Category Archives: Business & Marketing

Six figure salary? You’re not rich

Posted on by

I’m old enough to remember when earning a six figure salary meant you had made it. You were rich. This post on the Personal Capitol blog explains why that is no longer the case. Here are a few nuggets to get you started:

  • the median household income stuck at around $53,093 in 2014
  • the average price of living the American dream has now risen to $130,000 per year
  • today’s family would need to earn $288,713.59 to achieve the same kind of lifestyle as someone making $100,000 in 1980.
  • the median price of a home was around $282,000 nationally in May 0f 2014.
  • the cost of raising one child for a middle class couple has grown to a staggering $241,080.

 

 

Chipotle FM

Posted on by

I eat at Chipotle’s a couple of times a week. On Friday I realized I was bobbing my head in time with the song coming from the restaurant sound system. Didn’t recognize the song or the artist. Thinking back, it occurred to me the music there was always to my liking. So I asked Google “do all Chipotle’s restaurants play the same music?” and found the answer in a story at Businessweek (yes).

Chris Golub the founder and sole employee of Studio Orca which “creates customized playlists for restaurants tired of putting their dining atmosphere in the hands of Pandora or Sirius XM Radio. His job consists of researching music, discovering bands, and asking questions such as, “Would you rather hear folky banjo music or classic Motown as you eat your steak burrito bowl?”

“Golub runs Studio Orca out of his spacious apartment in a Brooklyn high-rise. There he spends 8 to 10 hours a day researching music for Chipotle, which lets him play anything he wants. “I’m looking for songs that make you want to dance around your kitchen in your socks and underwear before you’ve even had your second cup of coffee,” he says. “Not many songs can do that.” Golub listens to about 500 songs before he finds one that will work.”

“Chipotle’s 1,500 stores all play the same music. […] Four times a month he loads up his iPod with 15 to 20 new tracks and goes to a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to see how they sound in the store. Once a month he sends the updated list to Mood Media, formerly known as Muzak, which then streams the mix over the online service Rdio and into every Chipotle store.”

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable

Posted on by

By Seth Godin

“Our world is filled with factories. Factories that make widgets and insurance and Web sites, factories that make movies and take care of sick people and answer the telephone. These factories need workers.

“If you learn how to be one of these workers, if you pay attention in school, follow instructions, show up on time, and try hard, we will take care of you. You won’t have to be brilliant or creative or take big risks.

“We will pay you a lot of money, give you health insurance, and offer you job security. We will cherish you, or at the very least, take care of you.”

“It was always easier for management to replace labor than it was for labor to find a new factory. Today, the means of production = a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buy a work an entire factory.”

“If you want a job where it’s okay to follow the rules, don’t be surprised if you get a job where following the rules is all you get to do. If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they’re told, don’t be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing from you.

“We’ve bought into a model that taught us to embrace the system, to spend for pleasure, and to separate ourselves from our work.”

“It was always easier for management to replace labor than it was for labor to find a new factory. Today, the means of production = a laptop computer with Internet connectivity. Three thousand dollars buys a work an entire factory. pg 24

“If you want a job where the people who work for you do exactly what they’re told, don’t be surprised if your boss expects precisely the same thing from you. pg 29

“We’ve bought into a model that taught us to embrace the system, to spend for pleasure, and to separate ourselves from our work. pg 39

“A factory is “an organization that has figure it out, a place where people go to do what they’re told and earn a paycheck.” pg 40

“The launch of universal (public and free) education was a profound change in the way our society works, and it was a deliberate attempt to transform our culture. And it worked. We trained millions of factory workers. pg 41

“The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school. pg 47

“The law of linchpin leverage: The More value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. pg 51

“Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You’re always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. pg 54

“If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can. pg 70

“If you’re remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all. A resume gives the employer everything she needs to reject you. pg 71

“Projects are the new resumes. pg 73

“You are not your resume. You are your work. pg 74

“It’s okay to have someone you work for, someone who watches over you, someone who pays you. But the moment you treat that person like a boss, like someone in charge of your movements and your output, you are a cog, not an artist. pg 95

“The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor. And worse yet, the harder you work to quantify and manipulate this process,the more poorly it will work. The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth. pg 96

The Job Versus Your Art

“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.

“Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art “the work.” It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact that’s how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work. pg 97

“Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.” — Media economist Robert Picard pg 120

“Our economy has reached a logical conclusion. The race to make average stuff for average people in huge quantities is almost over. Improvements in price are now so small they’re hardly worth making. pg 123

It’s not an accident that successful people read more books. pg 126

There are plenty of bosses who fear the idea of indispensable employees and would instead encourage you to focus on teamwork. “Teamwork” is the word bosses and coaches and teachers use when they actually mean, “Do what I say.” pg 153

For the last five hundred years, the best way to succeed has been to treat everyone as a stranger you could do business with. pg 157

If you are working only for the person you report to according to the org chart, you may be sacrificing your future. pg 193

People aren’t going to follow you because you order them to. Linchpins don’t need authority. It’s not part of the deal. Authority matters only in the factory, not in your world. pg 201

For many of us, the happiest future is one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better. pg 203

Do you have any marketable skills?

Posted on by

stacking-beer-cansIf you asked 100 people “Do you consider yourself a success?”, I’d expect 90 of them to answer one of two ways: a) Yes b) Depends on how you define success. (Which sounds like “no” to me)

During my working years (I never thought in terms of ‘career’) I don’t recall thinking in terms of success. My defining question was “Am I enjoying what I’m doing?” Yes. I did, I am. Did I have a system? I would have said, no, I was just lucky.

Reading Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big got me thinking about success.

“The best way to increase your odds of success — in a way that might look like luck to others — is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.”

Adams provides a list of skills in which he thinks every adult should gain a working knowledge.

  • Public speaking
  • Psychology
  • Business Writing
  • Accounting
  • Design (the basics)
  • Conversation
  • Overcoming shyness
  • Second language
  • Golf
  • Proper grammar
  • Persuasion
  • Technology (hobby level)
  • Proper voice technique

In the book he makes his case for each of these skills. As I read, I evaluated my own knowledge of these skills.

  • Public speaking – Got my BA in Speech and Theater, taking lots of public speaking course along the way
  • Psychology – a course or two
  • Business writing – several books and some courses
  • Accounting – almost zero knowledge
  • Design – Yeah. Spent the last 10 or 15 years creating and websites for the company and clients
  • Conversation – co-hosted daily radio show for a dozen years. Hundreds of interviews
  • Overcoming shyness – college and community theater; 10,000 hours of airtime on the radio
  • Second language – nope
  • Golf – nope
  • Proper grammar – writing courses, public speaking, radio, all contributed
  • Persuasion – a couple of course in college; wrote countless radio commercials
  • Technology – geek wannabe. Got the computer/internet bug early and never lost it
  • Proper voice technique – see above

Turns out I had a pretty good handle on 9 of the 13 skills in Adams’ list. Not by design, mind you, just luck. Looking back, however, I can see how these skills combined and overlapped to make me well-suited to the work I wound up doing.

I can here all those zippers coming down, ready to piss on any idea that has Scott Adams’ name on it but I’d challenge you to read his book first. This little bit is just one idea in a couple of hundred pages.

I read a butt-load of management books during the first half of my working life but stopped after reading The Dilbert Principle and seeing myself lampooned on every page. Never read another management or self-help book, until this one.