BretWagner.com

I don’t typ­i­cally put my polit­i­cal views out there front and cen­ter, but a read through this Sunday’s State Jour­nal has me inspired to write what I believe is worth stand­ing for.

First, end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and end cor­po­rate wel­fare. Raise cor­po­rate income taxes and the upper brack­ets of the pro­gres­sive income tax until the deficit is elim­i­nated, the bud­get is bal­anced and our infra­struc­ture is rebuilt. Elim­i­nate loop­holes in cor­po­rate income taxes that allow com­pa­nies like GE to make $14.2 bil­lion in prof­its and not pay a dime in income tax.

Pro­hibit cor­po­ra­tions from mov­ing off­shore to avoid pay­ing taxes.

Pass a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment pro­hibit­ing cor­po­rate money in pol­i­tics. Repeal Citizen’s United.

Elim­i­nate child tax cred­its for chil­dren beyond the first two born to a couple.

Elim­i­nate inef­fi­cien­cies and waste in the Defense Depart­ment and domes­tic programs.

Cre­ate single-payer uni­ver­sal national health care. With­out this reform, pri­vate health insur­ance and med­ical care will con­tinue to spi­ral out of control.

Pass a sus­tain­able green national energy pol­icy, and a strong cli­mate con­trol plan. Let the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency do its job.

Reform the bank­ing and finan­cial indus­tries through stronger gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. Respect the priv­i­lege of work­ers to col­lec­tively bar­gain and to unionize.

Stop demo­niz­ing Medicare, Med­ic­aid, and Social Secu­rity. Doing so resolves noth­ing and polar­izes peo­ple. These three pro­grams pro­vide an impor­tant safety net to Amer­i­cans. Indeed, they rep­re­sent some of the most impor­tant and suc­cess­ful leg­is­la­tion in our nation’s history.

And finally, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq. We can­not afford to sus­tain these wars, and it’s ques­tion­able whether our con­tin­ued pres­ence is doing more to pro­mote ter­ror­ism than pre­vent it.

Oppor­tu­ni­ties are all about luck. Put your­self in a posi­tion for luck to find you.

You’re not going to find your dream job by send­ing out cover let­ters and resumes. You need to get out there and meet peo­ple that can open the doors for you.

You’re not going to start a bil­lion dol­lar busi­ness on the first try. You need to microtest your idea and, when you real­ize it won’t work, try some­thing else.

You’re not going to find your soul­mate at the bar. You need to min­gle in places where luck will bring you and your soul­mate close, real­ize the oppor­tu­nity and seize it.

Hang with the peo­ple you aspire to being.

If you want to be a top lawyer, you need to roll with the top lawyers. Find their pro­fes­sional events and crash them.

If you want to be a top busi­ness­man, never pass up an offer to get you in the door of a busi­ness net­work­ing event.

If you want to be rich, roll with the play­ers. To the extent that you stay sur­rounded by peo­ple of your socioe­co­nomic strata you will, more often than not, remain in that strata.  Given the oppor­tu­nity to jump ahead and be sur­rounded by peo­ple from a higher strata, you will see the chance to move your­self to join that strata.

Found this great info­graphic over at ChangeThis.  Thanks to the folks at Inter­na­tional Net­works Archive.

I’m see­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing shift in how I work. Where once I con­sid­ered Out­look to be an invalu­able tool for get­ting work done, I now con­sider it a nec­es­sary evil for use only when necessary.

Tak­ing on a new man­age­ment role left me over­whelmed with the amount of com­mu­ni­ca­tion I saw from project team mem­bers. Add to that my cus­tomer respon­si­bil­i­ties, and I was left with lit­tle time for any­thing but email. This focus on get­ting X num­ber of emails out the door a day left me with lit­tle sat­is­fac­tion at the end of the day.  I would go home dread­ing the knowl­edge that there would be another hun­dred for me to act on the next day.

Once I eval­u­ated my daily activ­i­ties, I started to see a clearer pic­ture.  Pareto’s Prin­ci­ple, also know as the 80/20 rule, says that 20% of one’s actions yield 80% of the results. The par­a­digm shift for me was to iden­tify all my tasks in the 20% bucket. 

Here’s my ‘a-ha’: major­ity of my 20% actions are spent away from e-mail.

This con­clu­sion bears repeat­ing — only a small hand­ful of the high value tasks I per­form in an aver­age day have any­thing to do with e-mail.

Some exam­ples of high value tasks that do not involve e-mail:

• weekly plan­ning and pri­or­i­ti­za­tion I do Sun­day evening and Mon­day morning.
• progress report review to get bird’s eye view of the project status
• cus­tomer edu­ca­tion via web pre­sen­ta­tion (work: MS Live­meet­ing, but if it was up to me every­one would be using dimdim)
• cus­tomer rela­tion­ship build­ing — feed­back in the form of notes and phone calls
• eval­u­at­ing com­pany processes and look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve

Let’s face it — e-mail is a major time suck. Man­ag­ing your inbox real-time is an even big­ger time suck, becuase it refo­cuses your atten­tion away from the task at hand, which is prop­bably higher impor­tance than that new email mes­sage you were just noti­fied about.

Spend more of your valu­able time away from e-mail and I’ll bet you’ll see a boost in results.

An inter­est­ing obser­va­tion of can­di­dates I’ve inter­viewed– it’s been about 50/50 between those can­di­dates who ask ques­tions dur­ing the inter­view and those that don’t.

One of the things I love about a can­di­date ask­ing ques­tions dur­ing an inter­view is that it shows gen­uine inter­est. Even if the can­di­date has already heard the answer, or maybe asked the ques­tion of another inter­viewer, it never hurts to get another perspective.

But there’s one ques­tion that is solid gold, and I have yet to hear it. I’ve made it a habit to ask this ques­tion when I’m in the candidate’s posi­tion. The ques­tion: Does any doubt remain that I would be a good fit for this position?

Boom.

Likely that you caught the inter­viewer off guard with that one. I could see some inter­view­ers not lik­ing this kind of direct ques­tion asked by a can­di­date. But I think the pros of ask­ing it far out­weight the cons, and I’m usu­ally will­ing to take the risk. You should be too.

Think about it for a minute.

The inter­viewer, out of polite­ness, is not likely to say ‘I don’t think that ques­tion is appro­pri­ate.’ Or ignore it. They have to answer, and the only two options are ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

If the inter­viewer answers ‘yes’, well then, you have a chance to probe a bit fur­ther and use your mad inter­view­ing skillz to try to rec­on­cile that doubt.

If the inter­viewer answers ‘no’, you have the job, right?

Not nec­es­sar­ily. But that’s the fun part about this. You have a chance to ask this of all your inter­view­ers… you can get con­sen­sus, and then you can use that con­sen­sus to your advan­tage. Build on pre­vi­ous responses to this query in sub­se­quent inter­views, and wrap this up at the end of the day with an explo­sive close that is the last thing the com­pany will hear from you before they call to offer you that job.

Inter­ested in learn­ing more about mar­ket­ing and the art of brand­ing? Check out Seth Godin’s web­site at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.