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/.