Audios

Audio

Being Entrepreneurial in A Non-Entrepreneurial Environment

From a talk given in 2014 on Being Entrepreneurial in A Non-Entrepreneurial Environment.

Being an entrepreneur in a non-entrepreneurial environment can be very challenging. It’s not an impossible situation; but first, you must first understand your environment.

The key to success, is meeting people where they are.

You’re not going to move mountains, or influence people, or be a tremendous change agent, if you don’t understand the facts on the ground… if you don’t understand what your starting points are.

You can be a visionary, you can have great ideas, you can have all the deal flow in the world; if you don’t have a receptive audience that understands the value proposition that you’re offering, it’s a non-starter.

If you want your solutions, your ideas, to grow and prosper, you have to plant [them] in fertile ground.

And that fertile ground comes – first – from understanding the problems that exist with your current workforce, with your current working base, and moving to address those; then, all the great entrepreneurial ideas you have will find some sustainability in the long term.

Go, and be you.

Audio

Trusting Your Gut

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Recently, I was going back over some old blog posts, and came across an unusually prescient observation that I made in June of 2008.

That summer, my family and I were preparing a move to Orlando, FL, from Nashville, TN.

On Memorial Day, the family and I drove down to Orlando, where we noticed that the traffic on I-75 was extremely light for a holiday weekend. Even, abnormally light.

We spent the next few days at Disney parks – and we noticed that all the parks were sparsely attended, at what should have been the beginning of peak tourist season. We never had to wait longer than 10 minutes, for any ride in any park, across 3 days of park hopping. Unheard of.

We had the same experience at our resort pool, and at the resort restaurants. No crowds. During peak summer.

Having lived in Orlando previously (well, Celebration, FL), we were used to the summer peak rush of tourists. But the uncanny lack of tourists that Memorial Day Weekend reminded me of another time – the time following the Post-9/11 crash in tourism in Central, FL.

In hindsight, knowing now what would happen just a few short months later – the beginning of the “Great Recession” –  I probably should have listened more closely to what my gut was telling me; something strange was happening in the economy.

But who could have anticipated the precipitous events of September 2008? Apparently, I noticed something. And did nothing.

We often talk ourselves out of taking action, by ignoring what’s happening all around us. Sometimes we do this out of denial, or a lack of sufficient information to act responsibly. And sometimes, we just can’t believe what our senses are telling us.

Acting on feelings, in the absence of data, can be an extremely dangerous personality trait. But learning to trust your “gut instincts” can also mean the difference between thriving, and simply surviving.

Looking back, I wish I had been more receptive – and proactive – to what I was noticing. All around me.

Go, and be you.

Audio

Surviving Professional Conferences

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I’ve accumulated more than a few lanyards. Eaten tons of bland conference food. And sat through my share of presentations – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Professional conferences are simply a necessary career evil. But, great ideas and collaborations are born through chance hallway meetings and after hours events.

Surviving the travel, inconveniences, disconnection, and cost of attending conferences can be a very close run thing. Conferences can be tremendously worthwhile – if you put in the work.

For Organizers:

  • Leave ample time between sessions for networking. Many conferences – especially academic symposia – tend to cram too many sessions into too little time – with little to no time for sessions to complete, questions to be asked, or networking to occur.
  • Make event particulars – date, time, venue, transportation, accommodations – easy to find. Corollary – every sizeable event should either have a conference app, or a responsive site, that allows participants to connect with other attendees, view the agenda, plan sessions they’ll attend – and provide feedback.
  • Have an easy way to find, and get, all presentation slides shown at the conference. This is a challenge at most conferences I’ve ever attended.

For Presenters:

  • Plan for stuff to go wrong. Because it will.
  • Please don’t read your slides, word for word.
  • If you can’t read a slide, don’t show it. Include those slides online, for later consumption.

For Attendees:

  • You’re there at cost to someone (you or your company). Make the effort to make connections, and to engage.
  • Mine the transitions between sessions for conversations, and just plain ol’ serendipity. This is where the real conference discoveries happen – outside the ballroom, in the hallway.

Professional conferences can indeed be a drag. You can also discover amazing people, and great ideas. You just have to do more than simply be present.

Go, and be you.

Audio

Confrontation

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Excerpts from a talk I gave in 2014, on “Confrontation” – DJH

You can approach confrontation as a learning opportunity, as a way to express why expectations don’t match up.

When we know we’re going into a confrontational situation, go into it with some intentionality, go into it knowing what you wish to express as your point of view, and what your desired outcome is – from the get-go. That way, both sides will at least know that there is some sort of target, as opposed to dwelling upon the aspects of the confrontation itself – something I call “arguing over how you’re arguing.”

You need to find common ground – if at all possible – and try to lay those out, before you get into the details of what the confrontation is [going to be].

You’re never going to agree, 100%, with everyone around you; they’re not going to agree with you.

But, if you go into any type of unpleasant engagement, unpleasant confrontation… if you have your facts on your side, that you can detail, that will allow the other side to be able to look at your point of view, look at your feelings, and ascertain whether you’re even having the same conversation.

Sometimes, you’re not having the same conversation… and realizing that, will actually resolve the conflict.

Sometimes pointing out your “facts on the ground” will illuminate facts unknown to the person to whom you’re talking, and will bring them around as well.

And, sometimes you’ll just come out and understand that you totally misread the situation… and it’s time for you to adjust your tactics.

Confrontation can be very healthy… it can also be destructive.

Try to go into it with a desired outcome, stating what your desired outcome should be, with an attitude that you will obtain a positive outcome… and not thinking that “I am going to destroy this person.”

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The Way Things Get Done

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In every organized group or enterprise, there is a chain of command, or at least, some loosely defined structure that is supposed to determine how decisions are to be made, and how authority is to be granted for doing the work of the organization.

Sometimes this structure is described in complex organizational charts, with layers and layers of reporting, tracing out the lines of power. Perhaps in your group it works differently. Small companies tend to be much more horizontal and flat, with authority being more autonomously localized.

And understanding the dynamics within Family owned operations are enough for a series of articles, all their own.

Regardless of the type of organization you run, or find yourself working within, there is the publicized or “official” way things are supposed to happen.

And – there is the way that things really happen. The way things get done.

Look around your company. Without thinking too hard, I bet all of you can come up with 1, 2, or 3 people who are absolutely vital when things need to be done, when real influence is needed. Maybe this person is the administrative assistant to a powerful exec. Or the old timer, who knows where all the bodies are buried.

You really come into your own within an organization when you start to understand the difference between the stated lines of power within your company, and the actual, unofficial, networks of influence. And more importantly, you start to be truly effective, when you understand how to leverage these informal networks to the good of your enterprise, and to the good of your career.

The risk in using these informal – and almost always unofficial – networks is that you will be in danger of Stepping on Toes. Jumping Rank. Speaking out of Turn. Being out of Line.

Fortune favours the bold. And the bold don’t sit around, waiting for that invitation to be awesome.

Go, and be you.

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Technical Debt

If you’ve been a developer for any significant amount of time, you’ve run across the concept of “Technical Debt.”

Technical Debt is nothing more than the eventual consequence of every design decision you’ve put into a codebase.

At the end of the day, we all have to ship our projects; we all have to deliver a product.

Technical debt represents the amount of work, at any given point in the project plan, to finish your project, and make it deliverable.

If we’ve made poor refactoring practices part of our design process, if we have paid too little attention to infrastructure design, if we have made a bet – a poor bet – on a software tool, or a software language, or a software platform – all that goes into building up your technical debt.

Now, when you look at large scale projects that have failed (when they don’t fail for lack of vision, or lack of project management), the next most visible cause is trying to pay down too much technical debt at any given time.

So, when you see a version going from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, typically what is happening during those transition periods is the paying down of technical debt; refactoring modules, redesigning software, redeploying platforms.

Technical debt can be manageable, when taken in small bites.

In order to minimize the impact of technical debt on your project, you need to have good testing practices, you need to have good design practices, you need to have good infrastructure practices, and you need to have good refactoring practices in place.

It’s an ongoing process. You don’t incur all of your technical debt overnight, all in one fell swoop – and you shouldn’t expect to pay technical debt all at one time.

Go, and be you.

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Residential Liberal Arts Colleges: Something’s Gotta Give

Plenty of people will gladly tell you that higher education is broken. That a college degree is unnecessary. And, that college is not preparing students for the job market, nor for life.

Perhaps some, or even all, of these statements are true.

What is undeniably true, is that college is expensive.

Yesterday, I described the elements of the collapse of Sweet Briar College: a school with a declining market of students, the inability to borrow money and pay down debt, and an endowment hog-tied with restricted funds.

Sweet Briar is not an outlier. More schools than not are in a similar condition, coming off a decade-long arms race of new dorms and facilities, new amenities, and substantial new bond debt.

What can small, residential colleges, particularly liberal arts colleges, do then, to fiscally survive, and remain true to the precepts of academic excellence, academic freedom, and the pursuit of knowledge, for knowledge’s sake?

Colleges will have to change. And they will have to change in ways that will make many inside – and outside – the academy uncomfortable.

Here are ideas that can really move the needle, financially, and still afford a quality liberal arts learning experience. All it takes is vision, and courage.

  • Offer three-year Bachelor’s degrees. This idea alone will drive the cost of college down 25%, by definition.
  • Ditch the high-list price / heavy-discount model of pricing. True market, apples-to-apples comparisons can then be made, based on ROI, and not prestige.
  • Do away with Sports programs. Saving substantially on facilities, travel, and staffing costs.
  • Accommodate non-traditional learners. Exploit the market beyond 18-22 year olds. Who have actual money to spend.
  • And, most radical of all – Do away with the residential model, altogether.

Someone will step up, and be the first to implement one or more of these measures – and rightfully be labeled a Visionary. Most likely, they will also be fired.

But they will still be right.

Go, and be you.

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The Residential Liberal Arts Elephant in the Room

This Spring, Administrative Officers across the country got to speak to their nervous boards and alumni, to allay fears that their schools wouldn’t be the next Sweet Briar College (which indicated it would be closing at the end of the Summer 2015 term, after precipitously deciding – over a single weekend – to shutter the 114 year old women’s college).

What little is known of the decision to close Sweet Briar is troubling to many liberal arts schools. The barely unspoken fear: Is this us in a few years?

Sweet Briar is an extremely small school: only 513 students. The school has an endowment of $84 million dollars – which isn’t substantially different from many other small residential colleges – but with most of these funds being restricted. Their bond rating was downgraded from “stable” to BBB “negative” by S&P, and reportedly the school hasn’t enough usable cash to pay down debt. And, while their discount rate (the rate representing what students really pay vs. the stated list price) has been rising, there are other small schools with even higher discount rates.

Current trends are against righting the ship. Single-sex colleges are less attractive to students, students are less and less attracted to bucolic liberal arts campuses located in the middle of nowhere, and incoming students are more demanding of amenities and facilities. If you can’t attract students, can’t borrow money to upgrade facilities, and you can’t pay down debt, your options are severely limited.

Is Sweet Briar College the “canary in the coal mine?”

For a certain type of residential college experience, yes. Yes, it is.

In tomorrow’s cast, we’ll discuss possible solutions, and the headwinds that lie ahead for the residential liberal arts college experience, as currently constructed.

Change will come – the question is, will small residential colleges innovate, or abdicate.

Go, and be you.

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Pitching? Start Here.

I work with PR people and reporters all the time. They are an essential part of messaging, for my own personal “brand”, and for communicating what I do on the job.

In the past, I have worked with extremely talented PR folks. And, I have also worked with firms that barely qualify as professionals.

Last year, I endured one of the worst PR interactions in my career. I was contacted by a PR firm – new to me – but now representing a trusted and key vendor that we were very happy with – a vendor with whom I had worked previously on other PR successful initiatives.

The new PR firm reached out to me by email, with a suggested time to call, a name of a person to whom I was to speak, and a list of topics we would discuss. All good to that point.

At the agreed upon time, no call. No explanation. I had blocked out the hour, but started working on something else. When the call did come, later that afternoon, the person on the other end was not the person I was expecting, didn’t know my name, the name of my organization, and didn’t know the first thing about us.

Now, without publicly trying to embarrass anyone in particular, let me offer the following tips for a successful interaction:

  • Call when you say you are going to call
  • Know my name
  • Know who I work for
  • Know why you are talking to me
  • Don’t send someone in your place, unannounced
  • Have your questions prepared ahead of time

Entrusting key customer stories to second-rate PR is a recipe for disaffection, disengagement – and disaster for your relationship.

Don’t outsource your relationship management.

That is, unless you don’t care about the long term prospects of keeping your customers.

Go, and be you.

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Even if it’s Obvious: Ask

I recently recounted a story about a project I completed at a prior job.

We had spent months designing a student teleconferencing lounge, complete with state-of-the-art codecs, microphones, cameras, and control interfaces.

Months spent meeting over the logistics of working with A/V vendors, electricians, and building contractors, getting people working on their part of the project, on time and at the right time.

We met regularly with our finance people, to make sure we were on track and on budget.

We met throughout the project with the people who would be using the space, to make sure all of the elements were going to meet their need, and that all of the elements going into the space met the stated intention of the room.

Finally, we outfitted the room with a wonking huge flat-panel display, to finish the room setup.

The day came to turn up the equipment, check out the networking, and test everything in the setup.

The codec worked beautifully. The sound was phenomenal. The microphones picked up every nuance in the room. The control interfaces were intuitive, and precisely what we described to our A/V vendor. Check. Check. Check.

Someone asked: “Where is the control for Basic Cable TV?”

Awkward Silence.

Dozens of people involved in the process. Months of planning. Detailed oversight throughout.

And yet, no one had thought to ask to install cable TV. In a student lounge. With a TV that covered the side of a barn.

No one – especially myself – thought to ask the most elemental of questions, concerning function over form.

Fortunately, we were able to easily correct the issue, and had basic cable installed in short order.

The only real casualty was our embarrassment. And, a little “stupid tax” we paid.

Even if the question seems obvious: Ask.

Go, and be you.