HAVE A HOBBY YOU LOVE? WHY NOT MAKE IT YOUR CAREER

by: Adrienne Rodney

Unemployment is rough. Not knowing when the next job will come; stress over paying the bills; judgment from others – it’s an unfortunate circumstance too many of us face.

We are led to believe that searching for a job is your full-time job. Not having an office means having to work extra hard; it is not an excuse to focus on anything else. However, this way of thinking only works for some. Many people take their passions that were once hobbies and turn them into careers.

Journalist Patricia Crisafulli and business consultant Andrea Redmond view unemployment as the perfect time to reflect and refuel. In their book, Comebacks, they recommend those at a rough spot in their careers forego others’ ideas of success and relish in the new opportunities available. It is time to ask yourself, they say, what do you want Act II of your life to look like? Read more…

LINCHPIN: ARE YOU INDISPENSABLE?

Book Review: by Steve Amoia

Seth Godin is a best-selling author and well-known public speaker. His latest book, “Linchpin,” reinforces many of the concepts that we promote at NSoW: Being different, creativity, innovation, generosity, personal networking and passion for your work. Mr. Godin teaches us that indispensable people, who he calls linchpins or artists, think “along the edges of boxes, because that’s where things get done.”

Mr. Godin has written an entertaining, compelling and provocative work. He discussed how the workplace has evolved along with how our brain structure creates resistance for 9 to 5 success. I liked how the book was organized into short chapters with many interesting anecdotes from his own life and concise examples from famous and not-so famous people. The author’s perspectives challenge our notions about the structure of work and the factory/office notion that defines modern-day jobs. Mr. Godin stressed that we must change to survive in a world where competition is not only around the corner but across the globe.

Several Thought-Provoking Quotes

One feature that I enjoyed was the amount of wisdom the author shared in easy-to-digest quotes sprinkled throughout the book. Here were a few of my favorites:

“Linchpins make their own maps.”

“We have gone from two teams (management and labor) to a third team. The linchpins. These are people who own their means of production, who can make a difference, lead us, and connect us.”

“They (linchpins) bring humanity to work. They don’t leave it at home.”

“Linchpins don’t work in a vacuum. Your personality and attitude are more Read more…

HOW TO GAIN EXPERIENCE BY WORKING FOR FREE

And Stay Within the Law

by: Brooke Allen with Adrienne Rodney

This article is about working for free and a follow-on piece will discuss educating yourself at minimal cost.

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Q. Are there laws that prevent you from working for free?

A. NO. You are not breaking any law if you work without compensation. It is a free country, after all.

However, there are laws against an employer hiring you for less than the minimum wage. During hard times, even unpaid internships have become harder to land, not only because there is competition from unemployed people with loads of experience, but also because the government has been cracking down on some of these programs as abusive.

You can find loads of opportunity to work for free in exchange for contacts, experience, and references, but first you need to understand the law.

Internships

Why are unpaid internships so hard to get, with some people paying as much as $8,000 to a broker to land one? (See the New York Times article: Unpaid Work, but They Pay for Privilege.) The answer lies in the law.

An employer may legally take on trainees without paying them (often called “interns”), however the United States Department of Labor (DOL) has issued a six-part test to determine if someone qualifies for an exemption to minimum wage laws. Among other things, the training must not be Read more…

JOB HUNTING IS LIKE DATING

But is it a seduction or a search for true love?

Paul Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University, and he is credited with the first published use of the term “neuroeconomics” which combines psychology, economics, and neuroscience in the study of how people make decisions.

Paul’s lab studies the role of oxytocin in trust and virtuous behavior, and he discusses this in his popular blog at Psychology Today titled, “The Moral Molecule.” He is working on the forthcoming book of the same name.

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<<< Elissa is a documentary filmmaker

Abby is a writer >>>

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Elissa and Abby were two of the many people who responded to an advertisement for an executive assistant placed by Brooke Allen, founder of No Shortage of Work, and who, by day, heads a quantitative trading desk for a securities firm. Brooke has an unusual approach to hiring that involves, in his words, “due diligence and full disclosure.” He says, “I try to be completely honest in presenting myself, the work and the firm, with a concentration on the negatives because I don’t want any nasty surprises afterward.” He has discovered that when he is honest, most people can’t help but be honest in response. Although Brooke got to know both Elissa and Abby very well, and now counts them among his friends, he did not hire them – not because they wouldn’t be excellent workers, but because his job would not get them closer to their dreams.

Many people have compared job hunting to dating, and Brooke agrees. However, he likens most job hunting advice to lessons in seduction, where landing a job is like going to bed for the first time – as if it doesn’t matter what happens afterward. “I don’t want to hire anyone until we both get to see the other person’s authentic self, because who else do we plan on being after work begins in earnest?”

Paul Zak has made a career of studying how people establish long-term relationships and create bonds of trust, whether in the workplace, the marketplace or the home.

Paul joined Elissa, Abby, Brooke and Adrienne (the person Brooke did hire) to discuss how the process of matching people and jobs can be made more honest, effective and humane.

Listen to their conversation:

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Audio engineering was provided by Glen Allen.

HERE COMES EVERYBODY

And They’re Coming to Teach You Things You Need to Know
By: Victoria Goldenberg

Could No Shortage of Work (NSoW) have existed 20 years ago? The costs in time, money and labor to gather and direct members and run a publication might not have justified the modest and seemingly unrealistic ends of encouraging people to work for free. But now that the Internet is widely accessible, setting up the NSoW Web site was relatively inexpensive and easy. More important, communities commonly assemble around Web sites without anyone organizing them. The formerly difficult task of finding people and directing them to collaborate on meaningful work now happens organically, as those who share NSoW’s philosophy participate in the community on their own.

NSoW exemplifies the behavioral shift New York University professor Clay Shirky analyzes in his engaging book Here Comes Everybody (2008, Penguin Books). He describes a compelling variety of cases, from charming Livejournal and Meetup groups to flash mob protests against the government in Belarus, to illustrate how ordinary people are taking the reins and using new tools, such as cell phones and blogs, to organize themselves.

Mr. Shirky stresses that technology itself hasn’t changed the world, but the ways people adopted it have. He cites people who took photos of Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade and posted them to the photo-sharing site Flickr under one name, so people could view all the pictures in one place. Prior to 2005, parade attendees hadn’t pooled their photos, but they’ve changed their behavior because of access to a service that makes it simple. At the same time, the photo-takers organized the pictures themselves, without supervision from Flickr or the parade’s sponsors. By coming together, the photographers created a new, valuable resource for the public.

What’s most appealing about Here Comes Everybody is that it resists exaggerating the Internet’s democratizing power and takes a realistic, contextual approach. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that new media and behaviors do not render older institutions useless, (such as newspapers and commercial developers of operating systems), but they do decrease their relative influence. I especially liked the chapter “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” which compared the effects of mass amateurization of journalism to the popularizing of the printing press, noting how it ends professional publications’ monopoly on the news just as the printing press ended scribes’ monopoly on publishing.

I spoke with Mr. Shirky by phone to discuss how No Shortage of Work can challenge people’s assumptions and encourage working for free, rather than not working at all.

“Whenever the digital sharecropper hypothesis comes up—why are all these people working without pay?—the answer is: That’s the wrong question. The idea of working for free assumes there’s this normal case in which you only do something if you get paid, and then there’s this pathological case in which you do things because you like them. That is a legacy of neoclassical economics that assume we’re all self-interested and isolated, rational, maximizing actors. One of the observations I’ve made recently is that one reason these behaviors are so surprising to us is because our previous explanations for human behavior were so lousy. We all do things for free all the time and we don’t even experience them as being for free.

“I think the surprise has been that we’ve believed that intrinsic motivation—things we do because we like them—is inherently limited to the private sphere, basically hearth and home.

“The intrinsic motivation can take place in the public sphere now. We just needed a medium to make that possible. The value of people working, full stop, is basically the value of making yourself happy. It’s a value that’s indivisible to other things.”

He also discussed whether communal learning might decrease the higher education system’s relative importance in the job market:

“Given that the premium of college education offers on the job market is now being leveled out, we’re clearly going to see a rise of lower-cost attempts to deliver the value of a college education.

“We may be in one of those times where people say, ‘demanding a four-year college degree for the training I need for this job doesn’t make sense anymore’. There have certainly been enough observations about the economic disadvantage of four-year education that people are willing to consider it, but it’s not going to be a general social change. Probably some industry will shift away from demanding a four-year degree pro forma to figuring out when it matters and when just having the skills training is enough.”

Shirky described how he learned skills such as computer programming from online communities and how this valuable method of learning can be invisible:

“I think it’s telling about the social piece that we don’t have any middle word between ‘I went to an accredited institution and got formal learning’ and ‘I am self-taught’ to reflect the way a lot of people learn these things which is, ‘I joined a community that knows and cares about the subject I care about, and I learned it there.’

“The language doesn’t yet give us a way to reflect on being communally taught as opposed to institutionally taught.”

No Shortage of Work is a venue for communal education. By participating in it you can learn from the pros, outside of a formal setting, and work to build vital job skills—or just for the joy of it.

ACTORS’ ADVICE TO JOB SEEKERS

by: Adrienne Rodney

You think you got it bad? Try waiting in a mile-long line where a callback is like hitting the jackpot and landing a part is like going to heaven.

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First Lesson: CHANGE THE GAME

Darbi Worley, producer of the Everything Acting Podcast, knows that not every role is right for her. “I look at every project as a jigsaw puzzle missing one piece,” she says. “I am a puzzle piece and I only fit certain puzzles. If I jam myself into the wrong puzzle, both the puzzle and I are going to be really uncomfortable. Better to wait for the right puzzle. It’s out there.”

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Second lesson: RE-FRAME REJECTION

Lidia Ryan says most thespians go on twenty auditions before getting a job – sometimes more, sometimes less. There are too many circumstances to take it personally. “I may lose a part not because I’m not a good actor or they [casting agents] didn’t like me,” she says, “but perhaps because I look too much like one of the actors in the project that are already cast, or they decided to go with…the opposite sex. It’s never a rejection of you; they just decided to go with someone else. If you see it as a rejection of you, well then you will probably just give up.”

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Third Lesson: KEEP GOING

Brooke Lewis, a horror-film actor and producer, knows how hard you have to work to be noticed. “When you get in front of those people you better be prepared and you better be good,” she says. “However, how will these people ever know you exist if you don’t put the work in to get there? If you’re not putting yourself out there in the work sense, then you’re not moving. You’re not getting to the next place.”

Ms. Lewis put herself out there by staying busy. “I can’t tell you how many coffee and dinner meetings I used to take, with anyone and everyone in the industry who I could have some kind of beneficial relationship with – where I could help assist them and they could teach me. I mean, you really have to put the time in.”

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Fourth Lesson: TAKE ACTING LESSONS

Dan Nainan was a senior engineer at Intel touring around the world with cofounder Andy Grove as his “Demo God” doing technical demonstrations on stage. He says, “Although the technical part was easy, the public speaking was terrifying, so I took a comedy class to help with stage fright, and found I had an affinity for comedy.” Now he’s a professional comedian and actor who appeared in a “Get a Mac” commercial for Apple. Learn how actors and comedians deal with their fears and it will surely help your career, and perhaps even lead to a new one.

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Fifth Lesson: DO SOMETHING ELSE

Kai Soremekun, creator of the web series CHICK, says, “When you’re looking for a job and worried about your future you’re already afraid.” She recommends, “Stop watching the news.” and “Get a hobby or project.” She describes a friend who renovates houses, “Often she is so wrapped up in the latest house she’s working on that it almost becomes a hassle to drop what’s she’s doing to go to an audition. But the result is she’s less invested in the outcome of the audition and so books more acting gigs.”

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Kai brings up a very important point. Optimism, helplessness, and depression have been studied for decades by Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, and director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his book, Learned Optimism, he describes how worrying about things out of your control (e.g., the economy, most news stories, etc.) will make you feel helpless and depressed. However, being engaged in an activity like a hobby or side business will keep you positive, particularly if it is meaningful and benefits others. Watch Dr. Seligman explain how to live a fulfilling life on this TED Video.

SMASH IN YOUR TV AND SET YOUR MIND FREE

by Brooke Allen

I was eight when we got our first television. Although it cost a month’s take-home pay, my parents consumed it sparingly, as if it were candy.

In the eighth grade I became interested in Amateur Radio, and lost interest in TVs configured as receivers, so I took one apart and rebuilt it as a shortwave transmitter. When my friends watched the Flintstones, I talked to people all over the world.

Yet television is insidious and relentless, and by my senior year in high school, my father, mother, sister, and I would spend hours each day sitting together as we drifted apart.

My freshman year at college was 100% TV-free and it felt great. As I flew home for the summer I formulated a speech about how I had no time for television.

Before I could speak, my dad told me the TV was in the barn if I wanted it for parts. My family had figured out what was happening to them. One night after dinner, my mom and my sister watched as my dad took out a .22 and put a bullet through the picture tube.

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Clay Shirky discusses television and brains with time to spare in his book Cognitive Surplus – Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. He says TV claims about 200,000,000,000 brain-hours in the United States each year. He estimates this to be about 2,000 times the effort that it took to build the Wikipedia in all its various languages.

Broadcast television and the Wikipedia are both things your brain can consume, but the Wikipedia is also something you can help produce. And if you do, two things will happen: 1) The world will be a better place, and 2) You will increase your connectedness with others.

In 1973, my girlfriend and I hitchhiked to Appalachia to spend a week with her aunt and uncle, who had surprisingly little news to convey about her childhood friends. “Don’t worry,” my friend said, “we’ll get the low down at the hoedown on the weekend.” It turned out there were no more hoedowns; they had been canceled once Hee Haw went on the air.

Shirky says that when lonely people watch TV, they report feeling less lonely, even though their passivity and the one-way nature of the experience makes them even more alone.

Q. What do people do when they lose a job?

A. They watch more TV. (Click on the graph above to see an interactive version of how people spend their time throughout the day. The big dark red band is TV viewing by the jobless. The tiny orange sliver is time spent working.)

When you lose a job, it is easy to feel useless and disconnected. And yet, watching TV is a useless activity that does not make you more connected – it just makes you feel as if you are.

Instead, do something with your excess brainpower (cognitive surplus). Even if you can’t find someone to pay you right away, I’m sure you can find something you enjoy doing for its own sake.

View the rest of this article for more pictures from people who have better things to do than watching TV all day (such as taking photographs). Copyrights are reserved by all original photographers. Read more…

HOW TO BE LIKE JACKIE ROBINSON: LIFE LESSONS FROM BASEBALL’S GREATEST HERO

A book review by: Steve Amoia

Pat Williams, who was assisted by Mike Sielski, has written a book about a famous American baseball player. (Baseball has the same popularity in the USA as cricket enjoys in Australia, India, Pakistan, South Africa and the West Indies.) More importantly, this is the story about a great American: Mr. Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a man of incredible courage, character and integrity. It is a story that transcends sports. This tale epitomizes the tremendous burden carried on the shoulders of one man and how the rest of us can benefit from his example in our daily working lives.

Legendary Athlete and Civil Rights Champion

“Jackie” Robinson was a star in the American Negro Leagues of baseball. He was a multi-sport legend at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) and also a former military officer. One of the painful ironies of the United States was that an African-American could die defending America on foreign lands, but he could not play in the Major Leagues (the highest division of American baseball.) Two men changed this injustice and altered the American sporting landscape forever: Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Jackie Robinson, the first man to break the color line of professional baseball in 1947. This was the first act by Mr. Robinson as a life-long champion of civil rights.

Strength of Character for a Greater Good

This book is replete with inspirational quotes, along with the long road of courage that was taken by Mr. Robinson. He had to make a vow to Mr. Rickey that lesser mortals would have never considered for a day. Jackie Robinson had to promise never to retaliate against the racial slurs, insults and deliberate attempts to physically injure him during his first season with Brooklyn. Mr. Robinson was a proud man and a ferocious competitor. But he understood the challenge that awaited him, and in one of the most unselfish acts, sacrificed his own personal feelings for a greater good. His actions opened the doors for generations of African-American athletes, and also opened the eyes to the country at large. As Dr. Martin Luther King would eloquently state many years later (and I paraphrase) “A man should be judged by the content and quality of his character. Not by the color of his skin.”

A True Champion

If I take one thing away from this great book, it would have to be the initial meeting that took place between Mr. Rickey and Mr. Robinson. It set the tone for everything that would follow. Branch Rickey began to insult Robinson in every form possible as a means to “test” him.

“Anger smoldered within Robinson, but he remained quiet for awhile.’ Mr. Rickey, are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?’ ‘Robinson, I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.’ “

Learn from His Example at Work

In an American society that is becoming increasingly sensitive, bad-mannered and thin-skinned, we need to look at the sterling example of Mr. Robinson. The next time that a boss or colleague gets under your skin, think about Jackie Robinson and his unique workplace circa 1947. It might put the matter into its proper perspective.

To learn more about the book at Amazon.com, please click here.

My rating: *****

Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor and translator from Washington, D.C. He is a contributor to NSoW and writes the World Football Commentaries blog.

FATHERLY ADVICE ABOUT WORK

by: Adrienne Rodney

My father, Mark Rodney, the musician, told me something profound that his musician father, Red Rodney, told him, “Whatever you do, whether it’s playing a guitar or building an atom bomb, learn you craft well; so when you get out into the real world, you are well prepared.”

For Father’s Day, we asked our readers and others for sage fatherly advice.

Some advice is easy to swallow. Alicia Moore’s dad encouraged her to accept transformation in the workplace. “You’ll change your career three times in your adult life. So it’s okay to change your job as your life changes. Don’t be afraid of it.” Alicia remembered these words when she left her job to start her own business as a virtual assistant.

After Mary Ruiz became disheartened from constant rejection from prospective employers, her dad knew the right words to say, “It doesn’t matter how many people say ‘no’ to you because you only need one ‘yes’.”

Some fatherly advice is not as easy to swallow. Richard Bird worked on his dad’s fishing boat when he was fourteen and he quit after one week. His father said. “We have an option ‘A’ and an option ‘B’. Option ‘A’: you can work for me and get paid. Option ‘B’: you can work for me and not get paid. This is a family business and we all have to work if we want to survive.” Richard continued to work for his father, and held his fishing guide license for 20 years.

Because Anand Bhatt’s dad couldn’t understand why he chose to be a musician, he struggled to find advice to give his son. But when a frustrated Anand needed him, he was there to get his son back on track. “Stress is not to be avoided. Life is like a guitar string. If it has too much tension, it’ll snap. But if it doesn’t have enough tension it doesn’t make a sound at all. You need just the right amount of stress to make life sound like you want it to.”

Many of us can reminisce about the long conversations we’ve had with our fathers, laughing at how fruitless we thought their lessons were at the time. Sometimes we don’t understand the power of their words until years later.

Brooke Allen, founder of NSoW, was told by his father, Tom Allen, Jr., “It is easier to make money doing what makes you happy than to buy happiness with the money you are paid for doing what makes you miserable.”

Brooke’s dad was a trained sculptor, and his career arc took him from fine art to management and consulting. Brooke thought his dad was crazy because it seemed to be hard to make money doing what gives you pleasure, and being a sculptor paid very poorly indeed. Brooke believed a good way to make money is to do things that make other people happy, and the easiest way is to do things that make them rich.

“Only later,” Brooke says,  “did I realize that he was right, because, if you spend your days working at making yourself miserable, you’ll find it very hard to make up for that, no matter how much money you spend.”

Sometimes, the best advice is to not take the advice. Rory Rowland’s father was uneducated (having left school after the 5th grade), and gave his son two pieces of advice: “Get an education,” and, “You can steal more with a briefcase than you can with a gun.” Rory decided to take his dad’s first suggestion but not the second, and now he consults to financial institutions, adding value, and getting paid much more legitimately than anyone could steal at a teller’s window.

Atypically, in a case of ‘do as I do, not as I say,’ Anna’s hard-working, honest dad recommended she take a job as a stock broker to make more money, even though she lacked confidence that she would know how to do right by her clients. He said, “A lot of people in that business don’t know what they’re doing. Besides, everybody is out for themselves, and the only people who are losing money are the ones that already have a lot of it.”

Anna was perplexed. She knew he wanted her to secure a better financial future, but he raised her to value morality. “He wouldn’t act like that himself,” she says now, ”and he raised me not to act like that either. So I’m ignoring his advice and remembering what he taught me to begin with.”

My father’s advice has ranged from questionable to good, although now that I am older I’m learning to reserve judgment. However, without question, he was right about practicing one’s craft. He’s been playing his guitar every day of his life since elementary school, and he surrounds himself with all things musical. That’s why he’s a pretty damn good guitar player: he took his dad’s advice.

It is Father’s Day – have you thought about what your dad has done for you? Do you think about the lessons you hope to teach your children?

NEIL MULLARKEY – International Man of Authenticity.

Interview by: Brooke Allen

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LISTEN TO NEIL and learn to MASTER A JOB INTERVIEW from a master.

Years ago, Mike Myers (aka Austin Powers) taught Cambridge educated Neil Mullarkey how to be funny, and along the way Neil discovered his authentic self.

Neil has been in double-acts with Mike Myers, Nick Hancock, and Tony Hawks. He has performed in numerous radio and television shows, including BBC’s Whose Line is it Anyway. (The show began in1988, ten years before ABC brought it to America.) He has been in many films including Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Goldmember.

For 25 years, as a founding member of the Comedy Store Players, and as owner of Improv Your Biz, Neil has been teaching the art of improvisation.

I recently caught his performance in the British Comedy Invasion in New York City. The audience was thrilled when he introduced his colleagues and mentors, Eddie Izzard and Mike Myers, as surprise guests.

So I asked him if he would speak to NSoW about the importance of mentors, and he graciously agreed.

Listen to Neil describe his relationship with Mike and what he learned. He talks about how he mentors others, teaching people from all walks of life how to improvise. You will hear about his alter-ego, L. Vaughan Spencer, the world’s worst self-help guru and author of Don’t be Needy, Be Succeedy.

Neil explains how improv can help you discover your authentic self. While actors might play people they are not, improv artists have no time to be anyone but who they are. In a good scripted performance, each line leads to the next. In good improvisation, each person hands other performers an opportunity to carry on, using what is called an “offer.” You may not know where you are going, but you offer the opportunity for another person to go somewhere. However, in normal conversation, we often bring a conversation to a screeching halt with what is called a “block.” These are conversation enders.

But a really good improvisationalist sees a block as just another form of an offer. Neil and I role-play with what is probably the most dreaded block job seekers face: The Turn Down – “I can’t possibly use you.” You will learn how this is not a block at all, but an invitation to explore everything else you might do with your life. And the best place to start is in the hiring manager’s office; the best time to start is immediately after you are rejected. The conversation does not need to be over. You have just been handed an “offer” to begin an entirely new discussion.

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW NOW.

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Before there was Dr. Evil, there was Dr. Wicked.

Watch MIKE MYERS and NEIL MULLARKEY perform together at the Edinburgh Festival on YOU TUBE.

Read the Humongous Shortage of Work’s  review of Neil’s latest book, Don’t be Needy, be Succeedy. They even have a promotional video you can watch that is a real hoot.

MORALITY AND BUSINESS – WHAT YOU CAN DO

A DISCUSSION WITH BILL BLACK.

by: Brooke Allen

William Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-07. Bill is an outspoken critic of our regulators, banking, and business leaders. You may have caught him on Bill Moyer’s Journal, or in his congressional testimony where he stressed accountability and the fact that elites refuse to accept responsibility.

I recently attended a conference on institutional decision making and group behavior. Many academics presented experimental results and mathematical models to explain how we make bad decisions. Yet, when I asked about the role morality plays in individual decision making, I was told that little research has been done and therefore there was not much that can be said about the topic.

So, I called Bill Black. I caught him at a conference run by the Gruter Institute for Law and Biology.

Brooke: You coined a term, “control fraud.” Could you tell us what that is?

Bill: Yes, control fraud is when the people that control a seemingly legitimate entity, whether it is private, non-profit, or governmental, use it as a weapon of fraud.

Brooke: There seems to be a lot of that going on now.

Bill: Yes, way too much. And the FBI just announced that property crime had fallen to yet another all-time low, because we don’t count serious white collar crime. None of the major things that cause massive losses are even counted. And, if you don’t count it, at the end of the day, it doesn’t much exist [as far as they are concerned].

Brooke: I recently sat next to a young soldier coming back from Afghanistan; a wise man at age 20. I asked him, “What have you learned?” And he said, “I have learned to make apologies, not excuses. If your gun jams because you have not maintained it, and your buddy gets killed because you can’t cover him, you have to apologize to his widow, and it is not your gun jamming that caused his death.”

He also said, “I now see my country as a nation that cannot apologize, and that is full of excuses masquerading as reasons.”

How can we be excused just because we haven’t modeled morality mathematically therefore we can’t know anything about it? This young man knows something about it.

Bill: Brigadier S. L. A. Marshall found that small unit cohesion was the absolute key. You will do astonishing acts of bravery for your little group, and you will do it for members of your group who you actually hate. And they’ll do the same thing for you.

What you see from our elites is an almost complete unwillingness to take responsibility. We even have all these flakey apologies. To take the soldier’s statement, when he apologizes, he doesn’t say, “I am sorry if you have interpreted my comments in a manner that caused you distress,” which is the standard non-apology apology that people use today that puts it on you; there must be something flawed about you that led you to take offence at your husband being shot down because my gun jammed.

Brooke: I have an MBA in Finance, and I took an ethics class, which was all about how to stay legal, and not about ethics. The strongest impact for me was in a course called Managing Organizational Behavior where we talked about the Milgram Experiments. [A series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram of Yale University, where he showed that most people would go so far as to give people an apparently lethal shock when instructed to do so by an authority figure.] These experiments were presented in class as things that couldn’t be repeated again. We are obligated to mention them, but don’t worry about them because we can’t repeat the experiment. But, isn’t that experiment repeated all the time? I had a hard time sleeping after that because I saw it in all our behavior. It was not Germans in Germany who did what they did in World War II, but humans, just like the rest of us, and we are all capable of that. That, combined with small unit cohesion (you fight for your buddies, not your cause) is a combination that is extremely powerful and scary, isn’t it?

Bill: It’s weird, but I had the same experience. That is the single scariest thing I have ever watched in my life, and of course, I have seen much more horrific, graphic, violent things that are real – and that was an experiment. My fear was, my god, what would I have done? I know what I hope I would have done, but after you see that film, you have to wonder. [He continued with a discussion of the Stanford Prison Experiments.] That’s why you have to have immense restrictions on abusing people you have made powerless, because it is such a human thing to abuse them.

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Perhaps psychologists consider running the Milgram experiments to be unethical these days, but reality TV producers do not. In 2006, a British TV station produced a show called The Heist in which illusionist, Derren Brown, began with 13 businessmen and women, and was able, in just two weeks, to persuade four of them to commit what they believed to be an authentic armed robbery. As part of the show, he reenacted the Milgram experiment as a test to identify his four most obedient participants. Darren got the same results Milgram did in 1963: over 50% of the subjects administered what they believed to be lethal shocks simply because a man in a white coat told them to. You can watch a report on the TV show here.

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Brooke: Are business schools doing a good job of teaching ethics?

Bill: When I am in a dispirited mood, I refer to them as “fraud factories.” They do Read more…

JUNE 8, 2010, NETWORKING PARTY in NYC

We are meeting again. Click HERE for details.

THREE KEYS TO CAREER CHANGE

You can always find or create a job for yourself if you are willing to change your job, change your location or change the amount you’re asking to a lower amount.

If there is insufficient demand for your particular skills and experience, first you will have to learn to do something else and provide skills that are currently in demand.  Employers don’t care about your past.  They care only about your future and your ability to contribute value to their customers.

You can change your location.  Sometimes you will have to move from one part of the country to another, from where there are few jobs to where there are more jobs.  Many people transform their entire lives by moving from an area of high unemployment to an area of low unemployment.

The third thing you can do to get back into the work force is to lower your demands.  Remember, because your labor is a commodity, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand.  If you ask too much, people will not hire you, because customers will not pay your demands in the price of the product or service that your organization produces. It is not the employer who is forcing this downward revision in wage requirements; it is the customer, through his or her buying behavior.

There is a small, creative minority in America who is never unemployed.  No matter what happens, they always have a job; sometimes two jobs.  If they lose Read more…

WANT A BUSINESS EDUCATION? – TRY ROLLING YOUR OWN

A conversation with Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University.

By Brooke Allen, founder of No Shortage of Work

“Perhaps business schools should issue recall notices.” These words were spoken last week by Henry Mintzberg, a featured speaker at a Fordham University conference titled, “MBA Under Siege: Reimagining Management Education”

Because I feel my MBA is one of my all-time worst purchasing decisions, I gave Professor Mintzberg a call at his office in Montreal.

I began, “As a hiring manager, I can report that there are lots of recently minted MBAs with upwards of $100,000 of debt, who, as far as I can tell, have no skills or knowledge I’d pay them a dime for. Worse yet, they come with an attitude, and it usually isn’t a good one. Are you saying that business schools have an obligation to tell students when their product is faulty?”

He replied, “There is no question that schools have a moral obligation to disclose, but it isn’t clear that they have a legal one. Toyota has a legal obligation to let people know when they uncover a problem, but the case can be made that schools are not failing all students, and in many cases they add value. I refer to the functional courses in business, not the courses in management, where they do very badly.”

“But, the fact that most Toyotas work just fine does not mean they should cover up a fault in a few,” I said. “Besides, one of the things I hated about my MBA education was that the discussion in Ethics class was about legality, not morality. Isn’t a moral obligation enough of a reason to do something? Shouldn’t universities hold themselves to a higher standard than businesses?”

Mintzberg laughed, “Don’t look for too much morality at most Universities these days. It is popular for academics to make the case that honesty pays, that ‘It pays to be good’ n – not so– it’s a sham. Sometimes, it pays to be bad. Shouldn’t you always do the right thing, whether it pays or not? I’ve written about that in my book, Power in and Around Organizations.”

“In your more recent book, Managers, Not MBAs, you say that businesses are all about making things and selling them, but MBAs don’t study that. Instead they develop a disdain for production and sales.”

“That’s right. Selling is earthy, and business schools don’t do earthy things. Marketing is one-to-many, and it is hard to tell if you are doing a good job. Selling is one-to-one, and there is instant feedback.”

“And rejection can make you feel bad,” I said, “I once took a day-long sales training class that began with the instructor asking each of us why we where there. One fellow said, ‘I want to manipulate people so they will do what I want.’ The instructor took out his checkbook, refunded the $100 fee, and told him to leave. He said selling was about helping people make decisions that are in their own best interest. Then he taught us how to do it. On that one Saturday, I learned more of value than during five years of night classes at N. Y. U. where not once did I see anyone, professor or student, called on the carpet for their ethics or morality.”

He said, “If you want to be a doctor, you should go to Medical School, and if you want to be a nurse, you should go to Nursing School, but if you want to manage in business, you should not go to management school.”

“So, how can someone learn about management if not in school?” I asked. Read more…

The Tao of Warren Buffett:

A Book Review by Steve Amoia

This physically small book delivers a very large message from one of our most admired and analyzed business leaders: Warren Buffett. He earned his billions by investing in conservative companies with strong balance sheets, along with passionate managers and subordinates who focused on the long-term. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is a sterling example that has rewarded its shareholders for decades.

Collection of 125 Quotes

This book is a collection from 125 of Mr. Buffett’s quotes on a variety of topics. The authors, Mary Buffett and David Clark, were a former daughter-in-law and family friend, respectively. They are best-selling authors of what they term “Buffettology,” which is the study of the tremendous investment and business acumen of this intriguing man.

Ms. Buffett and Mr. Clark have organized this book into fourteen chapters. For example: Business, Education, The Workplace, and Why Not To Diversify. You will learn Read more…

The Effect of the Internet on Labor Markets

By: Brian Egge

In the mid 1990′s the advent of the Internet promised to make our lives easier and markets more efficient. The availability of information and low transaction costs made sites like eBay and Amazon possible, and in turn changed many primary and secondary markets. The Internet has also had a large effect on labor markets; it has allowed people to work from home, and also allowed work to be performed where and when it’s most economical. Some of the most interesting changes have occurred only in the last few years.

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com, he decided to start by selling books because there were so many existing databases of book information. Taking the existing Read more…

NETWORKING IS NOT ABOUT GETTING A JOB

It is about making connections.

By: Frank McGrath

Networking is tricky if you are chasing an unspecific, yet oddly limited, goal: I need a job. I need a job now. I need immediate, directed help that I hope to get from indirect sources. This sort of networker is a supplicant, having little beyond selfish wants and requests, thus making everyone wary. No wonder the success rate for such networking is low.

This is a hard game to win. Broaden your goals so they are more about your life than just job seeking.

Make a list of interests. For example, my current list includes:

• Horse racing
• Trading macro strategies
• Good Manhattan restaurants
• Pro hockey
• Buying a second home in New Orleans
• A dream business on Moorea in French Polynesia as a post-Wall Street career.

Now that is a varied opportunity set, and successful networking in any of those interests brings the chance of something fun and worthwhile, and yes, maybe even paid work. Networking is not just about finding a job; it’s about Read more…

HOW TO INTERVIEW

Learn how to have purposeful conversations with anyone, and the job interview will be a piece of cake.

by: Brooke Allen

When Darya Gorlova met Lola Falkowski through No Shortage of Work, they did not just chat; Darya interviewed Lauren about her business, LolaFalk.

And Darya did not just write down notes, she wrote up an article.

She published it on her blog.

I am often asked by colleges to speak to their seniors about interviewing. I ask the colleges why they don’t want me to speak to their freshmen.

By the time a student is a senior, and ready to apply for the first serious job, she could have dozens, perhaps hundreds of interviews under her belt. And, I’m not talking about “practice interviews,” I’m talking about real ones. An interview is little more than a purposeful conversation intended to obtain information. If you want to learn something from someone, interview them.

A college friend of mine was never satisfied simply referencing publications in her schoolwork; she often called the authors on the telephone and interviewed them.

In a classic scene in Annie Hall, Woody Allen gets in an argument with a pedantic professor. Woody finds Marshall McLuhan behind a movie poster and gets him to straighten out the professor. Likewise, my friend could tell her professors, “Well, when I spoke with the author last night, he said…”

I admired my friend, but I did not emulate her, and that is why, when she graduated, she had many more useful contacts than me, and she was much more at ease speaking with strangers – particularly ones more powerful or knowledgeable than her. She had practice. I did not.

Here are some suggestions for how you can be more like my friend:

When you interview someone, your goal is to learn something. You will soon discover that people love it when you take an interest in Read more…

EVERY PROTAGONIST NEEDS AN ANTAGONIST

It was just a matter of time.

Somebody has created Humongous Shortage of Work.

 We do not recommend that you look – it will hurt your eyes.

THE WHUFFIE FACTOR

a book review by Paul Share

In The Whuffie Factor, author Tara Hunt tells the fascinating story of how, in recent years, entrepreneurs and companies of all sizes have used social networking to succeed in business. Hunt notes that traditional advertising is experiencing diminishing returns, as people learn to block out messages from a bombardment of media. Which brings us to the concept and use of “whuffie”.

Whuffie is a term coined by Cory Doctorow, a popular blogger, in a science fiction novel. He uses the term to describe social capital (or good will) in a future time when money is replaced as a medium of exchange by whuffie.   Hunt tells the story of businesses that have used social networking tools and Web 2.0 approaches to build a community of users, nurture whuffie with this community, and use this whuffie to thrive. She uses the telling of their stories to illustrate the various principles and “how-to’s”  that a person or business should follow in order to build social communities, interact with these social communities in a manner that builds whuffie, and ultimately benefit from the relationships and good-will generated.

But Hunt’s book is more than an engaging account of how businesses have successfully used these tools, and it is more than a how-to guide.  The Whuffie Factor also addresses a number of philosophical threads that are drifting through the cybersphere. Hunt writes that in order to be successful in building up Whuffie with a community, a member has to adopt a certain mindset. You can’t go into the community thinking of how you are going to benefit. Rather, you have to go in thinking of how you can benefit the community.

The success stories that Ms. Hunt recounts often demonstrate the “what goes around, comes around” school of karmic sociology. Many of these success stories are companies whose very mission statement involves doing good. Two examples are Stonyfield Farm, whose basic mission statement is to create environmentally friendly products, and Craigslist, which started as a free service and which to this day chooses not to charge for most types of listings. But even with businesses where a higher purpose is not built into the mission statement, Ms. Hunt shows how a key element in their success is a commitment to building and listening to a customer community, and using what they learn to improve their customers’ experience with their products and services. By serving their customers, companies create whuffie which, which as Ms. Hunt details, these businesses have used to improve customer loyalty and their sales.

I had the opportunity to speak with Hunt and asked her whether individuals looking for work can learn from the story told in her book.

She replied:

“Absolutely. When it comes to social capital, individuals are the key element, whether acting for a company or for themselves. It is always individuals who have the passions and human interests and emotions that can turn a series of digital connections into a community.”

“The world is changing before our eyes. Of the 500 companies included in the original Fortune 500 list published in 1955, only 71 (less than 15%) remained on Read more…