Business Without the Bullsh*t

by Geoffrey James

  You accomplish this by achieving unusual expertise in some area of the company’s operations. The more you can contribute regularly to the success of the company, the less likely you are to be replaced.

  Companies value three types of expertise:

  1. Deep expertise. This entails mastering one or more complex and specialized skills. For example, if you’re a computer programmer, you might want to become an expert in an obscure but essential programming language.

  2. Broad expertise. This entails developing business acumen that allows you to play a wide variety of roles. Bosses are reluctant to let go of “utility players” because they’d have to hire multiple people to do the same work.

  3. Network expertise. This entails building such a strong network of relationships that your departure would damage the firm financially. For instance, a top salesperson might take some customer accounts with her when she leaves.

  Suppose you’re a new hire in a marketing group that’s doing corporate branding. To make yourself less replaceable you might have three choices:

  1. Deep expertise. Learn everything you can about developing brand awareness through the use of multiple social media platforms.

  2. Broad expertise. Develop skills (and take on projects) that span the entire realm of brand marketing.

  3. Network expertise. Build relationships with your engineers and customers so both groups look to you as their ally.

  Similarly, suppose you’re a manufacturing engineer with twenty-five years of experience. To make yourself less replaceable you might have three choices:

  1. Deep expertise. Become the only person in the company who understands the software that runs the factory floor.

  2. Broad expertise. Become the overall manager of the technical aspects of the manufacturing system.

  3. Network expertise. Become the technical contact for the companies in your supply chain.

  3. CREATE A WRITTEN ESCAPE PLAN.

  In addition to making yourself less replaceable, spend at least two hours every week (schedule them!) finding new business contacts, developing those relationships, and keeping abreast of opportunities in your field.

  Your goal is to constantly have multiple job opportunities in various stages of development. Having such alternatives lined up provides four advantages:

  1. You will have the courage to say no to unreasonable requests.

  2. You will be more willing to risk your job in order to do the right thing.

  3. You will eventually find a job that’s better than the one you’ve got.

  4. You will be unafraid to ask for compensation that reflects your true value.

  As you develop these contacts and opportunities, put them in the form of an escape plan, detailing what you’d do and whom you’d call if you suddenly lost your job. There are three advantages to having a written escape plan:

  1. It helps you visualize the process, which will make it easier if you ever need to execute the plan.

  2. It makes it unnecessary for you to worry about what you’d do in the event that you lose your job.

  3. It provides a vehicle for documenting the contacts you make and the opportunities you’re developing.

  Example:

  Potential employer: Microfirm

  How I could add value: I use their products in my current job, so I could help them develop new customer opportunities.

  Contacts:

  • John Doe, marketing manager, 210-555-1543, jd@microfirm.net.

  • Jane Eyre, system architect, 210-555-1553, je@microfirm.net.

  Actions:

  • Met John at the EDA conference in June 2012, discussed new products.

  • Commented on Jane’s blog on subject of new instruction set.

  • Briefly discussed their future needs on phone call with John, 7/5/13.

  Ideally you want to be developing at least three of these opportunities at every point in your career. In other words, while you’ve got job A, you should simultaneously be developing job opportunities B, C, and D.

  SHORTCUT

  CAREER SECURITY

  LIVE below your means until you’ve saved six months of income.

  DEVELOP expertise that makes it less likely you’ll be fired.

  CONSTANTLY develop new opportunities and document them in a written escape plan.

  SECRET 23

  How to Have Enough Time

  Even though most people complain that they haven’t enough time, it’s actually easy to have enough time to get all your work done, and still have time left over for a personal life. The secret is as follows:

  1. STOP COMPLAINING.

  You get the same amount of time every day as everyone else. You may feel you’re short on time and that you desperately need more, but when the day started, you got your fair share: twenty-four hours.

  Nobody got any more than you did, so stop complaining. More important, the time you’re wasting by complaining could be spent doing something productive.

  2. TRACK YOUR TIME.

  Contrary to popular belief, the most difficult part of time management isn’t changing the things you do… it’s having the courage and discipline to track what you’re actually doing. It’s a perfect case of “knowledge is power.”

  Here’s the thing: once you realize where you’re spending your time, it becomes absurdly easy to determine where you’re wasting it. Simple awareness helps you decide what’s a priority and what can be eliminated or delegated to somebody else.

  3. LEARN THE PARETO PRINCIPLE.

  The Pareto principle is a mathematical law that applies in most situations. The law is as follows: 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your actions. Commit this rule to memory, because it’s the key to time management.

  The most famous example of the Pareto principle is the oft-repeated fact that in sales groups, 80 percent of the revenue comes from 20 percent of the team. There are dozens of other examples, ranging from wealth distribution to damage from natural disasters.

  The flip side of this principle is that 80 percent of your actions are producing only 20 percent of your results. Translation: most (i.e., 80 percent) of what you’re actually doing is pretty much a waste of time.

  4. PRIORITIZE YOUR TO-DO LIST.

  The reason most time-management systems don’t work is that they tend to treat the 20 percent of your actions that really matter as equivalent to the 80 percent of your actions that aren’t actually all that important.

  Instead, whenever you make a to-do list, prioritize each item by the amount of effort required, numbering them from 1 to 10, with 1 being the least amount of effort and 10 the most. Then estimate the potential positive results, again from 1 to 10.

  Divide the effort by the potential. The result is the “priority ranking.” Now do the items with the lowest priority number first. For example:

  Task 1: Write report on trip meeting

  Effort=10, Result=2, Priority=5 (that is, 10÷2)

  Task 2: Prepare presentation for marketing

  Effort=4, Result=4, Priority=1

  Task 3: Call current customer about referral

  Effort=1, Result=10, Priority=0.1

  5. DO ONLY THE 20 PERCENT THAT REALLY MATTERS.

  In order to take advantage of the Pareto principle, you’d do the above tasks in the following order:

  Task 3: Call current customer about referral (Priority 0.1)

  Task 2: Prepare presentation for marketing (Priority 1)

  Task 1: Write report on trip meeting (Priority 5)

  Guess what? If you never get to the priority 5 item, it’s no big deal. It’s probably part of the 80 percent that doesn’t really matter.

  I know this all sounds pretty simple, even simplistic. However, I can tell you from my personal experience that there has been nothing—and I mean nothing—that has added to my personal productivity more than this kind of prioritization.

  Hint: laying out your activities over the next two weeks helps you to finalize and reorganize
the plan for the current week. That way you can decide what to pull into this week and what you can push out until next week, or even later.

  6. AVOID THESE HUGE TIME-WASTERS.

  An easy way to do only what’s important is to cut out activities that consume large amounts of time but very seldom pay off big. Here are the four most common:

  1. Taking calls from people you don’t know. Unless you’re working in telesales or product support, there’s no reason you should ever take a call from somebody you don’t know. After all, when was the last time you took an unexpected call that was truly important? Days? Weeks? Months? If it’s important, they’ll get you through e-mail.

  2. Accessing voice mail. A voice mail message consumes minutes of your time (more if you have to replay) to communicate information you could absorb from an e-mail in seconds. Explain in your outgoing message that you don’t use voice mail and provide your e-mail address. This alone can save you several hours a month.

  3. Chitchatting with coworkers. For some people a day at work means an endless coffee break. They wander the halls searching for somebody, ostensibly to discuss business but really just to chat. Don’t let these time leeches hobble your success. Just say no. If necessary, get rude if it gets them out of your office.

  4. Letting “alerts” interrupt your thinking. Most of the 20 percent that makes a real difference involves doing something creative, talking to somebody important, or absorbing complex information. These are impossible to do well if your computer and phone are chirping and beeping for your attention. Whatever it is, it can wait.

  SHORTCUT

  TIME MANAGEMENT

  YOU get twenty-four hours each day, just like everyone else.

  KEEPING track of how you spend time is half the battle.

  TWENTY percent of your actions will produce 80 percent of your results.

  PRIORITIZE based on potential impact and ease of execution.

  DO only the 20 percent that produces the 80 percent of your results.

  AVOID workplace bustle that consumes time needlessly.

  SECRET 24

  How to Find Your Dream Job

  Most people blunder their way into their careers—they see an opportunity open up, maybe they’ve got nothing better going on, maybe they need some money, or maybe they figure this job is good enough for now.

  Rather than let yourself accept that fate, you should create a plan to get the perfect job. However—and I want to be very clear on this—you don’t have to land your dream job in order to use the other secrets in this book.

  Quite the contrary. If you do land a dream job, some of the secrets (like those about coping with difficult bosses and coworkers) are likely to be, if not totally unnecessary, at least less important than to somebody struggling with a less-than-ideal job.

  There are six steps to finding a dream job:

  1. HAVE A DREAM JOB IN MIND.

  At various parties, conferences, and get-togethers, I’ve asked hundreds of people, “If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be?” Almost every time the answer is something like: “Uhhh… I don’t know…”

  It should seem pretty obvious that if you don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes your dream job, the likelihood of getting it is exactly nil, because even if by some insane chance you get offered that dream job, you won’t recognize it.

  The first step toward getting a dream job is knowing what that job would be. Here’s a hint: in most cases your dream job will be connected with whatever truly interests you and makes you happy.

  2. START THINKING LIKE YOUR ROLE MODELS.

  Just about every “how to succeed” book suggests that you find a role model. Unfortunately, many people use role models in a way that guarantees failure: they imitate the strategies that the role models used to get to where they are.

  The problem with this approach is that what worked twenty years ago won’t work today.

  For example, if you wanted to be a film director, you might try to break into the film business the way Steven Spielberg did it: by hanging around a film studio as an unpaid intern.

  There’s only one problem with this… no, two. First, everybody else is trying to do the same thing, because they’ve all heard the same story about Spielberg. Second, and more important, today’s film studios are run differently from those of the 1970s. More security and less access.

  What’s valuable about role models is not the strategies they pursued, but the thought processes that led them to those strategies. It’s those ways of thinking, channeled through today’s realities, that will create the approach you’ll need to land your dream job.

  Spielberg, for example, had an almost megalomaniacal belief in his ability to make good films, and a complete imperviousness to the opinions of others about his talent. (He was rejected from film school twice.) Anyone whose dream job is that of film director would definitely need to think that way, but the strategy necessary to create that career today would more likely involve posting Internet fan films than a studio internship.

  3. BE WILLING TO PAY THE PRICE.

  You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. If you’re going to pursue your dream job—and absolutely succeed at achieving it—you may need to sacrifice other things, such as having a family, or eating regularly.

  I emphasize the word may because that sacrifice is not always required. Plenty of people have their dream jobs and still manage to spend time with their families, pursue hobbies, and so forth. (I’m one of them.) While you might not be called on to make huge sacrifices to achieve your dream job, you must be willing to do so.

  Hopefully you’ll be able to get to where you want to be without having to give up the other things you value. However, if you’re not willing to give them up, you’ll never reach your goal, because you won’t take the necessary risks.

  4. LEARN TO SELL.

  No matter what your dream job might be, you’re not going to get it unless you learn how to sell. I’m not saying you need to be a professional salesperson. However, if you can’t sell, you can’t sell yourself or your ideas.

  For example, suppose your dream job is being a high-tech CEO. You may have the most innovative idea since automatic bread-slicing, but if you can’t sell that idea, you won’t attract investors, customers, or talented employees.

  Knowing how to sell yourself gives you the edge. Consider this: a mediocre performer who knows how to sell always beats an exceptional performer who doesn’t. And an exceptional performer who also knows how to sell is virtually unbeatable.

  Finding a great job always involves selling yourself and your skills. And being successful at any career means constantly selling the value of the services you’re providing. For example, Picasso was a brilliant artist, but he was equally brilliant at self-promotion.

  5. CREATE A PLAN AND TAKE MASSIVE ACTION.

  Every “success formula” starts with (1) knowing where you are today, (2) knowing where you want to be, and (3) building a plan to get from here to there. Now you need a plan. Create one.

  That plan may involve meeting new people, doing new things, learning new things… the specifics of the plan are going to vary according to who you are, where you are, and where you want to get.

  Even if you’ve been serious about Step 2 of this method and trained yourself to think like your role models, your plan won’t be perfect, and chances are, it’s not going to work… at least not all of it.

  However, you can’t let that keep you from taking action. In fact, you want to take as much action as possible so you learn as quickly as possible which parts of your plan are going to work and which need adjustment.

  The sad truth is that even when people have plans, they don’t take enough action. Tentative steps simply aren’t good. Where the normal person would do a couple of actions to make the plan real, you should do twenty. Or thirty.

  For example, I recently met two men whose dream job was to write science fiction for a living. Both were equally talented, but one sent
his manuscript to a single small publisher and waited for six months. The other sent his manuscript to a dozen small presses and a dozen agents.

  Guess which of these two writers is now a published author.

  6. ADJUST YOUR PLAN BASED ON RESULTS.

  Taking massive action makes it impossible to fool yourself into thinking that the reason you didn’t get your dream job is that you didn’t try hard enough. Massive action forces you to reevaluate your plan if you don’t get where you want to be.

  In other words, your results allow you to go back and build another, more refined, plan based on your hard-won experience. Now that you’re armed with valuable knowledge of what didn’t work, your new plan will be far more likely to succeed.

  If you truly believe, in your gut, that your dream job is right for you, and truly believe that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get that job, you’ll find a way to get it. It’s truly that simple.

  You may also find that your dream evolves and changes as you learn. You might even land your dream job and then decide that it’s not really what you expected or really want to do.

  So even though you need to be focused, it never hurts to explore more than one area of interest, if only to diversify your skills.