Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Writing a Winning Cover Letter
A cover letter should jump out of the envelope and bite the reader on the neck. To do that, you need to write advertising copy instead of business jargon. What’s your headline? What would grab the reader’s attention? What would make you stand out from the stack of letters that hiring managers receive each day? Just like advertising, you can use words or you can use design (or both) to stand out from the crowd. You can say things that are unexpected. You can use designs that are unusual. But however you approach the task, you need to accomplish three things: 1) connect your letter and resumé to a job; 2) state a clear benefit that you can bring to that job; 3) set expectations for a follow up. It’s not brain surgery but it’s not just business as usual either. Learn more in the video.
The Cloud Comes to Your Car
During the week you drive to work at fairly low speeds in stop-and-go traffic. You don’t need a lot of power but you would like to improve your fuel efficiency. On the weekend, however, you hook your big boat to the same car and trailer it to the beach. Now you want more power even if that means poorer gas mileage.
What to do? Traditionally, you might buy a car or truck that could handle the heaviest load you expected to carry. For hauling a boat, that means a big, powerful car. During the week, as you commute to work, much of that power is unused and wastes a lot of gasoline.
As the cloud comes to your car, you’ll have an alternative. Think of today’s cars as complex software systems mounted on wheels. You can “tweak” the software to get more power or more fuel efficiency or some other characteristic. As cloud computing evolves, your car will communicate with “horsepower servers” that can set and re-set the performance characteristics of your car. Need more fuel efficiency? Just send some instructions to the cloud and get your software tweaked. Want to set a speed limit for your son? Just ask the “speed server” to set a limit whenever he logs in as the driver.
Cars are becoming computers. We can already see this in a crude way with the “sports” setting available in many cars. Push the “sports” button and you get stiffer suspension and slightly more horsepower. Turn it off and you get a cushier ride and better fuel economy. Soon, we’ll see different settings for different drivers and, yes, you will have to log in. We’ll also be able to tweak the software into a virtually unlimited number of combinations.
Cloud cars could bring us more convenience and, potentially, much better fuel efficiency as you match performance to changing requirements. It can also create some nasty security concerns. What happens if you car gets a virus? More on that in the coming weeks.
Webcrazy – Newsweek Catches Up
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the internet as a likely cause of dementia. Today, I saw an article from Newsweek titled, “Is the Web 
Driving Us Mad?” I don’t want to brag (well, maybe I do) but you heard it here first.
Prediction Markets and Obamacare – Intrade Got It Wrong
In my classes on strategy, I like to discuss how to prepare for the future. I’m careful to say that nobody can predict the future (though we often think we can) but we can prepare for it. In class, we look at various ways to think about the future, including scenario planning and prediction markets.
Prediction markets operate much like sports betting “lines”. In sports betting, the bookie simply wants to divide bettors into two equal camps. The amount bet for a team to win should equal the amount bet for the same team to lose. If the line is “Team A wins by 7 points” and too much money accumulates on one side, then the line moves up or down to even out the two sides. No matter which team wins, the bookie pays off the winners from the losers’ bets and keeps the service charge, known colloquially as the “vig”.
Prediction markets work essentially the same way, except you’re betting on the likelihood that something will happen or not happen. What’s the likelihood that Republicans will capture the Senate in the November election? What’s the probability that Greece will exit the euro before the end of the year? A number of prediction markets exist, especially in Britain where they seemed to first gain popularity. I tend to consult Intrade, which is probably the most popular prediction market in the United States.
Until recently, Intrade had a great track record in predicting political events in the U.S. It predicted, for instance, that the Republicans would not win the Senate in 2010, even as a number of pundits predicted exactly the opposite. This week, however, Intrade made a spectacularly wrong prediction. It suggested that there was a 75% probability that the Supreme Court would invalidate the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
So, if you can’t trust the crowd, whom can you trust? Should we turn back to the pundits? The New York Times says experts may be a better source for confidential, closely held decisions. Bloomberg points out that this is not the first time that Intrade got it wrong. Additionally, the blogosphere went wild — just google “Intrade got it wrong”.
What does all this mean? Perhaps it puts us back to the original point: you can’t predict the future, you can only prepare for it. By the way, as of this morning, Intrade says there’s a 56.2% chance that Barack Obama will be re-elected. Anybody want to place a bet?
Tips on Business Writing
I returned to academia last fall as an adjunct professor at the University of Denver. I teach within University College which provides professional and continuing education within the larger university. Most of my students are in their 30s or even 40s and many of them work within IT organizations. By and large, they know current enterprise technologies better than I do. They’re now returning to school to study for a Master’s degree that will help them move into management. That’s where I come in — I teach courses on how to manage IT processes, functions, and portfolios. I also teach the Capstone seminar where students demonstrate that they can take all that they’ve learned in their Master’s courses and use it to solve a problem in our profession.
I love working with my students both online and in the classroom. As is often the case, I probably learn more than they do. What surprised me, however, was the relative lack of writing skills among my students. They can write excellent Java code but they sometimes struggle with expressing their more abstract thoughts in written form. To help remedy this situation, I’ve written a six-page primer on effective business writing. It’s proven popular among my students and I thought you might like to read it as well. You can find the .pdf file here. If you find it useful, please feel free to pass it on.
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