Working Virtually? Yahoo!

This week, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo decreed that all her employees would begin working from the office later this year, and that the work from home experiment was over and that it wasn’t working out too well for Yahoo. Interesting, but I’m not sure it’s really the news story that it’s become. A CEO made a decision for her company that she feels is the right thing to do. Good for her. Who cares?  I don’t get why it’s such big news.

Marissa, all smiles...Before the entire world decided to voice their opinion

But it has made me think of my own work-from-home experience. In the past 15 years, I’ve gone through many phases of virtual work. I don’t love working from home. It’s not my thing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the flexibility, but the thought of getting up every morning and retreating to the basement isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Let’s just say that on a couple of occasions, one as recent as last week, 4pm arrived, I was still in my lounge-wear (read: pajamas) and I wasn’t at all sure whether I had brushed my teeth that day. The experience doesn’t motivate me.

In my early work from home days I spent a lot of time on the phone with my colleagues in the US and the UK. Lots of conference calls. Listen, conference calls are not my favourite thing on my best day, so add to that the inherent distractions of your own home. I have the attention span of a gnat, so I’m not exactly an engaged conference call participant when conditions are optimal. Now imagine me, cordless phone propped between my ear and my shoulder, trying to participate while taking out the garbage. Some people just shouldn’t work from home. In addition to finding my own ways to distract myself while on conference calls at home, my lovely daughters absolutely loved to pick up the extension and introduce themselves to my ‘friends’ in the UK and the US. That’s cute the first time. Mildly humourous the second time, and by the third time, career limiting. I now pay for a second line for my home office.

As my children have grown, they’ve become yellers. My lovely wife and my beautiful daughters communicate with each other at a volume that approaches that of a ZZ Top concert. If I’m working from home, I now make sure that there is no way that I am on a call at 3:30 when the masses arrive home from school, because I’m sure for the people on the other end, it sounds like I’ve just been invaded by North Korea. I now have a sign that I post up for all to see that says “I’m on the phone”. It doesn’t work. Turns out that screaming kids and howling dogs don’t take time to read.

Dogs don't read?  What?

We also had some operational challenges to overcome when I began to work at home. In the beginning, I’d be working, and Laura would call down to the basement to advise me that she was running out and that she’d be gone for a couple of hours. That left me in charge of the kids, who in those days, couldn’t really fend for themselves. Before I’d have a chance to object, I heard the minivan exit the driveway. On the bright side, I’ve had the benefit of a tremendous amount of 5-year old input into my strategic planning documents and sales presentations.

She also expected that I would be responsible for some daytime chores, like laundry. It was bad enough that my desk was jammed in a dark corner adjacent to the laundry room, which has no door, and I had to deal with the sounds of the laundry all day, but now there was an expectation that I was going to become an active participant in the process as well. I got so frustrated that I did what any normal work from home dad would do…I outsourced. I found somebody that would pick up five laundry bags from us every week (one for each of us), wash, fold, put it back in the bag it came out of, and return it to us the next day. The best $50.00 a week I ever spent. That went on for almost one blissful-laundry free year. I don’t know what happened, but it ended. I think I went back to work in the office.

Outsourcing the laundry.  It's a good thing.

In the course of my working from home career, Laura has gone from one end of the spectrum, where I’ve been an additional set of hands to help her, to the opposite end of the same spectrum where I simply don’t exist, and as such, she doesn’t offer to make me lunch or even tell me when she’s coming and going. The pendulum has now settled somewhere in the middle, and it’s working great. We even go out for lunch together sometimes. I’m still not wild about the idea of working from home everyday. I need the office, and the contact with the folks I work with. I think, though, that sometimes the office wishes I would just work from home.

 

Big Dreams vs Business 101

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Well, it just happened. I had a conversation with my daughter about work, a conversation I know my father had with me. And I’m sure I’m just as frustrated as he was. In the case of my father and me, I was making an argument for dropping math in grade 13 (yes kids, we had grade 13 in the old days). I was trying to convince my dad that as a big time journalist, I wasn’t going to need math. There was no math beat at the Globe and Mail, and being up on my calculus wasn’t going to help me get, or keep a job. I’d just be so much better off if I could take Italian. Or better yet, a spare. Somehow, I won the argument and calculus got dropped. Sweet victory.

Haley, my delightful, beautiful, and smart teen-aged daughter is about to enter high school. I was there when she popped out, and I can’t believe that fourteen years have passed by and we’re already talking about grade nine. She got her class option selection form last week, so it should have been a wonderful week spent planning her future, right?  Wrong. It’s been yelling, fighting, door slamming, and the occasional crying fit. And that’s just me. She’s been quiet and huffy, but if truth be told, it’s not that much different than normal. She is a teenager after all.

Haley wants to be a marine biologist. That career idea came to her on a visit to Sea World a bunch of years ago, and it was reinforced on a visit to Peggy’s Cove the next year. Then we went dolphin seeking in South Carolina, and most recently, whale watching in California. The kid wants to work with marine life and I’m a proud dad. Haley’s as sure at age 13 that she’s going to be a marine biologist when she grows up as I was at 16 that I was one day going to be the CBC Bureau Chief in Moscow.

In high school, all I could see in my future was me reporting, Live, From Red Square.  We know how that panned out.

So I gave up on math. And science. I worked my ass off, and got into Journalism school. I traded calculus for a spare period, and when I hit university, I even took Russian to help me get that Moscow gig. As it turns out, I despised J-School. I hated it the minute I walked in, and I hated every day of it thereafter. The idea of four years of journalism school made me want to jam knitting needles into my eyes. Russian was a bust, my professor, Gennady Orzornoy, promised me a C if I promised to never take Russian again, and I took him up on that deal with a heartfelt ‘Dah!’  Dasvidaniya Russian and J-School, Bonjour French and Political Science!

I’m not a journalist, and I have haven’t regretted it for one single moment. Had J-school worked out, I’m convinced I wouldn’t have the life I have today. Everything would be different. It might be good, but it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t trade what I have. Besides, newspapers are dying, and as it turns out, I only have a face for radio, and a voice for silent movies.

So imagine, over breakfast, trying to convince a 13 year-old future marine biologist that perhaps a credit or two in business might be a good thing. Without trying to kill her dream, I’m attempting to help her to realize that the world of work doesn’t always turn out the way you think it’s going to when you’re thirteen. This beautiful creature, who should be an amazing realist blend of a glass-half-empty mother and a glass-half-full father is absolutely convinced that there is no place for a business course in her sea-loving future. She’s viewing her future through her Shamu-goggles, where she’s wearing a wet-suit and riding a dolphin.

How many of us are doing today what we thought we’d be doing when we were going into high school?  I doubt that not taking a grade nine credit in business will stand in Haley’s way of a career on Bay Street or Wall Street if that’s what she ultimately decides she wants to do, but I also know it won’t hurt her either. I would love to take a poll to see how people are where they thought they would be…Are they doing the jobs that they thought they’d be doing, and the ones they thought they were preparing for.

I’m not doing anything close to what I thought I’d be doing, and for the record, it doesn’t make me sad one bit. In fact, I’m thrilled. But if I would have been a little more open to the possibility that the journalism gig wasn’t going to pan out, I might have stuck with calculus. And maybe physics. I hear physics conferences are a riot.

 

Click here to see the funniest physics conference ever.

Thank You Linkedin, For Making Me Feel Special.

I recently received an email from Linkedin congratulating me on having one of the top 1% of viewed profiles in 2012 across the entire Linkedin network. Pretty impressive right?  I sure felt special. I also wondered how that was even possible, that I could be in the top 1%. I kind of had a warm feeling come over me, and I started to walk a little taller. Then I read that Linkedin had just broken the 200 million-member milestone and my warm and fuzzy feeling went away. Fast.

Who wouldn't feel special?

My inner math-whiz took over for a minute. If I’m in the top 1% of 200 million, that makes me one of two million other people who got the same email. For about 5 minutes, two million people were just a little prouder. It’s not a very exclusive club. Mensa, for example has 110,000 members across the world. That’s a much more exclusive club. There’s even a club called the Ejection Tie Club. It’s made up of military pilots who have hit the ejection switch in their aircraft and lived to tell about it. 5,607 members world-wide. That’s way more exclusive than Mensa, but then, the initiation is kind of a bitch. They also get matching ties.

Live through this, join the club, get a nifty tie.

 So they truly have some marketing genius at Linkedin (perhaps a member of Mensa) who came up with this idea of acknowledging the membership with these “you’re special” emails. I know they went out the top 1%, top 5%, and top 10% of the membership. If you’re in the top 10%, that puts you into a super-exclusive club of 20 million people. That’s almost two thirds the size of Canada, and roughly the size of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Ireland combined. Congratulations, we’re all special!  It’s a brilliant idea. They created tremendous buzz around the Linkedin community for the last couple of weeks.

I’ve written about it before, but Linkedin has really become a major part of my working day. In my view, it’s made the rolodex completely obsolete. This once private asset of sales and business people who traded on the value of the names in their rolodexes, has now become a public, online measure of their networking prowess and success. For some people, it’s even become a competition to see how fast they can amass contacts. I have a rule that I have to know the person before I’ll reach out to connect. I may have broken that rule once or twenty times on my own quest to break the 500 contacts mark.

Before blackberries and Linkedin, salespeople had Rolodexes, and they were your currency.

I know that today, I won’t even interview someone for a sales or relationship job that doesn’t have an active Linkedin presence. In the old days, you had to hire a salesperson to find out how connected they were…take a big chance that they really knew who they said knew. Today, it takes about three clicks to see if they’re serious, and one more click tells you how connected you are with them and their network. It makes the pre-work so much easier. I don’t interview anybody that I haven’t checked out on Linkedin. I truly don’t care what’s happening on somebody’s Facebook page (even though I appreciate a good picture of a deer mother nursing a bear cub as much as the next guy), but I absolutely care what’s going on with Linkedin.

I know there are lots of people who don’t use Linkedin like me. Some don’t even use it at all. I get that many people have careers for whom networking isn’t nearly as important in their day to day work as it is for other people, so I get their hesitance in jumping onboard the Linkedin train. But for sales and relationship people, I’m boggled by it.

Linkedin tells me what they care about at work, and how they communicate. It gives me a sense of how they work in a changing social media climate. It tells me how they manage their relationships, and it gives me a good sense of how we’re going to gel. All this before we’ve had the first live conversation. I’m sure it’s not really the right way to do it, but a candidate without Linkedin doesn’t make it to my shortlist. I imagine I’ve probably let some good people slide by, but if we’re going to hit it off, it’s going to start with Linkedin. It’s like e-Harmony for business.

It's like online dating...come on baby, woo me with your contacts.

Luxury For The Man On The Move

Anybody that knows me knows that I don’t spend a boatload of money on clothes and shoes. Like most guys who work in an office, or who go out to visit customers, I have just the right number of suits hanging in my closet, and the appropriate number of pairs of shoes to match those suits. I like ties, but I don’t go overboard, and I haven’t yet sent away to Hong Kong for a trunk load of custom-made shirts (although I have often thought about it).  

I’m not a video game freak, and I’m not a serious sports fan. Ask anybody, I’m definitely not a fan of massage (somebody I don’t know, touching me, ewww), and I don’t go to the bar or out for wings. My lovely wife won’t let me buy a new car because she says I’m just gonna smash it up anyway. All this to say, that I don’t usually splash out on things for myself. I just don’t. I’m not proud of that, and I don’t try to be like that. It’s just not something I do.

There is one thing I do, that’s just for me, and it’s something that people don’t really think of often. In fact, it’s something that was once really popular, and now seems on the verge of going completely out of vogue. I really enjoy getting a shoe-shine.

It seems like an old-fashioned indulgence.  From before things like shoes were disposable.

When I’m at the airport with 10 minutes to spare, or when I arrive in downtown Toronto ahead of a meeting, I stop for a shoe-shine. I’m not sure what it is about the whole process that appeals to me, but it surely does. It’s 10 minutes of just sitting. You can talk to the shoe shiner, or not. You can read the paper or not. It’s 10 minutes of justifiable man-pampering, or manpering (I just made that word up, just like the people that made up the word manscaping, but that’s a blog for another day). When I’m feeling special, I splurge on new laces. They even put them in for you…while your shoes are on your feet! 

Where else, for under ten bucks can you sit down, and ten minutes later, get up and walk out with a new spring in your step. It’s like getting your car detailed. Dirt goes away, cracks and scuffs get repaired, a wash, a buff, and a new coat of wax. Right before your eyes. I’m astonished every time I sit down. Whether it’s the boys at Walters Shoe Shine at the Toronto Airport, Chico at the Montreal Airport, or the folks at Penny Loafers in the basement of the Royal York Hotel, in ten minutes these pros have you looking and feeling like a new man. Or woman, although I’ve never in my life sat beside a woman in the shoe-shine throne.

Quite possibly the only 10 minutes in my week where I feel like the King of the Castle

And a throne it is. It’s almost overwhelming. You climb the stairs to sit in the big chair, and you look down on all the people walking by. Many of them look up at you like…”Poncy flake…nothing but time to sit there and have somebody shine your shoes…” Think what you want, these people are pros, and I’m gonna do anything I can do to add lifespan to my fifty buck wingtips. And for 10 minutes I feel like a king. ‘And you, Mr. Dirty Shoes walking by, you’re banished to gate B494. Sit there and thing about those salt stains for a while. Don’t judge me.’ This is actually the conversation I have running in my head.

I do shine at home, but it never comes out just the same. I’ve got my polishes and brushes, and all the other stuff I need to do the job, but I can’t get it right. If you recall, I wrote about a pair of brown shoes that I bought back in the fall. I was wearing them the other day in Montreal, and I stopped for a five-buck shoe-shine. I sat there in awe as Chico put a shine so bright on those shoes that I could see my face in them. Without a word of a lie, shiner than when I bought them. How could you say no to that kind of little luxury.

Thanks Chico...They're Awesome.

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From Our Home to Yours...Happy Holidays

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Here's the latest in a long line of annual Christmas poems...I hope you enjoy.  Have a fantastic holiday season, and a New Year that is prosperous and filled with only happy surprises...

 

It’s just days before Christmas

Deep in work I’m still mired;

Such a crazy fun time

But I’m so freaking tired.

This year has been nutty

Loads of hard work and great fun;

I thought things would slow down

But I spent the year on the run.

I’ve been to almost each province

In this last twelve month span;

I’ve spent as much time in the air

As a wingless man can.

My frequent flyer balance burgeons

My hotel points, they grow;

I always know where to stay

When it’s away I must go.

I love the folks at the Marriott

And my new friends at the Hyatt;

I’m such a creature of habit,

If it’s new, I won’t try it.

I reached Air Canada’s big milestone,

That I wasn’t sure that I’d meet;

Not sure if it's a good thing or bad

But I’m now a Super Elite.

So I logged on to Aeroplan

To check out my status;

Looking for trips we could take

To go places for gratis.

I learned that free still costs money,

There’s just no free pass;

You get your seat on the plane

But you pay for the gas.

So we’re heading to Cali,

Just Laura, our girls and me;

To check out the sites

And to hang by the sea.

It’s our first time away

From all the Christmastime hustle;

To take some time to connect

To just chill, sans the bustle.

I don’t know what to expect

On a Christmas morning away;

But I do know we’re going

To San Diego’s fine zoo on that day.

But after our big family trip

It’s right back to the grind;

And my big New Years goal

Is for some balance to find.

My lovely bride is a saint

And the kids take it in stride;

But I’m going to try to be better

At managing this wild, crazy ride.

The whole year has flown by

Faster than it usually goes;

Lots of ups and some downs

But what’s next, no one knows.

And now it’s time for the holidays

This the season of cheer,

So take some time to enjoy

With all those you hold dear.

 Best Wishes to you and the people you care about, from me, and the people I care about.

Sean, Laura, Haley, Ainsley & Madeline 

Sweat Equity

I enjoy public speaking. Lots of people don’t, but it’s something I’ve always liked to do. I’m sure there are lots of opinions as to how well I do it, but the fact remains, it’s something I really like. I’m lucky to have a job that allows and even requires me to do it. I sometimes speak at conferences, I often get to introduce other speakers, and I regularly make sales presentations. 

Something tells me that this guy likes public speaking too.

During the recent US Presidential debates I heard that they kept the debate room at somewhere around 65 degrees. That immediately set me to wondering exactly why they’d want to do that. I can’t imagine that they’d want to keep it chilly to keep people from falling asleep, or to ensure that people were paying attention…it’s the President of the United States, after all. Then Wolf Blitzer cleared it all up for me, as he often does…it’s to keep them from sweating. Sweating is unpleasant. Especially when you’re in front of a bunch of people. Ask Richard Nixon.  Apparently he lost the very first televised debate to Kennedy as a result of sweat.

Tricky Dicky had to wipe sweat off his upper lip.  They say it cost him the debate.

A few years ago, I went Vancouver for a finalist presentation. We were a team of four, and when we arrived, they led us to a room that was built to hold about ten people. There were already 16 people in this room, and we just made it worse. The ceiling was low, and the temperature was already hot enough to melt chocolate. As I stood up to speak, in a room so crowded I couldn’t even move six inches to my right or left, I put my head right into a pot light. I wore that light like a hat.  My head felt like it was on fire. I could immediately feel the sweat beading up on my forehead, and worse, I could feel it start to run down my cheek and down the bridge of my nose.

This is how I felt.  Except way, way less cool.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I noticed that one of our guys had put his head back in his chair, and he was sound asleep. Just as a drop of sweat fell from the tip of my nose and splatted on the table like a rock splats into a calm lake, Rip Van Winkle woke up with such a jolt that the entire room turned to see him emerge from slumberland. Needless to say, we didn’t win the business.

When your sweat hits the table like a pebble hits a pond, it's a good sign that you're not going to win.

I was in Vancouver again recently to introduce a new product. We were going in to visit a customer who had brought about 20 people together to hear our presentation. The room was again extremely toasty, and from the moment I stood up, I started to melt. The more I talked, the worse it got. At one point, the customer, thinking that I was half way to a heart attack, stopped the presentation and dispatched someone for water. As I was dealing with the embarrassment of that, I took three steps to the right and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees. Turns out I had been standing in the exact direct line of the heat exhaust from the projector that was mounted about one foot directly over my head. I spent the rest of the presentation moving around, away from the heat, and we ended the presentation without the need for an ambulance, or a defibrillator.

I brought my laptop and my projector.  I did not bring my defibrillator.

Finally, again in Vancouver (I’m thinking there’s something about Vancouver), I was asked to introduce a conference speaker. It was Alan Fine, and he’s an excellent speaker with a really cool message. The conference provided me with his bio, and I spoke to him in advance to get a better sense of how to introduce him. As I walked into the room, not only did I discover that they were recording the whole thing, but that they had they brought in a huge number of extra lights. It felt like a movie set. As I stood there in front of the room, under these crazy hot lights, you guessed it, I started to melt. I felt like a freaking Big Mac sitting under the heat lamp. It was horrible. I was so fixated on the sweating, I lost complete control of my ability to form sentences. It felt like an eternity up there, and to his credit, Alan Fine just sat there, smiling, as I massacred his introduction. 

Those freaking lights are bloody hot.

The topic of Alan’s presentation?  Dealing with Performance Anxiety. I swear to God. Not my best day.

Alan Fine.  Excellent speaker.  And a gentleman.

 

One Space. Period. One Space.

It really doesn’t seem so long ago that I was one of the youngest people in the office, and if not the whole office, at least on my team. I remember when I arrived in Saskatoon as the assistant branch manager, I was the youngest person in the branch. When I added Regina to my empire, there might have been one person there who was younger than me. Now, sadly, I’m always one of the oldest. While I think that things definitely change, almost immediately as you step over that chronological milestone called 40, I haven’t spent a lot of time lamenting the fact that I’m aging.

A lot can happen once you pass this magical mile marker

However, now at least weekly, if not even daily, I encounter things that make me feel old. I was at a conference the other day and the speaker was talking about the Energizer Bunny. Just as he began to say that the Energizer Bunny is a pop culture reference that our younger colleagues have never heard of, it hit me that there are a bunch of things that make me feel old. Like that freakin’ pink bunny.

He kept going and going...Now, apparently he's gone.

I made a reference to Issac the bartender on Love Boat the other day. Not only did my audience not know who Issac was, they didn’t even know what Love Boat was. Really?  Am I that old?  When I facilitate a meeting, I like flipcharts and markers. I had no idea that flip-charting was old school, but when my kids saw my marker collection a couple of months ago, they really couldn’t conceive of anybody writing on a flip chart. Dad, what’s a flip chart?

How could a whole generation not know about the Love Boat.  I had such a crush on Julie McCoy.

I work with a guy, a communications specialist. He’s a great writer, and like all great writers, he’s very ‘particular’ about things like punctuation and spelling and all that. Every time I write something he edits the hell out of it, and it’s usually better as a result. We have this ongoing argument about the period, and how many spaces follow it when you’re typing. I say two spaces, and he says one. "Two spaces," he says, "...is old fashioned."  I’m resolute when it comes to my two spaces.  And he's fanatical when it comes to getting things right.  That's what makes him such a good writer and editor.

I said ONE SPACE!!!!

To put this into context, I took a typing class in grade nine. My dad couldn’t understand why typing would ever be important. I didn’t really know either, but there were lots of girls in the class, and as a gawky, chubby grade niner, it couldn't hurt to have the odds tipped a little in my favour. My teacher, Mrs. Clendenning, roamed the class with a manual typewriter on a wheeled cart, yelling out, “F, Space, F, Space, Semi, Space…” and so on. We typed as she yelled. There were always two spaces after a period and if there weren’t, you failed. Then, when I got to journalism school, one space after a period also earned you a failing grade.

Turns out that even the improved odds of being the only guy in typing class didn't help.

The communications specialist is practically always right when it comes to grammar and punctuation, and I know he enjoys demonstrating his rightness. Just a wee little bit. He searched it up on the google, because God knows everything on the google is right, and as it turns out, computers have made putting two spaces after a period obsolete. There is apparently no reason to do it anymore. The brain inside the computer understands and spaces appropriately. Hmmph. I still put two spaces, first, because I just can’t stop, and second, perhaps, just to keep him on his toes. If I keep doing it, he's gonna hurt me.

"Really, Sean, do you need some electric shock therapy to get this one space thing right?"

I learned that this spacing issue annoys other people too…After I posted my blog last week, I got a call from my friend Vera who runs a magazine. She had read my post and called to offer her feedback. “Seannie…,” she said, “…what’s the deal with the two spaces after the period?  It just makes you look old.” Bloody hell.

If Andy Rooney would have had a blog, he would have written it on a typewriter. And there would have been 2 spaces.