Featured
This week’s featured posts.
Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Activate Your Friends, Energize Your Enemies
In highly political situations, your ability to speak eloquently may actually work to your disadvantage. By speaking forcefully about a political objective, you may activate your friends but thoroughly energize your opponents. Your friends may support your objectives but without a great deal of energy. Your opponents, on the other hand, may be thoroughly alarmed by your presentations and highly 
energized to oppose your initiative. You can provoke a strong immune response from your opponents that can swamp even the best laid plans.
This happens regularly in political situations — especially during election campaigns. When one side speaks for something, the other side is motivated to increase the volume when speaking against it. Even if it’s a perfectly logical proposal, the mere fact that one side is pushing it hard may cause the other side to push back even harder.
Does this happen in business situations? All the time. But in business, the immune response is often cloaked. (In politics, the conflict is right out in the open — which may be healthier). If your business is highly political, you may find that speaking strongly for an initiative simply activates your opposition and weakens your position. If you think that’s happening to you, don’t stop speaking for your initiative but be sure to reach out to the opposition to look for common ground and areas of agreement. You need to make the first move — your opponents are not going to come to you. Look for private, face-to-face meetings with your opponents to clear the air and bridge the gap. You can learn more in the video.
By the way, the book I mention in the video is Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate by France E. Lee. You can find it here on Amazon.
Does your e-mail address say you’re a psychopath?
The first thing I know about a person is often their e-mail address. From that small scrap of information, I start building an image of what the person is like. If you think first impressions are important, think about what your e-mail address says about you. Your e-mail address is often the first element of your personal brand.
Some people use their e-mail addresses to identify their hobbies or interests, like bookworm@xyz.com or bikerbob@wxy.com. But I’m usually more interested in the information after the @ sign. If I receive an e-mail from an @aol.com address, I think the sender is over the hill and out of date. If it comes from a cable company (e.g. @comcast.net), I think they’re not very technically astute. If they change cable companies, they’ll have to change their e-mail address as well. How boring!
I thought I might be alone in these perceptions so I was interested to learn that no less an authority than the New York Times‘ David Pogue has similar biases. In an article in yesterday’s Times, Pogue introduced Microsoft’s new e-mail service. In passing, Pogue referred back to Microsoft’s previous service, Hotmail. Pogue writes that, “Even today, a Hotmail address still says ‘unsophisticated loser’ in some circles.”
For these reasons, I was deeply disappointed when Apple tried to shift its e-mail service from @mac.com to @me.com. My e-mail address has long been a variant of myname@mac.com. Part of my personal brand is that I use a Mac. It’s OK with me if people know that. Maybe they’ll think that I “think different”. When Apple changed it to me.com, I was horrified. In my humble opinion, anyone who uses an e-mail address of myname@me.com is self-centered at best or a psychopath at worst. Even if I think “it’s all about me” (and I do sometimes), I don’t want to project it in my personal brand. Thankfully, I can still use @mac.com designation and I hope I always will.
I teach my students that they need to think about their personal brand. It’s important for getting a job or a promotion. Your brand is a combination of how you behave, how you speak, how you dress, and so on. Each of those sends clues about who you are and whether you’d be good teammate or not. When you think about your brand, begin at the beginning — your e-mail address.
Questions & Charisma in The Job Interview
Effective communication can make or break your chances of getting the job you want. That’s the essential point I’ve tried to make in my 
recent postings about job hunting. Studying rhetoric – the art and science of persuasion — is a good first step. Rhetoric doesn’t just help you give a great speech. It can also help you get a great job.
In preparing my get-a-job posts, I read widely and learned a few things myself. Two articles seemed especially relevant, both by Jeff Haden in Inc. magazine. The first helps you prepare the questions you’ll want to ask when your interviewer says, “Do you have any questions you’d like to ask?” Hint: don’t ask when you can take your first vacation. You can find the first article here.
Haden’s second article defines what makes people charismatic. It’s really not about you. It’s about how you treat other people. If you always try to draw attention to yourself, you’ll be perceived as arrogant and self-centered. If you deflect the attention to others, you’ll be perceived as charismatic. Here’s a simple question: how do people feel when they’re around you? Do they feel suffocated because you suck up all the air? Or do they feel positive and enthusiastic because you take them seriously and promote their interests? Haden’s second article gives ten tips on how to be charismatic; you can find it here.
Will Good Grammar Get You a Job?
Good grammar won’t get you a job but bad grammar can prevent you from getting a job. That was certainly my attitude as a hiring manager and many of my colleagues hold similar opinions. We take grammar to be a marker of many other characteristics like intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. If you don’t know (or don’t care) about the difference between your and you’re then we have to wonder, what else don’t you know or care about? Good grammar is fundamental to good communication and good communication is fundamental to business success.
I just found an article by Kyle Wiens that makes this case better than I ever have. It’s posted on the Harvard Business Review Blog (HBR Blog) and titled, “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.” You can find it here.
Writing a Winning Resumé
I’ve read thousands of resumés. Most of them look alike and sound alike. They’re boring and they all run together in my head. Everybody wants to follow the rules of resumé writing … so they just come across as rules followers. That’s fine if you want to work in a rules following organization. However, I don’t want to hire rules followers. I want to hire people who can think differently and come up with insights that I might never find. I think most hiring managers want something similar. So, how do you break through? By not following the rules and by writing an advertisement, not a history lesson. That means you need to stand out and you need to state a benefit. Learn more in the video.
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