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June 30, 2006
The affable and bright George Blomgren of MilwaukeeJobs.com wrote me today to point out a new blog he's writing for job seekers.
From George's blog:
Postmodern job hunting and career management techniques, glimpses of sunshine and occasional pointless digressions. Use the "employment kung fu" outlined herein responsibly, as it provides you with a truly unfair advantage!
Sounds good to me! George knows a thing or two about this sort of thing. He's the marketing director at MilwaukeeJobs.com, and a really smart guy to boot!
Luck him, he got the enviable URL: http://employment.typepad.com/
If you're in the market for a gig, make sure that Harry Joiner's blog is on your list of resources too.
June 30, 2006
Seth posts about the problematic nature of making decisions under the 'guidance' of your marketing heroes. Point taken. You see this every day. I guess I think it's more an issue with sales than it is with Marketing. If you follow Mintzberg or Kotler or Guy Kawasaki or Jagdish Sheth, I don't know that it matters too much.
However, when it comes to sales strategy, many a disagreement can arise, especially at startups who are just defining their sales & marketing strategies, when you follow one sales type, such as Zig Ziglar, or a similarly slick figure vs. someone like Neil Rackham, who advocates a question/consultative strategic approach to selling.
Personally, my marketing heroes are:
1. Raj Devasagayam, my college marketing professor who told me that everything I needed to know about marketing I really learned in marketing 101. I prove him right every week.
2. Neil Rackham. SPIN selling & Major Account Selling Strategies changed the way I sell
3. Everyone who's featured in: "Marketing Classics: A Selection of Influential Articles" (Ben M. Enis, Keith K. Cox, Michael P. Mokwa)
Who are YOUR sales/marketing heroes?
June 27, 2006
Caught this little snippet of wisdom on David Maister's blog this week.
Always volunteer to take the minutes of meetings, and to do the first drafts of proposed initiatives or reports. Not only will you get credit for volunteering to do things on behalf of others, but you get control of what's recorded. You are now part of the decision-making process. He or she who writes the history gets to make history.
I've been doing this for years, basically as a mechanism to curb my introvertedness in new settings (and familiar ones). Introverts typically like things to do to keep them engaged when they'd rather turn inward. Turns out, there are added benefits, like being part of writing history.
June 26, 2006
Paul Graham has another brilliant and lucid essay on the genius of startups and business ideas at the margin.
...great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.
It's an old idea that new things come from the margins. I want to examine its internal structure. Why do great ideas come from the margins? What kind of ideas? And is there anything we can do to encourage the process?
I really can't say that I ever created a great or long-lasting business, but the most fun I've ever had in business (including now) has been in the businesses at the margins. My first and only 'startup' was my bicycle shop in the 'margin' of the garage of my parents' business. It was actually a highly profitable enterprise that was actually the only bicycle shop to serve rural Kewaunee county, WI, including service contracts with the high schools and it's own charity ride and junior mountain bike team. Not bad for something that was built in a marginal space, with marginal funds serving a marginal market offering marginal services and selling marginal brands.
Read more of Paul's essay. It's worth a few minutes out of your day. (via Fred Wilson)
June 16, 2006
The candidate selection and interview process for hiring great people has always confounded me, as it does many others.
I've heard the concept of "structured interviewing" (these guys should add their guide to Wikipedia - the article is only a stub) bantered around in previous lives, but never really dug into it much. However, it appears that Will Price and Mark Tsimelzon, founder and President of Coral8, have really put some thought into this structured interviewing thing with their post "A Practical Guide to Structured Interviewing."
Like any complex process, the interviewing process is best structured and analyzed as a sequence of phases. At Coral8, we have four phases: email interview, phone interview, the first in-person interview (with 1-2 person), the second in-person interview (3-4 others). Whether you have the same stages or not is not important. What's important is having a clear understanding of a) why you are having each phase b) what you are trying to accomplish, and c) how you are going to evaluate the results. It helps if all the interviewers share this understanding, and keep the process as consistent across candidates as possible.
I'm sold on the concept.! Ok, who do we hire next?
Technorati Tags: structured interviewing
June 2006 (5)