4 Biggest Lies About Social Media

Penelope Trunk

Here is an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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You cannot have social media goals. It’s like having copy machine goals. The copy machine is a business tool, and if you need it, it’s there to help you meet one of your business goals. Treat social media the same way.

The best way to understand which tools will help meet which goals is to cut through the crap that the buzz is built on. Figure out who is really using social media to meet their goals, and how they are doing it.

[Here are the first two of the four "lies" that Trunk discusses. To read the complete article, please click here.]

Lie #1: LinkedIn is for networking.

Networking should be at the forefront of every entrepreneur’s mind. Research from the Darden School of Business shows that startups are most likely to succeed when the founder is great at networking. But LinkedIn isn’t going to help you on that front.

LinkedIn is for displaying your network, not building it. For example, you can go on LinkedIn and find out that I’m really well connected. But most of you already know I’m well connected — I’m a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. Which means I didn’t build my network via LinkedIn networking tools. I built it offline.

Networks are built on relationships, which grow from conversation. LinkedIn is not for conversations. So you need to go somewhere else to build your network, and then when it’s big, display it on LinkedIn so you’ll look great.

Lie #2: Twitter is for conversation.

Twitter is an index of people with whom you might want to talk. It’s a great index — you can search by topic to find out who is interested in what, and then talk to them about mutually interesting topics. It used to be that you’d have to suffer through endlessly boring events at conferences striking up conversation to find the people to talk to later. Twitter makes that conference drudgery superfluous; you can talk to anyone you want, by topic or specialty, super fast.

The problem with using Twitter for conversation is that you’re going to need way more than 140 characters to make a genuine connection. So Twitter is great for finding people who have similar ideas, and for keeping track of them in a high-level way.

But you still need to go elsewhere — offline or online — to solidify the relationship to the point where you would actually care about each other in the way a solid network connection does, but Twitter is a good start.

Social media is about being nice. The people who are best at meeting their goals through social media are the most generous as well. When you use social media, give way more than you get. And remember that giving something that requires someone to do something for you (Download my book! Test out my free software!) is not giving. Ask people how you can help them. Read enough about someone to understand what they need and then surprise them. Be interesting without expecting anything in return. You could think of social media as its own economy: Interestingness is the currency; kindness is the way that currency is transported.

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Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups, most recently Brazen Careerist, a professional social network for young people. Previously she worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Mattel and Hyundai. Her blog about career advice, blog.penelopetrunk.com, receives half a million visits a month and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. She frequently appears as a workplace commentator on CNN, 20/20 and FOX News. She’s also the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a bestselling career advice book for Generation Y.

 

How to Remain Relevant [in Today's Job Market] When You’re Over 40

Here is an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Your earning potential pretty much tops out at age 40. This is because your skills become increasingly valuable until you amass fifteen years’ experience, at which point you’ve hit a peak. According to statisticians at PayScale.com, in all fields except law, people are not paid more money for experience beyond fifteen years.

This means that to remain relevant and continue to increase your value, you are going to have to learn skills outside of your field. Here are five skills you should pick up as your earning power is due to drop.

[Actually, here are three. To read the complete article, please click here.]

1. Community building.

Yes, this is an irritating buzzword for social media mavens who are probably fresh out of college and run their whole life on Facebook and tumblr.  But the reality is, social media infiltrates everything, in the same way that email  became essential 10 years ago. Ninety percent of messages today are via social media link, according to The Pinnacle Group, a New York City think tank. Only ten percent are via email. So we are already at that tipping point where you need to learn social media or go home. People who are exceptional with social media can build a community around themselves in order to get jobs, promotions, and do good works for their company. Here’s a first step: How to start a blog.

2. Information processing.

Remember the term “information overload”? That went out of fashion when hipsters made productivity blogs one of the most popular genre of blogs, and time management books hit the New York Times bestseller list. Today you are in a knowledge market, where knowledge workers trade on their ability to synthesize information faster and in more collaborative ways – or faster and in ways that are so innovative that their ideas stand out above the rest. Information processing requires a clear understanding of one’s priorities, and an insatiable curiosity. Starting point: Time management tips for multitaskers

3. Bridge building.

People who change jobs frequently build a wider set of skills and a wider network – both of which make them more employable. Job hopping enables you to create a series of bridges as you move between companies. The workplace no longer provides secure jobs, but you can provide security for yourself by creating a dynamic career where you move from job to job.  You can develop contacts and build relationships outside of a job, for sure, but if people don’t get the chance to work with you, then they can’t endorse your ability to work. Likewise, if you work in a company where people tend to job hop, you can still build this wide network providing you remain in touch with them after they move on.The best way to build a wide network is to actually work with a wide range of people.

Your resume, if you are doing this right, should reflect a significant, positive impact wherever you work, and you should leave in your wake a swarm of happy managers and co-workers who felt lucky to be on projects with you. That’s how strong the performance of a good job hopper is. Subset to this skill: How to quit a job.

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In general, it’s not about how old you are but how open you are to new ways of communicating. Aim to be open, widely networked, and adaptable to new ways of thinking. And in that vein, you should ask yourself routinely, what generation am I?

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Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups, most recently Brazen Careerist, a professional social network for young people. Previously she worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Mattel and Hyundai. Her blog about career advice, blog.penelopetrunk.com, receives half a million visits a month and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. She frequently appears as a workplace commentator on CNN, 20/20 and FOX News. She’s also the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a bestselling career advice book for Generation Y.

 

Atlas Mugged: The 12 Sleazy Reasons CEOs Really Like Ayn Rand

Jim Edwards

Here is an excerpt from a lively article written by Jim Edwards for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network (February 14, 2011). To read the complete article, check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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The new movie trailer for Atlas Shrugged is out and Ayn Rand fans — who over-index within the ranks of management — will be drooling over it. Yes, it looks like the film will be word-for-word faithful to Rand’s book. Yes, it will be long — the movie is apparently being released in three parts.

And yes, Dagny Taggart (played by Taylor Schilling, at left) looks really hot as she runs a railroad against the odds in a series of tight-fitting dresses.

Taylor Schilling

To see the film’s trailer, please click here.

There are plenty of honchos in the advertising business who are Ayn Rand fans, of course. Mattel svp/worldwide entertainment and business development Steve Ross and former Publicis & Hal Riney president Kirk Souder are two of them. Last year, 20 ad agencies in Belgium went on a “pitch strike,” the kind of Randian withdrawal of talent that forms the basis of Atlas Shrugged.

They say they are drawn to Rand’s central ethos, which favors laissez faire capitalism, limited government, and the notion that selfishly pursuing wealth is, ultimately, a noble act because of the wealth it generates for others. But if you’ve ever read either of Rand’s two big novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, you’ll know that there are some rather less honorable reasons why CEOs love Rand. Her books may play up libertarian zeal, but they also supply philosophical cover for some of the sleazier sides of business life:

[Here are seven of Edwards' 12 “sleezy” reasons. To read the complete article, please click here.]

1. There’s nothing wrong with forgetting your wedding anniversary. At the beginning of Atlas, steel magnate Hank Rearden is asked by his wife to attend a party in three months’ time. He’s really busy and important — so he tries to wriggle out of it, until Lillian reminds him that it’s their 10th wedding anniversary. When you run your own company, spouses come second.

2. Families are filled with mooches. One of the problems with being the most successful member of your family — as Rearden is — is that brothers and mothers and others keep asking you for donations to their various charities. Leeches, all.

3. Inheriting a railroad is just a normal part of American life. The central conceit of Atlas is that Dagny Taggart gets to run the Taggart Transcontinental railroad because she’s an amazing talent. It’s nothing to do with the fact that her father died and willed the company to her and her siblings. For Randians, hard work gets you to the top, not nepotism, no matter how much nepotism appears to be on display.

4. Action = meetings. Although Atlas features both a train crash and a plane crash, most of the “action” consists of a seemingly endless series of meetings about the future of the Taggart company. Meetings with suppliers. Meetings with government bureaucrats. Meetings with competitors. If, like most CEOs, your entire productive worth is measured by what you get out of meetings, then this is drama indeed.

5. Your childhood friends are some of the richest people in the world. Dagny Taggart’s childhood crush and adulthood old flame is Francisco D’Anconia, heir to the d’Anconia copper fortune. Aren’t your neighbors just like that? Just because you were born on third base doesn’t mean you didn’t hit a triple!

6. Sex with your wife is undignified so it’s OK to cheat on her. Although Lillian Rearden is apparently beautiful, demure, polite, submissive and loves Hank very much, he grew bored of her almost as soon as they were married and now

Ayn Rand

can’t stand to be touched by her. Marriage is “undignified,” a “degradation,” and “torture,” Rand writes, and distracts men from business. But Rearden “never entered a whorehouse,” Rand writes, as if he should receive a medal for it. That’s why Dagny and Hank go at it like rabbits in Atlas, and why this is presented as a great love and not a tawdry affair.

7. A magic pirate will help you avoid paying taxes. In Atlas, America is haunted by the pirate Ragnar Danneskjold, who steals from freight ships. Later in the book, Danneskjold presents Rearden with a gold bar representing all the taxes the government has “stolen” from him over the years. Interestingly, real life CEOs often employ a series of offshore devices to avoid taxes both at the corporate and personal level.

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But perhaps the oddest thing about Atlas, the movie and the book, is the business Dagny and Hank are in: Railroads and bridges — the provision of public transport and public infrastructure. If only today’s libertarians within the C-suite were as enthusiastic about those activities as Rand was, it might be easier to take them a little more seriously.

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Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University’s business and journalism schools.

Robert A. Eckert (Chairman and CEO, Mattel) in “The Corner Office”

Robert A. Eckert

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview Robert A. Eckert, the chairman and C.E.O. of Mattel, who observes, “I’m looking for fit, personality, values” when describing how he conducts job interviews. He adds: “I don’t really care how many places you worked at or what grades you got.”

To read the complete interview and Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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Bryant: Tell me about some early influences for you. What about your parents?

Eckert: My father was a single-practitioner dentist in suburban Chicago, and a World War II veteran. My mother started out working for him, and then she looked after the kids full-time.

Bryant: How did they influence the way you lead today?

Eckert: My parents were both very positive people, and never complained about anything. My father died a couple years ago at age 91. When we knew the end was near, I’d go see him all the time. And he’d want to know: “Bobby, how’s it going? Enough about me. Tell me about you.” He was interested in other people. And my wife has always said about him and me that we are “other directed.” Being other directed has always worked for me.

Bryant: What were some other early lessons?

Eckert: Kraft Foods was my first company out of school. I was a 21-year-old trained M.B.A. type, and I’m going to work for this fellow who’s in his 50s and worked his way up the ladder a lot differently than I was going to work my way up the ladder. And I showed him a lot of respect. I never walked in with an attitude of, “I’m an M.B.A., I’m Bob, let me tell you what to do.” And he taught me so much about the company. He’d worked there for decades, and he was open and willing to share a lot with me, and I would take that in.

I also met the old-timers for breakfast every morning in the cafeteria. I’d listen to their stories and engage with them, and they allowed me to be a part of their little club. I learned a lot about the company and how it worked and how they worked.

Bryant: What can you tell me about your approach to leadership now?

Eckert: Trust is an important thing. The way we run the company is, I have a lot of confidence in you, I have a lot of trust in you, we’re transparent — we share where we are and where we’re going and what’s going on. And that openness has always worked well for me. I come with a positive attitude that you come to work and you want to do the best job you can. That’s why you’re here. You could work some other place, you could do some other thing, but you work here. I want to help you succeed.

I’ve worked for one or two people in my career or seen one or two where it’s the opposite. They think you’re here to mess up, and it’s their job to prevent you from messing up. That’s not very motivating to good people.

Bryant: What kind of feedback have you received over the years about the way you manage?

Eckert: I’m not a quick trigger. If my bias is, if you’re here to do a good job and you’re a good person, then I’m here to help you. I spend an awful lot of energy, if you’re underperforming, trying to help you figure out how to perform better, when others might more quickly say we’ve got to move on. And being slow with the trigger hasn’t been productive for me. I recognize it. It’s still a flaw. Sometimes people really do turn it around and perform better, but it doesn’t always work out that way. And with the benefit of hindsight after letting someone go, you say, I should have done that last year.

Bryant: Let’s talk about hiring. If you were interviewing me, how would that conversation go?

Eckert: There are two things I look for. First, I’ll find out from you, if you’ve reached a certain level in business, whether you and I have a common acquaintance. It may take me a while to find out who it is, but I’m going to know a couple of people who you know. So before you’re hired, I’m going to call those people, and I’m going to hear them talk to me about you. That works well for me.

The second thing I do is look for values. I’ll take you back to when I was hired at Kraft in 1977. I met with Keith Ridgway, who was the C.E.O., and we’re having a chat. We’re chatting about how he was a World War II pilot, and that my father was in World War II, too, and we’re chatting about things that I found terribly irrelevant. I wasn’t convinced he had read my résumé. I worked hard and got good grades, but he didn’t seem that interested in that. I walked out of that interview and I didn’t feel good about it. It was just weird.

Then fast-forward 15 years, the kids are sitting on the couch, and I’m asking them about their families, and how they grew up, and who’s important in their life and how did they decide to do this and that. I’m looking for fit, personality, values. Is this the kind of person we want around here? Will they work well? And I don’t really care how many places you worked at or what grades you got or who your favorite teacher was or what your favorite class was. It’s about what kind of people they are.

Bryant: And what are you listening for?

Eckert: Stories. You’re interviewing me now, but we could just as soon be having a job interview. You’re going to walk away from our session right now with a perspective about me. And it’s not focused on my career accomplishments, like what I did in 1987 when I was the vice president of marketing in the grocery division. It’s a conversation about a person.

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Adam Bryant

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. To contact him, please click here.

Perfectionism Is a Disease. Here’s How to Beat It.

Penelope Trunk

Here is an article written by Penelope Trunk for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up.

It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.

We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so many people keep trying to reach this elusive goal and they drive themselves crazy in the process. So cut it out. Accept that it’s okay to do a mediocre job on a certain percentage of your work. If you need convincing, consider this: Perfectionism is a risk factor for depression. No kidding. Sydney Blatt, psychologist at Yale University, finds that perfectionists are more likely to kill themselves
than regular, mediocre-performing people.

Here are three steps to take to avoid the perfectionism trap:

1. Allow yourself to be wrong in front of others.

Try having an opinion that is wrong. Tell a story that is stupid. Wear clothes that don’t match. Turn in a project that you can’t fully explain. People will not think you’re stupid. People will think you spent your time and energy doing something else — something that meant more to you.

We all have many competing demands. We do not presume to know other people’s demands. But we are all sure of one thing: Our work is often not the most important thing on our plate.

Also, you’ll notice that people are not particularly vested in you being right. They don’t care if you’re right or wrong in what you do or say. They just want you to get stuff done well enough that they can do what they need to do. And this is usually a far cry from perfection.

The other huge problem with perfectionism is that people stop learning when they’re constantly afraid of being wrong. We learn by making mistakes. The only way we understand ourselves is to test our limits. If we don’t want anyone to know we make mistakes, which is how perfectionists tend to behave, we are actually hiding our true selves.

2. Being hard working is not the same as being a perfectionist.

You can be a hard-working person and cut corners. In fact, it’s often a requirement: Smart people cut corners. The art of being a star performer is knowing which corners to cut.

Focus on your goals, and be honest with yourself about whether your goals require perfectionism along the way. A lot of times perfectionism is a way to avoid focusing on goals. Real goals, after all, almost always require a little bit of luck and assistance along the way — factors the perfectionists tend to dismiss.

3. Spend your energy making yourself likable.

Tiziana Casciaro reports in the Harvard Business Review that people are not all that interested in you being super-good at your job. They care if they like you.

And, Casciaro found that if someone does not like you, he or she will decide you’re incompetent whether you are or not. Sad, yes, but the converse is true as well. You can do a poor job and no one will notice if they like you. And, newsflash: In many instances, this is good for business — teams do better work when everyone on the team likes everyone else. So don’t worry about doing a perfect job. Do a decent job, but leave yourself enough time to manage your relationships at work. Take lunch. Participate in office politics, because office politics is really about being nice
— which, frankly, is more healthy and certainly more achievable than being perfect.

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I highly recommend Tal Ben-Shahar‘s book, The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life, in which he explains that many people fail to lead a full and fulfilling life because they do not allow themselves “to experience the full range of human emotions” and thus limit their capacity for happiness. “They need to give themselves the permission to be human…to ground [their] dreams in reality and appreciate [their] accomplishments.” Throughout the book, Ben-Shahar refers to negative perfectionism simply as perfectionism and to positive perfectionism as optimalism. “The key difference between the Perfectionist an the Optimalist is that the former essentially rejects reality while the latter accepts it…as a natural part of life and as an experience that is inextricably linked to success.”

Penelope Trunk is the founder of three startups, most recently Brazen Careerist, a professional social network for young people. Previously she worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Mattel and Hyundai. Her blog about career advice, blog.penelopetrunk.com, receives half a million visits a month and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. She frequently appears as a workplace commentator on CNN, 20/20 and FOX News. She’s also the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a bestselling career advice book for Generation Y.

The Other Side of Innovation: A book review by Bob Morris

The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge
Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
Harvard Business Press (2010)

As I began to read this book, I was reminded of Thomas Edison’s observation, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Also of a statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: “I don’t care a fig about simplicity on this side of complexity but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Now consider what Govindarajan and Trimble observe in their Introduction: “There is a Rainier-like summit in the innovation journey. It is the moment a company says yes! That’s a great idea! Let’s take it to the market! Let’s make it happen!…Getting to the summit can seem like the fulfillment of a dream, but it is not enough. After the summit comes the other side of innovation – the challenges beyond the idea. Execution. Like Rainier, it is the other side of the adventure that is actually more difficult. It is the other side that holds hidden dangers. But because the summit itself has such strong appeal, the other side is usually an afterthought. It is humdrum. It is behind the scenes. It is dirty work.”

The “journey” metaphor is appropriate because Govindarajan and Trimble embarked (like Odysseus) on a ten-year journey during which they completed research on a number of well-known and well-respected companies (e.g. Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, The New York Times, and Unilever) and interviewed dozens of senior-level executives at dozens of other companies that include Aetna, Allstate, Ben & Jerry’s, BMW, Citigroup, GE, Harley-Davidson, Mattel, Procter & Gamble, Sony, and Timberland. What they learned about what works, what doesn’t, and why during efforts to reach “the other side of innovation” is shared in abundance in this book.

The challenge for leaders of innovation initiatives (whatever the scope and nature of those initiatives may be) must help their organization to achieve and then sustain an appropriate balance between “foundational” operations that are on-going and repeatable, and, experimental operations that non-routine and often disruptive. To help prepare leaders to meet this challenge, Govindarajan and Trimble explain how to

• Build a dedicated team
• Define a partnership of the team with the “Performance Engine”
• Obtain support from senior-level executives
• Anticipate and prepare for resistance and conflict
• Achieve buy-in
• Devise and conduct a “disciplined” experiment
• o Focus on learning when evaluating results
• Achieve transparency through effective communication
• Create a framework for accountability

These are worthy objectives, to be sure, but by no means easy to achieve. It is important to keep in mind that all organizations are works in progress and the same is true of those who are involved with them. Credit Govindarajan and Trimble with providing a wealth of valuable information, accompanied by rock-solid advice that isanchored in real-world situations. It is not necessary but, in my opinion, highly desirable to read their earlier book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution, first before reading this one.