Lessons Learned at Grad School: Part 1

About halfway through my coursework in the pursuit of my MBA, I remember pausing for a moment to take stock of where I was, had been, and was going.

In the one year since starting school, a lot had changed; mainly, I quit my job and moved to California.  I had left my former employer, as they were closing the office in which I had been working, and they wanted me to relocate to Siberia Minneapolis.  I decided that this was as good of a time as any to leave the company on a high note; I had just finished launching our most successful project to date, and I had no desire to live in Minneapolis. So with that, we packed up our things and headed out to San Diego, a place that I had been trying to return to for the past decade.

A short time later, I remember remarking that had I known a few years ago that I would resign from my job less than a year into a 2-year executive MBA program, I might have done things differently.  I thought that, had I known this early enough, I would instead have just taken a year off and gone back to school full time, or even considered going to INSEAD instead of Thunderbird (Gasp!), at least partially so that we could have a reasonable excuse to live in France for a year. I held this belief until I joined the team of my second startup, MindTouch, here in San Diego.

While I was coaching some of my colleagues here at MindTouch, I had an epiphany. I realized in that moment that in addition to all of the business knowledge that I gained over the past 2 years, I had learned another very valuable lesson;  I had learned to manage my time extremely well.  I had no idea what a valuable asset this was, both to my team, as well as to my mental health, until I came on board at MindTouch.

Enrolling in an EMBA program taught me to containerize my time very well.  Working at a startup, it is very easy to fall into the trap of working nearly every waking hour.  In having to balance school, work, and personal life, I learned to turn off “Startup Employee Mode” and turn on “Focused Student Mode”;  on top of that, I made sure to turn off both modes and turn on “Personal Life Mode” to spend valuable time with my significant other, which was very therapeutic.  For those of you that have worked at (or even with) a startup, you know how hard it is to turn off “Startup Employee Mode”. I was in a situation where I had hard deadlines created by others, as at work and school, which taught me to create some of my own deadlines, like scheduling date night, and workout times and sticking to these as unmovable commitments as well.  The truth of the matter is, if I didn’t schedule time for all of the other things that I wanted to get done, all of that time would be eaten up by my company  and my school.  Startup employees know this pain well;  you start work early in the AM and suddenly it’s 10PM;  unstructured environments like startups demand a great deal of personal time management.

Following graduation, I have continued to set deadlines for all of my commitments, personal and work related, and this time management has enabled me to get a lot done (or at least feel like I get a lot done) and keep my stress down to a reasonable level.

Breathe!

“I’m too busy getting things done to get things organized!”

For anyone that has worked or is working at a startup, you are sure to hear this all the time;  things are hectic, crazy, disorganized, and everyone is so focused on bringing in revenue or designing the next killer product that they never take the time to step back and analyze what they are doing to determine if that is what they should be doing.

I have been very lucky in my career to have had some absolutely great mentors to guide my way over the years;  more often than not, these mentors have been people that I worked for, often after convincing them that they should hire me and help guide my career path to the next level.  Did I mention that I’m in sales?  I recently read a great blog post by one of my fellow Brazen Careerist bloggers, Sydney Owen, on how to find a mentor.  The basic premise is you need to identify the right person and be assertive with them, offer them something, and listen to what they have to say.  Seems obvious, and Sydney does a much better job of highlighting how to go about the care and feeding of your mentor.

One of my first mentors was Kenneth Burrow, a division GM at Circuit City.  He taught me the value taking time to be introspective in the workplace.  His lessons to me have stayed with me through my entire career.  One of the most valuable of these was to instill in me the importance of taking a moment to step back and look at a situation, large or small, as just one part of the puzzle.  There were many times when I would let some tasks slide at the expense of others, but yet I had not taken the time to analyze which of those tasks should be priorities and which should not; to act without being analytical is a recipe for disaster.   Kenny was a great mentor in that he let me learn my lessons my way, by trying and changing until I found my groove.

Although I was working for a fortune 500 company at the time, these lessons in “taking a step back” were extremely valuable in later years working for several startups.  In many of these companies, everyone is so busy moving forward that they often forget that we have to steer as well; being able to take a step back, looking at how I am allocating my personal resources, seems so obvious, yet it takes a lot of effort to execute.

So next time you feel overwhelmed by everything that needs to get done, STOP!  take a moment, step back, breathe, and analyze the situation more objectivly.  The time spent taking the time to organize your project or analyzing how you are spending your time will pay back tenfold.  There are only so many hours in the day, the best thing that we can do is make sure that we are spending them well.

Being Prepared for The Unknown

I was originally going to title this post “so you’ve been laid off” but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to bring up a few things that everyone should do before yahoo calls the big monday morning meeting.

I’ve been laid off twice now, which makes me a little unique among my Gen-Y peers, not just because I have bad faildar, but for many of you, this will be the first time that you will be laid off (“made redundant”, for those of you that speak the Queen’s English).  The morning of a layoff is decidedly not the time that you should dig out the resume and start thinking about your career;  even if you do not leave your present employer or get laid off, you will likely benefit from a little reflection on your career path.  Below are just a few things that I feel are valuable steps to take as insurance should you be hit with a layoff.

1. Polish up your resume – The last time you had to write a resume, you may have had to describe that job you had where you dressed as a chicken at el pollo loco as “Product sample marketing manager” to help land that first job out of school. Now you have more experience under your belt, and it’s time to add those valuable tid-bits to your resume.  Think about what position you would like to have in your next career move, and shape your experience to help you move toward that position.  As in any company, your job evolves around you and your unique skill set, and often your position becomes remarkably different from your job description.  You may have been hired as a “Project Manager” but your job evolved into “Account Executive”, so it would be better to seek jobs as an account executive, not a project manager.  Ask friends for their input, or scour the web for ideas on how to improve your resume.  Shameless plug, I along with several friends all received helpful feedback from theladders.com resume service. Sure, they mostly try to upsell you to their resume writing service, but really even the free feedback made my resume much better.

2. Network, Network, Network – This really could have been it’s own blog post, but I’m going to try to keep it high level.  A few very important things to do:

First, if don’t already have a profile on LinkedIn, now is the time to start building that network.  Once you have your resume to the point where you feel it is polished, you should add all of that information to your profile. Guy Kawasaki has a great set of tips for using LinkedIn .  LinkedIn also recently released “groups” functionality to help broaden the reach of your network.

Second, you likely have made a lot of connections on a strictly business basis.  If the only place where you have their contact information is in your office email, phone, and/or blackberry, you need to get all of this contact information into your personal address book.  You will likely not be able to do this following a layoff, as there is likely to be an HR representative in your cube with you to help “recover corporate assets”   Depending upon what systems you use, and how secure your office is about USB drives and the like, there is almost always a way to get your contacts exported into a universal format like .CSV.  I know it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, while taking contact information is fair game, taking any proprietary information from your employer most certainly not.  Microsoft has an easy export function to get your contacts out of outlook;  Lotus notes is trickier, google is your friend to find the export specific to your version of notes.  Once you have all of your contacts in .xls or .csv format, you can use the import function on Gmail (or whatever client your use, but really aren’t we all on Gmail now?) Be forewarned, the limit for importing .csv files is 3000 contacts, so you’ll have to spilt the file past line 3000 and run import again; oh, and who out there has that many contacts? If all else fails, you can always just print all of your contacts on paper.

Third, now is the time to start networking with your peers.  I am personally a huge fan of meetup.com, but depending upon your occupation there are likely other organizations which will have regular meetings of like minded people.  You don’t have to be in journalism, PR or technology to find organizations which meet on a regular basis, and you will likely benefit from connecting with peers even if you don’t use those connections to find your next career move.

3. Take charge of your finances – All puns aside, now is the time to take a good look at your complete financial picture.  Study your bank accounts and take a good look at the discretionary items which you are purchasing.  Do you really need 2 XM radio subscriptions? Are you still paying for that “free” AOL account you signed up for 4 years ago?  Trim the fat now before you’re crunched for cash.  If you’re not already using financial management software, you need to start. There are lots of free versions online, such as Quicken Online (totally free) or my personal favorite, Mint.  These programs will download all of your banking info online, so it is relatively pain free to set up, and will help you decide whether you really should go out to eat for the 3rd time this week or stay home to save some money (here’s a hint:  It’s the latter).  Whatever you use, your goal should be to look at your “hard expenses”, like rent and car payments, etc; your “soft expenses” like groceries and restaurants and your “tertiary expenses” like hobby spending and nights out on the town.  You can’t do anything about rent and car payments (not in the short term), but you can reduce or eliminate from the other two categories.  don’t just look at a forward budget;  spend some time looking at your history.  It’s all well and good to say “oh, well we put aside $300.oo per month for food, but if you’re spending $500.00 per month, it’s not going to work out.  Be realistic, look at your history and make the changes you feel you can stick with.

All in all, I hope that the layoffs skip you and these steps help further your career.