View from the Mountain

Finding Your Own Path

There is little doubt that we live in a world where jobs sometimes can disappear with little notice and even less reason.  There are times when today's workplace seems like a minefield.

Even those lucky enough to have a corporate career know that it can end if the cards get reshuffled. Often the stress of wondering if and when a long held job is going to disappear can be almost as bad as the loss of the job itself.

The chances of a career of decades at one company are slim today and maybe not even worth it.  Only a handful of people have the option of ignoring the workplace completely. Yet many of us know that there is something better than hanging onto life in a corporation.

There is actually only one solution that offers a real path to independence.  You have to create your own career.  Sometimes even multiple careers are needed to carve out the income that you need.

Trying to find your way in the business world on your own is little like standing on a dock and looking at unfamiliar waters.  You have to figure out not only where you are going but how you are going to get there.

You might take a kayak from the dock or you might need a skiff.  It is a challenge figuring out what will work if you have never been in the waters.

You also have to know if you are a good enough paddler to get there or how to learn the skills you need very quickly.

The answers to many of the questions that you want to ask before sliding away from the dock are elusive.  Much of what needs to be done relies on faith in yourself and your ability to adapt to situations that are often beyond your control.

All of this takes time and effort and enough money to survive.  You also have to be able to understand when you are headed in the right direction and when you need to turn around and start over.  You might even need to find some new skills or equipment.

Several years ago I wrote about "Dip Thinking" and knowing when to keep trying and when to try something new.

Perhaps a few years later, my thoughts are a little different. Few of us can be the greatest at what we do, but many of us can be very good at what we choose to pursue.  My thoughts on creating your own career are fairly simple.

1. Believe in yourself.
2. Turn your passion into your career.
3. Be willing to do what it takes to be very good at what you do.  If you are not the best, be certain to learn from the best.
4. Welcome criticism and suggestions on how to get better at what you are doing.
5. Promote yourself and your enterprise.  No one else is going to do it for you.
6. Be patient.  It will take time to find the path to success.  The best that you can hope is that you have enough time left to achieve your goals.
7. Add value and solve some needs without harming others.
8. Help others be successful.  The Steve Jobs model does not work for most of us.
9. The journey never ends once you get on the right road.
10. None of this ever gets easy, but eventually it might not be as hard as when you first started.

My true journey perhaps began in the fall of 2011 when I started writing what would turn out to be my second book, The Pomme Company.  It was at that time that I made the decision to completely take the rudder of my own ship.

Much of what I learned since leaving the corporate workd ended up on the pages of the first book that we published in the spring of 2012,  A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide.

However, it took me until my third book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes, before I really hit my stride.

I am currently working on a 2013 update to our "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  I have some great plans for this edition. I have listened to a lot of requests and incorporated many new ideas to make it a travel guide that fits our connected world in ways that can make the book very different from others on the market.

I am hoping this next book is a big step in my journey, but I already know that there will be many others.

A couple of other posts that I have written which relate to this same subject of finding your own way are Lessons Learned Along The Way and Some Advice To My Chidren.

 

 

An Interesting Perspective on Apple

Once you are gone a long time from a company where you worked many years, they become almost like a place where you lived and then moved a way. There are still ties, just not as many.

Just like when you move to place and chose an area for specific reasons like the schools, sometimes you end up working at company for more than just the job. Like many who went to work at Apple in the early eighties, I joined the company because it seemed to be something special.

I even resigned my good job as a sales manager in the hopes that Apple would offer me a spot.  They did and it was an amazing ride as you read in my book, The Pomme Company.

That I and many others left our jobs and some like me took lesser paying ones to work at Apple is a measure of how unique the company was at that time.  We believed that we were changing the world one computer user at a time.

While we were naive, Apple's computers did bring about huge changes in the way we interact with computers and what we could do with technology.  Those first personal computers let us make massive strides in productivity in certain areas.  They also gave us new ways to create content and get information to other people. In a sense they were a revolution and we were part of it.

Sometimes revolutions take you in directions you never imagine. My most recent post, Finding Your Way to Leadership, was sparked by ongoing conversations that I have had with people who worked at Apple and some who are still there. As one of my friends told me after reading the article, real leadership has pretty well disappeared in technology firms.

One of the biggest differences that my former colleagues seem to notice is the lack of trust and vision. Current employees are micromanaged to death and all the companies care about is showing a huge quarterly profit.

This vision of Apple seems to be shared by Mathew Yglesias in his Slate article, David Einhron and Apple's Fear of Failure. This quote from the article really hit home for me because it highlights the huge change that I saw at Apple.

So from my view, the problem with Apple's cash is the reverse of Einhorn's. They're not wasting it aggressively enough. The company's fastidious approach means they're not going to blow $40 billion on trying and possibly failing to bring an autonomous car to market. They're not investing in the creation of original programming the way Netflix is. They're not running near-zero profit margins like Amazon. They're just making lots of money, perhaps because Tim Cook watched The Corporation or read an Introduction to Microeconomics textbook and got it into his head that maximizing profits is what companies do. Which is kind of sad. They're obviously really smart people and I bet they could make some cool stuff—and even come up with some plausible-sounding reasons for doing it—if they would just relax a bit.

The changes that have happened at Apple can be summarized as a company that started out trying to change the world by empowering people with technology to a company dedicated to making money by entertaining people.

I certainly do not blame Tim Cook because this really is not his shift. It was the side of Steve Jobs that many have never noticed.  When he came back to Apple there were two things that he wanted to prove. One was that he could still create products that could change the world and the other was that he could turn a money losing corporation into the world's greatest cash machine.

Steve accomplished both his goals but like Mathew, I am little sad.  Tim Cook is at Apple because he knows how to build very efficient supply chains that make lots of money for a corporation.  He is continuing to do what he knows best.

Unfortunately it is not what some of us want to see from Apple.  The trust to let employees make mistakes which are actually learning experiences is long gone.  The thought to keep moving the technology forward so it makes us more productive has perhaps disappeared. Making something revolutionary has been replaced by making something cool that people will buy just because Apple made it.

Please don't argue with me that iPads make us more productive. iPads and in a sense all tablets are devices to let us consume content not create it.  I'll grant that the smart-phone has made a difference in our lives, but it is still not a device I would use to create content.

As Brian Profitt says, Spin All You Like, Tablets Are NOT PCs, Dammit. Unfortunately I suspect that the next productivity advance will come from another company besides Apple.

Certainly making a better TV is not going to do much for me.  However, I would settle for just one change from Apple.  Could you please just bring back letting the "Escape" key take me back to the library in iPhoto instead of making me push a button in the hopes that I will get the hint and buy an iPad or iPhone so I can be annoyed by iPhoto on a small screen?

You never know which road these revolutions will take, but we can hope. Life and companies are full of surprises.  Two months ago who would have guessed that I would get to know Frank, a great egret from Canada?

If you have thoughts on this article, send me a note. I'll be glad to have a civil discussion.

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Your Way to Leadership

Not Always Blue Sky on the White Oak

I have worked in a number of leadership positions in my life.  You learn a little from each opportunity, but usually there is a moment of awakening that helps you make the step from being a manager to being a real lead

It is a fundamental transition that some people find challenging. Perhaps a little discussion of my leadership moment will bring things into better focus.

The summer of 1993, I was working as a higher education account executive for Apple computer.  I was doing very well in my job.  That year, I was named higher education account executive of the year for Apple.

Being a representative for Apple on college campuses was perhaps one of the most difficult jobs in the technology business.  Apple pretty well invented the higher education business so we had to create the business as we were developing it.  You also ended up being the sole interface between thousands of students, administrators and the company. Sometimes it was like being between a rock and a hard place. To top it off, you probably had very limited resources and the company was expecting tremendous success from you and your sixteen hour days.

That summer I was promoted to higher education district manager for Maryland, District of Columbia and Virginia. I ended up hiring a team of very experienced Apple people who were new to higher ed.  I was in the position less than a year when I picked up people covering North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Going from being someone who had to handle all the details himself to being a manager was a huge challenge.  Yet it did not take me long to figure out that being a manager with his hands in all the details was a fast trip to insanity.

In introducing the new people to many of the large accounts that I had covered so well, the temptation was to keep my hand in the pot and to continue to be involved.

I soon learned the first lesson of leadership is letting go.  I had given these new people accounts to manage.  I had to let them manage the accounts even if there were some things I might have done differently.

I could provide guidance for them but for me to try to manage the accounts after I had already assigned the task to someone else made no sense.  I was just creating more work for myself at a time when I had far more important things to do like leading the other people.

While I might have disagreed with some of the details and tactics being used by my team, I learned that what I might have viewed as efforts which could be improved to match my tastes were actually exceptional efforts in the grand scheme of things. That was especially the case since these efforts were done with minimal involvement from me.

You can still correct people as a leader.  You just have to do it carefully and make sure to not destroy their motivation.

It is a lesson that I never forgot.  When I became director of federal sales for Apple, there were a couple of managers who worked for me and perhaps twenty-three or twenty four people in total.  When we picked up the FOSE show, it was a large project and the temptation was for me to manage it.  I handed it off to a couple of people immediately.  They did a great job, and I did not have to do it.  I never second guessed them and never pulled a piece of the project from them because I thought I could do it better than them.  Actually I was too busy with higher level challenges.  What little time I had to help with the project, I usually spent praising them for their efforts.

The praise for their efforts and fully standing behind whatever your team turns out is exceptionally important when motivating people who are going beyond their traditional job and not rewarded for their efforts.  Praise is often all you have to give them so it needs to be heartfelt and delivered often.  These highly motivated folks were not being paid for their extra efforts so praising them was crucial to getting them to commit to another year’s effort.

You do not get to leadership quickly or easily. It is a journey. Usually you grow into it if you can learn to let go, be appreciative, prioritize, and stay out of the way of the capable people that you have hired for the job.  You need to be the person who carries the bucket of water and makes sure no one interferes with the efforts of the team. Run interference for others, don't try to make all the decisions.

If you second guess your team or correct them when you should be thanking them for their efforts, you will never make it to point where you are a real leader.  On top of it all, you will be worked to death trying to accomplish stuff that other people want to do and can do.  You will have also turned off people who could be helping you.

I have always found it refreshing to look back and see the difference between managing a team and leading one.  Next time you run into someone who is swamped with too much work, pay attention to how they prioritize and delegate to others.  Likely you will find that they have their hand into too many pots that others were already doing a good job of stirring.

I am proud that some of those folks who worked for me that first year went on to being leaders in their own right.

Sometimes words get twisted

Twisted words are especially a hazard when you talk about Apple.

I have been doing some writing and interviews to promote our book, The Pomme Company.  The publicity has greatly helped the rankings and the sales of the book.  As is often said, publicity is all good as long as they spell your name correctly.  Most of us in the web world like to add that we are very happy when we get a link to whatever we are selling.

However, anyone who has done more than one or two interviews will tell you that it is a little like Russian Roulette.  Sometimes it doesn't work out very well.  I remember doing one for Der Spiegel a few years ago and apparently one of the more interesting parts to them was my bald head.  Fortunately the interview was in German and I could just ignore it.  It did get me to stop doing interviews where the only agenda was the one of the person interviewing me.

I am back doing interviews now with the goal of selling books, and it is working.  There are some challenges as you will see from my recent experience.  Talking about Apple always raises the level of passion.  There are still people who believe Apple can do no evil.

The first interview that I did was with Dan Lyons. Dan is the former Fake Steve and author of The Secret Life of Fake Steve Jobs.  I've known Dan for a while, and I have enjoyed his stories.  I actually got to know him when I tried to help him get his Apple laptop repaired.  Apple never did fix his laptop, but like most people who love Macs, he just went out and bought a new one.

Dan was very careful to make certain that what he wrote corresponded to what I was telling him. I was impressed with his thoroughness and attention to detail.  His article, What's It Like To Work For Tim Cook? A Former Apple Sales Exec Dishes, was published on November 9.

Very quickly Yahoo News jumps on the bandwagon and publishes this article, Ex-Apple Employee Attacks Tim Cook: 'He Is Not A Natural Leader,' He Is A 'Lightweight'.  It was done by Jay Yarrow who at the time had not talked to me. His article was based on Dan Lyons article.

Things started moving pretty fast at that point, and I got an email from Greg Sandoval at CNET.  He wanted me to call him on his cell phone.  I called and got him as he was leaving a restaurant.  He said he would call me back in fifteen minutes.  I waited about forty minutes for his call before calling him back to tell him that I had another call at 3:30 PM which I expected to last until 4:00 PM. He said he would call me at 4:05 PM.  I said that was fine.  I finished my other call and waited until 4:30 PM for his return call.  I then sent him an email that I was going for a walk while the evening light was still nice.  I told him I was available in about forty-five minutes.  I'm also a photographer so I hate to miss the afternoon light since I get a lot of inspiration from it.

At 4:35 PM while I was out chasing sunsets, Greg sent me a nice note saying, "I don't want to hold you up. Forgive me, the nature of the job. I'm going to be satisfied with the story I have up. Thanks for calling me back. All the best with the book."  I guess he had gotten tied up with a Pandora story.  However, the result was that I never talked to him about my comments to Dan.

That afternoon Greg did publish an article, Former Apple sales exec says Tim Cook is tech 'lightweight'.  I did get my book link, but there are things that I would have corrected in the article.

While this was happening I got a contact from Jay Yarrow who had done the earlier Business Insider article and wanted to talk to me on Friday for a follow-up article.  Friday morning Jay and I talked for over an hour, and he published this article, Tim Cook Is One Of The Three People That Saved Apple. I got my name spelled right, but I am still working on the book link and understanding the last sentence. 

However, that's okay because not long after that I noticed that Forbes had picked up the buzz and included a link to the book in their Apple Loop article. 

The really interesting thing is that all these articles are at the end of the line based on one source or me more correctly.  Most of the information could be gleaned from my book or probably from some of the articles that I had on-line at my Applepeels blog for much of the last eight years. Many of the posts were pulled down in the summer of 2011 in preparation for our book, but there are still 47 of the original 405 posts on-line. A few of the most recent posts have a link to my Apple history.

Some of the folks who criticized my comments insisted that I probably never met Tim Cook. They certainly hadn't taken the time to read my book or even visit my website where you can still figure out that I knew Tim Cook.   They made wild assumptions without trying to get things right with easily accessible information. 

I know Dan Lyons has read most of my book, but I pretty sure none of the rest of the reporters has taken the time to do that.  I guess it is a little bit of the nature of Internet reporting, that speed is more important than research or getting things right.  My old friend RJ who was an editor at the Mount Airy News would be horrified.  He had great respect for the facts and strived to get everything right.

I hope to be writing more articles with Dan Lyons at readwrite and I expect some follow-up from Jay Yarrow. Still the truth is that it is sometimes hard to get across what you want someone to understand in a phone interview.

An example is the quote from me in Yarrow's second article, "Jobs came up with all the brilliant products, Anderson, who was the CFO, figured out how to pay for parts before people even bought the products, and Cook reorganized the company's logistics."

What I said was slightly different.  I said Fred Anderson figured out how for Apple to get paid for its products before Apple paid for the parts.  It is a small but significant difference.  It was the secret to making Apple a money machine because customers were giving Apple money for computers and Apple hadn't even paid for the parts of the computers that they had sold.

I will be talking more about why I think Tim Cook has a ways to go before he tames the Apple beast.  Of most concern to me is that I don't see a passion for technology, but that is a long post.

I also have a list of things which I just don't think make sense if Apple is going to continue to be known as the company where the tiny details matter.  I'm only going to mention one, and it is the location the SD (photo memory card) slot on the new iMac.  It is behind that lovely 27" screen if you buy the top end system.  Think about reaching around that screen to put your SD card in the computer, and let me know if you can come up with a real reason why you would want to do that. 

Jay Yarrow suggested Apple only wants people to use iPhones to take pictures.  Still I think it is a stupid location for an SD slot which is something that I use a lot, but more on that later.

Why Do I Have to Lose for You to Win?

A life spent in a number of unusual but meaningful pursuits has left me wondering how our society ended up embracing the concept that for one person to win another person has to lose.

I realize that as a society we are infatuated with sports where normally one team wins while another team loses.

Certainly there are people who embrace the idea that life is like a game with only losers and winners.  The concept of life with only winners and losers might unfortunately be the norm in our society.   However, I am really proud that I wasn't brought up that way.  Life is a lot more complex than a sporting event.

There are three things that I learned well when I was growing up.

The first was that winning at any cost is not worth it.  What good does it do to win if you abandon all of your principles just for the sake of winning? If the victory costs you your soul, it is a hollow accomplishment.  We all know people who will do anything to win.  They are among the most dangerous people in our world.

The second thing I learned is that it is far more rewarding to help someone else achieve a victory than it is to have a victory yourself.  If I help you win then in a certain sense I have also won.

The third life lesson I picked up is that encouraging words are far more effective in motivating people than threats or embarrassment.  In the same line of thought leading by example is far more effective than hollow words.

Ten years of running a farm and close to thirty years in high technology have given me lots of opportunity to observe the truth of these lessons.

In my last years at Apple when I was just another moth circling the bright light of Cupertino, I got to see first hand that many people were willing to push anyone even friends into the light in order to not only succeed but just to survive a while longer at the edge of the light.

That a person would work so hard to see others fail amazed me.  Even more astonishing is how some would drop any pretense of ethical behavior just to put a few extra dollars in their pocket even at the expense of others who were in theory their friends.

My sales career was a very successful one, but I take more pride in the awards that I helped other people achieve than I do with the ones that I achieved myself.

There is a great sense of personal satisfaction in helping someone reach a goal that they once might have thought unachievable. I still remember with pride the many team members whom I got to see stand up on the stage and accept national awards.

A recent sermon by Reverend Ben Burrows at Cape Carteret Presbyterian Church reminded me of the power of words.  In my days as a manager at Apple my door was always open.  Many evenings I worked hard to pick the right word to help a person move forward positively instead of falling backwards into negativity. Even with those efforts, I'm sure that within the Apple pressure cooker that I made my share of mistakes in saying the wrong thing to people.

Unfortunately motivating people with positive words was not the preferred way at Apple.  I will long remember the humiliation heaped on my team and myself at the national sales conference in 2003.  My team had done an exceptional job selling product and yet at the last minute we were blamed for the company's inability to ship products to our customers.  It was a cheap shot designed to undermine the success of our team which had been named team of the year the previous year. 

That we went on to have an exceptional year really didn't matter because the goal was to make us look bad in front of our peers during the one time of the year we all got together.  Unfortunately there are those whose only pleasure comes from knocking others down.

Apple wasn't the only company that I saw embrace the attitude that someone has to lose before someone else can win.  I actually once had a CEO of a company tell me that the only way to get salespeople to do anything is to threaten them.  It was probably the most misguided statement that anyone ever spoke to me in the business world.

Sadly the idea of needing a loser before someone can be a winner has also penetrated business dealings.  Even real estate transactions have become hostile events where buyers seem to relish how poorly they can treat sellers.

At one time people could have a handshake business transaction where both parties treated each other fairly.  Now days, a twenty page written contract will not prevent people from trying to push their edge over another person.

While there is little that I can do about a world that seems to be willing to accept the idea of winner take all, I plan to stay close to my upbringing.  To the best of my ability I will try to live a life dedicated to the double win which I heard articulated by Denis Waitley long ago.  If I help you win, then we have both won.

I am fortunate that there are places filled with peace where I can retreat to help me maintain my dedication to the double win while keeping me from falling victim to the idea that for me to win, you have to lose.

That I have recovered from the challenges of a long career at a winner-take-all company like Apple is a credit to the wonderful healing powers of North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.