About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I’ve written the same email five times in the last several months giving friends advice on how to write their resume, so I figured it was time for me to package it into a blog post that I could then just link to when needed. Assume this is my response to somebody with a few years of experience who is starting to look for a new job and looking for feedback on their resume.
The first thing to remember is that a resume is a sales brochure – the goal of a resume is to convince the HR person and hiring manager to give you a phone screen. That’s it. Your resume is not your career history or academic C.V. where you list everything you’ve ever done – its only purpose is to convince somebody to give you more time to sell them on the fact that you are the right person for the job.
Even scarier, your resume has only ten seconds to make that initial sale and convince the company person that you are a good enough fit for the position to be worth spending more time on. It may seem unfair for your career to be evaluated in ten seconds, but I’m often reviewing resumes at the end of the day, flipping through a stack and seeing if any catch my eye. I’ll review the ones that catch my eye more closely and spend as much as 30-60 seconds looking at the resume before making a decision on the phone screen. But the resume has to grab my attention in the first ten seconds, or it’s gone. I like Rands’s take on how a hiring manager scans resumes to explain the thought process.
If you only had ten seconds to sell yourself to somebody, would you try to tell them your entire life story? Of course not – you would tell them only a few key points that make you stand out and show that you’d be a great fit for the position. You should take that attitude with your resume – anything in your resume that does not contribute to the immediate goal of selling yourself to the company should be removed.
So what does that mean in practical terms? You need to make it really easy for the resume reviewer to learn what you want them to know about you in that initial ten seconds. You can help with that by only including what you want them to know and using formatting to make particular bits stand out. For instance, on my resume, I put my academic degrees at the top because seeing MIT, Stanford and Columbia generally gets people’s attention. I’ve also gotten to the point in my career where I’ve started dropping jobs that aren’t relevant to my current career track (e.g. my physics internship between undergrad and grad school).
You also need to sell yourself on the resume. This is difficult for many engineers and introverts, as bragging is not something that comes naturally to us. But this is the place to do it. Talk about how great you are, and the amazing things you’ve done. You can not expect the reviewer to spend time reading between the lines to understand your awesomeness – you have to spell it out in neon so they can get it on a quick glance.
Along those lines, list key accomplishments, not responsibilities. Don’t tell me that you were doing X, Y and Z – that doesn’t tell me whether you did X, Y and Z well, even if you say you “successfully” did X. Tell me how you changed things for the better. How was the company different because you were there rather than some other person? If you can quantify your accomplishments, even better – increased sales 20%, reduced downtime by 50%, whatever you can measure. As an aside, this is also useful to consider how you are approaching your current job – what are you accomplishing and can you measure it?
Make the resume specific to the job that you are applying for. Remember, the resume is a sales brochure – you want to target your sales job at your customer, the resume reviewer in this case. That may change which of your accomplishments you want to highlight in a given job, or may change what you want to emphasize with formatting on the resume. You can have a “raw materials” career history with all of your career accomplishments from which to draw, but then edit it down for this specific audience.
Include interesting extracurriculars, especially ones that show achievement. Again, the goal of a resume is to stand out from all the others ones in the stack being reviewed – extracurriculars are one way to do that. We had one candidate last year that included the fact that she had won beauty contests as a teenager – totally irrelevant for a financial analyst position, but it made her resume stand out, and we took a closer look at her actual credentials and brought her in for an interview. In my case, my San Francisco Symphony Chorus experience, which included singing at Carnegie Hall and winning a Grammy, is a nice tidbit to mention.
Keep the resume to one page – this may seem impossible once you have more than a couple jobs, but if you only list one or two key accomplishments from each job, you can do it. Remember, anything that isn’t relevant to making the sale shouldn’t be on the resume anyway. Plus I rarely read beyond the first page of a resume, so if there’s anything on the second page that you wanted me to see, you lost your chance.
I highly recommend converting your resume to a PDF before submitting (I print to a PDF file using CutePDF), just to make sure that formatting is preserved and nobody can edit your resume as it wends its way through the system.
That’s about it. Remember the key points – your resume is a sales document designed to earn you more time to sell yourself on why you’re the right fit for the job. It initially has ten seconds to stand out, and then another 30-60 seconds to convince the resume reviewer to give you a phone screen. Everything on the resume should contribute to closing that sale. If you do that, your chances of getting phone screens will go up.
P.S. I’ve uploaded the resume that got me the interview at Google if you’re interested in what I did last time I was looking for a job. I’d do things differently now, but hopefully it gives some ideas.
Last night, I attended the Mountain View Linchpin Meetup, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post (speaking of which, I need to review Godin’s book Linchpin at some point). Spending an evening with a group of people following their passion inspired me to take a swing at restarting this blog yet again.
Today’s topic – the danger of the slippery slope, as represented by me having given up on following Facebook, or my RSS feeds, or Twitter, mostly.
Why?
Because there’s too much to follow in each of them. It takes too much time each day to stay “up-to-date”. And once I fall behind, it’s hopeless to catch up, and I have trouble letting the bits go, so I just give up entirely.
How did I get here?
By being tempted by the deceptive value of “just one more”. On Twitter, when I met or heard about somebody, I would look at their Twitter feed and if they looked marginally interesting, I’d start following them. And that was my mistake. I was comparing the value of following their Twitter feed to nothing – so long as I liked even a couple entries in the feed, I added it. But that doesn’t properly value my time – the time it takes to read those extra Tweets adds up. And because I have not been ruthlessly curating the people I follow, I’m not excited to skim through all the dross to find the gems that can appear in my Twitter stream.
In other words, a number of thoughtless incremental decisions have led me to a situation where the entire system has become useless.
The same was true of my RSS feeds – once it got to the point where it felt like a burden to keep up because I’d added too many low-marginal-value feeds, then I stopped checking, even though there are still several truly amazing people whose work I want to track.
I’ve noticed the same trend for me at work over the years. I’ll agree to take on a “quick” task, 10-30 minutes, because how can I turn down being helpful if it will take me less than a half hour? And yet, those “quick” tasks, in aggregate, add up to a significant burden.
What does this mean?
For me, it means I need to re-examine the choices I make. I need to realize that adding even a seemingly trivial task or input to my life can, over time, add up to quite a drag. I need to learn that unless my answer is “Hell, yeah!”, my answer should be no. I need to be stop wasting my limited energy on small things, and focus on what’s important.
Of course, that means deciding what’s important for myself, which is a whole separate problem, but let’s start by clearing out the unimportant stuff out first.
Thanks again to all the great people I met last night, and let’s see if I can stop making excuses and start writing blog posts again.
The Management Innovation Exchange (aka MIX) looks like an interesting project. It’s a collaboration between McKinsey, London Business School and a couple companies like Dell, with the idea being to open source ideas about management. It’s unclear yet whether it will attract a critical mass of community to discuss ideas (so far, the curation looks weak), but given my long-standing interest in different management structures, I plan to stick around for a while offering up ideas. I’ve already written one post there about the challenges of communication within an organization, and plan to do a couple more this week. Check it out!
I started this blog to review books that I had read, but have been woefully delinquent in writing book reviews since August of 2008. But I have kept a draft post with the books I’ve read, so in the spirit of starting the blog back up (again), here’s the roundup. This post will be of fiction books, and I’ll post a roundup of the non-fiction books that didn’t deserve their own post at some point.
Of note is that almost all of these books are from the library. The Mountain View Public Library is a wonderful library, and the convenience of their bookmobile visiting Google once a week has changed my book habits. Instead of ordering things through Amazon, I send an email to Cody to put a desired book on the truck for me, and it shows up on Wednesday. Magic! It also means I read a lot more genre fiction, as I wouldn’t pay to buy these books, but if they’re free from the library, I’ll indulge myself and read whole series.
Normally, I’d link each title to Amazon, but there’s way too many to deal with that, so if you choose to buy one of these, please click on the Amazon link in the left sidebar, or just click here, to give me the referral fee.
Not much to comment on the last few and I’m running out of gas here, so I’m just going to list them for my own reference.
Good grief, that’s nearly 50 books read in the last year and a half. Not counting the non-fiction books, which is another couple dozen or so. Or the TV shows I follow. Or the DVDs I watched from the library or Netflix. I guess I know what I was doing with my free time now 
Trade-Off is a book which explores a simple, but useful, way to frame the world. Kevin Maney plots products along two dimensions, fidelity and convenience, and then spends the rest of the book discussing how products end up in different places on that graph, from the “fidelity belly” to the “fidelity mirage”
Fidelity is essentially quality – what makes a product unique or an experience. Examples include luxury goods that identify the owner as a person of taste, or live rock concerts where the sheer sensory overload is unmatchable by one’s stereo.
Convenience is, well, convenience – how easy it is to get the product. This includes both physical convenience as well as cost – places like Wal-Mart aim to maximize convenience by being a one-stop shop with the lowest prices.
Maney makes a few key points:
That’s basically the whole book right there. He tells a bunch of stories about how companies succeed or fail framed with this viewpoint, but you get the idea.
The book was a good reminder about the importance of focus and positioning; understand where you can get a step on your competition, and then find ways to maintain or extend that lead. The same applies to personal positioning, as Maney mentions in an epilogue. All in all, it was a quick read from the library, but I can’t particularly recommend it.
P.S. Jim Collins, the Good to Great author, wrote the introduction, and had a nice paragraph explaining the value of finding new mental models as tools:
A strategic lens … does not in itself give an answer about what you should do, and not do. Rather, and much better, it forces you to engage in a powerful question, from which you derive your own insight and make your own decisions. If you engage your team in a vigorous debate stimulated by the questions that naturally arise from the ideas in these pages, you will gain deeper understanding not just of what you should be doing (or not) but, even more important, why. The power of a strategic concept lies first and foremost in giving us a lens and a stimulus for hard thinking and hard choices. The critical question is not its universal truth, but its usefulness.
I picked this up from the library, as yet another in the recent series of books I’ve been reading that reinforce my own biases. Overall, I liked it – I knew most of the patterns in cognition that the book describes, but it summarized them nicely with good anecdotes.
One standard model of decision-making is that we are rational beings. We examine all of our options, we think through the consequences of making a decision, we weigh the costs and benefits, and then we decide. Philosophers like Descartes think that this rational mind is what separates us from other species (“I think, therefore I am”).
Another model is that of the unconscious mind, as popularized in recent books like Sources of Power and Blink. The theory here is that our brains have evolved over millenia to have an enormous amount of processing power that is not consciously accessible, and sometimes we have to trust the “intuition” that the unconscious mind is giving us.
Lehrer’s book reviews the strengths and weaknesses of each of these cognition models to help people understand when it’s appropriate to use each model.
The rational conscious mind is limited in power – we’ve all heard the idea that we can only keep 7 information nuggets in our brain at a time. It’s a bandwidth-limited single processor (one estimate is that it processes at 20 bits/second). Its strengths are that it can logically process new situations, override our kneejerk impulses that may not be appropriate to the situation, and come up with responses that have not been tried before. Also, decisions made using the rational path are easy to explain, as they are based in logic. Its weaknesses are that it is slow and has limited capacity (check out his anecdote on self-control when trying to remember too many things), and therefore works best on well-defined problems with only a few dimensions to consider.
The unconscious brain is in many ways the opposite of the rational brain. It is a parallel processor with enormous capacity that can optimize decisions among many conflicting dimensions. It is also extremely fast – it works by training neural circuits to recognize previously seen situations and respond quickly without involving the conscious mind. When we are developing our 10,000 hours of expertise, we are building the necessary neural pathways in the unconscious brain (what Daniel Coyle says are myelin sheaths).
However, the unconscious brain does not deal well with novel situations, as it may seize on an already-trained, but inappropriate, response. It is also unreliable in situations where previously seen inputs have different outcomes because the training doesn’t work – Lehrer cites slot machines as an example of the unconscious brain desperately trying to find patterns when none exist. One final weakness is that the decisions made by the unconscious brain are difficult to explain, as they are expressed through emotions we feel and so we can’t analyze the decisions rationally.
Lehrer describes many situations when the two minds are used inappropriately. For instance, complex multivariable problems can not be answered by pure reason (Lehrer cites the example of a man who lost his emotional capacity after a brain tumor was cut out, and was completely unable to make normal life decisions). In fact, if we try to attack such problems with the rational brain, we make poorer choices because we seize on variables that are easy to explain rationally rather than considering all of the possible benefits (Lehrer cites an amusing study where undergrads had to choose a poster to take home; those that had to give a reason for choosing a poster ended up choosing posters they were less happy with compared to the ones that just chose a poster). Lehrer suggests that the best strategy when confronting a complex decision with many variables is to study it carefully to load all of the information into our unconscious brain, and then go do something else (take a walk, go for a driver) while the unconscious brain processes that information. This idea is reflected in the standard trope that the best ideas come in the shower.
However, the unconscious brain only works well in repeatable situations where it can try out different responses to the same set of inputs and encode what works into the neural pathways. In novel situations, we can’t trust our instincts and have to slow down and engage the conscious brain. Lehrer tells the story of a team fighting a forest fire when the wind shifted unexpectedly and came towards them. The leader realized the fire was going to overtake him before he could get to safety, stopped running, thought for a second, and then set his own fire to create an already burned spot, which he then stepped into so that the forest fire would go around him. Most of his team was lost because they were only listening to their emotional brains telling them to run from the fire.
I liked the book’s balance between the “Blink” theory of trust your instincts and the “Descartes” theory of following reason. Both methods of cognition have advantages and disadvantages, and the best decisions will be made by taking those strengths and weaknesses into account. In some sense, the two brains are mental tools, and it’s up to us to understand when it’s appropriate to use each tool.
I have been a fan of Grant McCracken’s for several years now, so I was eagerly awaiting his new book, Chief Culture Officer. Note that I may be slightly biased in this review, as Grant mentions me in the book as a potential CCO candidate.
Chief Culture Officer is McCracken’s manifesto of how and why culture matters to the corporation. He starts the book with stories like Levi’s missing a billion dollar opportunity in the mid-90s because they didn’t see the hip-hop trend and therefore didn’t understand why anybody would want baggy jeans. Another example is Steve Jobs revolutionizing industry after industry by leading a new wave of culture e.g. using iTunes and the iPod to create an individual song a la carte option in the music industry so people could create their own mixes. Or Geoffrey Frost at Motorola creating an enormous amount of value with the Razr.
McCracken then dives into several of the trends that have been taking place over the last few decades:
One insight I particularly liked was that “Convergence culture is fleeting. But it supplies order, and for the CCO this order is a gift”. Seeing the right cultural trend splits the world in a useful way and illuminates events by giving a framework through which to view them. It gives us a meaningful story by which we can interpret what’s happening, and testable hypotheses as to what will happen next. McCracken suggests we should be tracking the trends that we think are happening and revisit those predictions, so that we can learn from our mistakes (I would note that blogs are a particularly good way to track such thoughts).
How does the CCO figure out which are the next meaningful trends, and which are fads that will fade away? They need to monitor magazines, TV shows, internet forums – one person can’t do it all, so how do we collaborate? McCracken suggests having a group of advisors/editors who can collectively share tidbits (I would suggest that Twitter can be useful for this purpose if following the right set of people). And once potential trends of interest are identified, how do we convert those into actionable insights? McCracken suggests that the CCO needs to champion efforts in the corporation that catch the rising wave, and fight back against the ones on the subsiding ones.
Another insight I liked was the corporations breathe culture in and out – “the corporation is not just an economic actor, it is also a social and a cultural one.” Brands are not imposed on people; instead, brands only derive meaning from how people incorporate brands into their self-story. Brands must spark a recognition within the consumer that the brand is a meaningful expression of identity. For instance, cars are a quintessential expression of identity, ranging from muscle cars, hybrids, or minivans. In this vision, brands that aren’t co-opted and multiplied by their users wither away and die.
McCracken finishes up with a chapter on the nitty-gritty of how to observe and monitor culture, including an appendix with “A Tool Kit for the Rising CCO”, which includes recommendations for magazines, TV, events, people, books, etc. His ethnographic perspective emphasizes the act of noticing, both observing a behavior and then explaining it with a story. Part of the challenge of noticing is keeping an open mind. If you go in with an opinion, you’ll fit your observations into that opinion – you have to pay attention what is actually happening and willing to follow up on surprising inconsistencies. The ethnographer is actively engaged, “capturing how and why the assumptions in this life go together, or feel they do”.
I like McCracken’s premise that understanding cultural trends is vital to corporations that want to act effectively in this world. And as usual, I love his insights into our culture – he provides useful stories for understanding what is going on around us. This is the kind of book that is easy to read, but has meaning that is only slowly percolating into how I think. Good stuff.
P.S. As mentioned previously, McCracken is holding a Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp this Saturday in New York. I’m excited to attend, and will report back with my notes and observations afterwards.
Dan Pink’s book Drive was good, so I also picked up this book from the library, subtitled “The last career guide you’ll ever need”. It’s written in the style of manga (Japanese comics), and can be read in half an hour, but offers solid advice on career management.
Here are the bullet points it hits:
I thought it was a cute idea that took some standard career advice mantras and made them seem fresh by presenting them in the new form of a graphic novel. Not a ton of depth, but I enjoyed the quick read.
I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other books, like What should I do with my life?. I also really liked his New York magazine article called The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids, which described Carol Dweck’s research into the fixed vs. growth mindset of children, and what a tremendous difference it made to praise effort rather than innate ability. So I’ve been meaning to read this book, which summarizes several similar topics (the praise article is the first chapter), and finally got it from the library a couple weeks ago.
The book covers several topics where common parenting assumptions do not match what science has learned over the past couple decades. The praise chapter describes how self-esteem is actually undermined by trying to build it up. There is a chapter on how squeezing in more activities and studying harder is causing kids to lose sleep, which has startling impacts on health and even intelligence (an hour of sleep a night separated A students from D students). Other chapters cover questions about race, honesty, the pace of cognitive development in children, self-control, and socialization.
One particularly non-intuitive point for me was that “to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying”. Parents hate arguments, finding them stressful, disrespectful and destructive, and don’t appreciate their kids questioning their judgment. The interesting result was that kids that respect their parents are the ones most likely to argue with them – the rest “just pretended to go along with their parents’ wishes, but then they did what they wanted to do anyway”. In other words, parents that shut down conflict and argument ended up promoting lying because the kids didn’t feel bound by arbitrary rules that made no sense to them. But when the kids were allowed to have their say, and where parents could explain why the rules made sense, then the kids could be honest and ask for what they wanted, rather than feeling they had to lie and work around the rules. As an aside, substituting manager and employee for parent and kid in this paragraph illustrates the connection between management and parenting (in case you were wondering why I’d be reading a parenting book).
I think NurtureShock is a nice summary of interesting results from the new “science of kids”. I don’t know if there are any mind-blowing revelations, but I’m definitely questioning my instincts about praise and other topics as a result. I recommend going and checking out the list of all posts and articles the authors have published on the subject, including links to the articles listed above and many others, to see if you’d be interested in the book.
In my last post, I talked about getting the reps to improve oneself on desired skills. But it’s difficult to make the time for practice, especially for deliberate practice where we are always dancing on the edge of failure. And I think that’s where I think Coyle’s observation that coaching is an integral part of talent development comes in.
One of the keys to being able to stay in the productive zone of deliberate practice is to create a tight feedback loop. Deliberate practice is about pushing oneself beyond one’s capability, failing and then figuring out how to do it right. However, a key aspect of this is getting immediate feedback on both failure and on getting it right. My theory is that part of mastery is repeating techniques until they are built into the unconscious part of the brain, and getting to that point requires consistent and useful feedback.
Fast feedback is also essential. Imagine a thought experiment where you had to wait a minute to find out if your previous action had worked or failed – you would never be able to stay in a zone of productivity because in that minute, you’d get distracted, and maybe even start on a different task (this is the experience of software engineers in languages without a REPL). To keep yourself driving forward, and experimenting with new techniques that may or may not work, instant feedback is a necessity. And that’s what a good coach can provide.
Coaches provide the immediate feedback necessary to stay in the mode of deliberate practice. This is especially necessary at the beginning of the path towards mastery, before the student has developed their own self-awareness so they can detect their own errors. Coyle described two researches watching John Wooden coach the UCLA basketball team; they were surprised to find that so little of his communication was in the form of praise or disapproval, but instead 75% was in the form of information transfer. He was watching his players and offering them instant feedback on what they were doing right and wrong. That accelerated their path to mastery, as they did not have to do trial-and-error experimentation to learn what worked and what didn’t.
One key aspect of coaching is that it’s not just objective feedback, but also why things happened. I could learn how to shoot a basketball better by just shooting a lot of baskets, where my objective feedback would be whether I made the basket or not. But when I missed a basket, I wouldn’t know why. And when I made a basket, I wouldn’t know how so I couldn’t repeat it. I would try a number of different things, and only a few of them would work, so I’d be wasting a lot of time in experimentation. However, if I had a coach, they could watch me, tell me what I was doing right, and more importantly, why it worked, so I could start to internalize the correct techniques. My improvement would happen much faster, because I would be able to integrate the “story” of the right way to do things into my self story.
As an aside, I was thinking about this last week during a discussion on a random Google mailing list discussing an ethnographer’s observations about Google in China. A couple engineers were dismissive, saying that objective data was better than these subjective stories. My point was that these stories help us interpret the data – data can tell us that market share is changing or that Chinese users are using instant messenger over Gmail, but social scientists can help tell the story of _why_ these trends are happening.
I think the other aspect of deliberate practice that a coach can help with is in helping with the motivation necessary to stay on the edge of failure. It’s so much easier to keep on doing what we are already good at than it is to consciously decide to do something that we know we’ll fail at. So having somebody there to encourage us to keep going past our existing competencies is helpful. Even in something as prosaic as weightlifting, I will never be as strong as I was in grad school, when I had a lifting partner who would push me to lift more than I thought I could – and it turned out I could do it. Now when I go to the gym, I don’t push myself anywhere near that hard, and therefore am not getting anywhere near the benefits.
Note that both feedback and motivation will eventually be internalized, and have to be internalized if one is to achieve mastery. Once I reach a certain point in skill development, I know what I’m doing right and wrong, and what I have to do to correct my mistakes. I also can get to the point where I don’t need external motivation because I am doing the skill for myself and can see how my practice and mistakes lead to improvement. But, boy, it’s difficult to get there, and having a coach to help with those aspects make it easier, especially at the start.
I realized as I was writing this that one of the challenges for me in my quest to become a generalist is the lack of coaching. There is nobody that can offer me instant feedback on what I’m doing, so I am in the inefficient mode of trial-and-error experimentation. And while I have been fairly committed to this path for several years now, it’s still difficult for me as I have few role models (Jerry Weinberg notwithstanding), and little in the way of formal encouragement. I don’t have a career path that I’m following, and while my position at work is enhanced by my generalist skills, they are not formally recognized, which is frustrating. I’m not sure what to do about this, but perhaps being aware of the difficulty will let me at least address the problems more directly.
Sorry for the long post – I originally had planned to split this post into one on tightening the feedback loop and another on coaching, but I feel like they work better together. Coyle’s framework is a useful way for me to think about these questions of mastery, and it integrates well with my previous thoughts on the subject. It also helps me to recognize that lessons might be the way to get me started on a new skill, rather than beating myself up for not having the discipline to start something on my own. Food for thought.
