Get on the Gorilla Bus: A Good to Great Book Review

Note: For new Gorilla Blogs, head over to The Gorilla Coach

"Sigh…

I just couldn't bring myself to come up with a more energetic response than that. Wednesday had arrived with all the energy of a three legged turtle hopped up on warm milk. The clocked ticked over to 8:00 am and I opened up my calendar to see what the schedule had in store for the day. "Oh, look. Just like last Wednesday. And the Wednesday before that, and the one before that, and that." In a sudden burst of morbid curiosity I jumped my calendar forward three months and  looked at Wednesday. "And we have the exact same day."

I sat back in my seat and stared fitfully at the ceiling. I had long ago come to the realization that this job was slowly eating out my soul from the inside. Still, here I sat preparing for yet another day. "Meh, it's a living." I said and reached for my mouse, intent on slogging through today's predictable pile of overnight email.

Mee… Mee… Mee…

"What on earth?" I stepped to the door of my office to find out what was going on.

I was greeted by the silvered back of Hogarth as he slowly back stepped down the hall. The god awful racket was coming from him, right in time with his long arms waving in a throng of confused looking businessmen. His poor imitation of a bus backing up was replaced by a gruff series of commands. "All right, Mr. CIO you're going to be down the left hall all the way to end. Don't worry, we'll replace the half eaten fichus tomorrow. Director of IT Database infrastructure, head left, third door on the right. VP of Human Exploratory Resource Operations, head to the right, take the first left, the second right and down two flights. Director of Project Improvement Management  Process, you're right here at the end of the hall. Peter, John and Michael second star to the right and straight on till morning."

"Hogarth, what are you doing this time?"

My gorilla pooka turned around and gave me one of his screaming white smiles. "Hey there, so are you packed yet?"

"Packed? What are you talking about?" I looked at the curious businessman trying to step past me into my office. "And why is this guy scoping out my office?"

Hogarth waved towards the exit, "The bus is here, time to get on it."

I shook my head, "I think you're getting that backwards. In Collins' bus analogy, the bus  is the company. You bring the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off the bus."

Hogarth nodded, "That's right. But where do you think the people being tossed off the bus go?"

"Another bus?" Realization dawned in my muddled brain. "Hey, wait a minute!"

BOOK REVIEW: GOOD TO GREAT, By Jim Collins

I was first exposed to Good to Great some years back. At that time I thought it was anything but great. I didn't read the book then, but my experience with it so colored my perceptions that for a while there, Collins was in my lexicon of four letter words. A VP had been brought in to lead my organization. He hit the ground running and held up GTG as his guide book for how he was going to improve the organization.  One of those "improvements" led to my being laid off with a large number of my fellow co-workers. Needless to say, my opinion of the book was pretty low and I hadn't even read it.

Years later and with the perspective of time I approached this book again and set out to read it. Doing so helped to codify my position on management and my own personal direction. I came to see my previous brush with Good to Great as being one of the best things that ever happened to me.

You see, I got thrown off the bus.

At the time, I thought this was the worst thing in the world. I thought the VP didn't have a clue and he was just making his own little crony club.  It took reading GTG to finally realize that he did have a clue, and it really didn't matter what happened in that job or what that VP did. I had been on the wrong bus!

I'm getting ahead of myself. Well more I'm pontificating and not reviewing.

Summary:

Why do some companies make the leap to being one of those companies we dream about being at and why do some companies become "Acme, oh I remember them, they used to be big in widgets?" That's what Jim Collins and his research staff set out to determine.  Collins had already delved into the mechanics of how visionary companies lasts, in his book Built to Last, now it was time to see where those visionaries came from.

Collins walks through a six step analysis of GTG companies, building on each previous step as he goes. You can't get from A to F without starting at A.

Level 5 Leadership: This scale does not go to 6. Collins explains the levels of leadership and why you need a level 5 leader to go great.

First who… Then What: Probably the most profound section for me. This one will speak to agilists as it is about building the right team, then building the company.

Confront the Brutal Facts: I'm the gorilla talker, I'm all about talking to the obvious and dealing with it. GTG companies have to do this to succeed.  Collins explains it all.

Hedgehog Concept:  Hedge what? Seriously you have to read the book, you have to understand why you do what it is you do best.

A Culture of Discipline: Can you say accountability? I knew you could.

Technology Acceleration: No, this is not how Twitter will change the world. This is more about the basic mindset of technology in the work place.

And he ties all that up into his Flywheel of doom.. No wait, the Flywheel and the Doom Loop.

The book is laid out in a conversational style, with Collins walking you through each chapter and each thought process. One could almost envision him standing in front of the class and giving one of those professor lectures we all actually liked to listen to. You know, the ones that got to a point and you could follow?

The books is only 210 pages long, with another fifty pages of explanatory appendix and a bibliography that would choke the world hot dog eating champion.

The Good:

Data, data, data- This book is not based on theory and hokum. It's based on hard research by Collins and a dedicated (perhaps crazy) twenty person research team. They piled through mountains of financial data, company reports, news clippings and conducted many interviews in the quest to create this book. When Collins declares a hypothesis, it is one based on mountains of research.

Sit on down for a chat- As mentioned in the summary, the book has a comfortable conversation style. Like Collins just sat down and talked about the book with the tape recorder on (I know, I'm dating myself) and then that was transcribed to text. It made the book very approachable and welcoming to read.

The right bus- I don't know if Collins ever intended the book to serve this purpose but I recommend this book to people who I can see are floundering in their personal careers or are stuck in dead-end jobs. CEOs read this book to find out how to make their companies great. Normal people read this book to realize that the bus analogy goes both ways. In a nutshell, one of the six components of a GTG company is "First who… then what." He uses an analogy of getting the people you need on the bus and getting the people you don't need, off the bus. Build a great team and the company will be great.

Now first of all I'd like to point over at my passion of agile management and how agile focuses on the team, not the project. Then I want to point out that the bus goes both ways. When I was kicked off the bus, I went on to discover that I'd been on the wrong bus. I got the kick in the pants that led to meeting Hogarth and waking up to smell reality. This book isn't just a good company guidebook, it’s a good personal guidebook. You can learn how to look at a company and decide if you should really keep clocking in or if it is time to find your real career.

The Bad:

Time is no friend to companies- When two of the companies featured are Circuit City and Fannie Mae, it can be hard to keep reading. Published in 2001, the book is a definite look back in time. Bank of America could do no wrong in the nineties. Today, we have 99%ers pitching tents in its lobby. While the facts used can't be argued with, I had to wonder at the connection between Great companies and companies that last. Is it sustainable to be Great or not? Perhaps the answer lies in Built to Last, which I've yet to read.

Drowning in data- There were times when I felt I was being bludgeoned by the data. I'd already understood the concept and I was still getting hit with the justifications. If you see yourself as already progressive, you might be able to stop after  the first chapter, or at least only read the first few pages of each chapter. The data will get to you as you say to yourself "I'm sold already, where the hell do I sign?"

The Bookshelf Index:

One of the ways I measure a books value is where I put it when I'm done with it, the book shelf index. GTG gets the best shelf space, sitting on my desk at work next to the Peter Drucker. Laid out with strong headers and valuable data makes it still a go to reference book in my day to day work.

In the end I found this book useful for reasons Collins may not have envisioned for the book. Yes, companies can use this as a guidebook for going in the great direction. And the individual worker can use it to determine if they are in the right company for them. As much a personal development guidebook as it is a company development road map.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Talker Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.

A Project Manager's Poker hand

Or- Ripped from Today's headlines; PMP certification and $4 will buy you a cup of coffee!

It was late evening at my office. I was still there to take a conference call with one of our Chinese out source firms. I strode purposefully down the hallway and straight into the conference room.

I stopped short. I backed up and looked at the name of the conference room. Yes, I was in the right place. Stepping back in my mind tried to make sense of the scene before me. Hogarth was sitting at the table, his back to me. He had garters around his forearms and wore a visor. He was rapidly dealing cards around the table to the other occupants of the room.

Two more gorillas, a black swan and a pink elephant.

The sheer absurdity of the scene froze me to inaction for several moments.

"All right, everyone ante up out," Hogarth called out.

"ITIL," mumbled the larger of the two gorillas.

"Six Sigma, Black Belt," the pink elephant said..

Slapping a chit on the table, the other gorilla declared "Prince2."

Quietly sliding her chit across the table, the black swan almost whispered "MCSE.l

"PMP," Hogarth said.

Everyone at the table picked up their cards and carefully began arranging them. Moments later Hogarth called out, "Opening bet is to you, Winston."

"I call two years of team leadership," the larger gorilla said.

The "betting" went around the table. "Award winning writing"," Paid to speak in public", "Risk management expertise…"

"HOGARTH!" My mind finally caught up with the absurdity. "What are you doing?"

My gorilla turned to look at me. "Oh, hi boss. Just playing poker with some of the guys." He pointed around the table. "I told you 'bout my cousin, Winston. The elephant is Percy, from accounting, that's Wendy's Gorilla, Stanley and birdie over there is Wanda from IT."

"Poker? What on earth are you using for money?" For some reason my mind had no problems with three gorillas, a pink elephant and a black swan playing poker. Instead I was trying to wrap my mind around just what they were playing for.

"Job experience and accomplishments!" He declared.

"What?"

Hogarth grinned ,"Haven't you heard the news? A PMP certification and $4 will get you a cup of coffee?"

Certification Poker, just what does a PMP get you?

A while back Simon Cleveland, of the Miami  Project Examiner, posted a blog titled "Why is just having a PMP not enough." In his blog he reviewed a study published in the Project Management Journal. The study surveyed Senior IT Executives and found that a PMP certification rated at the bottom of the list for considering a candidate for hiring.

The bottom?...

Yes, the bottom. Here is the list from Simon's blog:

1. Leadership = 94%

2. Ability to communicate at multiple levels = 93%

3. Verbal skills = 87.2%

4. Written skills = 87.1%

5. Attitude = 85%

6. Ability to deal with ambiguity and change = 82%

7. Work history = 68%

8. Experience = 67%

9. Ability to escalate = 66%

10. Cultural fit = 57%

11. Technical expertise = 46%

12. Education = 37%

13. Length of prior engagements = 23%

14. Past team size = 18%

15. PMP certification = 15%

Wow... My first reading of the article had me up in arms. I was ready to storm the walls and take no prisoners. How dare they say my PMP was the bottom of the list! Then I read a LinkedIn discussion on the matter. In that discussion, one person voiced confusion on why the PMP is considered a must have in so many job requisitions and with HR. Another poster wondered how this jived with PMI promoting project management as a "certified" profession, like accounting or lawyers.  I was ready to call the million PM march on Washington (okay maybe the century PM march, do I hear a dozen?).

So I read Simon's article again. This time I took my time. I paid attention to the listed values and the LinkedIn concerns from my fellow project managers. When I was done, I had learned two valuable things. The first is the old Netiquette adage to never immediately respond to a confrontational email or post. Write your post, then walk away for thirty minutes or more. Come back after you've calmed down and see if you still want to send it. You almost never will.

Of course that's not what this blog is about. The "Aha Moment" for me came when I realized that the study was 100% absolutely right!

"Say that again? "

That's right. I agree that a PMP should be at the bottom of the list for deciding if you want to hire someone. We saw Hogarth use his PMP (well technically mine) to ante up in his job experience poker game. He didn't use it for an actual bet. The PMP got him in to the game, but it wouldn't win him his hand.

It's the same for a hiring decision. A PMP certification is not the most important decision in hiring someone, and it should not be. The same goes for pretty much any other professional certification, Prince2, Scrum Master, PMIs new Agile cert ( You need a Medical Degree to be a doctor, that doesn't mean you are a good doctor.). A certification helps get you in the door. It's a must have on your resume and, in theory, is proof that you have the skills that the hiring manager wants. It is your ante to get into the interview game. It gets you to the table. Then you have to prove that your certification was justly earned, by demonstrating your ability in the skills. In the case of the PMP one of those key skills is the ability to communicate.

Three of the top four things on the study's list are about communication. Eighty percent or more of being a Project Manager is about communication. Then, looking at the top of the list, the number one thing IT Execs look for is leadership. It's not communication, though a good leader must be a good communicator. That said, I would argue that to be a successful Project Manager you must be a strong leader. If you can successfully lead a project team, without direct report authority, then you are probably a good leader.

Let's look at two more high ranking traits; handle ambiguity and change 82% and ability to escalate 66%. These are both vital tools in a good project manager's tool box. A dedicated PMP certified project manager should have these skills and actively cultivates them. I'd also argue that the ability to escalate is just another part of communication.

Conversely, notice where Technical Expertise rates? A whopping 46%. Leadership, communication, and adaptability (ambiguity and change) far outweigh the requirement for technical expertise.

So on reflection I think this article is spot on and fully supports who I am, as a project manager.

My PMP certification gets me to the table. It shows I want to be one of the best. I still have to prove to them that I am.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

Veteran, the project management wars

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.

The Holiday Job Hunt Gorilla

[This blog is dedicated to Skip La Fetra, facilitator of the Silicon valley PMI job search breakfast. He led a great meeting that tackled this gorilla in a wonderful way and inspired this blog.]

The jingle of bells battered my skull like a thousand tiny anvils being dropped from orbit. Grabbing my skull I turned from my desk to take in a sight I immediately wished I could erase from my memory.

"Hogarth! What in the Sam Hill are you doing?"

My gorilla looked down at the red velveteen jacket he wore, shaking his head as he did so. With the jingling of his bell bestrewed hat nearly overpowering his words, he said "Well I admit old St. Nick shares the red theme with Bealzabub, but isn't it taking things a bit far to accuse him of being devil and not elf?"

I rolled my eyes, trying not to let Hogarth's verbal judo distract me from exactly why he was dressed up like a Christmas in the jungle reject. "Why the heck are dressed like that?"

"For the holiday party" he replied, his tone so bubbly it could make Champagne feel impotent.

"Party?" I sighed. "Hogarth, I'm not going to any party."

"You're not?" he replied crestfallen. "So back to pinging your network contacts and checking job boards?"


I threw up my hands, "What's the point? It's the middle of December, I'm not going to get a job now. I just want to wash my hands of all this, try and enjoy Christmas and I'll get back to looking in January."

Now imaginary gorillas should be fairly benign, after all you've thought them up, right? So when he walked over and smacked me upside the head I was understandably surprised. "Ow! What was that for?"

"To snap you out of your Dickensian moroseness " he said. "Cause I'm the 800 pound gorilla in the room and I'm not leaving until you deal with your attitude."


And there I was, having literally been hit over the head by the "Holiday Job Hunt Gorilla"

I have had the experience of being unemployed over the US holiday season (Oct 31st to Jan 1st), twice in my professional career. The two experiences were stark opposites of each other and show a clear example of why the holidays is the time to Speed Up, not Slow Down your job hunt.

In my first experience , I all but hid from my unemployment, trying to deny it was there and giving all sorts of justifications to not make even a token effort to look for work. I also completely ignored every bit of advice I give in my own career insurance blog. Not only did I end up hiding from my lack of a job through Christmas, when the new year came along I had lost all my momentum, all my drive. I eventually landed a new job, but it was more luck than my own actions. I was out of work for the better part of a year that time, an experience I never wanted to repeat again in my life.

In my second experience I was laid off from my company on Sept 30th. I started my new job on Feb 2nd, nearly four months exactly. More importantly, between Dec 20th and Jan 1st I was speaking with three different companies and even interviewed in the week between Christmas and New Years. I not only followed my own advice (learned almost word for word from manager-tools.com) but I sped up my efforts over the holidays. I took advantage of the hidden benefits of the season to accelerate myself into a great job.

No, I think the holidays can be argued as being the best time to search for a job, or to at the least close in on that next job prospect. There is a natural spirit of giving and kindness in the season, that is not limited to department store Santas and It's a Wonderful Life reruns.

During a Silicon Valley PMI Job Search Breakfast the attendees came up with the following, excellent, list of things to do in the holiday season.

- Don't slow down. This is not the time to slow your pace, but to increase it.

- Most companies operate their Fiscal Calendar from Jan to Dec, so their year is ending. This means their new budget year starts in January. They already know their budget and likely have started their job reqs.

- Holiday parties are not a time to bemoan, but a time to network with friends and colleagues. Make sure your business cards are up to date and plentiful.

- It is the season of giving, take advantage of people's natural tendency to be more open and giving to approach them.

- Be prepared for rapid response "can you come in tomorrow?" This is very common in the holidays.

- Do NOT underestimate the power of the thank you note! If you were good about sending "Thank You" notes during your first interviews then you can follow up with a Christmas cards to reopen your communication with the hiring firm.

- The holidays give you a readymade excuse to reach out to an old colleague who you fell out of touch with. Haven't talked to Bob in a year? Send him a holiday card and reconnect, then stay connected.

- If you get a job sent to you and it is not for you, think of who you know that might fit. Keep up your spirit of giving and helping and it will come back to you.

In the end, it boils down to a very simple mantra "Don't Slow Down, Do Speed Up and remember all your job hunt and networking basics."

Wishing you all the happiest and most successful of holiday seasons!

Joel BC
The Gorilla Talker
Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email
You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.

Project Gorillas are Subject Matter Experts

Note: For new Gorilla Blogs, head over to The Gorilla Coach
[Non-legal mumbo jumbo: This piece was inspired by a conversation with fellow PMs at a Silicon Valley PMI job search networking breakfast. That conversation inspired me to write this little piece of fiction to bring my revelations to light. This blog goes the next step beyond the "Too many hat" blog that I did in February.]

  "Well it's rather complicated", the words were spoken by the pleasantly smiling engineering director. Having heard this lead in more than once, I instantly translated it to "I don't expect you to understand, you don't have a double masters in computer science and physics." Not that I said anything, I smiled back serenely and listened as he dove into a highly technical discussion that lost me in the first three sentences. But that was fine,


  I leaned back in my chair and watched as he grabbed a white board pen to start diagramming.
As he launched into a multi-level architectural diagram, in handwriting that would have confused a pharmacist, I glanced over at Hogarth. My gorilla was on the other side of the room, happily mapping out a Rube Goldberg machine. As near as I could tell it was a machine designed to give the Engineering director a wet willy through the use of canned air and plant sprinkler. Hogarth had also heard this speech before.


  A couple minutes later the director sat down, a look a satisfaction on his face. I looked up at the whiteboard, looked back at my notes. I then turned and looked at one of the software managers. She and I were old colleagues and I trusted her input completely. She'd already sent a status update that had given a high level status. Quoting it almost exactly I said "So you can't get the network layer to talk to the application layer and you think it will take four weeks to fix?"


 "Well if you want to boil it down to that…"


 "Yes, yes I do." I said, looking at Hogarth's satisfied banana grin.


  For want of a name, let's call this the "SME means you don't understand" gorilla. Spend a little time on any of the job search websites and you'll see a very common trend in Project Management job descriptions. It is couched in various ways, but essentially it boils down to PM jobs "requiring" expertise in whatever field the product being project managed belongs in. Working on an ERP deployment? Then they want you to be an ERP expert, preferably someone who's coded and deployed. Building the next best hand held device to use Android? Then they are probably asking for a degree in electrical engineering or at least mechanical engineering.

    In the end it typically boils down to a long list of very project management related skills, communication, organizations, facilitation, working with remote teams, etc., all topped off by a cherry of expertise in some highly specific job field (There is really a field called Human Ecology Engineering). The end result being jobs that become very tailor made to a specific job or industry. Best project manager there has ever been at your computer game company? That's great, but you've got no manufacturing experience so there is no way you could be a good project manager for a new line of toys. You do not have subject matter expertise, so you are not qualified. Even my beloved Manager Tools reinforces this concept to some degree. They describe three methods of management power, Role, Influence and Expertise. It is usually implied that expertise is SME knowledge in the industry or product you are working on.


My challenge to all this is simple. As a project manager I am a Subject Matter Expert, in Project Management.


     A Project Manager's SME knowledge is in getting a project from inception to launch with in the bounds of the project's constraints and while keeping the team from flying apart like wine glass shattering when it hits the floor.

     Let me explain a bit more- Project Management has officially been around since the first US Nuclear submarines. Such massive projects with very tight dependencies between teams, needed someone who could oversea the whole thing. These first PMs were usually taken from heads of a department or some senior engineer. He might not understand the full workings of the nuclear reactor, but he was a PhD. in naval structural engineering (or vis a versa).

    Moving through the close of the 20th century, project managers were typically pulled from a 'technical' field. The majority of PMs tended to be from engineering backgrounds of some kind. A large chunk of the rest rose up from the ranks of whatever they had been doing. A Logistics Planner had served on the front lines of shipping for years, before being tapped to coordinate a global logistics plan.

     It was not until the close of the 20th that this really began to shift. We started to see PMs who came out of business backgrounds. They still very much tended to be experts in a field. If you hadn't worked in insurance, being a PM at a risk management firm was pretty much a no go.

     It hasn't been until the 21st century that we have started to see Project Managers as a truly distinct discipline of its own. In the early 2000's the CEO of PMI met with a major university about Project Management (Thanks  to Cornelius Fitcher for his great podcast series where I learned this). The university was adamant that Project Management was a course, not a discipline. Today a Google search for Project Management Bachelor's Degree yields over 6.4 million hits.

     Today we are finally starting to see that Project Management is an area of expertise. The art/science of guiding something from start to finish is a critical and important as the art/science of laying out a PCBA board for the next great DVR product. The PM doesn't need to know the details of PCBA board layout. What he needs is the vocabulary to communicate with the guy who does know about PCBA and the mutual trust of a well communicating team.

     At the very fundamentals, I believe that a good Project Manager can manage any project. There are of course the typical caveats on "any" but I truly believe that PMs are far more industry portable than most industries seem to be ready to concede.
I've had this conversation with several people in the last couple of years. As you can imagine I've met with a fair amount of resistance to the concept. I had an IT PM adamantly insist that if you weren't an expert in IT infrastructure, or some major component of IT, then there was no way you could be a PM in IT.

     "Kind of like a software PM going to work for a Hard Disk manufacturer?"

     "Exactly!"

     Well I may not convince everyone, but I for one am confident in my Project Management skills. How can I not be? I started as a Customer Support rep giving game hints for the Nintendo game console. I've worked in handheld devices, mobile phones, consumer software, voice recognition, enterprise storage software, virtualization, and more. My most current job? I'm that former Software PM doing program management at a hard drive company. One of the best compliments I have ever gotten was from my current boss. "I hired you because you don't have twenty years of HDD baggage. I needed someone who would focus on the project."


On the front lines,
Joel BC
Veteran, the Project Manager wars
Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email
You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP


Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.

The Career Management Gorilla

There I sat, skimming through Monster job listings. "Out of state, not enough pay, under qualified, over qualified.. Ah ha!" Like it was outlined in glowing neon letters, it jumped out at me. Perfect location, good benefits, looked like it would pay just right.

I clicked on the 'apply now' button with eager glee. I browsed to my job hunting folder and found my resume, jbancroftconnors_resume. Smiling ear to ear I moved my mouse over the submit button. And that's when the smell of ripe banana hit me.

"Yur not gonna send that are you?"

Turning in my seat I looked up at Hogarth. "Of course I am. I'm perfect for this job. Heck it even ties into my old art school background."

Waving his half eaten banana at the screen my resident gorilla grunted, "Yeah but your resume doesn't mention that. And look here, the job is asking for someone who's worked with call centers in Ireland."

I grin cheerfully, "Right! And I've worked with Ireland in my last two jobs!"

"And your resume doesn't say that. Aren't you gonna customize it for this job?"

Sigh… The dreaded resume tailoring gorilla. We all know we should do it. Some of us do it, some of us never do it and others agonize for days to make each and every resume just perfectly right. Two things are a given with resume tailoring. 1- It's a good idea. 2- It's time consuming.

Regular exercise is a good idea too, want to know the last time I hit the gym?

Still, Hogarth had a point. I had fallen into the online application rut. I was using a 'good enough' resume and no cover letter. It's a wonder I got any phone calls (okay so to be fair, I was doing the networking thing and writing cover letters, but I was not customizing my resume).

Knowing I was doing it wrong but also being an efficiency minded project manager I sought a better way of doing things.

Enter the "Career Management Document". Full credit goes to Mike and Mark of Manager Tools. Their "Your Resume Stinks!" and "Accomplishments- Connecting your Resume and Interviews" pod casts gave me the idea for this. In these casts Mark Horstman describes how your resume should never be more than a single page, but your list of job accomplishments are not tied to the actual resume. Create a "Career Management" document (CMD) in which you have all the jobs you've worked. Under each job you list all your notable accomplishments, not just the ones that are current. Every three months you go through your CMD and look at all the jobs. Maybe you just got done with an ugly budget process and you remember that ten years ago you had to fix a budget on short notice. So you go back and update that old job with the accomplishment.

Then for every job you apply for, you go through and pick 3-5 accomplishments that make the most sense. Instead of manually crafting every resume, for every job, you take your 'Chinese menu' and pick what works.

Personally I use Mindmanager, from Mindjet to manage my CMD. I've got a Mind Map with bubbles for each of my jobs, career over view and my professional qualifications. I can export it to a word document, cut out what I don't need and bam! I have a tailored resume.

Here's a sample of what it looks like:

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b128/Welshman_BC/CMDTemplate.jpg

So with my career management gorilla appeased, I hit submit on my next great career. And a few months later, I'm very happy with that new job.

If you are interested in a copy of my MindMap template or want a PDF of the template, just send an email.

So until next time, don't forget to talk to your gorilla.

Joel BC

Veteran, the Project Manager wars

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.

The gorilla with too many hats

"So that said, can you code?"


I look across the interview table. Well okay I look at the telephone, cause I'm in the companies office but the person I'm interviewing with is sitting in his house 20 miles away. But that's another gorilla.


So I look at the phone.


I look down at my resume.


I look at the job description for this job.


Apparently, my interviewer takes my stunned silence for a request for more information. "Cause you see, we're running lean and we need people to do more than one thing. We might have to send you out to do a customer implementation by yourself. So how's your coding?"


Now Hogarth doesn't mind that the guy is on the phone. He's taking advantage of that by taking up the other two chairs in the room. "Welcome to the Teens, dude. If you can't do it all, then you're not good enough. Everyone has to work harder these days. If you can't code, do a balance sheet, fly to Malaysia for the weekend to close a sale and then get back on Monday to make sure the 300 person software roll out is on schedule, then you're no good to them."



Sigh… The "multi-hat gorilla"

Now Hogarth is right, to an extent. 2010 will probably go down as the year of 'do more'. With the global recession we are all being asked to work harder and do more in our jobs. It's part of the downside of the recession and the trend of higher productivity.

I'm all for productivity, but there's a difference between productivity and continuous partial attention. As you might guess, I'm not a fan of the CPA concept. Studies have proven (UCSD Study, MSFT Findings, just to name the first two I Googled) interruptions seriously affect performance. A single 30 second interruption can result in a 15 minute work loss.

I look back at the phone, "I don't code, that's what the engineer is for. My value is in making it so the engineer can focus on his job and not on the surrounding project issues. If you have four engineers working on the project of this size, adding a fifth one is already starting to hit that wall of diminishing return. If you add a dedicated program manager, you can get more productivity from those four engineers, than you would from adding a fifth engineer and expecting one or more of those engineers to also manage the customer relationships, deadlines, certifications, interface with marketing, etc."

"Uh huh…." came the reply from the phone. "So you don't code?"

Some gorillas are just better to let be.

There is value in improved productivity and we're doing more with less is the new norm. But all that said, a good, solid, project manager can make a team run more efficiently than just tossing another engineer on the pile. At least that's what Hogarth and I think.

Joel BC
Veteran, the Project Manager wars
Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

There is no such thing as Career Insurance

"Hogarth, what are you doing?!"


Hogarth looks up from where he's causally perched on the corner of my desk. Holding up a piece of paper he asks, "Did you know your resume is three years out of date?"


"Not now, Hogarth, I have a report to write, then I have a beta planning meeting and tonight I've got to fix the garage door." I shoulder past him, to drop into my chair. "Besides," I say, "this job is nice and stable and I don't have any plans to go anywhere else.


My gorilla blinks at me, "I'm sure the Titanic didn't have any plans to run into an iceberg either."


I pointedly ignore Hogarth and started typing up my meeting minutes.


Hogarth lets out a deep sigh. Sliding off his desk he gives a shrug, "Yeah sure don't mind me, I'm just the 800 pound gorilla in the room." Shuffling off to the far side of the office, he mutters "man my cousin has such an easy gig."


Unable to quell my curiosity I look over, "Cousin?"


Hogarth thumps down in the corner, "Oh yeah, he's got a great gig with AXA Equitable. Getting paid the big bucks to be the 'are you ready for retirement gorilla.' TV Commercials, print, web, you name it. You can watch his videos on the web."




"I'm already saving for retirement, Hogarth. Besides, I'm not getting paid to update my resume or network, I'm getting paid to manage this project. I just don't have time to worry about my resume."


Holding up his watermelon sized hands he says "Oh I'm not gonna talk to you about retirement, I'll send my cousin over to do that, but let me ask you something, do you have life insurance and pay money for it?"


I sigh, "Yes, but…"


"Do you have car insurance and pay money for it?"


"Yes, but…"


"Isn't it true that time is money?"


I let out a deep, resigned sigh, "Yes."

*****************************************

Yes folks, welcome to the 'career management plan' gorilla. It has got to be one of the most prevalent and avoided gorillas of all times. I know I've done it, I've watched friends do it, and enough people are making scads of money to help people with it, that there is no denying that this is one big gorilla.

Now folks, let me just start with saying, I'm not saying anything new. The very nature of gorillas, is that they are not new or ground breaking concepts. They are those things we don't want to face, and are often old and well known.

Michael Auzenne and Mark Horstman have made a business of advising executives and managers on the art of career management. Their Manager Tools podcasts are a must listen for any aspiring executive and a should listen for the rest of us. The November 2009 edition of PMI Network quoted John Challenger, of Challenger, Gray & Christmas when he said, "You should spend 5 percent to 10 percent of your time engaged with organizations and meeting people in your field or industry outside of work." There isn't a job board out there that doesn't advise you to keep your resume current. And if you talk to any successful executives, maintaining their network will be one of the top priorities they list.

Yet, especially in the high tech industry, we task focused professionals all too often bury ourselves in our work, wrapping it around us like a thick blanket of denial. It takes a market upset, a lay off you just escaped or that all frightening appearance of the HR person outside your office who says, "Can I speak with you?", for most of us to even think about anything but our job, the next release, the next project. Time was, at least so I'm told, that your company and your manager were as focused on your success as they were on the success of the company. Now I don't want to cast a blanket aspersion on managers, or even companies, but the hard truth is most companies worry about the company as a whole, or the bottom line and managers are often taking care of their own career insurance.

So as I had Tweeted - "Gorilla Talker Tip #2- There is no life insurance for careers, if you don't manage your career, no one else will."

So here are some tips I've personally found useful, vital and effective. (Again, nothing new, almost everything is something I learned from somewhere else, I'm just the guy talking to the gorilla.)

Listen to the Manager Tools podcasts: I discovered these not long ago and the light that went on, when I started listening, was incredible. I highly recommend "Your resume stinks!", "Building a Network", "How to handle headhunters", and "Contacting Recruiters", but I am personally in the process of listening to everything in their catalog.

• Maintain your network: 500 people in LinkedIn is not a network, it's just a tool. You need to keep in regular contact with your direct network. Set yourself a reminder to contact them at least once a quarter (Horstman calls it the "CTL-SHIFT-K rule", for the keyboard command to create a task in Outlook). On the LinkedIn front, if someone sends you a INMail or request for an introduction, respond! See the next rule.
• Give more than you take: Part of keeping up that network is being ready to give of yourself. Whether it's acting as a reference, sending a job lead someone's way or even more, don't keep score and you'll find it will come back to you.
• Own your own computer!: I've known friends who showed up for work and found the building locked, never to re-open again. I've seen people ushered from their cubes, only to return after IT has removed every piece of technology from the cube. You need your own computer and not just to find that next job. You need a secure place for your contacts, your personal career documents, your private email.
• Maintain a private email address: Don't just have it lying around for a rainy day. Keep it active, check it often, make it a way for people to get in touch with you. It should be professional! No "I_rock@izzy.com", get yourself a nice professional address at a mainstream provider or with your own private, but professional domain. For example jbancroftconnors@yahoo.com or Tom@Masterson.com.
• Point your LinkedIn to an email address you use: How many times have you heard "Oh sorry, I didn't see your invite, I don't check this email very often?" Point your LinkedIn to an active email account. Oh, and while we are on LinkedIn, treat this like a resume. Keep it up to date, keep it active and for heavens sake, keep it in sync with your actual resume (more on resumes below).
• Save your contacts: I've committed, this sin, keeping all my contact data in my work Outlook and then losing it all. In today's internet society, we have no excuse. Once a quarter sync your contacts with your Yahoo, GMAIL, Plaxo, whatever. But to add to that, print it out! Technology is great, but tech fails. Woe betide if you don't follow the 'own your own computer' and you can't even call people. Oh and cell phones don't count, not only do a lot of us use company phones, but they are one of the least reliable places for long term information storage. Sure I have an iPhone, but the contacts are from my Outlook and I've had to reset my phone more than once.
• Keep your resume up to date: Better yet create a "Career management document" (CMD). Depending on who you talk to a resume should be no more than one or two pages. A strong career will have a lot more than two pages of information. You could have half a dozen accomplishment that don't apply to your current work, but if you don't capture them somewhere, you might lose them. Used to be a crack shot at budgets? Guess what, budget skills are in style again. Still remember your accomplishments from 1998? I personally use a Mind Map. Each box is a job I've held and I then have bullets for all the accomplishments I have for that job. When I need a resume, I can pick and pull from each job, to tailor my resume to the position. The other part of this is to maintain it. Once a quarter, 30 minutes a quarter, go through your resume. Not just updating your last job, but the whole thing. Maybe you were working on an integration project and you remembered how you were given a commendation for integration work, ten years ago. Add that to your CMD for that old job. You never know when it will come in handy.

In the end remember the most important rule- Your current job could end at any time, a new once in a lifetime opportunity could come out of the blue, your spouse has to move to Australia, the list goes on. Only one thing is certain…

Change happens.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to talk to a gorilla about a horse.


I'm Joel BC, Gorilla Talker
Want me to talk about your gorilla? Send me an email


*-Special thanks to Mark Nottage, my excellent proofreader and all around skilled tech geek.