldn’t help myself – I had to see my new little guy more. I could lie to myself and say that I didn’t know that I would feel this way after having a son. That when I came back from maternity leave, I would pick up my career with the same passion, energy, and drive. But, I did know I would feel this way. I knew it all along.

So, My husband and I went through the budget spreadsheet about 20 times. We had about 40 conversations. And, in the end, he gave me a big hug, and I made the leap.

I will still work and I’ll give that work my best, but I’ll do it part-time, and now my work also includes 2 extra days with my son a week. Priceless. I can’t wait to get started.

The Coffee Shop Down the Street Plays the Best Music…

a little Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Billie Holiday, The Kinks, Buddy Holly. It just makes me so happy. A quick coffee. A scan of the New York times where there was a line so clever, in an article about how a backup opera singer got a shot last weekend to sing opera’s most difficult part “Siegfried” in Wagner’s “The Ring” on stage at the Met, that I actually wrote it down. Even the bathroom in the place looks like it belongs in a film noir shot. I feel completely at ease in the place and it makes my heart smile.

There are gorgeous yellow leaves on the few trees on my city street - I like to pick up a handful and scatter them above the head of Will and watch him watch them fall.  He folds them between his little fingers to hear the crunching sound, and then he tries to eat them.

This morning I lingered at daycare with him and banged drums and shaked shakers with him while the music teacher sang, “If I’d Known you were Coming, I’d have Baked a Cake”. Then, he had a warm bottle and fell fast asleep. I can tell that he’s comfortable there and it makes my heart happy.

It’s the little things…

Oh, and that line in the NY Times today: “To be self-critical without being self-destructive may be the single most valuable trait in adult life”.

What I Learned from On Base Percentage

Recently, I’ve listened to two interviews with the author,
Michael Lewis: one on NPR’s “Fresh Air” which is part of my nightly podcasts lineup, and the other, a sixty-minute interview on “Charlie Rose”. Charlie doesn’t
often give sixty full minutes to current heads of state, let alone nonfiction writers. Why did he do so this time?

Because Michael Lewis is really interesting. Uncommonly so.

Lewis first crossed my radar about seven years ago, when my
father recommended “Moneyball” to me. Though it was written in 2003, Moneyball has gained more recognition in the past few months because it is about to hit
theatres as a big-budget movie starring Brad Pitt. This strikes me as peculiar because the book is about….baseball statistics; specifically, On Base Percentage.

On Base Percentage, for those of you smart enough not to concern yourself with such a thing, is a stat that calculates exactly what it says – the percentage of times a player reaches base. How do you make a movie about On
Base Percentage that Brad Pitt wants to star in? I have no idea.

“Moneyball” follows the story of the Oakland A’s, a small
market team, that started winning consistently in the nineties; a highly unlikely scenario as their player payroll was one of the lowest in the league and should not have enabled them to even be competitive, let alone successful. Lewis peels the onion on a team that found a new way to use statistics to find players that were undervalued in the marketplace – players that could produce
but that the market didn’t see as valuable, because the market valued big-time hitters. One of the lines from the book that has always stuck with me is, (paraphrasing)
“With two outs, anything and everything is still possible. With three outs, nothing is.” What the A’s figured out that no one else caught on to was that On Base Percentage was a measure that told you whether a player was likely to become
an “out”, ultimately leading his team closer to its third out, and killing all opportunity to score. So, the A’s started recruiting players that didn’t have stellar
hitting stats or RBI’s (because these players were highly valued and had the price tag to go with that skill) but had high On Base Percentage stats which nobody
in the conventional scouting world cared much about. Because players with a high On Base Percentage were overlooked and undervalued, the A’s could afford
them. This lesson wasn’t really about statistics – it was about a team that found a way to value something that no one else did and used that advantage to win.

What the A’s learned about how to find value in the “unvaluable” is something I’ve often tried, in vain, to apply to my life in business. I am a marketer – the job of a marketer is to find a marketplace (aka customers) for a
product or service. At first glance, marketers often go after the biggest customers or the largest market. After all, if you want to eat well, you either catch the biggest fish or you catch the largest number of smaller fish. However, the
biggest customers and the largest markets are highly valued and therefore most expensive to reach – that billboard in Times Square will buy you a lot of newspaper ads in the “Bridgewater Bulletin”. As a result, you quickly learn in
business school that the best marketplace is not always the largest one but the most underserved or undervalued. The trick is to identify new customers that are ignored by others so you can acquire them faster and cheaper because you’re
not competing with all of the other fishermen. Knowing where to fish is easier said than done. The A’s found a way to do this and Moneyball tops my list of the books that should be required reading for anyone that ever wanted a job in
business.

Now, does it strike you as odd that Moneyball is the kind of
book that a father recommends to his 30-something year old daughter? Well, firstly, you must know my father. He recommends books all the time because he reads
– a lot. Like, eight books at a time. He is a compulsive book buyer – he literally can’t go in to or through an airport without coming away with at least two
books from whatever crappy bookstore he can find there. As I type this, I’m positive he’s giving himself a hernia carting his tomes around like an albatross in his leather briefcase. He’s the only guy I know who buys e-books
on his Kindle and also, buys them in hard cover so that he can have both the physical and digital copies. However, my Dad’s literary tastes and mine don’t always run parallel. He likes spy novels and encyclopedic histories about World
War II. I like fiction written by women (something my father does not read). Think about it – when was
the last time any man that you know – your father, brother, husband, friend read a book by a female author? Maybe Annie Proulx? Maybe PD James back in the
day because they didn’t know she was a woman? Even music – my husband has maybe 1,500 songs on his iPhone and I’ll bet there are less than 100 by women.

Dad thought I would like “Moneyball” because it was about a
subject that we had in common. You see, my Dad used to teach me how to keep the box score of baseball games when I was a little girl. I learned what a 6-4-3 double play was, I marked large “K’s” on the sheet for strike outs, I could
tell you that the shortstop was number 6. I wanted to know how to mark a specific error so that it would be correct. So, the wonderful world that is baseball stats became a language that my father and I could share. I could ask
him for the umpteenth time how to calculate Slugging percentage and he would patiently walk me through it again and again. Now, as a teenage girl, did I have an innate love of baseball? A sport I didn’t play and a game that I didn’t
really relate to? No. I watched those Montreal Expos games on French CBC with my box score sheet and a #2 pencil in hand because it was a means to an end – the end being something highly valuable: 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time with my Dad. I loved, and still love, watching sports with him. I even read David Cone’s biography because my father said that it was a good story – even if he did pitch his perfect game against the Expos.

So, Moneyball, was like apple pie for me; a piece of
nostalgia from my childhood, and highly relevant to my current life in business. Indeed, it was even more than those things. I’m fascinated with Michael Lewis’ writing because he has a skill that I find incredibly powerful yet rare –
he takes complicated subjects and makes them simple. Most of the people I know in business, academia, or communications of any kind place a premium on making
simple things sound complicated. People spit things into the “Jargonator” and out comes dribble that only sounds smart and compelling. I’m Exhibit “A”. My prized possession in college was my thesaurus. I used it to take the ill-formed
ideas in my essays and replace them with multi-syllable words and run-on sentences in an attempt to mask the fact that I didn’t have the first clue what I was talking about. Ahhhhh, but I was handsomely rewarded with many A’s for papers that were long on pretense and short on substance. Why? Because pretense is valued in our society – we’re all so afraid of looking stupid that we put up with a lot of obscure thoughts. I can’t tell you the number of times in a day
that we use three-letter acronyms at work and no one has the guts to ask what they actually stand for – it’s assumed that if it’s complicated or unclear, it must be profound in some way. It’s taken me a long time to figure out that it takes
a much smarter mind to simplify things than it does to complicate them.

Whether Lewis’ subject is sports strategy or, more recently,
the global financial meltdown, he tells it like the yarn an Irishman would tell you in a Dublin pub over several pints of Guinness. Because Lewis knows one fundamental truth – that all subjects, all stories, all problems are ultimately
stories about people. People are at the core of every subject and it is the personal stories and decisions of people that create the world around us. Focus on what motivates people to do things, to take action and you can boil down the
most complex topic to its essence.

Apparently, Lewis has written two riveting books about
mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps and how the world’s economies are collapsing. I wouldn’t know because I haven’t read “The Big Short” or “Boomerang”
yet. I’ve recently become a Mom so I’ve read exactly one book in the past seven months. However, I have both books on hold at my local library because everything I’ve heard says that these two books are the best accounts to-date
on the housing/financial crisis in the US, and why European countries like Iceland, Ireland, and Greece are going belly up faster than the IMF and Angela Merkel can bail them out. It’s as though Michael Lewis is an anthropologist looking down on baseball, on Wall St., or on European banks and telling us, the foreigner, what is happening in these distant lands and cultures. What does their language mean? How do the people within these closed communities relate
to one another? What do they value? At their heart, Moneyball and Michael Lewis’ writings about the financial crisis ask the same question, “What do we value?
Are we placing value on the right things?” Whether it’s a baseball scout using new statistics to get a deal on a player in the minor leagues or Lehman Brothers signaling to the world that mortgage-backed securities were the next
great money maker – often the notion of “what is valuable” is riddled with false assumptions that we never get around to questioning.  

In short, I’m learning that what is truly valuable are those
things that are simple, so boring and overlooked that we become blind to them –our On Base Percentage.

So, I’ve started a blog. Not with any particular audience in
mind – mostly, for myself. Simply to make some time for introspection. The act of writing helps me sort through what to value. Thanks Michael Lewis and Dad for the inspiration.