Author Archives: scbrant

An Olympic Observation

I read and enjoy Seth Godin’s blog nearly every day and have read a few of his books, I think he’s smart and prolific. This week, he posted about the Olympics and surprised me a little. Not with the fact that it may be time for the model to change, I could support that. It’s his opening phrase that threw me a little “I confess that I don’t watch the Olympics…” I guess he’s busier or cooler than me because my family has watched every night of prime time coverage and DVR’d some things as well. Heck, I even ordered an upgraded cable package so we could see more Olympics coverage on the “Networks of NBC.”

As we look ahead to the closing ceremonies, here are five observations and their corresponding hashtags from two weeks of winter Olympics coverage:

  • I viewed the results online before watching nearly every event covered in prime time. Does that make we weird? It was hard not to pay attention to all the headlines during the day and wait for prime time TV. I didn’t share what I knew with others so as to ruin their experience like my son did one night. My wife and daughter were settled in on the couch with popcorn with hope to see the first women’s bobsledding medal for the U.S. in like a hundred years. In seeing this when my son came around the corner, he looked up at the TV and said, “oh cool, they get silver.” #Spoiled
  • It’s hard to have a daughter who is interested in sports. The Olympics are one of the only times you can watch girls participate in sports at a high level. My son also likes sports and because of cable television, there is literally always a game on. Often my daughter hears sports on television and comes around the corner only to be disappointed to see Sports Center or the PGA, NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, etc. Not during these two weeks, there are girls on TV participating and winning medals! You can debate whether luge or ice dancing or sitting in the back of a bobsled is a sport but because of them, girls are on TV and the front page of the newspaper and that doesn’t happen every day. #Roar
  • The pressure on athletes at an event that only happens every four years is incredible. It’s not just the fact that years of preparation, perhaps your life’s dream, comes down to a hundredth of a second or less. It’s also quotes from people who didn’t succeed that I heard in almost every sport, “You know it’s (fill in the sport), and anything can happen.” Some competitors like our our ice dancers Davis and White, practiced together for 17 years and finally won gold. Skaters and snowboarders fell and skiers and sliders lost by a hundredth of a second. But, some athletes proved that it wasn’t about medaling but more about just being there. One great example of the spirit of some of these athletes is a skier named Heidi Kloser, who fell in a qualifying run, asked her parents if she was still an Olympian, and limped her way through the opening ceremony. It almost makes me cry just writing about it. #Winner.
  • Sports with judges, not clocks or scoreboards, are really hard to watch. In several events, points are awarded based on your ability to complete tricks or “required elements” and controversy nearly always ensues. Figure skating is the toughest to watch. The judges are anonymous and the competitors are all amazing but as someone who knows nothing about the sport, it seems crazy to me. Though I’m not sure that it’s worth conspiracy theories about countries trading points with each other but who knows right?  Either way, the Russians won a team gold and a ladies figure skating gold and the U.S. won ice dancing and those who didn’t win complained about the scoring system. I was even more struck by the post-race “adjustments” to times in long track skating that initially showed one competitor winning gold but then another. #Fishy
  • What does a silver medal mean? Is it second place or is it an amazing achievement? I’d like to close with two examples in women’s sports that I will certainly highlight for my daughter. The U.S. women’s hockey team had a great tournament and was beating their arch-rival from Canada for the gold but then lost in overtime. Sure, they were disappointed to lose the game but was it this bad? On the other side of the medal, a little known skeleton racer from Utah named Noelle Pikus-Pace battled incredible adversity after finishing fourth in Vancouver to even make it to Sochi where she accomplished her Olympic dream by winning a silver medal and wearing it so proudly. #Class

Thank god for school projects

I know, a lot of parents actually dread it when their kids come home with big projects from school. Just like the class from Christmas Story groans when their teacher says those dreaded words, “I want you to write a theme.” But, I just survived two big class projects, History Day in middle school and the Science Fair in elementary school. I supposed I could fault the school district for assigning both of these projects at the same time or say what most parents said when I saw them at the school after all the projects were done, “thank god it’s over.” That would be a little too easy though, right? Say what you want about American public education. My daughter’s 5th grade teacher, who is in his first year, says that today’s 5th graders are covering the content that he learned in 7th grade. I’d probably stretch that out a few more years because I’m older than he is. Do you believe the comparisons to other industrialized nations that say we’re falling behind? Maybe that’s because we over-emphasize extra-curricular activities? The high school my kids will attend actually sponsors 30 sports and probably twice as many activities. They don’t have a high school alpine ski team or jazz band in Indonesia for example but they are the happiest school kids in the world. Check out this study published in the December issue of the Atlantic which draws a reverse correlation between happiness in school and how are good you are at math. Did you see the best country in the world at math – Korea – also the most unhappy. The U.S. was much closer to Korea on the list than Indonesia. I’m sure we still need more focus on STEM – science technology engineering and math – so that would make me favor the science fair over history day.

 

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But I’m here to advocate for them both. Kids need to learn how to learn, that’s why projects like these are important. My son studied World War II but he researched an often forgotten aspect of it – the fact that the U.S. put Japanese Americans in internment camps because we were afraid of them after their country bombed Pearl Harbor. He learned that a young man named Fred Korematsu actually fought the U.S. government and lost. He also learned how to work with two other kids on this project. They actually let other kids do their projects by themselves, which I think should be penalized. They also let some kids’ parents do their projects for them but whatever. The bottom line is that my son learned something and taught me something. And, when it was over, he was happy.

 

 

 

ImageMy daughter learned the scientific process. She wrote a hypothesis, which she proved wrong. She ran an experiment and documented the results and told her story to lots of other kids and parents in a packed elementary school gym. She learned something and taught me something. And, when it was over, she was happy.

 

So, thank god for school projects and for kids learning. Not learning how to take tests or score better against other countries. Learning how to learn and then being happy when they are done. 

 

 

A Weekend Of Wine

Yes, I’ve taken a year off. I’m not getting paid for this you know but I would love it if I did. I had a moment this week when some friends asked me for recommendations from our trip to Napa Valley and I thought to myself, I should just write a blog.

I can’t imagine a better grown-up trip than one to wine country. I mean seriously. The whole trip was about wine and food and I got to drive a rented Kia. We started our adventure by flying into San Francisco, which I do not recommend. I know, I’m from Minnesota and people don’t think we have cars here but the traffic in San Francisco is ridiculous. We got a cheap flight and wanted to drive over the Golden Gate but it was a mistake. Getting out of town on a Friday was a mess and getting back in on a Tuesday was even worse. Fly into Sacramento, which is almost equidistant from wine country and has no traffic.

Besides San Francisco, we made one other mistake on this trip and that was our hotel. There are tons of cool bed & breakfasts and boutique hotels in Yountville but we planned our trip too late and ended up at the River Terrace Inn in Napa. Besides Napa being the most boring town in the valley, this was a not a great hotel either. The room was fine and it was clean enough but they made two big mistakes while we were there. First, I ordered a special wine and cheese platter to welcome us, which would have been so great after our terrible drive from San Francisco – if it would have actually gotten delivered! They brought it to the wrong room. Now, they did reverse the charges but come on. Second, their concierge acted like it was her first time to Napa as well. I asked for a map of the valley to which she responded, “Sorry, I don’t have any maps. I used to but we gave them all away.” I asked, “Isn’t there a map in that ‘Guide to Napa Valley’ magazine on the table behind you?” To which she replied, “Oh, there might be.” Yikes. I tested her with a couple of other questions while were there and she failed on all of them so I stopped asking.

Actually, the highlight of our trip was our guide and driver Lonnie Smith of www.lonnieswinetours.com I found him on Trip Advisor, where he has perfect reviews (including one from me) and he not only set up a day trip for us and drove our rental car but he also gave us recommendations about wineries and restaurants to visit on two other days. He’s the best.

You can buy California wine at any MGM Liquor warehouse but I am a farm kid and I wanted to see how people grew grapes and made them into wine! We did start with one of the big five wineries, Robert Mondavi. Who we learned was the godfather of Napa Valley wineries after prohibition and grew up in Minnesota! It has a great family story. He apparently had a huge fight with his brother over wine because he wanted to make it cheap and Robert wanted to make the best. He actually did when his cabernet beat the French early on and put California wine on the map. It gets even better; he lost his winery to a controversial takeover by the largest wine producer in the world. They ship like 300,000 cases and have several labels and a nice tour that’s worth seeing. We also went to two other huge wineries; The “Castello di Amorosa” built by multimillionaire wine maker Dario Sattui because he was “mad at his money.” We also visited Mumm Napa, where they make sparkling wine, which is kind of fun and different. There are plenty of tourist wineries that are very big like Sterling, Beringer and Sutter Home, who makes 18 million cases of white zinfandel a year, but we chose to focus on the smaller wineries that don’t have national distribution – you can only get wine from them directly. There are about 600 wineries in Napa Valley so you need some good advice, thanks to Lonnie again, and most of the smaller one’s are by appointment only. Two stood out for us and we joined their clubs. The Terraces in St. Helena, www.terraceswine.com, is run by a former IBMer, and they make about 2,500 cases a year. We got a fantastic tour of their winery and felt like family when we left. Similarly, Reverie in Calistoga, www.reveriewine.com, is an “estate” winery, which means they grow and bottle wine on site, also produces about 2,500 cases a year and had a great tour including a naturally occurring “circle” of redwoods where we drank incredible wine. Behrens Family in St. Helena, www.behrensfamilywinery.com, is small as well and they don’t grow grapes but they source them instead so they don’t have a tour but they have great wine and an incredible view. You do the tasting in an airstream trailer with your friend Robin. Right down the road from Behrens, up on the mountain, is Pride Mountain, www.pridewines.com. They are a medium size winery who makes about 18,000 cases a year and are a little more pretentious but still worth the drive. They have a great tour of their cave and a beautiful setting. Their Viognier has been served at the White House and is incredible.

I know this isn’t a travel blog so I’ll stop now but I’ll end with this. Being a parent is great and family vacations to the Black Hills and Disneyworld are swell but, taking a long weekend to do something like eat slow meals and drink wine just for fun is what life is all about. After all, Jesus did turn water into wine right?

What does it mean to be social?

I guess Facebook is kind of important with over 1 billion users. But, did you see their first ad campaign? Are they overdoing it a little comparing themselves to a chair? Here’s a great cartoon about it from my favorite marketing cartoonist, Tom Fishburne.

I still know a lot of people who are not on the Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter and their lives go on. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like chairs. I also know a lot of people who are on Facebook who don’t seem like they are accomplishing much of anything. But I guess they are trying to redefine being social and I’m all for progress.

Then there’s enterprise social, or using private social tools inside the firewall. There are a lot of players in that market too but I’ve worked with NewsGator, who is doing a great job of making big companies more social. Sure, it’s easy if you have a great corporate headquarters where everyone sits and gets free snacks. But, what about everyone outside of corporate? Don’t you want your corporate marketing people and your remote sales people to be better connected? What about your global supply chain? How about that consumer insights person in Asia that just ran a test on a new product that you may never see? If you’d like to learn more about building a successful social workplace, check out NewsGator’s latest white paper

What about people who are actually social? In our new neighborhood, where we’re all new and trying to build a community? We do things like get together – you know, in person – every Thursday night. And last night, we were sitting in our living room minding our own business just after it got dark and our doorbell rang. The guard dog sprung up from the floor and ran to the door and I was expecting a desperate politician or a gutter salesman. I was pleasantly surprised to look down and see a little pumpkin container filled with candy and a note. The note encouraged us to make a copy and share a “boo” with two other neighbors. What a nice change from e-mail chain letters right? We’re doing it tonight, making copies, filling containers with candy and ringing doorbells. What about you? Are you social?

Katy Perry’s Parents

So, we all know Katy Perry right? She’s kind of a big deal. She did something in popular music that no one else has ever done – her first five hits from one album all went to number one. We just watched her new documentary, “Katy Perry – Part of Me” with our daughter this week. I loved it and am not ashamed that I laughed and cried and most importantly danced with my daughter and golden doodle. I read some other reviews of the film; professional movie critic Dana Stevens for Slate magazine wrote one of the crabbiest. I’m not sure what movie she saw. I guess you come to expect that professional critics are going to hate some of the stuff that you like right? Rotten tomatoes actually was 77% positive or “certified fresh” on the tomato meter, here’s a link to their page: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/katy_perry_part_of_me/ So, there you go, fair and balanced. I thought it was a fun movie about a weird girl with a dream and it showed the ups and downs of making it in the music business but sacrificing your personal life. Katy Perry’s music has drawn criticism for being obscene but I’ve got to say, she’s an adult and is writing songs about being an adult. It’s a parents’ job to manage the content that their kids consume, not the artist. Besides, Katy has a decent public reputation – no trouble with the law like many of her peers – so it’s not like she made this movie to spin her public image.

I’m not writing today to encourage you to buy or rent her new movie or download any of her songs, I’d like to comment about Katy Perry’s parents instead, Keith and Mary Hudson. You may have read about Katy’s upbringing in an evangelical Christian home with minister parents. If you watch the movie, you will get a taste of it as well. They were a little nuts – overprotective, overbearing, and sure that they were doing God’s work. Here’s the interesting part. Even with where her parents stand, they love their daughter. They thought that songs like “I kissed a girl and I liked it” and “Friday Night” were going to ruin their ministry and be a negative force on the world but guess what; they still love their daughter. Look at some other young celebrity’s parents with names like Lohan, Cyrus, Jackson and try to find love and support. The Hudson’s are parents that look at their daughter and openly disagree but they haven’t disowned her, they come to concerts. That surprised me and encouraged me to be a better parent. Our kids all have dreams right? Some of those dreams are long shots like playing in the NFL or becoming a pop star but that’s what dreams are, sometimes they are silly and improbable. How many of us had dreams like that and got no encouragement and support? Think what you will about Katy Perry and her success but here’s what I got out of it – there was a little girl that loved music who had parents that weren’t so sure but they loved her and her dreams came true.

How do you hire people?

There are lots of tools out there to help you hire people. But, let me ask you this – have we gotten better at hiring because of application management systems, standardized corporate assessment practices, and industrial psychologists? What about new social tools like Klout? Here’s an interesting article on how Klout recommends you consult their scoring system before making any hires and one man’s view of that:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/klout-would-like-potential-employers-to-consider-your-score-before-hiring-you-and-thats-stupid/ 

I have to admit, I signed up for Klout and got all wound up about it and realized my score was 10 on a scale that goes to 100. That’s not great but I’m going to play the game and see if my score improves. It may even get better with this blog post and your reaction to it.

I have some personal experience with industrial psychologists, don’t we all? A friend of mine recently spent a whole day being tortured by pre-work, online assessments, a series of personality and intellectual tests under time duress and then role plays that included responding to an e-mail box full of e-mails and acting out a live scenario. Really? I think I’d rather just pay for therapy so I’d get something out of it.

This reminds me of one of my favorite movies – Tommy Boy. Do you remember the scene where Tommy (Chris Farley) was trying to make a sale using an old joke of his dad’s? His prospect said that he’d like to get a look at the new brake pad line before making a decision about buying break pads. Tommy was trying to overcome this obstacle with “when you’re trying to buy a good steak, do you stick your head up a bull’s ass or would you rather just take the butcher’s word for it?” but instead I think he suggested that his prospect stick his head up a butcher’s ass and there wasn’t any steak involved. I laughed until I cried. Eventually, he found his own style and was successful at influencing people using that style, not trying to be someone else.

I was in a meeting recently where two different senior people said that their interviewing style drives their HR people crazy but they focus on “intellectual curiosity” and have different ways of getting there. Their focus is on trying to get to know the person and how they think, not asking a bunch of questions about problem solving ability and conflict management. My favorite interviewing strategy is from Zappos.com. They are quite seriously looking for weirdness and trying to harness creativity to deliver great customer service.  They have some very different interview questions like “What’s your theme song? When you enter a room, what song should be playing?” Mine is probably “Small Town” by John Mellencamp. Why don’t we trust people to hire people anymore? Isn’t that how it used to be done when people spent an entire career at one company? I’d hire Chris Farley if he were still around.

Alumni Power

As I do a lot of networking, it’s amazing to be reminded of the power of alumni connections. It’s also fall and that means college football which fills huge stadiums all over the country with people dressed in matching sweatshirts, all cheering against their rivals. It seems that as the world gets busier and more fragmented, we appreciate connections to the past even more. Many people from my alma mater, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, have “ring” stories. You see, the college has a very distinctive class ring and a very high percentage of grads actually order the ring and wear it. I’m not going to lie, I dug mine out and dusted it off recently so I could see if it would bring me good luck or make some connections. There are legendary stories of alums all over the world running into and getting help from each other. I didn’t have my life saved in the ER by an alum or anything but I know an ER doc so it could happen. I’ve had a couple of good examples in the area of networking which started with me reaching out to alums and I heard back from them right away and had great conversations and they were very helpful. I made an assumption that the reason people help each other in that situation is that they are paying it back – someone probably helped them the same way. But who knows, maybe there is a real connection that people feel. I heard from a friend recently that it’s that way with sorority sisters as well. My friend’s daughter is at a big university and she is pledging or rushing, not sure what they call it, for a big sorority on campus. I can’t think about that without thinking about Animal House and wondering if they are going to have a toga party and wind up on double secret probation. But, similarly, my friend sought out people she knew to find a connection to that particular sorority and she did. A couple of e-mails later, this complete stranger was writing a letter of recommendation for a freshman that she never met just because she was a friend of a friend. There are varying statistics out there about the job search and what percentage of people get a job because of a connection – the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which seems pretty reputable, says that 70% of all jobs are found through networking. In my search online, the first post I found was for Yale, they actually have the Yale Career Network, a job board, and their own web site called STAY at www.yale.edu/stay/ for networking. So, why does anyone submit their resume to a company online anyway? That whole process seems like a huge waste of time right? I think LinkedIn has done a brilliant thing by allowing you to search alumni and sort by the year they graduated and what industry they work in and where they live. That’s an incredible resource and should be leveraged to it’s fullest extent by colleges and universities as the great demographic shift makes the market even more competitive for incoming freshman. I guess Yale gets it, what about your college or university? So, put on your old alumni sweatshirt or ring or whatever and cheer for your team – and if someone on your team needs a little help, do what you can.

The acronyms are all wrong

There are millions of business acronyms. At my last company, someone went through all the trouble of actually developing an acronym dictionary for new sales people. That’s a pretty helpful idea isn’t it? We’ve all been in that meeting where things are moving fast and people are referencing acronyms that we don’t understand but we don’t want to interrupt and ask what we’re talking about because people will think we’re dumb. One of my favorite acronym conversations happened on Friends when Chandler’s boss said that the WENUS (weekly net usage) has not been good at all over the last few weeks and that’s going to create a bad ANUS (annual net usage). The acronyms were clear but unfortunate. I even have a good story from my past. My first job out of college was an Assistant Analyst, you had to be careful how you abbreviated that title, I was trying to shorten it once and came up with Ass. Anal. and realized I needed a new job.

Anyway, it seems that many of our system acronyms, although cute, actually allude to the systems themselves solving the wrong problems. Take the LMS or Learning Management System for one. A friend of mine posted a question on LinkedIn the other day about lessons learned from LMS projects. I enthusiastically commented that usability was overlooked for functionality. So, maybe it managed learning or reported on learning or connected learning data to employee data but what part of that is good for the learner? In my experience, very little. We actually had a group that went from two clicks to access learning on their old system to about six clicks in the new one. And don’t think that those six clicks were as fun as playing doodle jump either – they were confusing and you had to do things like “book a course” before you could “take a course” and then you had to “confirm participation” at the end in order to get credit. We also had to train people to use the system. Yikes. One time I did a series of usability sessions before launching an intranet site and when we asked about training, people emphatically said not to send them paper because they wouldn’t read it and not to invite them to training because they wouldn’t come. They were a little crabby but isn’t that how it should be? The new system should work better than before right? The LMS should help learners, the Content Management System should make content better and easier to organize, the Applicant Tracking System should help applicants. In my recent experience, all those acronyms are a lie. How about yours?

I love social studies

It’s my son’s first week of middle school. Yes, think Greg Heffley from the books/movies “diary of a wimpy kid.” Not that he’s wimpy per se but everyone is a little self conscious and freaked out by big transitions right? He has a longer bus ride, two locker combinations to remember, 6 different teachers, the trumpet to learn, he’s swamped. So, the boy comes home one day and he looks exhausted like I do after a day of corporate meetings and he says “I love middle school.” I was more than a little surprised but it was the next statement that almost floored me. The boy never expresses emotion and never loves two things at the same time. No, it’s not what you’re thinking, he doesn’t love a girl yet, I’m not ready for that. Instead he says, “and I love social studies because of my teacher.” Maybe it struck me extra hard because of the boy’s usual lack of emotion. Maybe it got to me because  loved social studies too or because it was the week of 9/11 and an important election year and I’m a little sensitive. It could also be the fact that social studies often gets forgotten in the middle of all often misguided and overblown talk of student achievement in the areas of math and reading. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled. It’s great to pay attention to social studies and as his teacher defined it, that includes current events, geography, politics, government, history and culture. After all, what good would mad skills in reading and math be if you don’t understand the world we live in. Later that same week, I attended an alumni breakfast for my alma mater. The new president was just rolling out the new five year strategic plan. Don’t fall asleep, stay with me. One part struck me after this experience with the boy. Let me sum up. One part of the plan focused on how much the world is changing in the areas of politics, technology and demographics and that it’s less important to collect credits in college and more important to build competence, creativity, and character. This week, I thank Mr. Larsen for doing just that with the boy.