Like most people when they buy their first non-Windows computer, some software simply can’t be left behind. For me that was Microsoft Office.

Microsoft now makes a very snazzy version of Office, Office 2011 For Mac. Since I was paying for it myself, I went online to find the best price.

Using http://www.nextag.com, a reputable site I use several times a year, I found a sale, a download-only edition for $50, limited time only. No DVD, and it would take a long time to download, but cheaper, from a merchant I didn’t know. So I bought it.

It turned to to be a pirated version.  This was obvious immediately after the download finished (the skull and crossbones logo was a useful hint).

Now, $50 is not much money. I could live with losing it (I didn’t install the software). But since I paid with a credit card, I figured the thief who was about to profit from the illegal activity shouldn’t get paid. All Citi had to do was deny the transaction. After all, it was stolen property he was selling.

I contacted Citi with a secure message on their website and on the phone. I provided all the details, Web site, name, offered screenshots. I explained that I had gone through the tedious anti-piracy reporting process with Microsoft and could prove it. I asked that they not let this guy earn money selling illegal stuff.

Today, Citibank informed me that they were going to go ahead and pay him. Or, that I was going to pay him, since they were reinstating the charge.

Awesome.

Looks my everyday card won’t be a Citi card anymore.

(not safe for work, by the way)

<< For those who don’t have 27 minutes to watch a talk from a conference, the lesson: everyone is scared, don’t worry too much about that, make the change. But he says it better.>>

4 isn’t enough, right?

So I put the list away for a while, and came back to it yesterday. And I remember these, it turns out, because they are variations from a Tom Peters book I read more than a decade ago.

And I still use them all today. So maybe 4 is the right number after all.

1. Become valuable outside your own small area (in particular, to your company’s customers, instead of to your boss). That’s real job security and the path to advancement.

2. Think about what your resume says and work to make it better. You aren’t going to be in your current company forever. At resume-writing time, you don’t want to look back and realize you did the same job for x years, and it looks unimpressive on paper. So write your resume once a year or so, and decide what to focus on next year.

3. Ignore the performance review process. See #1 above.

4. You work for yourself, your employers are simply your biggest (or only) customers.

Image via Wikipedia

(Why I flew to these airports, GSO-IAD-DAY-ORD-MCI-ORD-GSO, in a single day)

Lately I have been digging into the details of ‘travel hacking’, which is a subset of (mostly business) traveling details where you exploit inefficiencies in how the travel industry operates to get either free flights, free hotel stays, or at least a better level of elite status, in order to get the former.

I’ve been doing something similar at Hilton hotels for years, because of how they’ve structured their Hilton HHonors program. To get to their Diamond level, you need to stay 60 nights, or 28 stays, in a calendar year. The 60 nights is self-explanatory. The 28 stays is where the inefficiency lies. I don’t travel enough to spend 60 nights at hotels per year. But 28 nights, that’s achievable.

At Hilton, a stay is a check-in +check-out. It can be of any length, and at any price point. And Hilton has a nice habit of putting their hotels near each other. To reach Diamond, I spend each night per business trip at a different Hilton property. Since most of my recent travel has been to the Washington D.C. area, I have 4 hotels there, and move daily. Most trips last 2 days, so it’s not a big deal to switch hotels once per trip.

28 nights/stays is still a lot of travel to many people, but it’s been pretty typical for me since I moved to America.

Note: An irony of doing a lot of business travel is that during your personal time the last thing you want to do is travel, but your family wants to ‘go somewhere’. Fortunately, when kids are small, even a local hotel is a treat, as long as it has a pool and breakfast.

So, back to travel hacking…

A few weeks ago I noticed that I could move up from Nobody, to the bottom level of Somebody on United Airlines, by doing the same thing I do at Hilton. I needed either 19,000 miles, or 7 segments, to get to Premier.

My local airport is Greensboro International, a small airport, and I almost always have to fly very small regional jets, the kind where one side of the plane has just 1 seat, the other side has 2. Small. No legroom. Always cramped. Premier level would let me select exit row seats and give me automatic upgrades, and ensure I always got on the plane before nearly everyone else. My trips are typically short, I only have carry-on luggage, and the front-of-the-line perk meant I’d always have enough overhead storage space (and yes, I know these all sound like small things, but what’s airline travel except many small inconveniences and indignities piled atop each other. Relief from a few of them means a lot).

In case you don’t fly much, a segment is the equivalent of a hotel stay. When the wheels kiss the runway, you just completed a segment. The price you paid, the length of the trip, the size of the plane, none of these matter. Did the plane land? Good, that’s another segment in your account.

Remember, to get to Premier, I needed 19,000 miles, or 7 segments, by the end of this calendar year. There was no way I would be flying so many miles. But the segments, that I could work with.

I knew I had one more planned business trip this year, for 2 segments, so that left 5 segments. I also wanted an extra segment in case I had a dispute with the airline. To book this mileage run (really a segment run), I needed a trip that could be completed in a single Saturday, would include at least 5 segments (6 for a safety margin of one), and it had to be inexpensive.

To book a trip like that, you don’t use the popular travel sites like Expedia or Orbitz. What I needed was a specialized tool. The travel hacking sites point to ITA, a company bought by Google a few months ago. You can’t buy a ticket there, but if you spend some time learning the different search options, it will find you a trip as crazy as you like. In my case:

1. I wanted a 6 segment trip

2. I didn’t want to pay much

3. I wanted to leave and return home in the same day

4. And I didn’t care where I went.

I ended up in Kansas City, Missouri, after trying a few options. Specifically, I started at 6AM in Greensboro, flew to Washington D.C., then to Dayton Ohio, Chicago, Kansas City, back to Chicago, and landed in Greensboro at 9PM the same day (last Saturday). The price was $158 plus tax. Because of how airline pricing works (or doesn’t work), it’s likely that anyone sitting next to me and flying between just two of those destinations paid more than I paid for the entire trip.

After ITA found me the trip I needed, I booked it at United’s website.

Summary

The next day, the segments posted to my account, and now I’m 1 segment away from Premier. Not bad for under $200.

Some observations:

1. It was boring. Many times that day, I thought about how I would have been happy to pay United Airlines the ticket price and stay home. Of course, travel hacking is about inefficiencies, and that option isn’t available. Someone pointed out that my carbon footprint for that day was really, really bad.

2. I didn’t bring a laptop, for probably the first time in 15 years. I did bring a Kindle, and it’s a great travel companion. I brought an Ipod, and never used it. I brought my Spint Evo cellphone to text my wife every time I landed and to use an app to keep my flights & gates organized. Highly recommend it.

3. The flight had so many segments, I couldn’t print all my boarding passes from United’s website. It has a maximum of 4 segments per day.

4. Kansas City has the stupidest layout I have ever seen. Every time you leave your gate area, you can’t return without going through Security (complete with X-ray) all over again. Want to cross the aisle and buy a coffee? That’s a security check when you return to the gate.

5. I’d probably do it all again, but I hope I don’t have to.

Related Articles

• How to Buy a Round-the-World Plane Ticket (That Kicks Ass) (fourhourworkweek.com)
• OnTheFly – ITA Software (itunes.apple.com)
• Frugal Travel Guy

McDonalds fries, when they are great, are really great. But most of the time, they aren’t. And sometimes, I feel like getting some fries, but it’s a gamble on whether they will be any good. If only there was an app that could tell me the latest reviews of fries, so I could go to the closest McDonalds that was making good ones right now.

*PS I know the trick about asking for fries with no salt, so that they have to make a fresh batch just for you. But that feels like cheating, and delaying other people’s orders.

[This is the second part of a two part article on finding a job in 2010-11. The first part is here]

In the first part of this series, I discussed the past decade and how some individuals helped me find new opportunities, and how I had done the same for others. And up until my most recent employer, all these jobs were found in ways that haven’t changed much in the past many years.

In 2010, there are new tools, and a new (very) general acceptance about using them. Things have changed a bit. Not as much as you might think, or hope. But changed nonetheless. And some new lessons are appropriate.

Caveat: I’m not 25, and I’m not looking for my first real job. So what I write below might not be as useful for people under 30 as for those over 30. I recently read an interesting article here that might be more helpful for younger folks.

1. Old but true: You still need to Google yourself occasionally.

Why? Several reasons:

• Every day, the likelihood of a potential employer doing it increases.

• You should know what’s there, before someone else searches for your name and then asks you (or passes on talking to you altogether) because of what’s there.

But it’s not just about playing defense. You can do a lot to influence what Google puts into those top 10 search results. And don’t think it’s difficult and not worth trying. Search Engine Optimization might be big business, but that’s because if you’re Coke, getting on the top of Pepsi searches is nearly impossible, and therefore expensive.

You’re not Coke.

If you have a very common name, like my friend Brian Gordon, you might be able to skip this step, because it really will be hard to float to the top with so many other Brian Gordons out there. The same might even be true if your name isn’t common in the USA, but it is in e.g. India or China, so the result is the same. But the less common your name is, the more important this step becomes, because it is easier to find the real you.

When I Googled my name last summer, there was basically nothing on the first page that was really me. And the first page is the most important of all, since virtually nobody goes past it to look at page 2. Under my name, there were a couple of Amazon.com reviews I don’t remember writing, a handful of listings for those creepy public record sites that scrape government webpages, and some Usenet postings (see? Usenet. I told you I was over 30).

Today, the creepy sites are gone, only one Amazon review remains, and everything else is from my blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Much better.

2. Today, we don’t have privacy, we have content (aka Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and you)

If I am hiring today, I go take a quick look at what the web shows about you. It’s easy, and since we’re strangers, I’d rather know something about you than nothing at all.

I won’t dwell here on the obvious things about Facebook, since I doubt beauty pageant winners with grabby boyfriends (or girlfriends), or silly  people who like to photograph binge drinking will ever read this blog. But there’s something subtler at work here, a possibility, that you might appreciate: you’re not a spectator or minor character in your online presence. You’re the movie producer.

Like a movie producer, you can’t control all the variables (actors!), but you get to set the theme, the overall direction, and to solve the problems. It’s the same with what I see about you online. The best way to influence what I see about you, since you’re never going to be famous and no one else is likely to intentionally write about you, is to crowd the other stuff off the front page. You, my friend, need to write. You need content.

So write. But do it in a controlled environment, like forums, blogs, personal websites that aren’t blogs (remember those?). And sure, write on Facebook. But let’s be serious here: for as long as you live, Facebook is now a megaphone for you, not a never-ending public conversation. You look outward, the way radio shows and businesses do there. Your days of Liking, commenting, and posting things you wouldn’t want your 9 year old niece to read tomorrow, are over. And whatever you can clean up today, do it. I have spent a lot of time tweaking Facebook privacy settings. You haven’t (be honest). Plus, Facebook changes them all the time. Stop playing chicken, and stop being reckless. The only people who should spend lots of time on Facebook are people who aren’t in the workforce and never will be again.

PS Same for Twitter, with a twist: if I see that you posted thousands of items and retweets, and the top couple of dozen aren’t quality stuff and interesting links, I might pass on you. Who has that much time to spend on Twitter? BUT, again, you benefit from the same effect I mentioned above about Google’s first page of results. Virtually nobody looks at page two (who has that much time?). So post 25 good quality tweets, to crowd out the other junk you put up there. Then either stop cold turkey, or keep up the good content stream.

And that brings us to LinkedIn.com

Older than the others, and smaller too. Much more boring. Incredibly boring. Like 75 million resume-length business cards, LinkedIn is the anti-Facebook. Everyone’s profile on LinkedIn is either non-existent or chock full of descriptions from (apparently) the greatest business people to ever walk the Earth:

- strategic thinker, innovative planner, and hard worker

- versatile professional with a decade of experience in multi-system global logistics who personally saved $1.2316 million by optimizing throughput in 3rd shift plants (how? where? is that a lot, relative to what you had to work with?)

-  John Smith, 3 LinkedIn contacts

Yet, LinkedIn is where the recruiters go. They might look at Facebook second to find bad stuff and save themselves embarrassment, but they go to LinkedIn to find good candidates. So when you are writing your content for your LinkedIn profile, you should lean more toward what you would write on Facebook than what others write on LinkedIn. Like I said, LinkedIn is smaller than FB, but it’s still 75 million strong, and that’s a lot of competition. Plus everyone there is scared of messing up, the place reeks of tension, so it’s easy to be noticeable by loosening up just a little. You need to stand out. Good news for you, everybody else is as boring as heck. So make your content as warm as you can get away with, write as much as you’re allowed to, and if someone writes you a generic recommendation send it back. And you, you write good, memorable recommendations for other people. Write for them first, pay it forward. Sow and reap. Any questions along that theme, read the Part 1 article again.

LinkedIn is so important, I am going to rephrase what I just said: This is where people find you for new jobs. Be as warm as you can while staying professional. Generate lots of quality content in your profile. Link to, or embed, your other content from your blog/Twitter. And show that you think (I know that you think, so show it). A weakness on LinkedIn is that your competition focuses on saying what they did but in the most generic possible way. You say what you did, but show that you think about stuff too.

(You can do this. Honest. I know you can. In most of life, ideas alone aren’t worth much, but they are valuable when someone is willing to write them for public view. So show us yours.).

Some other thoughts about LinkedIn:

a. Upload a picture. I use a cartoony graphic mainly because I want something that looks the same on computer screens and mobile phones, can be used on my blogs and other profiles, and would generally carry across wherever I was found and be recognizable. Someday I will switch to a photograph again. You should start there, if you can. And in your picture, fill the whole frame, look at me, and smile. Please.

b. Think about buying a premium membership for a month or two. There are some interesting features included.

c. Invite me to connect with you (just search for Dean Waye). Don’t use the generic message LinkedIn offers you. Tell me why we might be able to help each other, or be interested in working together someday. Or tell me you want to write a guest post on my blog (these things don’t write themselves, you know )

d. Join some groups, especially groups in your industry and your college. It’s a good way to connect with new people. Don’t join jobseeker groups, though, except maybe for a day or two, to find the recruiters and connect with them. Then quit. Tip: The recruiters are the ones with 9000+ connections.

Summary (where it all comes together)

It’s great when someone hassles you to take because they know you’re a great fit. Absent that, you can do a lot with social networking sites to put your best face forward and show that you’re a thinker and a doer who is responsible enough to manage the Internet Age’s replacement for personal privacy on Google and everywhere else. Be personal, post the odd trivial piece, but mainly keep the least impressive parts of your life off Facebook, and swing a little bit the other way on LinkedIn.

And if you find a great use for Twitter, send it to me? I still don’t truly see the potential there for individuals, yet. Maybe I should think about it…

Related Articles

• Get Linked to LinkedIn (howtospoter.com)
• 10 Tips for Finding a Job Using Facebook and LinkedIn (socialmediaexaminer.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Nobody finds a job alone.

I was thinking about this last week, after dinner with a former co-worker on Thursday. Both of us had been brought into my current company by the same man, who was trying to get him to return to the company the rest of us still worked for.

As I was driving home after dinner, I thought about the dozen or so jobs I had helped people (some friends, some acquaintances) start over the past decade, and I realized that none of them had ever helped me get a job in return.

But, you know what? I haven’t yet helped the three men who found jobs for me:

• Neil , a former grad school roommate who moved to America ahead of me and guided me into his company;

• Marty, who called me for months before I finally agreed to interview;

• and Mark, who I briefly worked for at Kronos, and who introduced me to my current employer after moving there himself.

All great men. All, I’m sure, have helped many other besides me. I’m part of their dozen, and others are part of mine.

Isn’t that strange? It’s as if career assistance is a giant game of pay-it-forward. Three people helped me. I helped a dozen. Hopefully, some of that dozen will help others whom I will likely never meet. And on it goes.

Which brings me to to 2010. I last looked for a new job in 2007, and I believe the landscape is very different today. For me, 2007 was like 2004, and 2001. The companies and jobs I have found through connectors like Neil Wornes, Marty Wells, and Mark DeArmon, have been good fits, even if I didn’t think they would be at the time. The jobs where I connected through unknown third parties tended to be brief, and bad matches, despite my initial feelings after the interviews (I’m looking at you, Robert Half).

But 2010 is different, apparently.

Prior to this year, I didn’t notice much of a social networking component to the job market. I joined LinkedIn in 2003, but only recently have connections there crossed over into the real world. I’m one of the geeks who has 400+ LinkedIn connections and actually knows nearly every one of them personally.

So I want to to walk you through a decade or so of job search history from age 29 to today, and discuss what worked and didn’t, and what I still recommend and don’t, and a few lessons that I hope are useful to anyone about to start a new job hunt.

Part 1: Prior to social networking sites.

Lesson 1. If you are young, and especially if you are in school, get out there early.

I was lucky (and financially already in trouble) when I started, so I had nothing to lose by taking anything I could.

When I returned to school after my bachelor’s, I walked directly to the career placement office and told them I wanted whatever odd jobs a technical person could do. That got me two short-term gigs almost immediately, as the ‘computer guy’ for an A/V company at a large annual software conference, and as a trainer for a subsidiary of MCI teaching people basics about MS Office and the web. The first led to my meeting a local event planner, whose small jobs kept me fed while I was in school. The second led to an opportunity to write a 1-day primer course for local telephone company workers who were being introduced to this new Internet thing.

That 1-day course course, and being the trainer who conducted it, eventually led me to a job at that telephone company. That was my last full-time job before I left for America.

Lesson 2. If you get the call, jump. Trust your new friends to know you.

When my former roommate called me from a company in Virginia, and told me I would like working there, I needed convincing. I had never lived in America, and I had about 10 reasons why the timing was wrong. But I decided to live in the States for 2 years, get some experience, and return to Canada.

[Note: over time, I met a lot of guys who have moved to America without already having family here. Those who remain here seem to fall into 2 groups. They came for a job and stayed for a woman, or came for a woman and stayed for a job. I'm the former)]

I stayed with that company for two years, but left after talking with a recruiter at another firm about the job of a lifetime that really wasn’t.
Lesson 3. As soon as you can, start speaking to groups, meeting folks, and helping others get work.

After a couple of years, including immigration issues and a post 9/11 economy, I met Marty through our accountant, who I think put us together because we were roughly the same age and were ‘computer guys’. We hit it off, in part because we were (and still are) in different parts of the industry; he’s hardware, I’m software.

Other than a one-time introduction to Darden Restaurants I made for him (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, those guys), which didn’t work out for either of us, I don’t know why Marty kept in touch with me, and kept asking me to join a company he had become a manager with (after meeting the owner on a plane, in first class, of course. Marty’s often lucky like that). But he kept calling, and eventually the budget opened up for a new position, and while I wasn’t sure about the company, I trusted Marty, and joined.

That job was my first return to management in years, and gave me the chance to help a lot of people get hired (and to hire some myself). I especially focused on helping recent grads and immigrants, spoke at colleges and universities, and at one point offered whatever help I possibly could to a meeting of 400 international students at UCF.That talk at UCF was a valuable lesson for me. I was the last speaker, and it took me half an hour to get out the door after I finished. Those folks were motivated to find work (this was about two years after 9/11, things in Florida were still bad), and a small mob peppered me with questions and requests before letting me leave.

From my talks at colleges I ended up either placing or directly hiring at least 4 people in my short time working alongside Marty, including one who graduated from UCF and, I swear, called me every 10 minutes for as long as it took to get me to hire her. I am still friends with her and her husband today, they are great people.

Extra Lesson: You never know where your next connection will come from. That UCF speech was by invitation of a truly amazing lady related to my wife, Melanie Parker. Today’s she’s at MIT, where I’m sure she helps many, many people find jobs after graduation.

Lesson 4. Know what your salary number needs to be, and especially if it’s a big boost for you, argue for it. Once you accept the job, you join the annual review / salary adjustment track, and might never see a big boost again.

From working with Marty, I went to KRONOS, and set to work getting more great people hired there. KRONOS was the kind of company where, if you set your mind to it and didn’t mind the travel, you could meet an awful lot of people, both colleagues and clients. I worked with Honeywell, GE, state and county governments, and many, many others. I also worked with a lot of client HR teams while working both with and for KRONOS (I was a KRONOS customer when I worked with Marty), learned a lot about payrolls, and saw the truth of the old adage “People don’t get what they deserve, they get what they negotiate”.

If you could see who-earns-what in your own company, or the company you are looking at joining, you would be SHOCKED. Many of the hardest-working and critical people in every company earn so little, you can’t believe they actually raise a family on it. And some of the lowest contributors (and least useful) people earn so much, you can’t believe they are kept on. Also, in my experience, especially these days, few people actually rise within a company. And the larger the company is, the truer this becomes.

Extra Lesson: My busiest day ever at KRONOS was when a large layoff was anounced. I knew several people who were laid off, and from a Jackson, MS airport spent hours on the phone (took a later flight) to call everyone I knew who might have openings, to place people into new companies as quickly as possible. The lesson… somedays, it’s your turn to deliver real stuff to real people. When that day comes, don’t hold back. Don’t hold back. Don’t hold back. Pay it forward.

Lesson 5. Somedays, it’s your turn to accept the phone call. It never hurts to listen.

Near the end of my time at KRONOS, Mark DeArmon was hired and became my manager, only to leave six months later. Soon after that, KRONOS went through some major changes. I had been there three years, and decided to accept his introductions to hiring managers at my (now) current employer. Similar to Marty, I don’t know why he singled me out and kept calling me, but he did, and after talking to three different hiring managers, I joined that company.

Summary of Part 1:

These are three men. There are people who think they are ordinary, or worse. But they made big dents in my universe. As I made big dents in others’s. No one finds a job (or starts a business, or does anything big) alone. There are people who can make a difference. You already know who they are. Stop putting them off to another day, a better time, or any other excuse you have. Let them help you. If I knew you’d, I’d help. I have to pay it forward, especially since I haven’t helped them yet.

Next: Part 2: What Social Networking sites change about the job search (and what they don’t).

Related Articles

• Marty Stouffer Has Some Advice: “Do Not Get a Job” (prweb.com)
• Kronos Retail Labor Index™ Shows Retail Hiring Still Down (eon.businesswire.com)
• Make the Most of a Starter Job (online.wsj.com)

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After catching up on Brian’s progress, I started wondering if my own job was easy to outsource to the other side of the world, and decided it wasn’t. Well, it is, though not really. But I started doing a little thought experiment on what might make it obsolete altogether.

The Thought Experiment: What could make most software project managers obsolete?

Project managers, in the best cases, can add a lot of value. The best (paid) ones manage undertakings that are either:

(1) complex, and would surely never happen without someone experienced in the challenges and tools to manage them

(2) necessary, but hard to make a profit on, without someone who knows how to do that

(3) fraught with risk, where the PM’s main contribution is to manage the project in a way that avoids loss or ‘failure’

The above are general enough to suggest that PMs will always be with us. But can a case be made that 10 years from now, most won’t?

There are a lot of project managers in the world today. There are nearly half a million PMP-certified ones, and most people in a project management role today are not PMP-certified.

For #1 above, what if complexity gave way to smaller sized efforts? The inefficiency of communications between departments, teams, individuals, or countries yields once the complexity subsides.

Likewise for #2 and #3, more and more software profits are based on services and other add-ons, where ‘regular’ managers with some project management knowledge could become the norm.

#1 The March Toward Less Complexity

These are the questions that are on my mind. Because I read a Wired magazine article a few weeks ago that showed how it is traffic from smartphone apps, not web surfing, that cellular networks are groaning under. And because of an article a few weeks ago about how more and more software development is being based on the iPhone/Android model of strictly defined frameworks (the smartphone/tablet operating systems) instead of more general frameworks like Windows, and that this is being done to protect users from malware as well as handset/tablet/iPad manufacturers from the general bugginess Windows users face. The same security model will, I think, become popular across all software, not just phones and tablets, and while it’s good overall, there are implications.

Also, apps are less complex in general that other software. They tend to be single purpose, and the definition of a successful one isn’t that it does everything, but that it does something well that you find useful. As those companies (or more often individual coders) try to add in more features, they quickly run up against limits on the device itself. In most cases, they create additional apps, instead of bloating their latest success.

What could this mean for high-end project managers? Maybe very little for the very best of them, because there will always be some complex projects needed, somewhere. Even if it is primarily to care for the current complex systems. After all, there are still people making a living with buggy whips.

For the lower-end project managers, it might even be a boon, and these are often the types of location-independent project management jobs that can indeed be sent to a different country.

But for those in the middle it could mean their ranks will be thinned out. As usual, the middle is the most dangerous place to be. Take out complexity, and you’re left with depending on inefficiency for your job’s value. Since much of the inefficiency is due to the size of the community or bureaucracy those PMs deal with, when it is reduced, so is their value.

If I was in the middle right now, I’d make a 5 year plan to move up the value chain, move down (by relocating to a cheaper place), or move out.

#2 The Project Manager Yields to the Profit Manager

Making a profit is hard. Most project managers whom I know never have to think about doing it. Staying within budget, yes. Adding profit, no.

Staying within budget is like being on the cost of side an enterprise, instead of the revenue side. In every enterprise, there are the people who focus on cost containment/reduction, and the ones who focus on revenue generation. Some management people have to do both, but generally it’s one or the other. The head of HR isn’t thinking about revenue creation, the head of Sales doesn’t care what paperclips cost. No matter who you are, you are one side of this split.

If your interest, as a project manager, is on cost containment, then the (merely possible, granted) reduction in complexity as a general trend means this role is less necessary than before. Another reality of our modern life lately, the freemium, means the pressure to find additional ways to create a profit will grow.

Personally, this is where I contribute most of my value as a project manager*, whichever company I am working for, and it’s tricky. At the last company I worked, I eventually had an entire system fashioned for myself, never shared**, that had me bringing in extra revenue for my employer amounting to 10x my salary. I have been sitting on the article I wrote about how to do it for a while now, because I am sure it would kill my career. It was 100% ethically conducted, but why even let the topic come up in conversation with a customer?

#3 If I Wasn’t Here, You’d Be Screwed

This where most of the project managers I know live. Their ultimate role is to manage or protect the project against loss, financial, time, or otherwise, by keeping things moving in the right direction. It’s hard work. It’s time consuming, maybe even life consuming. And it’s thankless. It really is a thankless job. But somebody’s got to do it.

But what is that somebody isn’t you?

What if the general trend really is toward smaller, less complex, inside tighter frameworks? Or what if the general business model is moving away from high priced services and toward offshore project managers where the first taste is free? If I lived in this space, I’d be the most concerned. Not only could the general trending be against my favor, but most of the project managers in my world are in the same boat, so there’s going to be price competition for the jobs I want. Price competition is bad.

If either or both of #1 and #2 come true, depending on #3 for your value to the enterprise becomes risky. I could even argue that we see this already… how many project managers now run multiple smaller projects, where neither is big enough to justify their salary?  Specifically, how many of us have seen this become more common over the past few years? I know I have.

Relax, Maybe I’m Wrong

I could be completely off base, by the way. Maybe projects will become more complex. Maybe profits will become easier to create (okay, I’m being facetious about that one). Maybe the PM role won’t change much over the next decade.

Maybe. But I still feel better having thought about the what-if.

* Interesting note: percentage of project management job listings online that mention the word profit anywhere? Zero.

(** If you are interested in the basics, you can contact me, but you can’t publish it anywhere. It’s a blending of lessons from this book, and this one, and this one. Oh, and what triggered this post’s creation was the first 3 chapters of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky. It wasn’t new stuff, it just triggered the other memories. But maybe it would be new stuff to you…)

Just before the Avis bus lumbers out of its parking spot to take us to the terminal, a young attractive couple manages to jump on. Not married.

At the terminal they leap off that bus and run, yes run, ahead of me.

…

Security line. I see them again but I am ahead of them somehow. They get lucky and end up in the faster line. For the second time today I see their backs as they run.

…

Through Security. Putting my belt on (mental note, wear this new belt through the metal detector someday. It might not need to be removed).
I see them emerge on the other side with me. Again they were behind me somehow . Hello again, backs. Bye bye. Run, backs, run.

…

Now they are getting on the shuttle just before we leave. I am sitting and try not to watch them. Careful of those doors!

…

They are ahead of me again, looking at the departure board. Wrong terminal.

Today I am the tortoise.

Image via Wikipedia

Brian Gordon, American born and raised, just moved from South Florida to Cambodia, and I am trying to help him reverse the outsourcing dilemma you might be worrying about in your own job.

Dude!

It was good to hear from you, and I was glad to see that the move to Cambodia was trouble-free, given how problematic the months leading up to it were.

Now that you are settled in, and want to find work, consider marketing yourself in a way that takes full advantage of your situation.

First, I think that your story is compelling. The Great Recession + the Florida housing bust wiped out your equity, and then you got laid off. I used to live in Florida, and so I know you weren’t unusual. It was just bad luck – you weren’t sub-prime, you got crushed by falling prices, like millions of other people. And getting laid off during this recession happened to millions of people too, not just you.

But what you did next is what makes the story so interesting. You picked a place you visited once before and liked, gave yourself a September 1 deadline to find a new job in America, and when you didn’t, you left.

Now, you can geo-arbitrage. You can work for American companies (or really any company, anywhere), undercut your on-shore competition by 20-30%, and take advantage of the lower cost of living in Southeast Asia.

Not many people could make the kind of change you did. And even fewer would even try. But you did it.

So, now, how do you find clients?

This is the weak spot in your strategy, since ideally you would have lined something up before leaving, but I don’t fault you for it. A big change like that means sticking to a date no matter what. Otherwise, maybe you would have never had ‘enough’ clients, and therefore never moved.

The situation is what it is. Let’s just get started.

1. You have a domain name, and an email address (brian.gordon@kronosreports.com). Put your story on your website, along with the type of reports you have done and can do for clients. Keep it friendly. (Note: Brian’s specialty is creating database-driven reports for HR systems)

2. Decide on a rate schedule you can live with, and stick to it. If possible, be the second-highest cost provider among your competitors.

3. Get someone to send you a MagicJack, so you’ll have a US number that you can use and a voicemail box for the calls you can’t take (sounds simple, I know, but it matters). While you are at it, sign up for Google Voice.

4. Email everyone you know, individually. Especially former clients. Tell them your story, give them your contact info and website and let them know that you can handle their work easily from where you are, at prices they won’t find locally, at least not with the experience level you offer.

5. Record some high-quality video and upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. At a minimum, record a 1 minute introduction to your website, again telling your story and how you are able to offer American-style work in a way that benefits the client. Then embed  the video on the front page of your website (this is easier than you think, honest).

6. Set up Google Alerts for keywords that include your specialty, former employers, and former clients, and when you see new business deals announced, contact the people mentioned and offer to supplement what they are buying with your own offering. We both know the crazy markups that services like report creation have. Some of those companies will be happy to reduce their costs and get the same results.

7. Subscribe to Help A Reporter Out. Yours is a story that is extreme enough to get media attention, and that sort of publicity will help you get clients and make them more comfortable with you.

8. Start a blog on WordPress.com, and write about your career adventure. Posts there are picked up by search engines very quickly. I just googled ‘brian gordon‘ and I am pretty sure none of the top results was you. Even ‘brian gordon reports’ didn’t return anything about you. You have a common name (sorry, it’s true), so you need to start getting noticed by Google, buddy. We can’t all be named ‘dean waye‘.  

9. If one exists, join a group on LinkedIn for people who either do what you do, or are in industries you have sold into. I joined my first 3 groups the other day, and I was blown away by how many project management jobs are listed. Also, post either your website address or this post to Facebook/Twitter, and ask your friends there to pass it along. Mainly for the Google search results help, but it also might you pick up something.

10. Finally, take a look at the freelancer sites like elance, guru, odesk, and TweetMyJob. They can get you started on something until you get established.

Also: Dear Reader… yes, you, you right now, reading these words… What do you think? Got a comment, or a suggestion to help Brian?

Right Date, Wrong Airport

Dear TSA, do boarding passes matter anymore?

Last week I posted about being full-body scanned in Raleigh en route to Montreal, and no one looked at my boarding pass to ensure I was supposed to be in the airport in the first place.

This week’s trip has me flying from Greensboro to D.C. and this time (it is really early, 4 AM-ish) I accidentally handed the wrong boarding pass to the TSA agent that examines boarding passes & IDs. He takes a good long look, he initials that he checked it, and lets me go forward. There is no one behind me in line, so no hurry at all.

So what was he checking, exactly? He wasn’t confirming that I was in the right airport for that flight. Or that I was on any flight out of Greensboro today.

If he had given it all a cursory check I could understand. But that’s not the case. He took his time.

Do boarding passes matter?

Image via CrunchBase

Dear LinkedIn Colleagues,

I wrote my first personal recommendation on linkedin.com 7 years ago, in October 2003. Since then, I have written at least 35.

My early ones were lousy.  Over time they improved,  when I re-thought the audience. At first I was writing for you. Later, I started writing for your prospective hiring managers, in a friendlier tone, highlighting fewer things about you, but hopefully doing a better job overall.

I think I have gotten better over time. But practice makes perfect. I’ll rewrite yours, if you are one of the early ones

* A short note. People are, in general, bad at requesting these recommendations. Virtually no one knows what they want highlighted. Instead, it’s left up to me. In those cases, you have to take what you get. So please take a moment to consider what you want someone to say to your next boss on your behalf. Also, unfortunately, LinkedIn.com recommendations have zero feedback available. So we never know if anyone reads them, likes them, hates them, or even notices them. Maybe LinkedIn can address that in a future release.

Here are some examples of what I have written for others, in chronological order.

1. October 2003, for Raj Vennam at Darden: Raj has the tenacity and sunny personality that make for a great coder.

[sorry Raj, you deserved better]

Same day, for Uday Shivaswamy at Microsoft: Uday is one of the best programmers I have ever worked with. Very cerebral, with quick insights. [This one had a typo, that I fixed today, after 7 years!]

2. February, 2004, a little better, this time for Roy Crippen at Digital Fusion: Roy really set the model for me on what a CEO is and does… broad strokes, vision, incredible people skills, and integrity. I’ve measured every other boss against him, and most can’t measure up.

3. December, 2005, for Rich Bergmann, programmer extraordinaire: When I needed answers about solving a tough software problem, Rich’s answers were the only ones I trusted. He was the only person we all trusted. If Rich said it was possible, you went back to your desk and worked harder. If you still couldn’t figure it out, Rich was always there to help you. If I had ever been as good a programmer as Rich, I probably wouldn’t have moved into management.

4. February, 2007, for Nader Hooshmand at Kronos: For me, Nader defines conscientiousness and tirelessness. He cares about every aspect of his job. I’m not sure how he does it. He throws himself into it, I’m not sure he ever sleeps, and he’s one of the smartest people I have ever met. Promoting him to be a practice manager was probably the easiest decision his boss made that year.

5. May, 2007, for Aaron Fausz at Kronos: Change Management is such a difficult field to excel in… blending the science and art of it takes a certain kind of person, and a certain kind of approach. When I choose people to wade into my customer’s organization, I’m very picky. I have to be. I want someone who has perfected the art of “think fast, but talk slow”. That’s Aaron. He’s the only one I know who expertly does both, so all types of businesspeople feel they are in good hands.

6. December, 2008, for Uta Grzanna, a former client: None of the multinationals (GE, Honeywell, etc.), governments, or tech clients I ever had at Kronos knew as much about, found as many flaws with, or offered as many solutions to our software’s architecture as Ute. She’s ‘that’ client… the one that keeps pushing you to be better: better designed, better implemented, better supported. If I had my time back I would chosen her as my FIRST Kronos client…  having done the work required to make her happy, I could have cruised through my remaining years at Kronos

7. August, 2009, for Sudhamen Chandrasekaran at InfoSys/Time Warner Cable: When Sudhaman QAs your product, you end up treating him like he’s the actual customer… a true pain in the ass customer. He treats your product like he’s the one buying it, and picks at it from end to end. He shines a light on every nook and cranny, and writes you up for every little deviation from the spec. And he doesn’t back down.

8. Last month, for Charlie Shaw, PMP:  Charlie is the project manager I always think of when I think about the PMI, and my own PMP certification.  For me he has always been the PM’s PM. The standard bearer of the PMI Way.  And the project manager you look to when you need the job The Right Way.

9. Yesterday, for Usman Bashir at Time Warner Cable: Someday, Usman needs to do my job for a day. And I need to do his. Someday, Usman will have to give up that fabled deep-focus thing he does, and handle all the trivia and minutiae and cheerleading and threatening I do, and I will get to focus solely and deeply on that day’s problem until I emerge on the other side with the simplest, most elegant answer ever seen. And manage to know the latest cricket scores at the same time.

Someday… but likely not.

So.. the later ones are better than the early ones, right? I hope so. Later, I will tell you the secret behind the recommendations others have posted for me.

*Something occurred to me. This blog is indexed by Google within an hour after the article posts… if your name is mentioned above, this post will soon show up whenever someone Googles you. Try it.

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