Thinking Inside the Box: I Guess I've Been Bad…

I've never been a big believer in Feng Shui, but I do think your office layout has a certain bearing on both your position in the company and your general demeanor.

My old boss, for example, used only lamplight and conducted all his meetings at a round table in his office. It conveyed a sense or welcome and equality, and I always felt comfortable talking with him. My current boss, on the other hand, keeps all the lights on and stays perched behind her desk at all times, a not-so-subtle reminder that she's the boss and if we don't do things here way then there are always files to clean out.

My personal workspace is cramped and exposed, with my cube sitting right out in the middle of the hallway. I also have a cube neighbor (we're the only two cubes in the whole department), and we're separated by a high wall that discourages most interaction beyond the occasional flung paper wad.

The worst part of the layout though, is that I'm forced to sit in a corner opposite the cube opening, with my nose facing the wall and my back to everyone that walks by. It's as though by even taking the job I've misbehaved, and now I must be punished every day until I move on. I'm sort of waiting for the day someone hands out fruit or lashes to pelt me with as a lesson for simply being me.

Not long ago, my neighbor and I decided we'd had enough with our arrangements and came up with a new setup. We thought it would be nice to get rid of the wall between us, turn our desks to face one another, and put an opening between them. That way, whenever someone came to see us, we'd be looking at them, and we wouldn't have to constantly wonder if we were being spied on over our shoulders. It seemed like a great solution. We'd finally feel like members of the team rather than insolent children.

When we presented the idea to our boss (still perched behind her desk) she fully supported it. However, she had to run it by her boss, because, you know, these sorts of things have to go through at least two levels of management or else they don't count. Oh bureaucracy, how productive could we be without you!

After a few weeks the word came down, her boss had put the kibosh on it, and I loved the reason why. According the bigger boss, we couldn't rearrange the workspace because the people who held the jobs we currently hold after us may not like a shared workspace.

So let me get this straight, we can't rearrange our furniture now, because when we inevitably quit in frustration over stupid junk like this, you can't be bothered to put the desks back when the new employees come in? Wow, great retention methods.

So for now I continue to sit in the corner, wondering what's happening behind me and constantly glancing over my shoulder every time I hear footsteps. Sometimes I silently weep for the next person to take my job. Not only because the work is boring and meaningless, but also because no matter what they've done in their life, be they sinner or saint, it's already been determined that this person is a bad boy (or girl), and must therefore sit in the corner.

Self Motivation – The Key to Productivity

Whether its athletes, musicians or high powered executives, from the outside it seems that the most successful people appear to have an inhuman ability to stay self motivated.

Douglas Walker and Steven Sorkin wrote a great book called "A-Ha! Performance, Building and Managing a Self-Motivated Workforce." The authors claim that building and maintaining a self-motivated workforce is the single best way to improve company performance. They outline the eight Intrinsic Motivation Points (IMPs) that drive human performance and they show managers how they can use these IMPs to get their employees to increase motivation and productivity.

Managers can learn a lot from the book, but we entry-level folks can learn something too. We can learn that being self motivated, without any external help from our bosses and managers, will give us a big leg up on the competition. Here are a few things that help me stay motivated on a daily basis.

Create a schedule, but don't get too comfortable

I usually start work at 8 a.m., break for lunch around 12, head to the gym at 4 p.m. and get back to work until dinner. This schedule is great, but some days it just doesn't work.

Today I couldn't concentrate. I attempted to fix some of our financials with no luck, then I tried to write a post but nothing came to mind. From experience I know that trying to work when I'm not all there is just a waste of time. My productivity and quality of work drop dramatically. So I closed my computer at 1 p.m. and headed to the gym to sweat out the weekend. Now it's 8 p.m. and I'm sitting at a coffee shop making up for my lost work time.

Get some exercise

I love what I do, and I've admitted to being a workaholic, but if I didn't run on a daily basis my motivation and productivity would take a serious hit.

Studies show that aerobic exercise provides benefits including mood enhancements through the release of endorphins, and neruogenesis, the creation of new neurons in the brain. I'll admit, I'm not totally sure what this means, but I do know that during and immediately following a run, my creative juices are in high gear.

I've come up with the topic for almost every one of my posts while jogging, and my highest productivity point everyday is right after a good run. Whether it's running, lifting, basketball or tae bo, get some exercise everyday and your motivation to work is bound to increase.

Don't forget to sleep

The average American gets six hours of sleep per night. For most of us, that's just not sufficient. Strangely enough, you often hear successful people like Donald Trump and Condoleeza Rice being praised for surviving on next to no sleep. But don't be fooled, not all highly successful people forfeit sleep for success. According to Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief campaign advisor, Bill Clinton was famous for his afternoon naps. And Ronald Reagan was too.

When I worked at IBM I would typically get six hours of sleep. I figured after getting home from work I needed at least another six or seven hours to run errands, work out, read, and watch TV, so I went to sleep around 1 a.m. every night. These days I make it a priority to get a minimum of seven hours of sleep, and if possible, I get eight hours.

Needless to say, my productivity at IBM wasn't even close to what it is now. I often crashed after lunch and Monday mornings were especially difficult. Everyone's body is different when it comes to sleeping patterns, so figure out what works for you and be sure to get the necessary amount of sleep, you'll be amazed at the increase in energy level.

Managers should certainly take the advice from Walker and Sorkin's book and do everything they can to build and sustain a self motivated workforce, but in the mean time, us workers should do everything in our power to build and sustain our own self motivation.

Before You Commit to Being an Entrepreneur, Stop and Think

The only thing I knew about entrepreneurship when I joined Brazen Careerist was that it was going to be risky, more than I could have ever imagined during my time in Corporate America.

In hindsight, I was probably ill-prepared to make such a big commitment. Would I have made the same decision if I knew about the pressures I deal with today? Sure, but I'd certainly plan better.

Preparation is key for any soon-to-be entrepreneur. Timing can be everything, and the people you work with can make you or break you. Not to mention, it's a commitment that's not easy to walk away from.

Find Your Strengths (via StrengthsFinder 2.0)

Ryan Healy, Penelope and I are all very different. Unfortunately, we didn't truly discover this until after we all got together in Madison. It would've been nice to know more beforehand.

Fortunately, our strengths ended up lying in very unique areas. If they didn't, we might have ended up stepping all over each other.

Business partners who are too common end up in competition. Do a strength assessment with your potential team to determine if the relationship can really blossom into something great. I recommend using StrenghthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. The book took me 45 minutes to read (I'm a really slow reader) and the online materials are especially practical for someone who is online for a significant piece of the day.

Make sure your finances are in order

In a perfect world, money wouldn't matter. But it does. Even our career decisions are affected by the clutches of personal finance.

Money was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about entrepreneurship. I had been working for less than a year, had a full-year lease on my house and had a heap of other payments to deal with on top of that. How could I give up a steady paycheck with all of these responsibilities?

After taking a look at my finances I decided that I could manage my bills on the money I saved, barely. Speaking of, you have to be willing to barely get by to endure the life of an entrepreneur. You'll always have just enough to survive and you'll never stop worrying about when the money will run out.

Ask a lot of questions, share your concerns, don't be afraid to annoy

Don't be embarrassed to ask questions about everything, it's expected of you. In retrospect, I wish I had asked more. And I asked questions for a solid week.

Still, after committing to Brazen Careerist, the questions didn't stop pouring in for at least another month. The sheer anxiety of the situation kept me up at night.

I must've been an enormous pain in the ass, but I didn't care. I was committing to a huge lifestyle change that wasn't going to be easy. I had to be sure that my big questions got answered before I packed up the moving van and hauled it cross-country to Wisconsin.

Ultimately, asking questions will make your business a lot stronger. When everything is out on the table you understand where each other are coming from and know where concerns lie.

Make sure you're doing what you really want to do

Everybody says that they want to be an entrepreneur, but most people are just kidding themselves.

Most entry-level corporate jobs are going to suck. And to top that, the transition from college to corporate is damn near depressing. So a lot of people tell themselves that their problems are with corporate life when they are really about the stage of life they are in: the transition into adulthood.

Most people can get through this period and have a fine life in the corporate world. So it's important to know how to make these distinctions.

Entrepreneurship is a very stressful endeavor. Dealing with your transition into adulthood is not going to get any better because you're an entrepreneur. It's probably going to make things more difficult. Think about it.

3 More New Marketing Rules for Recruiting Millennials

This is the second in a series of posts discussing how Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae applies to recruiting Generation Y. In short, the rules for marketing have changed. But the number one problem in corporate America is recruiting, not marketing.

What I've come to realize is that recruiting and marketing are not as different as one would expect. Godin's 14 new rules for marketers capture perfectly the new rules for recruiting and retaining Gen-Y.

Here's how trends four through six from Godin's book relate to recruiting.

4. Extremely short attention spans due to clutter

I'll admit it, my attention span is virtually non-existent. When a friend sends me a link to a YouTube video, if I'm not hooked in 10 seconds, I don't watch the rest. When I stumble onto a new blog, if the first post doesn't suck me in immediately, I usually leave, never to return again.

Godin says, "Commercials used to be a minute long, sometimes two. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea of running two per minute, then four. Now there are radio ads that are less than three seconds long."

People will not invest time and energy into something that is not immediately appealing.

So what does this mean for recruiting? It means that your job descriptions must be amazing. The first sentence has to hook the candidate: it should explain why your company is great and how you are making some sort of difference. The rest should tell them how your job will position them for success in their career–and not just with your company.

The old approach is to list all of the responsibilities someone will have when they work for you. But we Millennials aren't looking for a laundry list of things that you will tell us to do. We're looking for a reason to believe in your company. Give us one.

5. The long tail

In his book and blog, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson claims that given the choice, people want the choice. In any normal marketplace, if you give people more choices, revenue goes up.

That's why Amazon.com has defeated traditional booksellers. Since they don't need concrete bookstores, they can sell millions of books, not just the 150,000 top sellers that fit in a Barnes and Noble. In other words, the internet provides too many choices. And the choices aren't between Pepsi and Coke or Careerbuilder and Monster. The choices include every niche product out there, which can be found everywhere because of the ease of starting a business today, again, thanks to the Internet.

What this means is that you should find some niche job sites. Careerbuilder is a giant job board with cool commercials, but too much spam, and Monster is, well, a monster. Instead, use Dice or Tech Crunch for technology, use the ladders for the $100K plus hires, and scour the Internet for the top blogs in your particular field. The best candidates are hanging around the niche communities. They've already sifted through the mass of career-related clutter online. Now they're waiting on your company to do that, too.

6. Outsourcing

We've all heard about people losing jobs to workers abroad who can perform the work for 1/5 of the price. It's a very real problem and it's going to continue.

Godin says, "Either what you're doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or its homemade, insightful, and filled with initiative and judgment, in which case you can charge for it."

At first glance, this has nothing to do with recruiting or with Millennials. But, think again: if your recruiters are doing the same thing now that they were doing five years ago, they're wasting your time. Writing standardized job descriptions, preparing rehearsed speeches with three year old PowerPoint slides, using old marketing copy–all of that outdated recruiting activity can be outsourced for next to nothing.

However, you cannot outsource the personalization of the recruiting experience. You can't send YourManInIndia to a college campus for dinner and drinks with a recruit, and you can't send a worker in China to Mind Your Decisions to join in a conversation about Finance with some very smart young people.

A competent, contemporary recruiter can do these things. And if he has that kind of initiative, he can probably write you a great job description, too. And he will do these things, because it's the only way to get top talent.

Can your recruiters be outsourced?

Thinking Inside the Box: What Business Cards and Kissing Have In Common

I'm going to be perfectly blunt, I hate networking. I know, I know, as a millennial I'm supposed to be a social butterfly, someone who can walk right up to a complete stranger and initiate a conversation about anything from the weather to the price of grain in Micronesia. However, I find networking to be too much like dating, and I never was any good at that either.

Firstly, let's talk about why I hate networking. It's not that I haven't tried, my goodness, have I tried. I spent a whole lot of time both in and out of college trying to get connected with people in a variety of industries. From academics to politics, public sector and private, I was scheduling all sorts of meetings and talking with anyone who would give me thirty minutes and a glass of water. I admit it; I was an informal informational interview prostitute.

Most conversations ended with an exchange of business cards and the encouraging, "Give me a call if I can ever help out" but nothing more. Once I scored a pity interview, but could never get back in the door. I was like the career version of the one-night stand, initially boosting my self-esteem, but then doing the walk of shame back to my car.

I tried the more informal social networking route, but a lot of people at networking events don't have a whole lot to say. Yes, the weather is crazy. Uh huh, those politicians sure are wacky. No, I don't know much about French wine, mostly because I can't afford French wine. Oh, and the fact that getting drunk at $100 a bottle doesn't really appeal to me. Why can't we just cut through the formality and get to the point? I need a job, you have a job, and we need each other. So how about we give this thing a shot and see what happens?

Funny thing is, even though I don't like networking, I'm doing it right now. Every one of you out there reading this is a potential contact, just an email or comment away from taking our relationship to the next level, so to speak. So what do you say, willing to take a chance on a guy whose idea of a productive afternoon is discussing potential new markets and strategies for maximizing revenues?

Oh yeah, I know you love it baby, call me sometime.