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Counterintuitive resolutions
for workplace '04
1. Don't be the hardest worker.
You can't work 70-hour weeks your whole life and not lose your mind
-- or at least your perspective. You need to pace yourself. Besides,
the hardest worker is not always the best worker, but she is always
the most desperate-looking worker.
2. Hire people you wouldn't want as friends.
Diverse business teams are more successful than homogenous
teams. Creating diversity doesn't mean hiring one guy from each
fraternity. It means hiring people who scare you, who disagree with
you, who think in a totally different way than you.
3. Embrace failure.
Most people who have wild success have wild failure first.
Have your failure early and significantly so that you're primed
for success.
4. Learn to write direct mail.
A resume is a piece of direct mail. Hiring managers look at
your resume for 10 seconds to decide if they want to interview you.
Know how to control what happens in those 10 seconds. Hint: You
don't want the person to spend that time reading "References
available upon request."
5. Bake cookies for your office.
Surprise people with your caring and kindness. They will take
bad news from you much more generously. Also, showing a soft side
of yourself is nice, but risky. Cookies are softness without the
risk that you're showing too much.
6. Embrace the buddy system.
You cannot get to the top alone. Education is the No. 1 factor
in determining who will be successful. The caliber of your stable
of mentors is the No. 2 factor. So fill that stable.
7. Women, don't be supportive.
One of the biggest barriers to getting women into senior management
is that women put themselves in support roles early in their career
(human resources, for example) and then do not have the training
to move into senior management. No CEO learned to run a company
from human resources. Marketing, sales, operations: This is where
top brass get their experience. Get yourself out of the support
ghetto immediately.
8. Toss the business books: Read fiction.
You should read to understand people because your career is
as dependent on your people skills as it is on your good work. Read
the novels your co-workers recommend and you'll have reliable repartee
for weeks. Reading nonfiction is a way to learn about peoples' mistakes.
Reading fiction shows you what is possible to achieve.
9. Say no frequently.
Be picky about how you spend your time so that each project
you do is another great bullet on your resume. Don't work on projects
that don't matter. Don't work on projects that will get killed,
or pull you into a black hole of mismanagement. When your boss asks
you to do something you don't have time to do, remind her of her
priorities and tell her you want to work on the thing that is most
important to her. This is a professional way of saying, "Get
this off my plate."
10. Ignore the urgent stuff.
Most urgent items on your to-do list are not big-picture items.
But the big-picture tasks are the ones that will make a significant
difference in your career. So block off time in your day when you
can only work on big-picture aspects of your to-do list. You don't
have to be a visionary at work. But if you're not a visionary for
your life, no one will be.
-- Posted: Dec. 29, 2003
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