Bill Stewart dies at age 59

Bill Stewart dies at age 59

RIP Bill Stewart —  You will be missed!

Nail the “Tell Me About Yourself” Job Interview Question!

The “tell me about yourself” job interview question isn’t just a warm up question, but, as with the other questions, a chance to sell yourself as the perfect candidate for the job. Prepare your best answer with this three-part statement approach.

The Personal Branding Blog recommends you craft your answer to include a summary of your career history (one sentence), an example of one career accomplishment (one or two sentences), and a summary of what you want next in your career that’s relevant to the position at hand (one or two sentences).

Here’s the example given:

“I am a chemical engineer with eight years of experience, four which were in process engineering at Clorox working on improving plant productivity and four in specialty resin chemical sales where I help customers develop new products that improve their competitiveness in the marketplace. (Part One)

“Recently, through networking, I learned of a company that had great products except for their concrete coating line. I knew that we had a resin that would enable the company to develop a faster drying concrete coating, thereby improving the company’s ability to compete more effectively in their marketplace. I called on the decision-makers, got their interest, worked with R&D and helped them develop a product line that resulted in $2 million in new sales for the company in the first year, which meant $400K in new sales for us. (Part Two)

“For the next step in my career, I would like to be with a larger firm with more resources so that I can continue to drive business and grow sales for both the company and my customers in a wider variety of applications. Once I have proven myself and earned the right to get promoted, I would like to use my skills to lead and develop a sales team.” (Part Three)

Note that the answer is targeted to the job, not a personal biography—because hiring managers don’t really care where you grew up. What matters most is how you’ll contribute to the company.

***** Thanks John for the contribution to our blog!!! — Here is the link for people that are interested…it’s a great article and The 212 Group would like to give recognition to the author: — http://lifehacker.com/5911124/nail-the-tell-me-about-yourself-job-interview-question-with-this-three+part-answer *****

When Choosing a Job, Culture Matters!

Some organizations will excite you. They’ll stimulate your success and growth. Others will be stressful. They may lead you to quit before you’ve accomplished much or learned what you hoped to. With the pressure (or excitement) of finding a new job, it’s all too easy to pursue a job opportunity or to accept an offer with only a hazy view of how the institution really operates. The path to an institution you’ll like is to investigate the culture you’re thinking of joining before you accept the position.

Sean (name has been changed) is a master at this. He pursued a job offer at a Fortune 500 company to be the first Chief Administrative Officer (CAO). He was well-qualified, presented himself well, and got the offer. He’d been competing with capable people. He was proud he’d “won the contest.”

The next step was a return visit, after which he’d decide to accept the offer. Sean had already learned a lot about the company’s businesses and some things about the organization. His priority now was culture and how the new position might fit: “I asked people, ‘What are you excited about? What are you proud of? Who are your close friends in the company? How does the group function together?'” Sean learned things like who the heroes were, what made them successful, and what his biggest challenges and opportunities would be in the job. The different people he met with were learning from his questions. It was almost like he already worked there, and they were jointly determining how to make the new role successful.

Surprisingly, Sean turned down the offer. The new role was a misfit in the company’s culture.

As he learned more about the company, Sean questioned how he’d be viewed as the first CAO in a company where everyone else focused on bottom-line results. It was a highly performance-driven environment with lots of business units. Corporate staffs were secondary.

“I asked how they’d keep score on me, how they’d really know I was making a difference,” he said. “We never got to satisfactory answers to that question. They weren’t hiding anything. This CAO position was a new one, and they didn’t really know.”

Sean was concerned that this new position wouldn’t fit in the company’s culture, that he wouldn’t really be accepted, and that it wouldn’t be a springboard to the line job that he really wanted after two or three years as CAO. He might have made it work, but why take the risk?

It’s not uncommon for job seekers to enter organizations without understanding the culture and come away disappointed. When considering a new job, be sure to investigate the institution’s culture. Consider these questions to guide you:

1. What should I learn? Understand the organization’s purpose — not just what they say they’re doing, but also how their purpose leads to decisions and what makes them proud. Learn how the organization operates. For example, consider the importance of performance, how the organization gets things done, the level of teamwork, the quality of the people, how people communicate, and any ethical issues.

Except for ethical issues, there’s no absolute standard of what’s best in organizational culture. Different purposes and different organizational features can be more or less appealing to different people. When you understand how the potential employer operates, you’ll need to consider how well that matches your goals. Your target organizational culture is an important part of your aspirations.

2. How should I learn? Read everything you can find about the institution, but read with a critical eye. Institutions have formal vision statements, and they often mention cultural topics in other public reports, but these documents are written with a purpose in mind. Independent writers take an independent perspective. They can be more critical, but they can miss details and get things wrong.

Discuss culture with people in the organization. You’ll talk to people in the interviewing process, of course. But you may learn different things if you meet others there who aren’t involved in your recruiting process. Also talk to people outside the organization who know it — customers, suppliers, partners, and ex-employees. Their different experiences with the institution will affect their views, so ask about situations where they’ve seen the culture in action.

3. When should I learn? It’s hard to learn about culture at an early stage in your search. But your impressions can guide you to target some institutions and avoid others.

Culture may come up in job interviews, although it may be complicated to do much investigation when you’re trying to sell yourself. People sometimes worry that discussing culture might make people uncomfortable and put a job offer at risk. The culture topic is certainly not off-base, and it is necessary to know for future growth in the company. Hiring managers should expect it. Whether it’s in interviews or after you have an offer, you’ll do best if your questions show you’re learning rapidly about the organization, taking the employer’s perspective, and beginning to figure out how to succeed there. Culture questions can cast you in a positive light. Sean’s line of questioning confirmed the CEO’s judgment to hire him, even if Sean didn’t like the answers.

What’s your view of how culture affects the job search? Has culture played a part in how you choose your future employer?

This Blog was written by:

Bill Barnett

Bill Barnett led the Strategy Practice at McKinsey & Company and has taught career strategy to graduate students at Yale and Rice. He now is applying business strategy concepts to careers.

May The 4th Be With You!

May The 4th Be With You!

Is Starting a Business an Art or a Science?

Business as Art
Fact: Entrepreneurship is an irrational pursuit. Founding a company–much less one that could “change the world”–entails insane amounts of risk, ridiculously low chances of success and zero work-life balance.

Nevertheless, the value of risk-taking is incalculable, insists Steve Blank, professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, who pioneered the Lean LaunchPad course that the National Science Foundation adopted for its new incubator boot camp, I-Corps. Blank started a total of eight technology companies–two of them massive failures, one that set him up for life–before turning his attention to the next generation of visionaries, to whom he’s been extolling the virtues of embracing his particular brand of irrationality.

Why? Well, Blank says, illogical ideas are how society achieves progress.

Every great entrepreneur, from Richard Branson to the late Steve Jobs, made decisions that seemed crazy to the rest of us. But those decisions did eventually change the world. And almost every great entrepreneur, when asked to share the secret behind such success, chalks some of it up to “gut instinct.” (Seriously, check out their quotes.)

“It’s a survival trait,” says Blank, who believes that entrepreneurs are wired to think differently and to see things most people don’t, so they should be encouraged to act on their instincts. In fact, he maintains that a good chunk of what people call gut instinct is really a mesh of experience and a data-driven way of thinking about things. “Entrepreneurial brains are like full-time pattern recognizers,” he explains. “People attribute radical decisions to their guts, but there is actually a lot of hard thinking and information processing that goes on subconsciously before there’s a pattern match.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean they always get it right–quite the opposite, in fact. Blank says 90 percent of entrepreneurial ventures fall prey to “noise and hallucination,” but the impact of the remaining 10 percent is so valuable that it warrants setting up an environment in which more entrepreneurs can thrive.

“Ultimately, entrepreneurship is more of an art than a science,” he declares, comparing the revolutionary beauty of Facebook and Google to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony­­ or Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Makes sense. Starving artists and budding entrepreneurs always did have a lot in common.

Business as Science
Not so fast, says Kay-Yut Chen, principal scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. When it comes to starting a business, he proposes taking a more methodical approach.

Trusting your gut sounds great, says Chen, co-author of Secrets of the Money Lab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business, but if entrepreneurs are indeed irrational, it stands to reason that their instincts can lead them astray. Chen’s proposal: more science. Besides, he says, from a numbers perspective, it’s only logical that if enough people are out there pumping resources and energy into entrepreneurial pursuits, good things will happen.

“Think of an investment portfolio,” he says. “There are methods of managing risk and increasing efficiency, but you cannot get away from the fundamental fact that you need to diversify for the overall portfolio to win.”

If the underlying objective is for entrepreneurs to drive progress in society, then it’s important to tweak and test the system to get better results, faster. The prevailing view among behavioral economists like Chen is that if people understood their mental limitations as well as their physical ones, they could design products and companies more efficiently. Indeed, if people are irrational, then instinct can certainly lead them astray.

“There isn’t enough emphasis on science and analytics at startups,” he says, noting that once entrepreneurs are aware of irrational behavior–theirs or their customers’–they can make smarter decisions in every aspect of business operations.

For instance, you might think customers will appreciate more choices or features. However, Chen says, many studies have shown that when there is too much variety, people become paralyzed by the options, and often walk away without making a purchase. Knowledge like that can have important implications on marketing and product development.

A more scientific approach can even help answer bigger “gut” questions, such as when to call it quits if things aren’t going well. Chen notes that entrepreneurs often feel a sense of pride and attachment to their companies, and usually end up wasting money on an obviously sinking ship. But looking through a more rational lens, it becomes apparent far more quickly when to start over, or “pivot,” as they say in startup circles.

Applying more analytics to entrepreneurship isn’t expensive, but Chen concedes that entrepreneurs have limited resources and attention spans, and there’s not a lot of time to learn the science surrounding every decision. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that entrepreneurs could benefit from being a bit more cautious. After all, gut instinct may be a survival trait, but so is prudence–and the latter doesn’t have a 90 percent failure rate.

***** Here is the link for the article — http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222795 *****