Monthly Archives: March 2014

Musical Memories

We all have musical memories right? When that song comes on the radio and takes you back in time, you can feel those memories, smell them, maybe even taste them. That’s amazing isn’t it? That’s why music is so important.

Here are some of my musical memories:

  • George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning” takes me back to my dad’s Dodge truck, it was raining lightly, he was smoking and we were driving around looking at our crops
  • Chicago’s “You’re The Inspiration” takes me back to a gym at a school dance where I had my first kiss with a girl who was quite a bit taller than me
  • Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” takes me back to a time with my brother in his girlfriend’s Chevy Chevette driving way too fast on a gravel road where we grew up
  • Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” takes me back to my grandma’s basement at Christmas because my cousins got “Thriller” on cassette and we just sat there and listened to it over and over

Maybe you’re one of those lucky one’s who can actually make music. It’s interesting how many of us try, even Seth Godin says he played the clarinet for eight years but then corrects himself,

Actually, that’s not true. I took clarinet lessons for eight years when I was a kid, but I’m not sure I ever actually played it. Eventually, I heard a symphony orchestra member play a clarinet solo. It began with a sustained middle C, and I am 100% certain that never once did I play a note that sounded even close to the way his sounded.

I watch – and listen – to how much progress my son has made with the trumpet this year. It’s amazing. He played it for the first time about 20 months ago and that was painful, I’ll admit. The dog hid, we put him in a room with doors that we could shut, the neighbors called to ask if everything was ok. It was, and now it’s much better and it sounds like music. The whole band sounds like music. He’s not getting calls to join The Roots or anything but I can tell what he’s playing. Maybe he’ll be in the high school pep band, maybe he’ll get a scholarship to play the trumpet in college, maybe he’ll get paid to play the trumpet – who knows?

What I do know is that he’s learning a system and once you learn a system like math or music or another language, you can transfer that experience. For those of you who don’t think that technology is changing everything, even the way people learn, let me tell you about an app called SmartMusic, check it out at http://www.smartmusic.com/ This is a piece of software that listens to you play an instrument and then gives you instant feedback on the quality of the notes so that you can fix them. That’s a revolution. I wonder if it would have helped Seth? I wonder if these first memories of my son playing the trumpet will be one of those moments that I remember for my whole life or if it will be those first bad notes instead? What are your musical memories?

 

 

Advice From Spiderman’s Uncle

I was really hoping that Sheryl Sandberg would fade back into her day job at Facebook and that her book tour would finally end so I could quit hearing about “Lean In.” I realize that I cannot speak for women in the workplace but neither should Sandberg or someone like Reese Witherspoon, who is featured on leanin.org for overcoming her fear of public speaking so she could become the spokesperson for cosmetics giant Avon. Really? I’m not worried about the lack of opportunity or confidence for anyone – woman or man – with a Harvard B.A. and M.B.A. who has worked at World Bank, McKinsey, The Department of the Treasury, Google and Facebook. Other people seem to agree with me, including these two accomplished women: Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ campaign holds little for most women; or Sheryl Sandberg Lean’s into another controversy. 

Why “Lean in” anyway? I’m assuming they have a class at business school that teaches aggressive behavior. I’ve had bosses tell me to “lean in.” It was bad advice and it never worked. My impression is that the single biggest problem with business leaders – and our current crop of politicians – who have elite educations and make millions of dollars is not that they don’t lean in, it’s that they have lost touch with reality.  I suppose it’s kind of hard to keep it real when you reportedly cash in $90 million in Facebook stock right? In today’s corporate and political climate, it seems like compromise and collaboration should be valued and celebrated more than aggression. Do you think the government would have shut down last year if our political leaders were more collaborative? I’ve seen some interesting research from a corporation that was having problems with new leaders failing – both men and women. You know what the biggest problem was? They were too aggressive, they burned too many bridges, they failed to see people on their teams and in other departments as people and instead saw them as obstacles to profit and career advancement. 

Apparently Sandberg is really committed to being in the news because now she’s back with a few celebrities and the girls scouts trying to ban the word “bossy,” I thought she over did it before, but this may be an even worse idea and less helpful than leaning. Here’s a nice piece by a woman who is much smarter than me and has actually done research on this topic. Her name is Peggy Drexler, and is the author of “Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family” and “Raising Boys Without Men.” She is an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University. One of her quotes is worth repeating here in case you don’t read her entire opinion piece published on CNN: 

“Let’s not forget: There is evidence that girls and women aren’t in fact being overlooked, or discouraged into meekness. Girls are outperforming boys in schools. More women than men are graduating college and going on to earn as much, if not more, than their male partners. Fortune’s latest ranking of America’s 500 largest corporations includes more female CEOs than ever.”

I want to comment specifically on the fact that girls are outperforming boys in schools – that is certainly true in K-12 public education. I used to work in public education and I learned that the much maligned “No Child Left Behind” law was actually going to report scores by gender as well as every other grouping but that scores for boys were much lower than girls and “they” thought it would distract from the focus on raising test scores. In addition, the facts are there about the new gender imbalance in colleges and universities across America as well. The fact is that boys are being left behind or at least at the back of the class according to this piece in the NY Times.

Finally, to quote Spiderman’s uncle, “with great power, comes great responsibility.” So, I ask this simple question, if Sandberg really wanted to put her considerable wealth and influence to work, how could she? I have ideas. Even if she just wanted to help women, which I would be fine with, I can think of several more valuable and worthwhile ways than teaching them to lean or banning the word bossy. Here are two easy ones for someone like Sandberg, first, if you insist on being aggressive, how about helping young girls who have difficulty with bullying and their self image? Second, probably the easiest one for an executive at a technology company – what about getting more girls interested in technology and engineering careers? Those problems are real. They could be solved or at least affected by wealth and influence right? I think Uncle Ben would be proud of that.

Forget Law And Medicine, Try Software Engineering

I was reading yet another article about Yahoo and Marissa Meyer this week. Apparently she’s fixed the company’s biggest problem – talent. Read all about it here on QZ

I pulled a couple of insights from this article that I can’t help but comment on. First, the long tenured Head of HR at Yahoo was replaced by a former private equity exec. Then, they went on a buying spree, but not for market share or synergies, which drives many acquisitions, Yahoo bought 37 companies including Tumblr for over a billion dollars – for their talent. For other CEO’s who have “talent” as a goal, and they all should, this is an interesting strategy right? Their CFO was quoted as saying they lost a lot of talent and companies didn’t even want to be acquired by them so they had to pay a “Yahoo Premium.” Apparently their reputation has been repaired to a certain extent because the number of job applications more than doubled in the past year and they are the third highest paying company for engineers in the Silicon Valley. I’ll get to the pay issue again later but one other interesting place that Yahoo doesn’t score well is being a great place to work. Mayer’s ideas in that area haven’t been as big a hit. According to Glassdoor, which provides the salary info too, Yahoo did not make the 50 best places to work list like their other high tech peers.

Now let’s talk turkey. If you clicked the link to the QZ story above, I hope you noticed the table that lists average base salaries for engineers. If you didn’t, let me enlighten you. I remember when I was growing up, not that long ago by the way, the cool careers were law and medicine. They came with good pay and prestige – the two most popular TV shows were St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law. I wanted to be a lawyer for a very long time – until I bombed the LSAT and did some internships that is. I have friends who are doctors, that’s no picnic either, lots of headaches with insurance and patients. Here’s some advice for you parents out there – get your kids into software engineering or let them develop their own social network app.

At Juniper Networks, the highest paying company in the Silicon Valley, the average base salary for engineers was $159,900 last year. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all pay over $120,000 a year.

Oh, and by the way, there is no end in sight to the demand for software engineers. Everything runs on software and everything will for the foreseeable future. Remember, Yahoo bought 37 companies to get their engineers. Forget clarinet lessons and getting into the Ivy League, let your kids absorb and learn to love technology because we need them to take care of us so we can eventually retire.

Social Media Breakfast?

Have you ever been to a social media breakfast? It’s almost an oxymoron right? It could be on a list with bitter sweet, definitely maybe, jumbo shrimp or seriously funny. It sort of sounds like one of those virtual conferences where people synchronize their watches to tweet each other or all agree to post their status on Facebook from the comfort of their homes along with their coffee and toast.

Well, it’s a real thing where people gather together in an actual place and have breakfast and discuss social media. I’ve been involved with the Minnesota version of the breakfast, SMBMSP, and am part of a panel discussion on the use of social tools inside the firewall at SMBMSP #63 on Monday, March 3: http://smbmsp.org/2014/01/smbmsp-63-behind-the-firewall-social-networking-for-employee-collaboration/

There are SMB’s all over the country from Boston to Seattle. The event in Minnesota started in February 2008 and has been going strong ever since. I’m rather fond of their informal motto of “community + coffee with a side a bacon.” According to their web site,

“Since it’s founding, SMBMSP has been a regularly occurring event where like minded folks across the Twin Cities get together to share & learn about social media. Online membership has grown to over 2,300 professionals from all different disciplines, and many partnerships, jobs, career changes, and friendships have blossomed because of this group’s ability to connect people who enjoy sharing what they know!”

That kind of sounds like what social media was intended to do right? Bring people together? I know facebook started out being a way for college kids to rate their peers and find out if they were single. Now that almost everyone is out there, it seems like people share too much that is worth too little. Twitter was an ingenious innovation, limiting the length of communications! After working in corporate America for almost 20 years and creating lots of 70 page PowerPoint presentations and sitting through full day meetings, that’s a concept I really like. It’s much harder for people to understand though with the hash tags and the mini urls and the language all it’s own. LinkedIn is easy but it’s status as a meat market of sorts for talent and recruiters is a little hard to get past. Do you understand all the social tools like Pinterist, Snapchat, Instagram, Google+, Vine, and the hundreds of others? Some brands have like 9 icons on the bottom of their page so you can “connect” with them. I mean really? Are they bringing people together? Are they even doing a good job with their brand?

However you feel about social tools, find a local social media breakfast and connect with people, dress business casual, create a new tradition and be alone together.