Flattered that Mirek Burnejko with IT Certification Master did an interview with me on my career.  Full article can be read here.  I don’t know if I am in fact the most certified director, but I have definitely done (and continue to do) my share of professional development and try to help others where I can in their own pursuits.

Looking through http://groups.google.com I discovered many of my old posts.  At the time I had a timeshare account through Florida International University.  I was 19 and a big advocate of the Amiga at the time.  My timeshare account was offered through the Southeast Regional Data Center (SERDAC), which was one of multiple division data centers created in Florida and connected via the Florida International Resource Network (FIRN).  FIRN was largely connected via X.25 using TymNET software.  My email address at the time was xnybpf01@serss0.fiu.edu.

For sure, I have emails going back much further than this, at least until 1985, but I have been unsuccessful in finding archives.

There are as many different types of employees in the marketplace as there are ways to measure them.  Some companies will put them into piles of A Players, B Players, C Players.  There are the smart, the not so smart, the hard workers, the lazy, the “so-so”, etc.

The worst sort of employee one should set out to hire is the mediocre.  Don’t get me wrong, all companies have some mediocre  employees, and even worse.  But with a limited amount of people a manager can add to their team, why ever settle?  One may argue there are worse types than the mediocre.  The reality is that those types should never make it into an organization to begin with, via a set of controls in screening process, followed by the judgment and intuition of an experienced manager.  If somehow, one were to make it through, then a process would generally exist to to deal with those delivering sub-par performance, either by helping them better themselves or ultimately helping them out the door.  My point is, mediocre is never something  anyone should set out to intentionally hire.

Some are “Experts”.  Employees who have tried to learn everything they can about a subject.  Very valuable to any organization.  These employees bring the asset of their knowledge to the table.  Vast amounts of information that cannot be gamed, it had to be digested via multiple feedings, readings, exercises and life experience.  An organization can truly be given an edge by these individuals and they are definitely at an advantage over most of their less learned peers.  Experts are by nature hard workers as no one can become an expert without hard work.

The downside to knowledge?  Is you generally pay more.  It’s in fact all too often what is weighed on the scale in hiring negotiations, but a trait that almost anyone can learn.  It is simply the result of a time/ingest product and given the resources and a reasonable amount of comprehension, it can be overcome by many with dedication and effort.  This is why so many focus on degrees, certification, and other accolades, because it gives them something tangible they can negotiate with.  Some managers take comfort in knowing they are getting a certain minimum level of competency for their wage.  But this is a fallacy, because knowledge and competency do not necessarily correlate.  In fact knowledge can work as a disguise to hide serious issues that may exist.

Trust your Instincts

Intuition is vital.  Our minds process way more inputs than we are conscious of.  Thousands of years of existence have relied on basic intuition and in managers it should be well honed.  Obviously there is only so much information you can gain in an interview, which is why multiple interviews should be the norm.  There is nothing worse a manager can do than make a bad hire.  It’s one of those things that the manager should have complete control over and if they understand the consequences of making a bad hire it should be avoided like the plague.  If I feel even a bit on the fence about hiring someone, I am going to say no.  The people that work on your team are what is going to be what limits you or catapults you in your career.  You can’t accomplish anything without having a good team.  It’s easy to think in terms of “I need to hire this guy, work is piling up and he is available.” or “He seems like he knows some of what I need, we can teach him the rest.”  These are decisions being made about what someone may or may not be able to do, what someone may or may not know.  These fundamentals can be and should be assessed, but weighed on the scale with things of much more importance.

Attitude – Welcome to the chance to work here

Whether or not someone has the right attitude should be an absolute deal breaker in an organization.  Working today is less about being told what to do and someone looking over your shoulder and making sure you did it.  It’s more about being self-managing, and you can’t manage yourself without learning to work with others.  If someone doesn’t have the right attitude, then they must have the wrong  attitude, and that is going to negatively impact business in one way or another.  I am not talking about someone who is grumpy or negative.  Those people once again are easily identified and should never be selected.  But finding someone who’s attitude fits in with the organization.  Much of this is dependent on the values and culture of the organization.  Some things that may resonate in an organization are: staying positive, offering to mentor and help others, fosters teamwork, doesn’t just criticize but also offers solutions.  With a healthy attitude there should be a healthy amount of energy in the room.  Nothing saps energy like negativity.

Attitude may be something you need to help bring out in someone.  Not everyone is an extrovert and is going to show you their attitude upon first meeting them.  This is one more reason why multiple meetings for likely candidates are a good idea as well as some informal conversation up front to get them talking about anything, something off topic but not inappropriate perhaps a common ground in a sport or hobby.  This is building a relationship and too many people try to do this after they hire someone, and I can tell you that doesn’t work out for good averages.  More the reason to develop relationships with as many in your field as you can: friend of foes – you never know who you will be hiring next or who you may end up working for next.

There are other parts of people’s character that are just hard to measure on interviews, but equally important.  I remember when I worked for an ISP and we had tech support technicians.  In some cases, one of the hardest traits to find is the ability for someone just to show up for work!  The last thing anyone needs is someone that doesn’t show up, is inconsistent, has constant personal drama being brought to work, etc.  And who is going to answer negatively to the question “Do you show up for work?”.  No one.  So there are numerous other indicators that have to be looked at to make sound decisions.

Aptitude – From knowing very little to being very good

Many times managers are looking at people coming into an organization and basically evaluating them on things they have achieved in the past.  There is nothing wrong with measuring people this way, as it is one of many measurements that should be taken.  I would argue that achievements and knowledge should not be overly weighed.  The time frame that one made the achievements in would be of more particular importance.  Over a 30 year career?  Or over their first 5 years in the field?  And how stale is that knowledge?  What is more important to many, is not what you know, but what you can learn.  Employees with high aptitude can be highly efficient.  They have that ability to take pieces of disparate information and synthesize it into something totally new, not just read a manual and regurgitate.  These are the kinds of people that will burden others less, as they work hard to figure things out for themselves as they have always done..  They can show up in your organization as the “new guy” and be as good as or better than your “average” employee in almost no time, and be an A player.

Passion – What makes people remarkable

For someone to be remarkable at what they do, they have to love what they do.  In there lies passion.  The objectives of most organizations are very difficult.  You are not sprinting and then resting, you are basically sprinting all the time.  It requires a enormous amount of energy to keep things always moving, never resting, never giving an edge to the competition.  People that are truly passionate will do this with less energy.  In fact, they will feed on the eustress of working a lot because they love what they do.

It takes a lot of searching to find people that are authentically passionate, but I would say it’s worth passing on other opportunities to find someone that is passionate.  Passion can take someone that knows very little about a subject, help elevate them to an expert, allow them to innovate and potentially dominate their competition.  If attitude can be thought of as a vector, then passion is the force applied to that vector.

The ability to meet the minimum should not be a motivation to hire.  Everyone has to start somewhere, but you won’t grow your business by people staying there.  Passion, ambition, fearlessness – these things need to exist.  Any hire made to someone who does not have these qualities, is taken up by someone who doesn’t.

Summary

Businesses change a lot, they have to.  Conflict comes with change, and that conflict must be managed.  Employees have to adapt.   Change places less importance on what you know – it may be irrelevant, but what you have learned is important.  Don’t evaluate and hire for what you need today, but hire for change.  If you hire for change, you will be ahead of the competition.  This requires hiring exceptional employees that possess the attitude, aptitude and passion which should absolutely always be the goal.

Today I read a very inspiring article, which I found in of all places, CNN.  Titled “Take a risk and put your true self out there” by Brené Brown.

The article is something that hits very close to home for me.  I am constantly searching for the authenticity in myself, in others, in the place I work and in the places I choose to do business with.  It can be very hit or miss at times, but there is something very powerful when it’s found.  An organization that says what it does and does what it says.  A culture where the values exist, are well known, and evidence abounds of their continual reenforcement.

Brown goes on to say in the article “It’s easy to attack and criticize someone while he or she is taking a risk — voicing an unpopular opinion, or sharing a new creation with the world, or trying something new that he or she hasn’t quite mastered.”.  I applaud Brown for this comment.  There are so many people that hold back from just communicating because they are too concerned with being perceived as a pessimist, non-conformist or imperfect.  Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely a time and a place for some conversations.  Just blaring out anything that comes to your mind, especially when coupled with poor manners to begin with, is a recipe for disaster and likely to lead to unforeseen changes in your career path.  It is said “There are those that have to say something, and those that have something to say“.   It’s the latter of the two groups that you want to find yourself in.  Someone speaking up, coupled with an environment of temperance, tolerance and rational behavior can be a very powerful source of information for managers and leaders.  It can help us understand when we are doing something right, and take pause to evaluate when we may be doing something wrong.  If someone doesn’t speak up unless they know they are right, then that will make for two conditions.  First, they will only be speaking up when something is likely already well known, and in this case it adds little to no value.  Second, they will likely not be speaking up very often.  The end result is less communication, less authenticity, and less innovation, less advantage, weaker culture……..oh but it’s very safe.  Safe is a losing strategy when the issue at hand is internal communication.  After all who are we trying to stay safe from?  What’s the worst case scenario?  I am not speaking of limitless boundaries of common sense, but rather speaking in terms of someone speaking up to say “I disagree”, or “Maybe there is a better way…”, or “why aren’t we doing things this way?”.

Managers and leadership are still in control.  Decisions are still made based on an understanding of what is the best way to proceed, but the amount of information one has to make a decision increases.  Some people would say they don’t want all that information.  I would say those people should look to change their own ways.  All companies are competing on ideas and information.  Ideas have value and if someone’s ideas are not valued, then maybe they shouldn’t be working there, however if they are, then they should be heard.

One of the points Brown brings up is “When I started thinking about what it really means to practice authenticity, I realized that choosing “being real” over “being liked” is all about playing it unsafe.”  I disagree partially with Brown on this.  I don’t think you have to compromise either “being liked” or “being real”.  Most rational people should want you to be real and like you for being real.  If people don’t like you, and it’s simply because you have different ideas then they do, then it is they who have the problem.  And believe me those people exist, in all organizations and generally everyone knows who they are, and they usually are not well liked themselves.  The reality is, if you are disliked simply simply because of your ideas, then you are probably either saying and doing things that are not inline (perhaps you need to work on your soft skills, as approach is 99% of a successful delivery), or perhaps you have found yourself in a truly caustic culture and the determination needs to be made if it can be repaired or if you should jump ship.  Props to anyone who has stayed to help change a culture, it’s such a more simple and easy decision to leave, but quitters aren’t the kind of people that ultimately advance a company into the winning position.

Much of this goes back to what we keep hearing from every business school, magazine, blog and life experience.  Disruptive change is happening, those that embrace it and learn to profit from it, will be able to steer a course that furthers the business and stays ahead of the competition.  Those that resist disruptive change, will be caught in the crash of a wave and find themselves in unfamiliar territory very quickly.

Famed American academic Thomas Davenport brought data analytics to the forefront with his acclaimed article Competing on Analytics (Harvard Business Review, 2006).  Davenport spoke of how companies like Marriott, Capital One, Amazon and more had gained huge advantages over their competition by deploying data analytics.

Data Analytics makes you more valuable to your company.  You can compete on a level that many competitors are just ignoring or not adapting fast enough to.  Business has seen waves of change over the years, everything from industrialization to most recently social networking.  The key leverage businesses can gain today is in data analytics.

Word to the wise, you need to start learning Data Analytics now.  The winning manager of this era will need to rely on Big Data as much as instinct.  It can take years to gather a sufficient amount of usable data internally.  Some data will be external to the organization and can be purchased and incorporated into analysis.  The real value however, is in understanding your internal data, your resources, your processes, your trends.  Many companies are gathering data, but is it the right data?  If not, you may need to think about what type of data you need, and start gathering it.  Once data is gathered, you may need several years before you have enough of it to do meaningful analysis.  Once you finally are able to analyze the data,  you will draw conclusions, possibly via regression or statistics.  Acting on those conclusions may be premature however and lead to wrong outcomes.  So typically you would make some analysis, draw conclusions, and then after more time (perhaps a few more years), see if your conclusions were proved correct.  If so, then you know you have some data you can put to work.  All of this culminates in the ability of an organization to make predictions and forecast accurately.  Modeling and backtesting can be used against historical data and trends to understand how changes to processes, resources, supply chains, etc. will effect outcomes.

If this sounds like a lot of time, it is.  The reality is it can take as long as 5 years or more to get data analytics working in a company that has not been collecting the right kind of data.  Even if you have the right data, it can still take a while to get the data analytics practice in place.  A company has to decide to hire data analysts or train internally.  Ideally it may be a combination of both.  You then have to wrap your arms around all of your data.  Figure out what data is important, what tools will be used to analyze it, visualize it, warehouse it.  The data warehouse is important.  One thing you don’t want to end up with is a bunch of people, all with different spreadsheets of data that don’t agree with each other.  In a data warehouse you can hold all of your raw data.  The data can have a high degree of data quality.  Ideally as many people as possible would have access to the data.  People should be able to socialize around the data, make comments on the data, talk about the data, share in the data.  The company benefits, employees feel more engaged.

This is truly the era of Information.  Today companies can get easy access to the storage, compute, collaboration tools, analysis tools and most importantly the Information itself, in a timely manner, and put it to work for them.  Tools exist today such as EMC Greenplum, QlikView, Talbeau…..one can even get started with as little as Microsoft Excel.  Those who enjoy programming and having a very extensible environment may choose to deploy R, Processing and many other tools.  There is definitely value in looking into the more prominent tools.  The difference between using something like Microsoft Excel vs. Tableau is like a Ford Mustang vs. a Ferrari.

Some of the areas Big Data can be put to use in a business to gain a competitive advantage:

• HR can use data analytics to discover what leadership and management styles are most effective in the organization based on performance.  They can then target these attributes in candidates.  This is happening today.  Many HR departments are looking at Meyers-Briggs or similar data within the existing organization, finding trends in their top performers and finally recruiting based on this data.
• Data Analytics can be used to find out where to price your product within the marketplace, capturing as much revenue as possible without overpricing yourself.
• Customer data can be analyzed to understand the Customer Lifetime Value.  This allows the organization to make sure they are focusing on it’s most important customers and making sure they build relationships and strategy to retain these customers.
• Supply chain management is an important part of a company that can be optimized with data analytics.  Understanding how much inventory to keep, what the consequences will be of shortfalls in the supply chain, which parts of the supply chain are impairing a faster time to market, etc.
• Marketing can use data analytics to understand how well a campaign is performing, which communication routes customers are using to reach out to the business or even understand how product placement within a store is influencing sales.

Even without prediction and forecasting, just having employees know the data makes them more in touch with what the business is doing.  This viral knowledge of business data increases chances of innovation within the business.  Businesses will need to adapt to Big Data by deploying the tools and infrastructure and  most importantly gathering analytics talent to make the most use of it.