Paul Graham, he of Y Combinator fame, offers up some learned and insightful advice on how to do what you love.
What you should not do […] is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?
This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
via Link Banana
Consultant Steve Friedl offers some fantastic advice on being a consultant. I found this comment interesting:
I purposely put the technical part of this Tech Tip last, to reinforce the notion that “customer service”, not “computer science” skills are the biggest factors in a successful consulting practice. But it’s foolish to think that technical skills don’t matter: you don’t have a business unless you can offer a service that a customer is willing to buy.
What counts here is truly learning the subject matter.
An interview with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign manager, David Plouffe:
There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don’t have quarter after quarter to succeed. You either win or lose on Election Day. It is a very accelerated environment. For us particularly, because we weren’t planning to run for president, he got into this very unconventionally. It’s like taking off while you’re fixing the wings on a plane. You’re up on the high wire, but by the end we raised over three quarters of a billion dollars, over $750 million dollars. We had over 5,000 employees, we had millions of active volunteers. So it was a big organization. The most important thing for me as a manager was the senior staff. If you don’t have strong senior staff, you’re going to struggle, and I was blessed to have a strong senior staff. And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.
Charities should embrace for-profit business models in order to drive fundraising, or so says Dan Pallotta, author of Uncharitable and founder of the now-defunct Pallotta TeamWorks company; a for-profit organisation that produced many successful fundraising events for nonprofits.
In his column The Sin of Doing Good Deeds, The New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof said:
There’s a broad recognition in much of the aid community that a major rethink is necessary, that groups would be more effective if they borrowed more tools from the business world, and that there is too much “gotcha” scrutiny on overhead rather than on what they actually accomplish. It’s notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book, and it’s certainly becoming more socially acceptable to note that businesses can also play a powerful role in fighting poverty.
I can think of no good reason why this shouldn’t be so, and no other way charities can attract top business school talent. As Pollotta said, making a difference and making money shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
During times of recession the way business is conducted changes drastically. Given the current economic climate, Lynda Gratton—a professor from the London Business School—wonders what working habits will emerge now?
The 1981-82 recession heralded the end of the notion of a “job for life”. Jobs and careers would never be the same. The mantra following the 1980s recession was that of the “free agent”. The relationship between employees and employer was described as moving from “parent-child” to “adult-adult”; flexible working was increasingly seen as a viable option and only the deluded thought they had a job for life. This is increasingly seen as the norm, bringing despair to some and a sense of liberation to others.
The recession of 1990-91 accelerated these changes while adding one more important dimension – that of globalisation. Costs were cut by moving work out of the developed countries into the labour markets of the emerging nations such as India and eastern Europe. What began as the exodus of low-cost work accelerated over the next 10 years into the globalisation of talent in sectors such as information technology and research.
So what impact will the current recession have on work over the next decade? Of course, these trends are easy to spot in hindsight – more difficult when you are in the midst of the downturn. But there are enough clues for us to make a guess.