I hope you can join us on Sep. 22 evening for a presentation on "Where are the Deals?  Private Equity and Venture Capital Funds' Best Practices in Deal Origination ".  We'll be discussing preliminary findings from a white paper we're writing on this topic.  I'd like to thank our hosts, the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York .

Here's the ad:

The quality of the deals you source is one of the greatest drivers of your success as an investor. What are you doing to improve your deal flow?

David Teten will discuss:

• How are you positioning yourself to become your target's preferred investor?

• What does research on deal-origination indicate are the primary sources of deal flow for institutional investors?

• What are you doing to identify companies that might be interested in being approached?

• What are the earmarks of a potential investment opportunity?

• How are you systematically identifying industries/situations in which you may be able to create new companies, rather than find existing companies?

• How can you use Web 2.0 tools to identify appropriate investments?

• How do you increase your inflow of useful referrals?

• What is the best way to make warm cold calls?

David Teten is a Managing Director of Evalueserve, the world's largest knowledge process outsourcing company.  Founded in 2000, the company has over 2,400 employees.  Among its 1,100 clients are 6 of the top 10 investment banks and 10 of the top 15 strategy consulting firms.  David joined Evalueserve when the firm acquired his company, the Circle of Experts.  He leads Evalueserve's services in helping institutional investors originate investments.  David was formerly CEO of Teten Executive Recruiting, which he sold to Accolo, #42 on the 2007 Inc. 500 list.  Previously, he was CEO of GoldNames, an investment bank serving the internet domain name asset class.  He worked with Bear Stearns' Investment Banking division as a member of their technology/defense M&A team, and was a strategy consultant with Mars & Co.  David is lead author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first book on how businesses can use online networks and other "Web 2.0" technologies to originate deals, raise capital, win new clients, recruit star employees, and market their firm.  He holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA, both with honors.   David is a member of the Advisory Board for Accolo, Grouply, and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.   He is a frequent keynote speaker to finance and technology conferences

DATE
Monday, September 22nd

AGENDA
6:00 - 6:30 PM Registration
6:30 - 8:00 PM Program & Reception

PLACE
Cresa Partners

100 Park Avenue, [between 40th and 41st Street] 24th floor

PRICE
CBSAC/NY Members $25
Non-members $35
Pre-registration recommended. $10 surcharge added to day-of-event registrations
To become a member click here

REGISTRATION
To purchase tickets click here: Click here to buy tickets!!!
Space is limited and will fill up quickly.

NOTES
Reception includes bottled water, soft drinks and hot & cold hors d’oeuvres

EVENT ORGANIZERS
We are grateful to Gene Kenny and Frank Graziano (CBS '82) of the Private Equity Committee for organizing this event

Events | Leadership and Management | Private Equity Investing | Social Software

Lately, I have been thinking about the unemployed and underemployed as a pool of talent. I'd argue they are one of the most undertapped economic segments.  Of the global working population, 6.3% is unemployed.  In the US, the long-term unemployed are better educated, older, and more likely to be professional workers than the mean unemployed population.  These workers are particularly held back by age discrimination and high wage expectation.

I am reasonably familiar with this market because a key component of the Circle of Experts' strategy is to tap the knowledge of people in transition.  Working with this community excites me because the unemployed are people facing significant challenges.  While they are wrestling with finding a job, we are glad to pay them a competitive rate. 

Particularly now as layoffs increase, there are significant entrepreneurial opportunities in creatively tapping the time and talents of the unemployed and underemployed.  The expert network business, the fastest growing sector of the investment research industry, is a prime example.  Other successful startups working in this market (broadly defined): Accolo, TheLadders, Notch Partners, and ProfessionaLink. Who else would you add to the list?

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management

I recently learned about an entrepreneur with a very clever business model: Thorkil Sonne, founder of Danish software testing company Specialisterne.  The 55-person firm's clients include CSC, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Specialisterne claims to be the world's first company focused on leveraging the unique talents of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).  Sonne started the company in large part to ensure that people with ASD—including his own son—would have employment opportunities.  ASD, the most common form of autism, affects close to 1% of the population, but only 10% of ASD adults obtain any form of employment.

Software testing is a repetitive role which requires high attention to detail, and is an excellent fit for the typical ASD personality. 75% of Specialisterne's testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of ASD.  Sonne estimates that 1% of all the tasks executed in a given large company are suitable for autistic workers.

What I particularly like about this is that Sonne identified a community of talent almost unused by the labor market, and has built a successful firm on that insight.  From the point of view of both profit and of social welfare, he has built a powerful model. He is now expanding internationally.

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

I finally had a chance to upload slides prepared by my partner Scott Lichtman on how law firms can use Web 2.0 technologies to increase their billings. Download. Scott delivered this presentation as a talk some months ago.

Leadership and Management

I’m looking forward to speaking at the monthly New York Software Industry Association meeting on September 10 in New York. The topic is ‘Secrets of Silicon Alley's Serial Entrepreneurs’. Carter Burden, Laurel Touby and I will be sharing our thoughts. (Personally, I think the key secret is fail fast and often.)

Career Acceleration | Events | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

I'm looking forward to speaking at an upcoming conference, Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 in the Capital Markets Industry, on September 17 in New York.

Liz Abraham of Financial Markets World reports that they still have slots for a few speakers with experience in using or implementing Web 2.0 in the capital markets industry. If you're interested and qualified, contact liz.abraham(at)FMWOnline.com .

My topic is How to Source Deals Using Web 2.0 Technologies, focused on how investment bankers, hedge funds, and private equity funds source investments.  I also will be on a panel on Web 3.0.  Preliminary outlines of my presentations are at the preceding links.  If any readers have suggestions on this general topic, I would welcome them.

Leadership and Management | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

I enjoyed tonight's talk by Peter Thiel at NYC Junto, on "How New Technologies Thwart Government and Promote Freedom". Junto is a libertarian-focused discussion group organized by Victor Niederhoffer. I've been following Peter's writing for a while, since we overlap directly in our interests in investing and in online networks. Peter is President of Clarium Capital Management, an investor in both LinkedIn and Facebook, and was co-founder and former CEO of Paypal.

Peter started with two questions:

1) Let's assume libertarian view is correct. Why aren't more people libertarian?

2) What do we do about it? How do we make the world more libertarian?

Answers to question 1

- maybe libertarianism is not in peoples' interest

- lack of education

- [Cf. Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of The Rational Voter]

Answers to question 2

When Peter was an undergrad, he might say:

- Education

- Go door to door

- Convince people to vote for candidates

But as he got older, he saw this is very hard to do.

(highlight of the evening: Victor Niederhoffer's toddler son wanders around Peter's legs at this point)

An IQ test for libertarians: ask them how optimistic they are. The more pessimistic they are, the smarter they are.

One solution: move control of money from the government to individuals. But you cant do this via plebiscite. If there was a form of money that government couldn’t measure or track, you'd have a powerful alternative. This insight was genesis of Paypal in late 1990s.

In mid 90s, several companies were creating alternative currencies: Cybercash, Digicash, etc. All of the initial attempts were going out of business. Money has a network-like aspect. How do you create a new currency when no one else is using it?

All these efforts had run aground against this rock. So Paypal started by leveraging against existing systems: credit cards, checks. Send money to anyone with an email address. Started with 24 employees at Paypal. Preloaded accounts with $10. Started to spread. We grew at 5-7% compounded daily.

Einstein, "Compound interest is so miraculous it could only be created by G-d".

Initial theory was very idealistic. In reality we ran up against many obstacles, the first of which were customers. Massive amounts of emails/customer service inquiries.

Spring/summer 2000: discovered bad people are out there. Whole wave of fraud, including Russian mobsters, tried to exploit Paypal. Someone threatened Peter's mother unless PayPal unfroze his account. Then that person ended up shot dead.

Found dystopian website in Former Soviet Union: "Carders World". A carder is someone who steals financial information on people. This was a marketplace for personal financial information. They had a manifesto saying that they were going to take down the capitalist system. Paypal information was there.

2001 period: next obstacle was government. Initial Paypal strategy was to ignore government regulations—'we are not a bank'; ' none of these laws apply to us'. If we rolled this out quickly enough, the government couldn't stop us. "If you have a world where everyone is a criminal, you have to change the law."

Visa/Mastercard tried to come up with rules to prohibit Paypal from using their service. Government was even slower. Radical technological change must be fast.

In 2001/02, when company went public, things really hit the wall. The person investigating their S-1 thought that his job was to stop companies from going public. "He was demoted in government, which is a really extraordinary thing to happen."

Businessweek article said that state of Louisiana hadn't quite signed off on this. SEC investigator told Paypal management that state of Louisiana was going to shut this down. So in middle of roadshow, Peter had to track down government regulators in Louisana and convince them that Louisana did not want to get reputation as a particularly backward place. "So within 2 days, we managed to get that stopped. At the time we had 100,000 Louisana users."

"We are now in 100 countries. 3^rd largest payment brand after Visa/Mastercard in the world. "

How successful were we? Paypal currency is still denominated in national currencies. If you only have one form of currency, you're beholden to the issuer of that currency. Our initial vision inspired in part by Argentinean economic turmoil. If you can force competition between governments, you'll have stabler currencies.

Early 1980s: high inflation rates all over the world. Since then, it's gone down almost everywhere. Forms and symbols can persist well after the substance is gone, e.g., Queen's face is still on UK currency. Technology has been a very powerful force for decentralizing things.

1960s Time magazine cover: picture of 1 big computer that could run the world. Cf. Hal 2001. Computers as a force for centralization is a classic image. In the 90s, power shifted to individuals.

Famous early example: Soros distributing fax machines throughout Eastern bloc.

If everyone becomes a currency dealer thru Paypal, it changes the world.

So much has changed. For example in 1971: it was illegal to own gold and other currencies in the US. 1971 Treasury Secretary said, "It's our money---we can print as much as we want and it's the rest of the world's problem". You can't imagine Hank Paulson saying something similar today.

Power is shifting ineluctably away. Will technology continue to be a force for decentralization?

Why did 1960s vision of centralized computer not happen?

Peoples' ability to process information is flat, but the amount of information has gone up dramatically. So the only solution is decentralization. This is also why Moscow can't set the price of potatoes in Vladivostock.

You may be able to approximate information processing to a problem solveable in polynomial time---and then you have AI, and the 1960s vision of a centralized computer processing everything.

By 2050, we could have thousands of different countries. We have 10-20 years to push as hard and far as we can in direction of more liberty.

Q: How do you prevent Paypal from being used as electronic hawalla---form of terrorist financing?

A: We have protections in place---abide by Patriot Act.

2002: first year number of printed checks in US went down.

Q: question about Second Life and inflation

Q: question about goldmoney.com

A: The problem with gold is that when you really need it, it's not there. In 1933 the government confiscated all the gold bullion in the US.

Q; How do you promote libertarianism?

A: When I was young I tried to reduce the demand side (demand for regulation), but then I saw it was much too hard. So now I focus on the supply side. If I expand the supply side (e.g., more options for currencies), I reduce the amount of government in the system.

I want to promote change without being obliged to go through an election or plebiscite.

Governments are losing power to inflate because of technology. The risks are now tilted to deflation, not inflation. A deflationary environment is hard to invest in, because you can't just lever up and pay things off in cheaper dollars. Private equity and real estate are bad ideas in a deflationary environment. Donald Trump's argument is that you should be short dollars by going long real estate, is disastrous.

Q: How does Facebook promote libertarianism?

A: Facebook will be the dominant next media company . Since the old media companies are non-libertarian, this in itself is good.

Hedge funds are a way to bet against stupidity of governments.

Q: Could you comment on US visa policies and their impact on competitiveness.

He commented that once a tipping point happens, it's impossible to go back. Once the camel's back is broken, it can't be healed. Right now the marginal tax rate in NY is ~50%. In London it's 0%. So it's compelling for a hedge fund to set up shop in London, not NY.

There's a definite shifting of centers of quality overseas. It's happening faster in finance than in technology, but it is happening. (Audience member mentioned that Microsoft is setting up research centers in Canada and elsewhere specifically because they cant bring the researchers they hire into the US.)

Events | Leadership and Management | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research | Social Software

Jason Alba at JibberJobber added a JibberJobber profile to the Virtual Handshake social software company wiki. Barbara Safani writes,

A successful job search campaign requires exceptional organizational and follow-up skills. Jibber Jobber provides an easy to use interface that takes the drudgery out of the job search process while improving efficiencies and accelerating search activity.

What I like about Jibber Jobber is that it addresses a clear need among job-searchers: managing their job search and all of the people and companies with whom they interact during the course of their job search. The great majority of people I meet have very primitive personal CRM systems--often as primitive as a shoebox of business cards. So there's a large opportunity to provide people with more sophisticated tools. Jibber Jobber's challenge is that it is so narrowly focused on the job search, whereas every professional needs a personal CRM tool (e.g., Act, Microsoft Business Contact Manager, etc. They may find that they successfully penetrate the job-seeker market, then at some point rebrand and target the broader professional market.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

I am prone to agree with Robert Frank's argument in "A Career in Hedge Funds and the Price of Overcrowding". 

"[The market for hedge fund talent] is what economists call a winner-take-all market — essentially a tournament in which a handful of winners are selected from a much larger field of initial contestants. Such markets tend to attract too many contestants for two reasons.

The first is an information bias. An intelligent decision about whether to enter any tournament requires an accurate estimate of the odds of winning. Yet people’s assessments of their relative skill levels are notoriously optimistic. Surveys show, for example, that more than 90 percent of workers consider themselves more productive than their average colleague.

This overconfidence bias is especially likely to distort career choice because, in addition to the motivational forces that support it, the biggest winners in many tournaments are so conspicuous. For example, N.B.A. stars who earn eight-figure salaries appear on television several nights a week, whereas the thousands who failed to make the league attract little notice....

A second reason for persistent overcrowding in winner-take-all markets is a structural problem called “the tragedy of the commons.” This problem helps explain, for instance, why we see too many gold prospectors, an occupation that has much in common with prospecting for corporate deals. In the initial stages of exploiting a newly discovered gold field, adding another prospector may significantly increase the total amount of gold found. Beyond some point, however, additional prospectors contribute little. The gold found by a newcomer to a crowded field is largely gold that would have been found by existing searchers."

more...

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing

In our latest FastCompany column, we summarized best practices in managing virtual employees at Evalueserve:

...Daigle observed that the virtual structure eliminates many political issues: "Not only do we not have much of the water cooler, idle time type of communication, and resulting issues -- we don't have time for it. I think there is some truth that the four of us [of the EVS management team] have got by without serious conflicts over 6 full years because we're somewhat forced (by geographic non-proximity) to stay out of one another's way, trusting each other to execute. Despite being geographically dispersed, all four senior managers are actively involved in both sales and operations, in touch via email, instant messaging, and phone daily. However, because we are distant we are forced to act independently and to focus on execution."

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

I hope that some of you will join us for the program below.

CONSULTING OPPORTUNITIES WITH HEDGE FUNDS, PRIVATE EQUITY FUNDS, MUTUAL FUNDS AND OTHERS

Webinar with David Teten, Co-Managing Director, Nitron Circle of Experts

Friday, June 08, 2007, 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST

Sponsored by Execunet, the executive network for the $100K+ executive.

David is Co-Managing Director of the Nitron Circle of Experts ( CircleofExperts.com ), an independent research firm that pays senior industry executives to consult with professional investors, law firms, and a range of corporate clients. Our clients learn from experts like you through one-on-one consultations, customized surveys, and interactive events. Nitron is a subsidiary of Evalueserve, an offshore research & analytics firm.

Joining the Circle of Experts never costs you a dime. Your benefits:

• Interact and learn from the leading institutional investors.
• Work on strategic, thought-provoking projects.
• Monetary compensation. We pay a competitive hourly rate, varying depending on your experience.
• Convenience. Most consultations are over the phone, at times you choose.
• Privacy. Your consultations are entirely confidential. Only discuss topics of your choosing.
• Earn additional compensation to introduce qualified colleagues.

Among our Circle of Experts are alumni of:

Premier companies:

AIG, Cisco, Dow, DuPont, GE, IBM, McKinsey, MetLife, Microsoft, Pfizer, Shell, Sony, Toyota

Leading universities:

California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, MIT

Scientific institutions:

National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Harvard Medical School

Update:

Execunet has posted a recording of the presentation, available free at

http://www.execunet.com/execunet_ondemand/FTBREATETE_tetan_coffeebreak/ondemand.html

REGISTRATION

(Requires membership in Execunet )

https://members.execunet.com/e_membership_alertlogin.cfm?
redirfile=e_network_online_register.cfm&
fmtid=7a56&CFID=9087973&
CFTOKEN=4193b43320a9da58-C37A4E8C-EA68-1A78-C8A40DD1F900B762

Career Acceleration | Events | Leadership and Management

The folks at Landslide have figured out a great marketing strategy: If you view a demo of their "sales workstyle management" system, they'll give you a free copy of The Virtual Handshake--Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.

Alex Salkever of Inc. wrote in Turning Sales Into Science that Landslide "gives sales staffers what they need, when they need it, to close a deal."  In other words, Landslide provides salespeople more infrastructure, so that they can focus more on selling and less on all of the other activities that distract them from their main job.

Link: Watch a Landslide demo, get a copy of The Virtual Handshake

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research | Social Software

If you're having trouble understanding why and how it's become normative for the broadband generation (12-24) to document their entire lives online, I recommend Emily Nussbaum's Say Everything in New York magazine. My favorite section is from Clay Shirky of NYU, who has an amazing gift for metaphor:

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole.

“Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

Gary Stern of Investors’ Business Daily wrote in a recent article, Blogs Are Put To Use As Business Machines on the significant benefits of unconventional marketing tools, especially blogs. According to the article, blogs can help greatly in generating new prospects and business leads. Of course, blog functionality is migrating steadily to all websites. The Hindu Business Line predicts Blogs may replace typical corporate Web sites. There is one slight misstatement in the article. In the quotation from me about the efficacy of referrals, the correct quotation from me should be, “83% of emails sent via a LinkedIn referral receive a response, far more than without a referral.”

General | Social Software | Leadership and Management

Dion Hinchcliffe reports on "Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0".

One of the questions I get asked fairly frequently is how people can leverage Web 2.0 techniques in their applications and infrastructure today. Now that it's getting more well known, more people seem to be actively interested in making immediate, practical use of Web 2.0 ideas.

On a related note, the new meta-search tool Zuula looks very useful. (via Shally)

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

Via Barbara Safani:

Career Hub, a career advice blog I contribute to, recently launched their second free ebook, Insider’s Guide to Resume Writing. The free download is http://careerhub.typepad.com/main/2007/01/resume_writing_.html

General | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

"For CEOs and CEOs-to-be, sports may be a more effective training ground than any business school, according to both psychologists and entrepreneur athletes themselves." http://trax.inc.com/k/w/mailman/inc_leading/20070117/athletes

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

An interview with Michael Gerber, Author of The E-Myth Revisited:

"If they don’t fail outright, most businesses fail to fully achieve their potential. That’s because the person who owns the business doesn't truly know how to build a company that works without him or her.. which is the key." - Michael Gerber

Michael Gerber is the founder and CEO of E-Myth Worldwide, and best selling author of The E-Myth Revisited, and E-Myth Mastery. He defines E-Myth as:

1: The entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start a small business are entrepreneurs,

2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does technical work.

Since its publication in 1995, this business classic has sold over one million copies, and is published in 16 languages. Michael observes that most small businesses are started by "technicians", that is, people who are skilled at something and who enjoy doing that thing.

When these technicians strike out on their own, they tend to continue doing the work they are skilled at, and ignore the overarching aspects of business.

 Without clear goals and quantification benchmarks, they soon find themselves overworked, understaffed, and eventually broke. They come to hate the work they do. Rather than owning a business, Gerber writes, "they own a job." Click here for the interview.

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

America is ready for a new diet fad every year or so. Now that Atkins is done, the Calorie-Restriction Diet could well be next, particularly as the baby-boomers age. For a view of life with that diet, see New York magazine's article.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

"People who access the Internet for what have become routine functions -- sending emails, writing blogs, and posting photos and information about themselves on social networking sites -- do not realize how much of their personal privacy they put at risk, according to Wharton faculty and legal experts. Nor, they add, have the courts fully addressed the ways in which the Internet can be harnessed for questionable purposes that encroach on privacy. "

Kevin Werbach observes:

...[L]ots of situations that used to be private are now public. It's not a question of privacy but of social norms. Perhaps the answer is just, 'That's too bad.' If someone had snapped a photo of [the Korean girl who didn't clean up after her dog on the subway] robbing a bank and she said, 'You can't take a photo of me,' most of us would say, 'Too bad, you were robbing a bank.' In a perverse way, we're going back to the small town where everyone knows what everyone else is doing by virtue of the global information superhighway. My point is, right or wrong, this is going to happen. Google is not going to go away."

I agree that we may be moving to more of a "small town" environment, where your actions are known to many people, instead of you benefiting from the traditional anonymity of the big city. However, unfortunately so far there's very little evidence that this is resulting in an increase in standards of behavior, which would be my preferred outcome. Unfortunately, for broader societal reasons, we seem to be steadily defining deviancy down. More at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1567.cfm

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

General | Leadership and Management | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

From Scott Allen:

This week, Work.com relaunched in the form of a Web 2.0-ish business community. The site consists of how-to guides for running your small business, written by a combination of in-house editors, certified topical experts, and members. While this has admittedly been done before, Work.com has done a great job on the execution: - great domain name - a clean, well-organized design - a highly consistent guide format that includes links to online resources to help you get it done - a team of professional editors, community leaders and experts to make sure content stays current and appropriate and to help members get engaged in the community I'm the community leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel, and there's already a tremendous collection of how-to guides available on the site, including one I wrote on online business networks. Here are some of my other favorites related to online networks, social software, and Web 2.0:

• Small Business Blogs
• Start Podcasting for Your Small Business
• RSS for Small Business
• Marketing Your Small Business with a Blog
• Managing Small Business E-mail
• Managing E-mail Overload

I've committed to several more guides in the next few weeks -- I'll post here as they go up. Also, if you have a particular area of expertise and don't already see it covered (or at least not as well as you think you could), then you can also create a new guide yourself. If you do, be sure to stop by my profile and send me a message so I can have a read and come post comments. Hope to see you at Work.com!

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Quietly hidden in [Scott] Adams' groundbreaking work is a financial formula so simple it rivals Einstein's E=mc2. In its original form Adams' formula was apparently so heretical and so explosive that no major house would touch it when he proposed publishing it as a one-page book. After initial rejections, he announced sadly that "if God materialized on earth and wrote the secret of the universe on one page, he wouldn't be able to find a publisher" either. ... Fortunately for America's 95 million investors, Adams' secret nine-point formula was finally revealed in "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels." Notice its simple brilliance in the exact reproduction of his formula:

1. Make a will

2. Pay off your credit cards

3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support

4. Fund your 401k to the maximum

5. Fund your IRA to the maximum

6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it

7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account

8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement

9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

MarketWatch via TheBigPicture

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

Via Wharton's newsletter:

It's always been assumed that when employees leave their companies to join other ones that all their knowledge and experience leave with them.

 But new research suggests that, at least in the high-tech field, firms can wind up gaining access to the knowledge being generated at their former colleague's new place.

The results of this research are presented in a paper titled, "Learning from Those Who Left: The Reverse Transfer of Knowledge through Mobility Ties," by Wharton management professor Lori Rosenkopf and Wharton doctoral student Rafael A. Corredoira. ... "Contrary to the view that companies lose something when a worker leaves, the study found that they stood to gain.

Specifically, firms that lost an employee to another firm were 8% more likely to cite that firm than other equivalent firms, Rosenkopf says. The reverse flow of knowledge was particularly pronounced when the employee moved to another region. Then the old firm was 22% more likely to cite the new firm."

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1565.cfm

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

As a followup on my Vistage presentations, here's "What every CEO needs to know about the array of new tools that foster online collaboration -- and could revolutionize business": Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

For people who are really sick of losing bags, try flying with a gun. It works for this photographer:

A "weapons" is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols - those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets - are considered weapons...and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States. I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare...I'm given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me. That's the procedure. The case is extra-tracked...TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero. It's a great way to travel with camera gear...I've been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

Via Schneier via BoingBoing

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

I enjoyed speaking at lunch at two Vistage conferences this past week, in New York and Chicago. (As background, Vistage is the world's largest CEO membership organization based on revenue.) You can download my two presentations here: + Chicago Conference: How to Accelerate Your Company with Web 2.0 Technologies New York Conference: Seven Free, Easy Steps to Accelerate Your Business with Web 2.0 Technologies. I have also attached the New York handout below in HTML format. Feedback welcome!

Seven Free, Easy Steps to Accelerate Your Business with Web 2.0 Technologies

Ch = Character

Co = Your firm’s Competence

R = Relevance of the other company

S = Strength

I = Information

N = Number of companies

D = Diversity

Value of Your Corporate Network = D * ∑^N_n=1 (Ch_n * Co_n * R_n * S_n * I_n)

Attribute	Next Step	Cost
1) Character	Review your senior executives' profiles on ZoomInfo.com.	$0
2) Your firm’s Competence	Experiment with BasecampHQ.com for project management.	$0 for one project
3) Relevance of the other firm	Encourage employees to join LinkedIn.com, Xing.com, and other relevant online networks.	$0
4) Strength	Standardize internal phone calls on Skype.com. Encourage employees to use Instant Messaging services. (They're already doing it, most likely.)	$0
5) Information	Sign up on Bloglines.com, Technorati.com, or Topix.net for alerts about you and your competitors' appearances in blogs and news sites. Join CircleofExperts.com to be eligible for paid consulting opportunities.	$0
6) Number of people	Create standard corporate e-mail signature with strong brand reinforcement.	$0
7) Diversity	Use Jigsaw or Spoke.com to identify contact information on prospects.	Jigsaw: $0 w/uploaded contacts. Spoke: $50/mo.

And one more resource:

8) Learn more about Web 2.0

Download The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online at www.TheVirtualHandshake.com

$0

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

Via Barbara Safani, a no-cost job search ebook from Career Hub:

I'm excited to announce our very first eBook! The book, which features in-depth job search advice from 17 career marketing experts is available for download now.

 We put this book together because we know that so many job seekers feel lost when they start out on their search.

Having put all their time and energy into making their employers successful, they've had neither the time nor the need to keep up with the latest in job search strategies.

The Career Hub contributors are career coaches, recruiters, consultants, business executives and resume writers and all have valuable knowledge to share.

So I asked each of them to contribute to this free eBook in order to share what they know with those of you who are working your way through the job search process now (or plan to do so in the future).

Please feel free to share the book. And tell us what you think, either by email or in the comments. We plan to issue more free eBooks and your feedback will help us make them as useful as possible. Download here.

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management

The courageous actions of passengers on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11 flew in the face of a long-standing contention in social science circles that people won't put themselves in danger to right a wrong, e.g., the famous Kitty Genovese case.

This fact prompted Monica Worline, a professor of organizational behavior at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, and a colleague to find out what was different about this incident.

The result of their lengthy research is a new paper entitled "Capabilities for Organizing Courage: The Story of United Airlines Flight 93."

It is the first academic study to examine the group behavior dynamics aboard the plane on that fateful morning. The chief finding?

 "People do things in conversations with others that create psychological resources that allow them to act in difficult situations."

http://knowledge.emory.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=996

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

The event below is targeted at CFOs of mid-size and larger companies (over $50M in revenues). I hope that you can join us.

 CFO Leadership Team First Alumni Gathering September 21, Stamford, CT Guest Speaker: David Teten The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online Join fellow CFOs of mid-size and larger companies, and learn how to accelerate your sales, recruit star employees, enhance your marketing, or just find your next job by using online networks.

David Teten will discuss blogs, social network sites, virtual communities, relationship capital management software, biography analysis software, and other new tools.

 When: September 21, 6:30 to 8:30 PM Cost: $30 including hors'deurves, cash bar

Where: Stamford, CT (location disclosed to confirmed attendees) RSVP: by September 14 to Kevin McEnery, KJMcEnery(at)aol.com, 1-203-348-4435

Who: This event is open only to members of the CFO Leadership Group. Members must have experience as CFO or Divisional CFO in an organization with at least $50M in revenues.

 A few select recruiters specializing in CFO searches will also attend. Our members have experience with companies that include Acclaim Entertainment, Altria, Arc, Associated Press, Atari, Barnes & Noble, Calvin Klein, Dover, Gartner, Georgia Pacific, Gerber Scientific, Groupe Danone, Kodak, Labatt, McCann Relationship Marketing, Nestle, Newsweek, Pepsi, Revlon, Rogers, Scholastic, Sesame Workshop, The Reader’s Digest Association, Time Warner Cable, and World Wrestling Entertainment. Nominations welcome for members.

 Why: To see old and new friends

MORE ON OUR SPEAKER When you finish David Teten’s program, you’ll know how to:

 * create a powerful professional presence online

 * attract business in online networks

 * meet more relevant clients and potential clients

 * start and promote your own blog

 * master the email deluge

 * analyze and value your community of business partners

 * manage your contact database

 * ensure privacy and safety online

 "We hosted one of David Teten’s presentations at the Euromoney 2004 Annual Hedge Fund Start-Up & Business Development  Forum. Out of 40 speakers, David tied for first place for the highest speaker rating." - Diane Higgins, Financial Markets, EuroMoney PLC

BIOGRAPHY David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors ( www.NitronAdvisors.com), which provides independent industry experts with consulting opportunities to hedge funds and other institutional investors.

 To participate in paid interviews with Nitron Advisors’ institutional investor clients, at no cost to you, join the Nitron Advisors Circle of Experts ( www.CircleofExperts.com ).

 David is the co-author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online ( www.TheVirtualHandshake.com ).

David was formerly CEO of an investment bank specializing in Internet domain names. He has worked with the Bear Stearns Technology investment banking group and Mars & Co strategy consulting.

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:

The researchers identified four successful tactics for obtaining stretchwork that were common to both groups:

* Differentiate competence. Anyone hoping to advance must distinguish his or her performance on the job. This is particularly true, however, for contract workers—because they are paid for each short-term job, their employers are likely to subject their work to close, frequent evaluation.

* Acquire referrals. Because high-tech contractors tend to work with a number of clients, brokers, and fellow contractors, they enjoy a broader social network from which to draw referrals than most permanent employees. In the film industry—where most hiring is done based on a production manager's previous experience with an individual—referrals are a vital aspect of getting any job, particularly if it stretches a worker in a new direction.

* Framing and bluffing. "This is one of the most creative attributes for obtaining stretchwork," O'Mahony notes. "People who are good at presenting their prior experience in a way that allows for an easy translation to the desired job can narrow the gap between their past experience and future capabilities." Adopting a hybrid job title to identify oneself—"director-screenwriter," for example—can also help establish authority in more than one area.

* Discounting. Accepting pay below the market rate is a temporary disadvantage some contract workers are willing to accept, if it means gaining the experience and exposure that will lead to a new position. One technical writer put it this way: "I turned down solid offers from three companies, all paying over $100K a year…I would take a job at $55K if they're using a totally new technology so I learn something…It's like playing pool…You hit the green ball with the white ball, and the point is to place the white ball to get the next shot. So I take that job in order to learn skills for my next project."

More...

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

There's a product liability lawsuit waiting to happen here:

Studying with diligent friends is fine, says Heidi Lessing, a University of Delaware sophomore. But after a couple of hours, it's time for a break, a little gossip: "I want to talk about somebody walking by in the library." One of those friends, however, is working too hard for dish -- way too hard. Instead of joining in the gossip, "She says, 'Be quiet,' " Lessing says, astonishment still registering in her voice. Her friend's attention is laserlike, totally focused on her texts, even after an evening of study. "We were so bored," Lessing says. But the friend was still "really into it. It's annoying." The reason for the difference: Her pal is fueled with "smart pills" that increase her concentration, focus, wakefulness and short-term memory.

more at A Dose of Genius

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

Thanks to the American Mathematical Society, Dartmouth is giving away the much-praised textbook, Introduction to Probability by Charles M. Grinstead and J. Laurie Snell, as free etext. The website also includes computer programs to go along with the book. Link Via http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/03/introduction_to_prob.html

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

Via Scott Allen:

One of the few e-mail newsletters I read from top to bottom every month is Springwise, which features hot new business ideas from around the world. These may be local/regional businesses that can be duplicated in your area, or just an early player in a new market segment that is still wide open to new entrants.

The current issue features stories on:

Car Prices by Text Message
Car shoppers can check retail and blue book prices via cell phone.

Boutique Wines Online
Advice, discounts and access to boutique wineries not generally available at your local liquor store.

Dinner in the Sky
This one's kind of wacky - you'll just have to see it.

Luxury Convenience Store
In England, it's Harrod's. Imagine a Neiman-Marcus Corner Store in your neighborhood.

Repackaging Barcodes
Graphic designers are turning plain old barcodes into an integral part of the packaging.

Social Money
New tools help people who share bills or who lend and borrow money among friends to keep track of it. The latest issue of Business 2.0 predicts this is a $100 billion industry.

Subscriptions to Springwise are free. If you like it, be sure to check out their sister publication, Trendwatching, which covers new consumer trends.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

The August issue of Scientific American takes a deep look at how experts--chess grandmasters, musicians, physicians--develop their abilities.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence.

That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.

It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car.

 But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax.

 Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement.

In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

More... via Boingboing

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

According to the NY Times:

The amount of Internet buzz a movie generates is a strong predictor of its box-office take. But it hardly matters whether that buzz is good or bad, according to a study by Yong Liu, an assistant professor of marketing at the Eller College of Business at the University of Arizona.

I'd love to hear from the folks at trend-tracking companies such as Trendum, Intelliseek, Cymfony, and Brandimensions if they a) agree that people's positive or negative feelings are irrelevant for movies, and b) if this is true, does this pattern hold for other product categories?

General | Social Software | Leadership and Management

Dennis Kimbro's Prescription for Gaining Greatness in Work and Life

What makes the great, great? It's a question author Dennis Kimbro took 20 years to research, interviewing leaders from diverse backgrounds from Earl Graves of Black Enterprise magazine to Bishop T. D. Jakes. His findings were eventually culled into a book of the same name and recently shared with aspiring corporate and entrepreneurial leaders of the future at the inaugural Black MBA Diverse Leadership conference at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Among the offerings, Kimbro advised students to be "driven by your vision. Get a big dream and believe in yourself when no one else will."

http://knowledge.emory.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=979

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

HBS Professor Andrei Hagiu is an expert on multi-sided markets, and recently interviewed me on that topic:

Market Platform Dynamics--Catalyst Conversation: Conversation with David Teten. His site requires that you submit an email address to read the article (but I should note that he doesn't actually test if the email address is functional.)

General | Leadership and Management | Public Markets Investing | Social Software

John Doerr's Startup Manual is still timely (even though it dates from 1997). Via Marc Cenedella's blog

General | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing

Younger siblings, better entrepreneurs?

Which slot in the birth-order sequence makes for the most successful entrepreneurs? Ben Dattner: It's not that cut and dried. There are positives and negatives -- and examples of successful business people -- from all the places in the birth-order spectrum. For instance, first-born entrepreneurs tend to be more extroverted and confident than their younger siblings. In a business where somebody needs to maintain a high PR profile, you could imagine that it might be easier if you're naturally extroverted and confident. Especially if you'll be called on to talk to the media as the public face of your company. First-borns also tend to be more assertive and authoritarian, dominant and inflexible. They're good at executing a plan, following it, and driving others to follow it in a disciplined way. Conformist, task-oriented, disciplined, and concerned with getting things done right -- all these traits are naturally found in first-borns.

more..

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

The MBAs of the Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA program have posted summaries of all of their classes at: http://www.kr04.net/ This is a handy reference site---a summary of what you learn in an executive MBA, all on one website.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing

Via Marc, I was led to a blog post by David Manaster on recruiter efficiency. He reports that "It would seem that (on average) the optimal workload for a recruiter is between 11 and 20 open positions. " I'd argue that the main reason for this phenomenon is that most recruiters are using only the traditional toolkit: Excel, Word, email, phone, to keep track of their applicants. Nitron couldn't function effectively if we were this inefficient. John Younger, CEO of recruiting process outsourcer Accolo, observed:

I actually find this research to be right in line with our surveys for the typical recruiter today.

 We have found the optimal workload to be between 4 and 18 unique full-time jobs simultaneously.

 At 18 or more, the applicant screening, follow-up and tracking take a severe dive.

The astounding part is that this is the same recruiter workload of 1963! Think about it.

What else in our lives has not budged a bit in productivity in over 40 years! This is the time before e-mail, job boards, the internet and Starbucks.

The core reason is that the recruiter today operates in exactly the same model as the early 1960’s. All we have done is pave the cowpath.

 It gets worse… the hiring manager service and applicant experience have actually diminished with all the technology noise in the middle.

There are new models emerging, but there is an army of people invested in keeping things the same.

According to a staffing.org survey of 2,294 companies, during 2005, the national average Recruiting Efficiency Index was 12.3%. REI is calculated by dividing total recruiting costs, including recruiter salaries & overhead, applicant tracking, advertising fees, etc. and dividing it by total compensation recruited. Accolo reports an REI of under 7% for clients using Accolo's system. Among the drivers for that efficiency: - much higher per-recruiter workload - use of online networks for recruiting (more on that topic)

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Steve Pavlina's list of 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed is worth reviewing even for the non-self-employed. Via Marc Cenedella's blog

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

A jobless marketing manager recently touted his accomplishments to New York search firm Canny, Bowen. He simultaneously sent the same cover letter and resume to more than 150 other executive recruiters -- and identified every recipient on his e-mail's distribution list. The shotgun approach helped chill the chances of Canny, Bowen proposing him for any vacancy. "We get a half-dozen mass mailings like this every week," reports Gregory Gabel, a managing director. "Two years ago, I never used to get these."

more...

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

From our latest FastCompany.com column:

Your dream employee is lurking out there. How do you find him or her? To track down those stars, recruiters are aggressively using online tools such as blogs, virtual communities, social-networking sites, and biography-analysis software. Here are some best practices in those areas, drawn from Accolo, Nitron Advisors, and Microsoft.

(Disclosure: I'm on Accolo's Advisory Board). full column

General | Social Software | Leadership and Management

From the Freakonomics column in the New York Times:

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. .... whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

more

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Hedge-fund guru Joel Greenblatt (also a principal of the Value Investors Club) applied Wall Street principles—and $1,000 per student—to turn around a struggling Queens elementary school. And it worked, spectacularly. more...

General | Leadership and Management | Public Markets Investing

From Tom Peters: This list of not-always-obvious tips is worth reviewing. http://www.changethis.com/21.01.111ThoughtsOnSelling

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Maureen Crawford Hentz writes on Phone Interview Etiquette Can Propel You to the Next Step in the Hiring Process.

Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee writes in his blog:

I have an article in the spring 2006 issue of Sloan Management Review (SMR) on what I call Enterprise 2.0 -- the emerging use of Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis (both perfect examples of network IT) within the Intranet.

The article describes why I think this is an important and welcome development, the contents of the Enterprise 2.0 ‘toolkit,’ and the experiences to date of an early adopter.

 It also offers some guidelines to business leaders interested in building an Enterprise 2.0 inftrastructure within their companies.

One question not addressed in the article is: Why is Enterprise 2.0 is an appealing reality now? It’s not because of any recent technology breakthrough.

Blogs, wikis, and RSS have been brewing since the 1990s, and folksonomies and AJAX since the early years of this decade.

 Is it just that technologists and entrepreneurs needed a bit of time to absorb all of elements and combine them into useful tools?

That’s certainly part of the story, but focusing only on technology components risks missing the forest for the trees. In particular, it misses three broad and converging trends, all of them concerning the changing relationship between those who offer technologies and those who use them.

The trends are:

 1. Simple, Free Platforms for Self-Expression ....

2. Emergent Structures, Rather than Imposed Ones ....

3. Order from Chaos ....

 the technologists of Web 2.0 are providing a third valuable service -- they’re rolling out tools that help us filter, sort, prioritize, and generally stay on top of the flood of new online content.

 As described in the SMR article, these tools include powerful search, tags (the basis for the folksonomies at del.icio.us and flickr), and automatic RSS signals whenever new content appears. ... I’ll end this post with an anecdote that showed me that these three trends are not yet well understood by many business leaders.

 Last week I was teaching in an executive education program for senior executives - owners and presidents of companies.

I assigned a case I wrote about the internal use of blogs at a bank, and also gave one additional bit of homework: I pointed the participants to blogger and typepad, and told them to start their own blogs and report the blog’s URL to me.

What they reported instead was that they had no intention of completing the assignment.

They told me how busy they were, and how they had no time and no inclination to mess around with blogs (whatever they were).

 Out of two classes of 50-60 participants each, I got fewer than 15 total blog URLs. Trying to turn lemons into lemonade in class, I asked some of the people who actually had sent a URL to describe the experience of starting a blog.

They all shrugged and said it was no big deal, took about five minutes total, didn’t require any skills, etc. I then asked why I would give busy executives such a silly, trivial assignment.

 In both classes one smart student piped up to say "To show us exactly how trivial it was." At that point, class discussion became interesting.

via Ross Mayfield What Prof. McAfee is describing *inside* the enterprise is exactly the same sort of phenomenon that we see salespeople, recruiters and other using both inside and outside the enterprise, and explore in The Virtual Handshake. Another person now writing on this area: Paul Gillen. (Via Centrality Journal )

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

I hope that some of our readers will join me at TiECON East, June 15-17, in Boston, MA. With over 1,200 expected attendees, TiECON East plans to become the largest Global Innovation conference on the East Coast.

 The sponsoring organization is TiE, whose members receive roughly 5% of the venture capital investment in the United States.

Speakers include: -

 Howard Anderson, Founder Battery Ventures and The Yankee Group - Nikesh Arora, VP & GM Europe, Google - Clayton M. Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School, Author, The Innovator's Dilemma - Rajat Gupta, Senior Partner Worldwide, McKinsey & Co. - Ray Kurzweil, Author & Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence - Venkat Ramaswamy, Ross School of Business at University of Michigan - Paul Sagan, CEO, Akamai - Mohanbir Sawhney, Professor, Kellogg School of Management - Howard H. Stevenson, Professor, Harvard Business School - Hatim Tyabji, Executive Chairman, Bytemobile Inc.

 I'll be participating in two panels, one on innovation in social software and online networks, and one on innovation in investment research.

The keynote speaker is Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations (although I somehow doubt he will be talking about innovation, given that's not the UN's strength.) With prices starting at $269 for TiE Members and $100 for student members, the conference isn't expensive. For more information or to register, contact the TiE-Boston office at (781) 272-3875 or visit www.tieconeast.com .

Career Acceleration | Events | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research | Social Software

Katharine Hansen discusses how to maximize your internet job searches: http://www.quintcareers.com/maximizing_net_job_search.html

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

(From "Remember Every Name Every Time" by Benjamin Levy.)

In the book, Levy describes two methods for remembering names.

First, the verbally-oriented, "basic" technique:   FACE. FOCUS on the name. ASK again. COMMENT to them and yourself about the name. EMPLOY the name in conversation.

 Second, the visual, "advanced" NAME system. It's "advanced" because it doesn't depend on you working the person's name into conversation, and it does take a lot of practice.

But Levy remembers hundreds and hundreds of names using the four steps below. NAME stands for... NOMINATE - Survey the face, then choose a feature, any feature! [Ex. Bob's nose.] ARTICULATE - Describe the feature to yourself so you know it.

 [Ex. Bob's nose...it's large in proportion to his face, and the nostrils are very prominent.]

MORPH - Names don't mean much, so transform them into nouns! [Ex. "Bob" becomes..."bobsled!" Visualize the famous Jamaican bobsled team.] ENTWINE - so that... NOMINATED feature + MORPH = a lasting memory [Ex. Dozens of bobsleds shooting out of his nose!] Via Keith Ferrazzi's newsletter

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Technology has made it possible for teams with members around the world to work on virtual projects.

A monthly budget for such a project can easily exceed $1.2 million and involve more than 60 team members worldwide.

 Although email and other communication tools make this possible, what happens when team effectiveness is hampered by the same technology?

Dominic M. Thomas, a visiting assistant professor of decision and information analysis at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, and colleagues studied the failure of large virtual projects to learn what went wrong.

Their findings are presented in a new paper titled "Making Knowledge Work Successful in Virtual Teams via Technology Facilitation."

http://knowledge.emory.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=945

General | Leadership and Management | Social Software

I recently was fortunate to participate in a panel discussion on “The Great Sales and Marketing Debate: The Cagey Sales Veterans Debate the Young Up-and-Comers”, sponsored by the New York Software Industry Association, March 13, 2006, held at JP Morgan Chase.

 Allen Reynolds and Jesse Mandell all took some notes, which we have merged in the summary below. Master of Ceremonies, Bruce Bernstein, welcomed and introduced the two questioners and four debaters.

 Questioners: Sherri Sklar and Ruth P. Stevens Sherri Sklar, President, Sherri Sklar Strategies, LLC Sherri Sklar has built a star track record in helping organizations obtain exceptional results.

 Over the last 20 years, she has enabled organizations to make dramatic turnarounds, helping under-performing divisions achieve significant growth in the most difficult of marketplace conditions.

 Ms. Sklar has helped organizations in marketing strategy and execution, sales strategy, sales execution and performance, business development strategy, channel management, and communication skills training.

 A frequent presenter at seminars and conferences, Ms. Sklar practices and teaches 'peak performance delivery', a proprietary technique Ms. Sklar employs to help clients achieve optimal results.

Ms. Sklar is President of her own consulting company, Sherri Sklar Strategies, LLC., (SSS). SSS is a sales, marketing and business development consulting firm that delivers measurable results from assessment, proven strategies, and excellence in execution.

 Ms. Sklar received her MBA from Harvard Business School and her BA from Newcomb College at Tulane University.

Ruth P. Stevens Ruth P. Stevens' expertise in customer acquisition and retention derives from a decade and a half of hands-on marketing for both large enterprises and start-up companies.

Just prior to beginning her consulting practice, she served as chief marketing officer at an Internet company in New York City.

Before that, she had broad responsibilities for direct marketing at three corporate giants-- IBM, Ziff-Davis and Time Warner. At IBM, she served as director of direct marketing, North America, for the IBM hardware, software and services brands, leading a team of 140 direct marketing professionals.

 She then moved to the IBM Software Group, where she directed global direct marketing. At Ziff-Davis, she served as vice president of marketing for the electronic publishing division, and later helped launch Ziff's Consumer Media Group as its vice president of marketing.

At Time Warner, she worked in marketing, new business development and general management for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Time-Life Books.

 Ruth has been a regular columnist for DMNews and is a frequent contributor to a variety of marketing publications.

She teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School and NYU's Stern School of Business. Ruth serves on the boards of the Direct Marketing Idea Exchange in New York City and the Direct Marketing Club of New York.

She is past chair of the Business-to-Business Council of the Direct Marketing Association and holds a BA from Hamilton College and an MBA from Columbia University.

Debaters: Alan Kaufman, Ed Martino, Larry Cohen, and David Teten

Team Old School: Alan Kaufman and Ed Martino Alan Kaufman

Alan Kaufman is a 38 year veteran of the Computer/Software/IT Industry. He was a founding member of the management team of Cheyenne Software, Inc., where as executive vice president of sales, he grew the business from $1 million in fiscal 1990 to over $200 million in 1997 to propel Cheyenne into the 13th largest software company in the industry.

 He has served as an officer in the Navy and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University.

 He serves on the Board of Directors of NetIQ, a leader in server and security management, and is a Trustee of Outward Bound USA.

Alan also serves on the Board of Directors of NYSIA and is its founding president.

Ed Martino, Director of Industry Business Solutions, Sprint Nextel Ed Martino is currently the Director of Industry Business Solutions for the new Sprint Nextel Company.

 He has worldwide responsibility for the market penetration, solution development and overall growth in industry sectors for Financial, Insurance, Media and Professional Services, a $2b business area.

Prior to this role, Ed was the Director, Northeast Corporate Sales for Nextel Communications.

Other roles have included the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales reporting to the President for two companies both in the global systems integration business.

Ed also served in various global management positions for the IBM Company for eighteen years.

Ed is a member of several boards including the NY Software Industry Association where he is the Vice Chairman.

 Team New School: Larry Cohen and David Teten Larry Cohen, EVP, Heartbeat Software

 Larry Cohen is one of the most creative and inventive minds in the software business. He has that rare ability to listen to a business problem, quickly isolate the key issue, and translate that insight into a practical software solution.

 From his early days in the industry, Mr. Cohen has demonstrated a remarkable instinct for identifying a new technology solution and putting it to work quickly.

Shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley, he pioneered the use of Webcasting in the healthcare industry. Soon after, he received an NIH grant to conceive the first online adherence programs ever developed.

 Larry was a driving force behind the first enterprise-class, web-based software products for Marketing Content Management (MCM) in the financial services industry.

 He devised a highly innovative technology and methodology for performing online competitive intelligence. And lately, he's been fashioning a new form of CRM that integrates data-mining and web services.

 Throughout his career, Larry has closely advised some of the world's most prestigious organizations, including Amgen, Novartis, GSK, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Intel.

David Teten, CEO, Nitron Advisors

David Teten is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Nitron Advisors, an independent research firm which provides hedge funds, venture capitalists, and other institutional investors with access to a network of frontline industry experts.

 He is also coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first business guide to how to use blogs, social network sites, and other online networks to accelerate your sales.

He blogs on the Circle of Experts Brain Food Blog and at TheVirtualHandshake blog.

 David formerly worked with Bear Stearns' Investment Banking division as a member of their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team, and was a strategy consultant with Mars & Co.

 He holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA. NOTES ON THE EVENT: Larry Cohen, EVP, Heartbeat Software David and I see 5 main differences between the 'old school' and the 'new school' of sales and marketing:

 1. The new school sells highly focused products.

The new school goes after underserved, highly niche markets (and submarkets) that do not have much competition or many me-too products.

 For example, Heartbeat Software does not sell CRM to pharmaceutical sales organizations. We sell a highly specialized CRM product to Medical Affairs Departments and their Medical Science Liaisons.

 Due to our specificity, we are able to work with the majority of pharmaceutical companies and offer them incredibly specific learning from their competitors.

We aim to penetrate the majority of these markets (and have done so in pharmaceuticals). Similarly, Nitron Advisors focuses specifically on introducing their clients, hedge funds, VC funds, and law firms, to industry experts---and more specifically experts in transition.

The new school understands that we need to do a few things very well and that companies buy software because their competitors have bought software - period. One client told me that if no one has bought the software they would never buy it.

 If everyone has it -- what's the point? But if a few key competitors have purchased, they will quickly jump on board. Non-vertical specific back-up software, data storage, or cell phones are not specific enough to attract the new school.

 2. The new school does not waste valuable marketing dollars on soft, non-focused, and unproven channels.

The new school uses on-line and off-line tools that have a proven, measurable ROI by creating a direct, track able, one-to-one relationship with our customers.

Among the major mechanisms for this: + highly targeted old school cold calling with a new school spin; selling a proven piece of software to a sub-market that is not being called on; + e-mail marketing to very specific titles and organizations where we have market share, with tracking provided by software provider; + Pay per Click search engine advertising (Google, etc.) + Pay per Call search engine advertising (Ingenio, etc.) (Teten's editorial note: Eloqua offers some useful marketing ROI tools.)

3. The new school focuses on smarts & network, not necessarily experience.

 Sales methodologies are interesting.They are also boring and notoriously difficult to get to stick or to actually change behavior.

The new school understands that growing a stellar sales team is about hiring smart, energetic people who are great at sales.

 What makes a good salesperson?

The new school knows that it is one thing: A person that keenly understands the part of themselves that other people relate to and who can leverage that part to get people to buy. We hire those people. No matter what experience, sales training, or existing client relationships they have. Google famously put a billboard up on the road from San Francisco to San Jose that had a complex mathematical problem on it. If you solved it, you gained access to a recruiting website. The new school knows that smarts goes a tremendously long way.

4. The new schools taps online networks, not only face-to-face networks.

 Consider that 84% of U.S. Internet users have used the Internet to contact or get information from an online group—more than have used the Internet to read news, search for health information, or even to buy something.

More and more of us are using online networks, such as blogs, social network sites, virtual communities, and other "social software" as a daily part of our business life.

 All the major Internet players, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, eBay, and Google, are already offering social software tools and planning more in the near future.

 Bill Gates, John Kerry, and other celebrities are among the over 2 million people currently registered on LinkedIn, a popular business networking site. Nitron Advisors uses these technologies both to target customers and to recruit new industry experts on our clients' behalf.

 5. The new school sells based on product quality, not just on who plays better golf.

Many salespeople spend a tremendous amount of time and energy playing golf and drinking beers with customers. They believe that a personal “I like him" relationship is key to closing the sale.

 In the new world, that relationship is helpful, maybe even a prerequisite, but it doesn't close the sale.

Neil Rackham, founder of sales consultancy Huthwaite, conducted a study of whether salespeople who built good relationships would really make more sales:

"We found that sellers who dealt successfully with small retail outlets in rural areas seemed to rely heavily on personal factors in their selling. . . . For example, the seller might ask, “How’s Ann enjoying her riding lessons?" . . . In rural areas, where the size of the sale was small, successful sellers used more of these personal references than did sellers who were less successful." "But it was a different story in the large urban stores, where the average sale was more than 5 times the size. We found no relationship between success and reference to personal issues[emphasis added]." … "I’ve heard many other professional buyers complain about salespeople who try to open calls by cultivating areas of personal interest. The last thing a busy buyer wants is to tell the tenth seller of the day all about his last game of golf. . . . Many buyers become suspicious of people who begin by raising areas of personal interest."

Source: Neil Rackham, Spin Selling (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988), 140.)

Alan Kaufman After Cheyenne sold, I retired.

 Soon after, I was approached by the VP of sales for NetIQ Corporation and asked where I found my stellar employees. The answer was that I trained them.

Training is incredibly important. Every new situation I went into was different. I never took a cookie cutter approach to anything.

 A good sales/marketer carries a quiver full of arrows and can use each one for any new situation that arises.

Sherri Sklar, President, Sherri Sklar Strategies, LLC As my first question, can you sell a complex software solution without meeting the client face to face?

 Ed Martino, Director of Industry Business Solutions, Sprint Nextel Yes, you can, but I wouldn’t advise it. If it’s complex, it needs lots of service.

The biggest cost is in the service side and your goal is to build a bridge to the customer and use them as a referral to build business.

 David Teten Yes you can. Salesforce.com does it all the time.

That said, the more complex the product and particularly the after-sales support, the more helpful meeting in person can be.

To sell virtually, you first need credibility (your potential clients and competitors look you up online and evaluate the validity of your service) and second, effective relationship management.

Ed Martino I disagree with David. Most of Salesforce's sales are to corporate customers and their success depends on the time that they spend with their customers.

 David Teten But it is impossible for a company to meet with all their smaller customers.

 Alan Kaufman You must identify how complex a sale is and whether you need to go out there to meet face to face.

 Ruth P. Stevens To be competitive in getting the product to market, how should the marketing be structured? What is the best marketing approach?

Larry Cohen At Heartbeat, customers pay for product development. Marketing should focus on specific departments in like companies.

When we call someone who works in hedge fund marketing, and say we have a product designed just for him, we get a good response rate. It's not spam if the person is interested in buying what you sell.

 Alan Kaufman Good marketing programs include people who are interested in talking to analysts to see how the customers are buying. I don’t believe in print advertising, especially if you are working with a small budget.

 Bruce Bernstein How should you go after your target market? How do you enable the sales to happen? How do you structure the sales team?

Ed Martino It all depends on the size of companies. It always takes lots of research and phone calls, and knowledge of the competition.

Draw 3 circles:

1. What business am I in?

2. What are the customers' needs?

3. What does the company have to offer?

The little space where the circles overlap is what you develop and present to the CIO.

Larry Cohen Small software companies are unable to pay to talk to analysts, so they must talk to businesses in the area for the problem they are going to solve.

Refer to previous success that you’ve had at one or two other companies.

 Ed Martino I agree that if you don’t have a large enough budget, don’t talk to analysts.

Talk to smaller CIOs from a niche group and then work your way up to the top.

Larry Cohen I agree with Ed. We use that business model at Heartbeat Software. Ruth P. Stevens The marketing department must provide good leads for sales force. How would you suggest that you develop these leads?

 Alan Kaufman Having an inside telesales group that goes through incoming leads and cold calling is good. You also need to develop a good computerized process that is repeatable. Leads from the Internet need to be shown to the inside sales group as well.

 David Teten We get to the big dogs through networks. Each member of our sales team (and of our whole company) has a personal network that we can tap. In addition, no surprise, we use online networks. We post intelligent comments on someone’s blog to make an entrée, and get into a target's network in that manner. Microsoft has approximately 1,200 bloggers out of 55,000 employees.

 There is no excuse to cold call Microsoft; just contact a blogger in your target area, and use their blog as a conversation starter.

Ruth P. Stevens What incentives do you use for the sales team to follow up?

David Teten Pay people a good commission. Develop a sense of ownership. Give options.

 Larry Cohen We have company wide minimums. If it’s a top 25 pharmaceutical company we go in person and talk to them David Teten In order to get leads, people should be thinking about how to talk to their particular network. This method is much easier than getting leads from a database company.

Bruce Bernstein The old school is emphasizing structure and the new school is going with leads. We hate the people who contact people for business by my boarding school alumni directory.

 What do you think about David’s method?

Ed Martino If you have a niche, then you don’t need to worry about making the phone call. If you’ve got value and you’ve done the research, then the other person may actually appreciate the call.

 Bruce Bernstein It might also be a generational thing. The youngsters don’t mind getting the networking call.

David Teten The issue is how to get the most targeted individual. Email used to be an effective means, but today, email is broken. You can’t reach people easily via email due to spam filters and overuse of the email medium. If you can find the name of person in your sweet spot, call them. Even the shallowest referral is better than an cold call.

Sherri Sklar What are the most important things that someone in marketing can do to create a buzz for their firm and their product?

 David Teten Get to opinion leaders. Get to bloggers. They are very powerful way to spread word of mouth. That's a large reason why companies like Foldera have attracted over 1 million downloads---great coverage in influencer blogs like Techcrunch and Om Malik.

 Lead events. Be a speaker and put yourself in a leadership position. You will reach far more people speaking at a conference, than you will handing out business cards before one. Reach 100 people, not 5.

 Ed Martino Blogs sound good. We want to look into them. Press releases are also good. Sometimes a trade show is a good idea, if you can find ways to bring customers too it. You will create a buzz just from saying that you are going to be at the show. Target is the key word.

 Marketing to promote your product in a targeted way is very important.

Larry Cohen For selling to institutional investors, I lean more toward conferences on asset management trends, rather than trade shows, since marketing and business people will be speaking at them.

Pay for your sales people to attend, and shake hands and create relationships. It's cheaper to send 5 salespeople than to get one corporate sponsorship.

Alan Kaufman The trade shows that you choose to attend must have your customers there. I like to allow our customer a chance to demo our products. If possible, get a small booth so people can at least see your company logo.

 Ed Martino It’s all about ROI. It can make the difference between a million in sales and 60-70 billion in sales. ROI is key. You must be selective and you must leverage the money that you put out to get a return.

Sherri Sklar How do you grow a stellar sales team? Do you simple hire energetic, smart people, or is there much more?

Ed Martino I am big on balance. People with fire in the belly are important, but what you really need is diversity because it enables different groups and people to bring in their abilities to the sales force.

You want young people who are energetic and idealistic to bring in pep, and older people who can bring in learned skills to pass on. You also need people from the industry for which you are selling.

The younger people will give you a lot of overtime. Motivation, however, is key.

 People need to feel empowerment and ownership.

 Larry Cohen We are a $10m company.

Each person needs to meet their quota. We do, however, go after a wide range of people. The key is to find people who know what about themselves makes them successful. We interview a ton of people, but after they are hired, 99 percent of them stay.

 Ruth P. Stevens As sales managers, how do you optimize profits to your firm when the sales team is always trying to give away a deal?

Alan Kaufman I think it is sloppy to sell on price. You can always cut a deal if you have to. If they cut a deal too much, the loss should come out of the salespersons percentage.

 Larry Cohen We need to train people to stay by their product.

David Teten Another idea is to pay your sales team a commission on margin instead of based on revenue.

This margin info should be shared with your team, but it often isn’t. We show all our new employees our full business plan on their first day of work, because we want them to understand the big picture.

 Ed Martino In smaller companies, I would drop price to get marketing traction. If the customer will eventually become a testimonial, then it’s good. You need to take risk. Larger businesses need to have focus. They need to pick customers. At the end of the day, you want sustainability.

 In smaller companies, salespeople don’t see the sales price, and that’s why they try to give it away for lower.

 Sherri Sklar If someone says that he is interested in your software if you can prove to them that it is buy worthy, do you fly someone out? How do you approach the relationship?

 Larry Cohen Because products are focused, we phone and then fly to meet with them. I’ve learned that we are more likely to make the sale if we stick to the price, because if we slide, then they may question the value of the product more and more.

 Alan Kaufman In today’s world, regions are a lot larger so you have to be careful about support. How would you support your product in South Africa?

 This scenario requires discipline in the sales force. They should know not to go after crazy leads. If it’s a one-time, you might want to walk away, but if it's American Airlines in Texas, you have a lot of chances to make other sales.

Sherri Sklar What technologies can you use if you don’t know what the return will be, you don’t want to lose it the sale, but you also don’t want to send expensive resources out?

David Teten Use all the media: IM, email, webconferencing, phone, in-person meetings. This allows for a steady progression of relationship closeness.

 Professor Caroline Haythornthwaite has done some very interesting research in this area showing that the more media channels you use, the higher the trust levels that develop between two parties.

QUESTIONS FROM AUDIENCE: Scott Lichtman How do you feel about PowerPoint and its role in sales pitches?

David Teten People buy from people, not from paper. The more talking I do, the less selling I do. Communicate value and use a slide show for support. You want the attention focused on the company and the project, not the PC.

 Ed Martino I am seeing that the PowerPoint is here to stay. Today, it is more animated and you are trying to stay way from stale slides. There is more animation and stuff over the net. Webinars etc. are a great way to get your story in front of a lot of people.

David Teten Humans are wired to be interactive. PowerPoints are passive, and your potential customers will learn less and buy less when they are passive. You need to keep them active if you want to keep them interested.

Bruce Bernstein What method was used before PowerPoint?

Alan Kaufman We used flip charts and then foils. I love listening to good speakers. A major problem today is that people don’t speak to the audience. Also, never read from your charts.

If you read to your audience, you will lose them. Using a wipe-board works for developing an idea in front of a crowd. Using a PowerPoint can be a disservice.

Audience Member In your experience, what best motivates a sales force?

Ed Martino Incentives work if they are fun. Recognition of achievement is also important. Build a plan at the beginning of each year. Each person should know what the accelerator and multiplier is.

If they blow the doors off, they will know what the cap is.

 Alan Kaufman Salesmen have fragile egos, and when they are in a losing streak, it gets to them. Give recognition to the people who perform the best. This has the incredible effect of reinforcing their positive performance.

 Audience member The three most important things for generating leads are current clients, (stealing from) competition, and referrals.

Larry Cohen I find that if they have a rolodex, it may be all that they have to offer. That’s why we don’t go with them. At some point the rolodex runs out.

Alan Kaufman There is nothing wrong with a portfolio, especially when you are trying to capture a vertical.

Larry Cohen We put out our own PR, and when we come out with a new product, we send out targeted emails.

 Bruce Bernstein Earlier in evening, David Teten mentioned that email was broken. Ed Martino said that there is no place for instant messaging in corporate America. Please expand.

Ed Martino Instant messaging is internal. Email should only be used because everything needs to be logged. Instant messaging isn’t on the radar screen, and it can’t be logged or archived.

David Teten As the young grow up, instant messaging will become an increasingly important medium. There are plenty of companies which sell archiveable IM and email solutions. IM is being used regularly across corporate boundaries—we use it with our clients.

 Bruce Bernstein Are there fundamental differences in advertising that that came out during this discussion?

David Teten

 1) There is a movement in spending from advertising in mass media to PR. We are so deluged with advertising that it has lost efficacy. However, people do read the actual content in the magazine around which the advertising is wrapped. A good PR firm can get you in there as content. We get sales leads every few weeks from a Businessweek article about us from last year.

2) Secondarily, there also exists a movement to advertising where you can calculate an ROI. We're moving from pay per click, to pay per action or pay per call. Compare that with throwing a million dollars at the Superbowl and seeing what happens.

Ed Martino I have to disagree because my company (Sprint) sponsored the Superbowl! It depends on the industry. If you are in a big industry you have to make a statement, so you have to go with pro golf, the Super bowl etc. If you do not advertise with it, people ask why you aren’t in it. Such mass advertising is important.

Alan Kaufman No one can afford TV. PR means hiring an agency. It’s best if you can get someone to develop relationships with the editors of blogs.

You have to stay on top of people who can influence the influencers

CLOSING STATEMENTS: Ed Martino There is more in common between the old school and the new school, because it is an evolution from one to the other.

Sales and marketing is fun and the interrelationship and interdependence between that and finance is important. Ethics is also very important. Ethics is everything.

You need to have respect for your customers and your competition. We need to be ethical about how we do our business.

David Teten We're in the advice/education business. Ironically, there is a lot of advice out there in the world, but most people don’t absorb it and don’t follow it.

They listen but don't learn. I encourage people to internalize the ideas that we've discussed here. I hope that people learned something that they can take home and incorporate into their sales and marketing strategies.

And as last words: A.B.C.---Always Be Closing.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

I recently had a chance to have a conversation with Pamela Walker Laird, a History professor with the University of Colorado at Denver, and author of the new book Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, a history of strategic relationship-bulding and mentoring in American business, published by Harvard University Press, 2006.

She was kind enough to agree to participate in an email interview about her new book.

David Teten: Why this book? What led to it? How did it evolve?

Pamela Walker Laird: As a business historian, I repeatedly come across biographies of so-called self-made men whose careers had in fact depended on mentors and access to powerful networks.

I began this project to determine for what portion of well-known businessmen this was true. Pretty quickly it became clear that the statistic was easy to calculate: 100%.

That is, not one case of a successful businessman or woman exists for which mentors and/or networks were not essential. Why is this?

 It is possible to get rich by gambling, either at a roulette table or by day trading, without participating in networks.

But real business is a social process. Learning the trade, getting leads, making connections, closing deals, getting promotions: they all require social interactions.

 It is not enough to “know" your trade. Moreover, how can you learn a trade and perform it in isolation?

Certainly you can’t make deals if you are unknown or you can’t be accepted as a person worth talking to. Your chances of closing a deal vastly improve if you can share a golf game, a beer, or even a taxi with decision makers.

 What began as a study of 19th-century entrepreneurial businessmen, then grew into the 20th century.

 I began to think about the modern notions of corporations as meritocracies.

 Within these, thanks to personnel departments and “objective" standards for hiring and promotion, people are supposed to succeed based on their work performance only. People think of “office politics" as an aberration, something that happens when the system breaks down.

 However, once I started looking into the realities of what was supposed to be a meritocracy, I realized that connections and even connectability mattered in corporations, as much as they do in small firms and as they always had in the past, in every environment.

Even so, I do not want to minimize the importance of individual initiative and abilities. After all, connections help those who help themselves.

 Connections can create a opportunities for some, and they can deny opportunities to others, but they cannot make people into successes without their own effort and talent.

David Teten: What are your goals for Pull? What sort of impact would you like it to have?

Pamela Walker Laird: In talking about this project over the last few years, many of my audiences have found it gratifying to have their own experiences validated by my scholarship.

 This is especially the response I have received from women and disadvantaged minorities, as well as from anyone who has been passed up on the corporate ladder by people with fewer task-specific skills than they had.

 In addition to these individual responses, I hope that Pull will provide insights to decision makers within corporations as well as those within less-privileged advocacy groups.

 Sometimes there is nothing like a good story—or in this case, three hundred years of stories—to show how something works. I also hope to have an effect on how we think about people’s success and failure.

 Social capital is the term sociologists have developed for what I have been calling "connections and connectability".

Anyone who reads Pull will ask, "What is the social capital story behind every success or failure?"

 That is, we will start to look for the advantages from having mentors and access to influential networks, or, conversely, the disadvantages of not having connections or not being connectable.

David Teten:—What could a CEO who was trying to build a diverse management team gain from Pull?

Pamela Walker Laird: Most executives today understand how differences between groups of people can complicate and possibly undermine their firms' interpersonal dynamics.

 So their commitments to employing and promoting diverse populations are practical as well as idealistic. Yet the best of intentions are usually not enough to see the bottlenecks and the pitfalls.

 Pull shows how managers struggled for decades with these problems and how some of them learned how to overcome them. More often than not, the strategies that worked applied universally what were understood by the 1960s as good, basic personnel management procedures.

 The trick was applying such recruiting, hiring, and promotion practices to everyone, and not just to those who seemed to have “potential."

 Pull shows the problems that can result from presumptions about who has potential. However, no amount of “objectivity" in personnel practices can overcome the social factors in gatekeeping and networking.

Therefore, rather than try to suppress the social factors, which simply drives them underground and generates all the tensions related to office politics, top managers can develop strategies for synthesizing social capital for everyone.

 Instead of ordering gatekeepers to exercise objective judgment, leaders can guide them to take their blinders off and to grow connections with people they might otherwise look past.

 This strategy is not the same as following all the latest cheery methods for “networking," which tend to ignore persistent social processes and expectations.

 It means recognizing the power of social dynamics and distributing their advantages broadly.

It may mean bringing social scientists on board to help everyone see ongoing stereotypes that persist despite the best of intentions.

 Predispositions and blind spots can hinder the operations of even the best laid plans for diversifying management and for creating teams out of the resulting mix.

The trick to breaking through the glass ceiling and increasing diversity at the top of management is to recognize that people can’t break through from below, whatever their ambitions and talents.

People can only pass through the glass ceiling by getting pulled from above. This almost always means that the people with whom top managers feel most comfortable are the ones they mentor and pull up.

 Therefore, mixing groups of people together is the key—creating ways for a sense of familiarity to develop between top managers and talented people with whom they would not ordinarily socialize.

 David Teten: What are some of Pull’s lessons for ambitious individuals?

 Pamela Walker Laird: — Because business is a social process, interactions are at its core.

 With whom do you interact? With whom do you have close, frequent interactions, and with whom do you have distant, occasional interactions?

Optimally, you should interact with the people who make decisions about promotions or contracts as frequently as possible, both formally and informally.

Sociologists have shown that we benefit by both “weak ties" and “strong ties."

Strong ties with people who don’t know anymore than we do, or who don’t have any more connections than we have, may not help us as much as multiple weak ties that are sources of lots of kinds of information and leads.

 Our “luck" can actually seem to improve as our contacts with other people grow.

 After all, sometimes luck is just a matter of hearing about a chance opportunity from a casual acquaintance.

The interactions that can benefit us don’t even need to be face-to-face, as you discuss in your recent book (The Virtual Handshake).

 Learning from online exchanges and making connections online are becoming increasingly useful tools.

By adding up the benefits of many weak ties, online connections can provide a lot of information and advice.

 They can even lead to the close social interactions—the strong ties—that moving to the top of a corporate ladder or forming a partnership entail.

 Sometimes even holding on to your job in this age of relentless downsizing requires deliberate care and feeding of your social capital.

For example, if you telecommute, you must somehow make yourself “real" to the decision makers who put people’s names on the “keep" list.

 It is essential that you be something more than just a number or a name to them.

Therefore, go to corporate headquarters on a regular basis.

 Find reasons to share “face time" with those list makers. Make sure that they think of you as a human being whom they like, as well as one who gets “the job done."

Keeping a job involves a lot more than “doing" it. It is also possible to grow your social capital—if you can get past the first level of gatekeeping in your targeted profession.

 For instance, I know of a man who is now a screen writer. Initially he had no connections and couldn’t get any one to read his work, but he managed to get a job as a gofer in Hollywood.

 For a couple of years he ran errands and got coffee for screen writers and producers.

Eventually, as writers got to know him, he could ask them to read something now and then. This long-term strategy for building social capital worked and got him “discovered."

Networking does not just mean that you should pass out your business cards everywhere. Nor does making a pest of yourself help. A contact is not a connection.

Nor is it always possible to be connectable. The people who are the gatekeepers or the decision makers in your field can be too insulated by their staffs, their schedules, the places where they socialize, or their prejudices to be accessible to you.

 If that is the case, then you have to figure out either how to break through that insulation, or rethink your ambitions. Sometimes the best strategy is that of the Hollywood gofer, who combined work and patience.

 He did his day-to-day job well and wrote his screen plays on his own time, preparing—not just waiting—for his opportunities.

David Teten: What myths does Pull challenge and how?

Pamela Walker Laird: — The most important myth that Pull overturns is that it is possible to be a self-made business success. For openers, Pull examines two of the most famous cases of allegedly self-made success, Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, to demonstrate that even their successes involved astute and deliberate development and exploitation of networks.

 These two illustrious successes went against the statistical grain by truly achieving rags-to-riches success, for almost all American successes began in comfortable or very affluent circumstances.

 But they did not go against the social capital grain: like everyone else, their successes required access to networks and assistance from mentors and important gatekeepers.

The reason that social capital is necessary is that business is inherently, profoundly, a social process. It requires interactions, whether those be competitive or cooperative.

Therefore, being a self-made success is impossible. That doesn’t mean that ambitious people can’t grow their social capital. It means that they must maximize the productive ways in which they interact with others who can assist them.

This also matters because we tend to praise people who become successful and think about them as having been self-made, as being rugged individualists.

 However, no one, not even Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch in our own times, has ever “made it" without help from mentors and networks.

 David Teten: Do the insights of Pull apply beyond business?

 Pamela Walker Laird: — The distributions of opportunity in all fields, in all professions, hinge on social dynamics.

Having access to networks matters as much in medicine and academics as it does in business, possibly more. Likewise, in sports, coaches are the primary gatekeepers; in politics, lines of mentoring go back for generations; and in the courts, judges are almost always former clerks of older judges. Thus, up until the 1980s, most newspaper references to mentors were about people in sports, politics, and law, not business.

 David Teten: How does Pull relate to your own background, training, experiences?

Pamela Walker Laird: — In the course of my life, I have had mentors in some situations, but lacked them in others.

Being on both sides of this experience has given me insights about how these advantages work.

In academia, mentors are at least as important as they are in business, and for all the same reasons: teaching the tools of the trade; giving advice; providing introductions to influential people; helping to form connections to gatekeepers.

 Watching all of this over the years and talking about it with a few trusted friends made me aware of the dynamics when I saw them happening in business.

 One of Pull’s chapters begins with my experience working for a bank while I was in college.

The vice president of my division asked me to stay, but when I jokingly said that I would stay if I could be a vice president in ten years, he was shocked! He said I could only become the secretary to a vice president.

 He was ready to be my mentor, but his ambitions for me would not have helped me climb his—or any other male-dominated—ladder.

I had a contact, but it was not a connection.

David Teten: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me!

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management

I am happy to report that we are relaunching the Nitron Advisors Circle of Experts Brain Food blog from a new home on the Web, http://www.CircleOfExperts.com/blog . Please tell your friends! From that link, you can subscribe with your favorite blog reader (Bloglines, Newsgator, etc.) or get every posting via email.

If you would like to change your subscription, unsubscribe, or make other changes, just visit http://lists.circleofexperts.com/mailman/listinfo/brain-food .

We will continue to write on Brain Food about career acceleration, business acceleration, consulting opportunities for industry experts, investment research, and online networks. We always welcome suggestions from people with good content.
We have several sister blogs and mailing lists we recommend:
http://www.nitronadvisors.com/mailing-list.html – two mailing lists for businesspeople interested in independent consulting assignments and new full-time jobs

http://www.circleofexperts.com/nyc : worthwhile business conferences, panels, and other events in the New York area

http://www.TheVirtualHandshake.com : how to sign new clients, raise capital, or even find your dream job with blogs, social network sites, and other online networks. You can also download there a complimentary copy of my new book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.
To make sure that this email gets through to you, please add brain-food-blog-do-not-reply@circleofexperts.com to your address book or trusted sender list.Thanks for reading, and if you like this blog, please tell your friends!

General | Social Software | Events | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

(This was originally written in 2002-03, but still relevant today.)

Getting a VC job: fighting upstream By Mark Cicirelli Mcicirelli(at)mba2002.hbs.edu I have compiled what I hope are helpful observations from my job search since finishing my MBA this June.

 Be warned that my advice is most relevant to those at the same stage of career and training.

 I’m very much a generalist. I received my undergrad degree in economics and government from Dartmouth, spent three years at an investment bank, one year founding and fundraising for two startups, and then received my MBA from Harvard.

While I am very familiar with the private equity process, I am not an engineer, a biochemist, or a war-weary, metal-bending “operations guy."

Those who have that sort of background will face different obstacles and opportunities in seeking a VC job.

The environment; no rush, very particular: Pundits predict a 30% to 75% reduction in VC personnel.

Venture funds are shrinking, and with them the fee income available to support salaries.

Aggressive boom-years hiring, and reluctance to layoff, has resulted in excess junior staff.

Above all else, this means VC are in no rush to hire. Layoffs in banking, consulting, and VC have also resulted in an ever growing supply of highly qualified candidates.

 Additionally, since post-MBAs usually fill partner-track positions with an eventual claim on fund profits, VC have little incentive to hire.

This environment has given them the luxury of being extraordinarily particular. Why hire someone that requires training when there is an abundance of candidates who already possess buy-side experience, a scientific degree, an MBA, were strategy consultants and started several successful ventures? 

What to do?:

But even as the industry contracts, particular circumstances do create openings, and some people are being hired. Given the bad environment, what can improve your odds?

Proprietary “deal flow" As in the VC business itself, creating proprietary deal flow is key. With so much competition, you need to uncover openings before they are widely known.

 Usually positions will never be advertised. In an environment of few openings and long odds, it’s a numbers game. Certain sources of leads may be more productive, but you cannot afford to neglect any.

One approach is to follow industry news and anticipate hiring. Monitor electronic newsletters like VentureWire.com and TheDeal.com, and the site Privateequitycentral.org, and look for announcements of new fund closings, or organizational shakeups, or shifts in strategy that might result in a firm staffing up around a new initiative.

 Better yet, if you know fund-of-fund investors or private equity lawyers, ask them who is in the market raising not-yet-announced funds.

 Work the network Once you’ve identified a likely target, both as a way to improve your chances, and as a source of new leads, you must shamelessly work your network.

You cannot hesitate to lead with your “in" and then ask for what you want. Ideally you know someone well who can personally introduce you to the firm.

 Personal references are easily the single best way to approach a firm. Lacking that, look for some point of commonality in background between you and the fund’s management.

 Often this will be a university or a common prior employer. Bluntly highlight this common connection, in the subject line of the email, and make sure the first paragraph unambiguously communicates what you want of them (a meeting or a phone call).

 Where you think a firm is hiring, but you don’t have a contact, or where you have a contact, but their firm isn’t hiring – still try. Circumstances might eventually change, and your contact can point you in productive directions and make introductions.

Speaking of contacts, don’t make the mistake of only networking towards the most senior people.

While they may have the most sway in their organization, they are hardest to reach, most burned-out on networking, and probably know the least about junior hiring at other firms.

Counter-intuitively, some of my best networking has been when I’ve networked down in the organization.

Junior people are more generous with their time, are often more open, can give you valuable scoop about their firm, and have friends at other firms who know about the junior staffing situation.

 Getting them to talk It also takes practice to get useful information from contacts. Only after fifteen minutes of conversation, once they have had time to dwell on your situation, and once they have decided you are a quality candidate, will they begin to offer you leads and introductions.

 Best of all is to push for an in-person meeting, where you are most likely to have a lengthy conversation. Ask to grab a coffee or meet them at their offices.

 Less effective but the vast majority of your conversations will be by phone. Email is only useful to send your resume, introduce yourself, and set up a time to talk or meet.

 Once you’re talking you need to persuade them to take ownership of your situation, and you need to differentiate yourself.

 Asking for “help" and “advice" on your job search strategy psychologically allies them with you, and prevents them from declining to talk because they don’t have an opening at their firm.

 This “help/advice" phase of the conversation also gives them time to warm up to you so they are comfortable using their Rolodex for you.

 Be different, have a solution To differentiate yourself be prepared to have a well conceived point of view on where you’d be investing right now, or interesting ideas on sourcing deals, or generally some way to demonstrate that not having a VC job hasn’t prevented you from acting like a VC.

Make it clear that hiring you will provide a solution to whatever may be their problem. Along these lines, going to conferences will give you ideas, put you in contact with new leads, and prove your sincere interest in the business.

(It’s often possible to get into conferences for free or at discounts if you offer to help the organizers with event setup/breakdown.) Working around VC if not in it If none of this is working, there are more creative but time-consuming ways to get noticed.

 VCs have mentioned that they would consider short-term consulting relationships to help them deal with troubled portfolio companies. Others have said they would welcome introductions to quality companies seeking venture investment.

They are often prepared to pay for these services. Actually taking a full-time position at a portfolio company is another possibility. Targeting the segment du jour And if you are interested in buy-side private equity generally, there are areas that are actually thriving in this environment.

 Loath to lose management fees, many partnerships are shifting their investment focus rather than returning capital commitments.

Mezzanine debt, biotech, distressed assets, and defense companies have all seen investment increases. If you are flexible on geography, approaching venture firms in smaller cities or suburban areas will allow you to sidestep the throngs of candidates on either coast.

 Do you really want in?: With so much turmoil, it’s not always clear that any job in the industry is a good job.

 Numerous VC to whom I’ve spoken have warned that the job isn’t nearly as fun as it once was, and job security no longer exists.

Evaluating a job offer is complicated by the questionable viability a numerous partnerships, portfolio write-downs endangering incentive compensation, and the likely death struggles for advancement in overstaffed firms.

 The good news is that for those firms that survive the shakeout, those standing will be richly rewarded during the rebound.

Even if the job search is unsuccessful, the effort itself extends your network – the seeds you sow today may yield fruits in better times.

Mark Cicirelli graduated from Harvard Business School in 2002, and joined Thomas H. Lee Putnam Ventures. Mark is now an investment analyst at Elliott Associates, an activist hedge fund.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management

an offer from my coauthor Scott Allen: Next Wednesday, February 8, from 1:00-2:30 Pacific (4:00-5:30 EST), I'll be doing a no-cost teleseminar with Steven Van Yoder, author of Get Slightly Famous (review), on how to use blogs, social network sites, and online communities to increase your exposure and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Some of the topics we'll cover include:

• 12 steps to use online network sites and blogs to become a virtual guru
• An overview of several important online network sites and how to choose the best ones for your business
• Demystifying the world of blogs and social network sites, even for the "technically challenged"
• How to select and engage effectively in online network sites
• How to create your own group within a social network site
• How to position yourself as a Slightly Famous expert online

The teleseminar is free, but seats are limited, so you will need to register in advance.

Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

The Rotman business school is offering a complimentary book compiling the best articles from their magazine , in a book called A New Way to Think: The Best of Rotman Magazine". (yes, i like stuff that doesn't cost anything...)

Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Via the The Social Networking Weblog, this is a brief interview with the creator of the MBA Applicant Wiki, ClearAdmit:

Why you created it?

The MBA applicant community is typically pretty open to sharing ideas and experiences, this occurs on various applicant blogs (I am subscribed to about 100) and discussion boards, principally BusinessWeeks discussion board.

Clearadmit itself hosts a blog that has become quite popular for this community, we get approximately 1,000 unique visitors a day (yesterday was a record, 1,300).

That all being said the idea behind the wiki was to provide a central resource that applicants could share their information and insights.

For example, for each school we list there is an interview section. The applicant can share his / her interview experience.

This becomes useful to those prepping for an interview at that particular school. Once completed we hope those who benefited return and share their experiences etc.

Leadership and Management | Social Software

For a certain type of person, this is definitely a dream job:

The World Economic Forum is selecting 30 exceptionally talented individuals to join its organization on a three-year Master's Programme in Global Leadership.

The 2006 class will start next September. As a Global Leadership Fellow, you are fully integrated in the World Economic Forum and benefit from an intensive work and learning experience intended to develop and train future leaders of global enterprises and international organizations.

The Global Leadership Programme is designed by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with its worldwide network of distinguished experts and leaders.

Upon successful completion of the programme, you will receive a Master's in Global Leadership and will be provided assistance in identifying career opportunities at, but not limited to, the World Economic Forum and its Member companies.

We expect you to exhibit demonstrated leadership capabilities, excellence in a particular field or discipline, and proven interest in global affairs.

 You possess a broad intellectual background with a Master's degree (or equivalent) in science/engineering/economics/business/public policy/public administration.

You have minimum 3 years of professional experience, 2 of which are in business.

Additional public sector or NGO experience is appreciated.

You are fluent in English and at least in one other language. You are committed to the mission of the World Economic Forum.

 Please apply through www.weforum.org/careers and provide us with a cover letter, your curriculum vitae, three references and an 800-word personal essay on what you would like to achieve in your life.

Please note that the application deadline is 15 February 2006.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Social Software

As usual, Dave Pollard posts a well-thought-out, thorough piece on "Social Networking Tools & Knowledge Management: What You Can Do Now". This was presented at the KMWorld and Intranets 2005 Conference. It includes an overview what was wrong with the traditional siloed social network model (Friendster, etc.), and what you can do within the context of a large corporation to take advantage of these technologies for better Knowledge Management.

Social Software | Leadership and Management

I think that one of the most obvious applications of the wiki model is in the legal space, and no surprise, it's been launched: wiki-law.org .

I think that this site has the potential to significantly change the practice of law.

 My motivation and likelihood to contribute to this site is far higher than it is to contribute to Wikipedia.

 Like many businesspeople, I already have a library of template contracts; why not share them? (And I'm not even a lawyer.)

For TheVirtualHandshake.com, I held an email interview with Pangea3's Vice President of Litigation & Research, Dan Savitt, about the site. (Dan is a recovering litigator.)

Teten: What other online legal resources do you consider comparable or competitors to wiki-law.org?

Savitt: FindLaw is a common and widely used resource for a broad array of areas.

But it isn't always well-maintained, with broken links and such and it isn't always intuitively organized.

My favorite free legal service, albeit not entirely open source, is the Legal Information Institute’s site (run by Cornell Law School).

I know that LII is developing an open source legal encyclopedia but is extending invitations to only its members.

Law.com is a good resource for legal news.

Teten: When A hires B to do legal work for him, who owns the text of the resulting contract? Does A have unlimited rights to post that text on a wiki, share it with friends, etc.?

Savitt: I'm not sure but the terms of the engagement would likely govern, with the default being that the client has unlimited rights to do what he wishes with the work so long as the attorney did not reserve rights in it.

Generally speaking, the attorney would not retain any property rights in the legal content of the document-- because the law isn't copyrightable -- although the attorney could retain a property interest in the format of the contract if the form is unique and the attorney takes steps to protect his interest by imprinting the form with a copyright notice and a reservation of rights.

For example, Blumberg is the dominant publisher of legal forms.

Its forms are copyrighted.

And Blumberg has 10 different forms of subpoenas for 10 different situations.

 Now, Blumberg cannot copyright subpoenas in general.

Anyone can produce one, and Blumberg has no right to claim that it has a property right in all subpoenas because it contains the same language as its subpoenas.

 But it can have a copyright in the look of its subpoenas because it originated the look of its subpoena and the look was unique and not already in the public domain.

Another example is the cases that you pull down from Westlaw or Lexis. You will note that those cases have copyrights too -- but the copyrights are limited to the headnotes and Westlaw's or Lexis's added content, like page cites or other editorial additions.

Then there is the issue of intent/fair use, etc.

 If you go onto thesmokinggun.com or findlaw, you will find many examples of copyrighted materials, contracts, subpoenas, etc. But these sites aren't violating copyrights, because the documents were introduced into the public domain; the senders had no expectation that the documents would be kept private; the documents are not unique or may not have copyrightable materials; and the posting party put the docs online for newsworthy purposes/ for the public benefit.

But as the Supreme Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster last summer emphasized, a poster may be held liable for copyright infringement if it posts copyrighted material on-line with the intent to encourage users to infringe the copyrights even if the main thrust of the site is for lawful purposes. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

So if you are served with a subpoena on a Blumberg form, and you then post that form on-line with intent that people should use/copy the form for their own subpoenas (or otherwise know that people will use it for infringing purposes), then the poster may be liable for copyright infringement even if there is a substantial non-infringing use of the product/website.

Teten: In many cases, there is no formal term of engagement between a client and counsel. Client just says, please help me analyze/draft X, and the counsel does that. If there's no formal documentation of ownership between the two parties, what should we assume are the ownership rights in a given contract?

Savitt: First off, New York -- where I’m admitted -- requires attorneys to enter into a formal written engagement agreements with their clients before beginning any legal work, so your question deals with a situation that isn’t or at least shouldn’t occur as often as you suggest.

 It’s just good practice, moreover, for an attorney to have an agreement in place that clearly defines the terms of the engagement, including who owns the resulting product.

Nevertheless, if, as you suggest, there is no agreement or the engagement letter is silent on who owns the resulting work product then, as I mentioned before, I would guess that once the attorney delivered the product to the client, the client then has full ownership rights in the product -- be it a contract, complaint, letter or memo -- and can do whatever he pleased with it so long as his use is lawful.

There are at least a couple of caveats: such as, (i) the creation and delivery of a legal document by an attorney generally does not destroy any pre-existing third party property rights that are incorporated in the delivered product (like my Blumberg example) and (ii) that hypothetically the governing State’s law could suggest otherwise.

That being said, I’ve never heard of a case where an attorney demanded that a client return all copies of a contract or memo he drafted because the client’s use purported violated a common law property rights.

(The issue of a retaining lien is different and goes simply to enforcing the bargain between the attorney and client.)

Teten: Assuming wiki-law is successful, which is a reasonable assumption given the astonishing popularity of wikipedia.com, how will it impact the legal profession? In particular, how will it impact the "bread-and-butter" legal work that makes up a high percentage of the typical law firm's revenues?

Savitt: I don't see very much of a financial impact.

 If anything, it will detract business from other form providers.

That's because the beauty of law is that it is broad enough to cover new situations, and new situations rise up every new day.

What is good for A yesterday may not be what B needs tomorrow, even though B believes that his situation is no different than A's.

How do you ultimately know that A's form is good? It gets tested; modified and improved; and tailored. Ultimately, forms are only as good as the persons who use them.

Teten: Which is exactly the point of the wiki!

Savitt: True, but there is more to the law than cases, statutes and contracts.

In the end, those are only tools.

How to use those tools effectively to carry out your legal and business concerns? Well that’s the rub.

And it’s awfully close to falling under the scope of practice of law statutes, which are typically so broad that they can capture whatever conduct the state regulators want them to.

Just ask the folks at We the People and look at wiki-law.org’s own disclaimers.

We the People is one of several businesses that specializes in selling self-help legal "document preparation" service to non-lawyers using paraprofessionals.

(I remember seeing in a couple of unauthorized practice of law regulatory actions that they have offered reference attorneys, who offer suggestions but do not create an attorney-client relationship with the consumers -- to their customers as well.)

Their target audience is small businesses and consumers who can't afford to or don't want to pay an attorney for what they perceive as relatively simple legal tasks.

In essence, the site says use this great resource – but caveat emptor and don’t blame me if the information is wrong.

Ultimately, the reader has to decide for himself if he can rely on the information he finds on wiki-law.org. Is it is dependable? Is it complete? Is it up to date? How is someone supposed to know the answer except through professional expertise, intuition or blind faith? Lawyers know that the law doesn’t always work intuitively.

 I’m not suggesting that only lawyers can make that determination but odds are they will, as a group, be much better prepared than non-lawyers.

Wiki-law could be very useful in educating non-lawyers about the law, but it cannot teach the ability to think critically about an issue that is beaten into every attorney beginning with his first year in law school.

 Where I do see a tremendous opportunity is for attorneys to take advantage of the resource.

 I know that there are already dozens of web-based communities where practitioners of similar ilk compare notes and exchange ideas.

 In other words, the value I see in the site is as a legal resource, whose value will rise or fall depending on the reliability of the contributors, their content, and the strength of the site's editorial guidelines.

It may even work itself into legal opinions once it gains acceptance.

 I could see wiki-law as the ultimate living legal constitution that aggregates legal discussion, commentary and knowledge.

The possibilities are really interesting. But all it takes is one wrong answer and the resource’s credibility could be mortally wounded – causing attorneys and their clients to stay away.

Ultimately, the key will be in the content providers and their editorial good senses.

 Dan continued…. Interestingly, our interview highlights one of my concerns about of wiki-law in that my answers reflect only my elementary largely uneducated understanding of copyright law as clouded by my experience and understanding of property law in general – "Savitt on Copyright", if you will.

But I am not an expert on copyright law and I haven't reviewed any of the caselaw and secondary sources that are required to give a proper understanding of some of the issues (despite that I included a quote from a recent Supreme Court opinion that I happen to have on my laptop last night.)

 In other words, I learned long ago as a junior associate that you wouldn't want to buy this version of Savitt on Copyright.

 So, I just want to clarify that that my response is more speculation than legal knowledge That being said, I am sure that lawyers logging into wiki-law could annotate and properly give my responses the critical eye it needs and provide a more thorough response.

 But that leads to the issue of specific legal advice and independently rendering it to the public (something which we can't do here at Pangea3).

Would the site allow people to pose legal questions and then have anyone -- lawyers or laymen -- to offer advice tailored to those suggestions? Teten: I don’t think that's their current model, but that's a logical service to offer. Ingenio.com and similar sites already offer this sort of access.

 Savitt: The State Bar regulators wouldn't be too happy about that and might see wiki-law or its users as aiding and abetting the unauthorized practice of law, which regulators consider just as bad as engaging in the activity itself. And then there is the issue of liability for a wrong answer -- could the responder/poster be held liable for malpractice or under an unauthorized practice of law? Why not? A court could find that the disclaimer was boilerplate and not want to enforce it.

Then again, the (stated) purpose of unauthorized practice of law statutes/prohibitions is consumer protection -- and not job protection.

 Regulators who see it as their duty to protect the public from charlatans posing as legal experts may ultimately see that the public would be adequately protected.

30 years ago, paralegals in a law office were a rarity, and now they are an integral part of any decent sized functioning law office taking on tasks that don't require the lawyer's full legal acumen. 15 years ago, contract attorneys doing document reviews were a rarity.

But now even the bankruptcy courts, with their strict fee sharing prohibitions, recognize that they are also an integral part of controlling costs in any decent sized litigation.

 And in the past few years, the ABA has promulgated amendments to its Model Rules to provide safe harbors for working with foreign attorneys and those amendments have been adopted in one form or the other by many States.

One additional thought, as legal costs have skyrocketed, and there seems to be no corresponding increase in the caliber of legal services to match the increases, the public, both businesses and consumers, are looking for more value: consistent high-quality service, reasonable price, and efficiency from their legal service providers.

And they are expanding their sources for that value, which in part is driving Pangea3's business (although we don't independently provide legal services to the public): litigation consultants, legal technology providers, paraprofessional legal document preparation service providers and other alternative legal service providers. Wiki-law may fit in there but if and when wiki-law turns from a resource into a provider, well, then my paternal unauthorized practice of law concerns get tripped again.

 In the end, intriguing legal issues.

I'm having flashbacks to the bar exam as I type this.

 Regardless, the site -- like Pangea3 -- is a natural progression in how law continues to advance and adapt to the world around it, albeit kicking and screaming.

Thanks for the dialogue. Teten: Thank you! The legal industry, like the medical industry, has traditionally been marked (or marred) by a notable resistance to take full advantage of technology.

 I look forward to wiki-law, Pangea3, and other attacks on the traditional model upending the traditional apple cart.

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

How to Give Employees What They Want: The Returns Are Huge - Knowledge@Wharton

Leadership and Management

Cem Sertoglu referred me to Nick Denton's useful list of basic tools for a startup. Although this list is focused on cheap/no-cost tools, these tools are also relevant for much larger firms. Cem adds Bugzilla for bug tracking and Kwiki for knowledge management. I'd also adde-chx for payroll processing.

Leadership and Management

(book summary written by Scott Lichtman): I recently borrowed a copy of The Six Sigma Way, a book by Pande, Neuman and Cavanagh (consultants to GE, Allied Signal and other corporations). While the book and concept have been around several years, the steps it recommends for services firms are fresh and valuable today.

Six Sigma refers to a statistical principle of reducing defects in any process (invoice entry, web page development, iPod manufacturing) to less then 3.4 per million.

More generally, it's a method for prioritizing the greatest value-generating processes in a business and reducing 'defects' by orders of magnitude - time and again.

 Defects can refer to data errors, physical flaws, or anything that a customer considers less than perfectly executed.

Usually, businesspeople associate Six Sigma with the manufacturing line, but it's equally valuable for services firms.

In fact, it's extremely valuable for knowledge-based firms because have spent relatively little time analyzing and perfecting their processes.

Some would claim this is because of intangibles in the creative process, but I suggest there's also a reluctance by higher-paid knowledge workers being to be subjected to "quality control." Let's look at a few service activities where process measurement applies.

 1) Accurately qualifying prospects. E.g., at what percentage of first sales meetings will the prospect say "yes, this is a service that's relevant to me"? Do you know what's an optimal return-on-meetings (or RFIs, for that matter) for your business model?

2) Up-to-date information on a web page. How many of your web pages at any given time have out-of-date information or broken links?

3) Clarity of marketing materials. How many of your marketing materials would prospects say they "understand fully".

4) Timeliness of investment research.

Did a research piece your team produced get to the relevant investors within a day? An hour? How long a delay is acceptable to your customers?

5) Finishing projects according to original schedule and budget.

The Six Sigma "cure" isn't rocket science but almost all firms that have used it succesfully emphasize the following steps in the following order:

 1) Identify your core customer-facing and profit-generating processes within and across functions. Also identify your key profit-generating customers.

 2) Have customer define the performance levels for acceptable and exceptional delivery.

 3) Measure current performance.

 4) Prioritize, analyze then implement improvemnets.

 5) Integrate Six Sigma into daily activities through ongoing metrics, "Voice of the Customer" input mechanisms, etc. Firms tends to fail at this process when they skip a step, such as systematically interviewing customers or "back of the envelope" guessing current performance.

 Firms also tend to underestimate the benefits of long-term adherence to the program and top management support; these foundations lead to both incremental improvements and breakthrough changes in how one does business, resulting in profit improvements of 10% to 30% or more over several years.

Quality control has taken hold in mass-produced services, such as call center response times.

 Now it's time to look at your knowledge-work business and find the benefits of systematic process improvement.

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

This is the draft operating Manual for "Junto 2.0", a MasterMind group based in the New York tri-state area.

To learn what a Mastermind group is and how it works, continue reading… Junto 2.0 DRAFT MasterMind Group Operating Manual by David Teten and Kaushal B. Majmudar Outline of Manual

 I. Introduction

 II. Objectives

 III. Benefits

 IV. How Does It Work?

 V. Requirements for Entry

 VI. Process for Joining

 VII. Meeting Rules

 VIII. Suggested Meeting Structure (Subject to Modification)

 IX. Sample Meeting Topics

 X. How to Exit

 XI. Appendix 1: Ben Franklin's Junto Society

 XII. Appendix 2: Thoughts on cooperation from George Lucas

 XIII. About the Authors I. Introduction This is the draft operating Manual for "Junto 2.0", a MasterMind group based in the New York tri-state area.

David Teten and Kaushal B. Majmudar have been working together to create this new group.

Jo Condrill's definition of a Mastermind group: "A master-mind group consists of [a small team of] people who work together in absolute harmony to achieve diverse goals.

 While these people work in harmony, they may be very different from each other.

 The common element is that each draws something from the others, and each contributes freely to the group.

 It is the focusing of each mind on a common issue that triggers thoughts not readily available to one mind.

 Those in the group draw upon their unique experiences and specialized knowledge to help each other.

 When many minds concentrate on a single point, the activity generates a power over and above the sum total of each of the individual minds.

It is as though an invisible force joins the group and provides additional insight.

Personally, I have used the master-mind concept with amazing results -- first to advance my career and later to lead a group of volunteers to achieve remarkable results, ranking number one in a worldwide organization, Toastmasters International.

" (source) Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, is widely credited with popularizing the concept.

For more background, see also this summary from the "NYC Junto": http://www.nycjunto.com/whatisjunto.htm .

Our motivations in creating this group: primarily, to accelerate our success and personal efficacy in achieving our goals.

Anthony Robbins once remarked that only about 5% of his audiences actually acts to implement and benefit from any of his teachings on how to achieve personal and professional success.

 Many books on success emphasize the value of creating a mastermind group (perhaps using some variant of the term). We decided to actually implement the idea that so many experts recommend.

 We were also motivated by some bloggers who also are active in Mastermind groups, including the prolific Steve Rubel.

We are posting this manual on the Web in an attempt to gather constructive feedback and share the results of our brainstorming and collaboration with other likeminded individuals elsewhere in the world.

Everything herein is a work in process, and is thereby subject to discussion and modification as we receive feedback and as other members of the group provide input or suggestions.

 II. Objectives

 A. "Create access to advice, counsel, and personal cooperation of a group of people who are willing to lend each other wholehearted aid in a spirit of perfect harmony" (source: Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill)

B. Share best practices and resources

C. Work on self-awareness and self-improvement

D. Create synergies and new possibilities: “No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third invisible intangible force which may be likened to a third mind" (source)

III. Benefits

 A. Accelerate your personal and professional progress

 B. An instant and valuable support community of peers and friends

 C. Give back to your peers and to society

IV. How Does It Work?

 A. Monthly meeting to be held for 2 to 2.5 hours, typically over lunch or dinner

 B. Absolute maximum of 10 members

 C. Rotate facilitation -- each month has a new leader/note-taker for accountability

 D. Occasional special training and learning sessions (possibly with invited speakers)

 E. Group will meet in a mutually convenient place (can alternate geographically if to makes sense to do so)

 F. Diversity of group is important. Strongly prefer representatives from diversity of occupations: entrepreneur, investment banker/asset manager, policy, legal, media, operating executive at large company, physician, politician, academic. We also strongly prefer diversity across race, religion, etc.

 G. Use confidential Yahoo! Group for online communication

 H. Democratic Process: everything about the group is subject to scrutiny, discussion and modification by vote of majority of members in the group.

V. Requirements for Entry

 A. Nominated by existing member.

 B. Within driving or commuting distance of group meeting locations (in our case in the New York Tri-state area).

 C. Has a compatible current level of career and professional achievements and aspirations.

 Some evidence of being a significant  achiever in chosen field. Potential to be at the top of their chosen profession or business.

 D. Thoughtful and analytical.

 E. Has the desire and inspiration to make this year, decade, and life extraordinary. Has an "internal locus of control": knows  he/she  is ultimately responsible for his/her own success. Ready to let their desire to be passionate about their life and work overcome their fear of change.

 F. Is an active listener. Responds well to, and acts on, feedback. Open-minded.

 G. Wants to win based on values; has a greater purpose.

 Cares about and wants to give back to their community and society

 H. Realizes that cooperation is far more powerful than competition, i.e., people who are committed to helping others succeed.

 Has an abundance mentality.

Understands and cares about what drives his/her partners' businesses.

 I. Ideally, not working in the same industry as any current member, and with a significantly different personal background than every other current member.

J. Enthusiastic about participating with intent to actively participate in the group and attend meetings in person (commits to provide advanced notice to other members in case absence is unavoidable in a given instance)

VI. Process for Joining

A. Nominated by existing member of the group

B. Submit resume and statement of personal goals (1, 5, and 20 years)

C. Interview and approval by all existing group members

VII. Meeting Rules

A. Better to give than to receive (but the law of reciprocity works – give that which you would like to get)

B. Try to emphasize solutions, encouragement and pointing out possibilities vs. focusing on problems, criticism, and pointing out hurdles

C. Share time, ideas, and best practices, but don’t dominate

D. Listen actively and intently with a desire to understand. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

(Source: Steven  Covey)

E. Maintain confidentiality.

 No one outside the group (not even life partners/spouses) should have access to any information about what is discussed by other members of the group, particularly the personal information of individual members.

 It is OK to share best practices and ideas that you have learned with others.

F. No putting down, arguing with, or directly contradicting other speakers. All discussions should be conducted "without fondness for dispute or desire of victory."

 "All expressions of positiveness of opinion or direct contradiction are prohibited."(Source: Ben Franklin).

G. Mutual respect and supportive environment to be maintained at all times

VIII. Suggested Meeting Structure (Subject to Modification)

A. Brief (one to three minutes) check-in by each member.

Start with the best/most positive thing to happen since last meeting.

B. Book report by one member - distribute 1-2 page summary of book and lead discussion (15 to 20 minutes)

C. Person I admire report by one member – distribute 1-2 page summary of person’s life and what can be learned from him/her (15 to 20 minutes)

D. Update and ask.

 Each person must state a goal they will have accomplished by the next month's meeting and review how they did on last month’s goal.

Members can also share issues/problems they are currently grappling with and ask for help/suggestions from the group to unlock strategies, resources, etc. that might be helpful in overcoming these obstacles.

 (5 minutes each) E. Free discussion time – discuss one question or topic of the day (e.g. see questions below) (30 to 40 minutes)

F. Distribute notes/highlights from the meeting to those (rare members) not in attendance, but who are committed members of this group

IX. Sample Meeting Topics

A. What is the function by which we should measure our life's actions? Proposed formula: Maximize: (Power * Money * Health * Spiritual Growth * Community Impact * Family Strength * Friend Strength) / Age, subject to constraints of: ethics, law, and resources

B. Accountability Sessions (potentially a recurring topic): Each person to ask and answer the following questions: What are my most cherished goals for this coming decade, year, and month? What concrete steps have I taken to realize these goals? What are the steps that I should take, but have not yet done so to advance in the direction of my goals? Why have I not taken these steps and when do I commit to start? - group participants to ask and HONESTLY answer these questions once in a while in front of the entire group to encourage each of them to realize and take corrective action, but in a more self empowering and positive way than if it were to come in the form of critique from others.

 C. Play the Game, a success technology developed by Sarano Kelley. D. Learning about Thinking Sessions/Thinking Partners (See book: Time to Think by Nancy Klein).

X. How to Exit

A. Member no longer wants to be a part of the group (voluntary exit).

B. Member fails to attend 2 meetings in a row without advance notice AND good cause.

C. Consistent failure to participate in or contribute to the group, as noted by one or more current members.

D. If there is a consensus among more than 66% of the members that you should not remain in the group for any reason.

XI. Appendix 1: Ben Franklin's Junto Society Source: Ben Franklin's biography, by Walter Isaacson “Ben Franklin was the consummate networker.

He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life.

This approach was displayed when he formed a club of young workingmen in the fall of 1727, shortly after his return to Philadelphia that was commonly called the Leather Apron Club and officially dubbed The Junto.

Franklin’s small club was composed of enterprising tradesmen and artisans, rather than the social elite who had their own fancier gentlemen’s clubs.

 At first the members went to a local tavern for their Friday evening meetings, but soon they were able to rent a house of their own.

There they discussed issues of the day, debated philosophical topics, devised schemes for self-improvement, and formed a network for the furtherance of their own careers.

Franklin’s Junto initially had 12 young members.

Besides being amiable club mates, the Junto members often proved helpful to one another personally and professionally.

The tone Franklin set for Junto meetings was earnest.

 Initiates were required to stand, lay their hand on their breast and answer properly four questions:

1.) Do you have disrespect for any current member?

2.) Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession? (Editor: add race, for the modern context)

3.) Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinions?

4.) Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake? The pursuit of topics through soft Socratic inquiry became the preferred style of Junto meetings. Discussions were to be conducted ‘without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.’

All expressions of positiveness of opinion or direct contradiction were prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

 Though the youngest member, Franklin was by dint of his intellectual charisma and conversational charm not only its founder but  driving force.

The topics discussed ranged from the scientific to the metaphysical.

 E.g. Did importing indentured servants make America more prosperous? What is wisdom? In addition to such topics of debate, In Franklin's original Junto, the members used as a guide a series of 24 questions, such as:

1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read, remarkable or suitable to be communicated to the Junto, particularly in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge?

2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?

3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?

4. Have you lately heard of any citizen's thriving well, and by what means?

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?

6. Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action deserving praise and imitation?

7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately heard; of imprudence, of passion, or of any other folly or vice? What happy effects of temperance, of prudence, of moderation, or of any other virtue?

8. Do you think of anything at present in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind?

9. Have you any weighty affairs in hand in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service? In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist of in any of your honorable designs?

10. What is the most interesting or unusual thing you have read, seen, or heard about in the last month? What is the most potentially dangerous or harmful? The most beneficial? The most significant for the people here today?

11. What can we learn from world events today? Has there been any notable failure or success, financial, political, or otherwise, from which we can gain insight and understanding?

12. Can a man or woman arrive at perfection in this life? What is the proper balance between idealism and pragmatism in our existence? (Franklin's own question)

13. How can we judge the goodness of art, music, drama or literature?

14. Is science compatible with religion? What is the appropriate role of religion in our lives, if any?

15. What is the most important political issue facing this country in the next five years?

16. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country of which it would be proper to move the legislature for an amendment?

17. Has anybody attacked your reputation lately and what can the Junto do toward securing it?

18. Is there any man whose friendship you want and which the Junto or any of them can procure for you?

19. Whom do you respect most? Why?

20. In what manner can the Junto or any of them assist you in any of your honorable designs?" Franklin was in turn influenced by Daniel Dafoe’s essay “Friendly Societies" and John Locke’s “Rules of a Society which Met Once A Week for the Improvement of Useful Knowledge"

 XII. Appendix 2: Thoughts on cooperation from George Lucas

 Source: interview at Academy of Achievement at www.achievement.org, in response to the following question: "You mentioned the words "communal" and "connecting."

Your generation of the top film makers all seem to be friends.

 How did you band together in a field that is so competitive?" George Lucas: “I think that's the advantage that my generation has. When we were in film school and we were starting in the film business, the door was absolutely locked.

 There was a very, very high wall, and nobody got in. All of us beggars and scroungers down at the front gate decided that if we didn't band together, we wouldn't survive.

 If one could make it, that one would help all the others make it.

 And we would continue to help each other.

 So we banded together.

 That's how the cavemen figured it out.

 Any society starts that way.

 Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and  compete with each other.

 Farming cultures started this way, and the first hunting cultures started this way.

 Everything started in city-states.

 We have a tendency to lose it when we forget that, as a group, we are stronger than we are as individuals.

 We start to think we want everything for ourselves and we don't want to help anybody else.

 We want to succeed, but we don't want anybody else to succeed, because we want to be the winner.

 Once you get that mentality -- which is unfortunately the way a lot of the society operates -- you lose.

You can't possibly win that way.

 Part of the reason my friends and I became successful is that we were always helping each other.

 If I got a job, I would help somebody else get a job.

 If somebody got more successful than me, it was partly my success.

 My success wasn't based on how I could push down everyone around me.

 My success was based on how much I could push everybody up.

 And eventually their success was the same way.

 And in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that, and we still do that.

 Even though we all have, in essence, competing companies, if my friends succeed, then everybody succeeds.

 So that's the key to it, to have everybody succeed, not to gloat over somebody else's failure.

 We continue to do that, and we do it with younger filmmakers.

 There's no way of getting through any kind of endeavor without help from friends. And trying to be the number one person,  ultimately, is a losing proposition.

 You need peers, you need people who are at the same level you are.

 You never know in life when you're going to need help, and you never know who you're going to need it from.

 One of the basic motifs in fairy tales is that you find the poor and unfortunate along the side of the road, and when they beg for help, if you give it to them, you end up succeeding.

 If you don't give it to them, you end up being turned into a frog or something.

 It's a concept that's been around for thousands of years.

 It is even more necessary today, when people are more into their own aggrandizement than they are in helping other people.

 I don't think there's anyone who's become successful who doesn't understand how important it is to be part of a larger community, to help other people in larger communities, to give back to the community."

XIII. About the Authors David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors, an independent research firm that provides institutional investors with access to frontline industry experts.

 He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first mass market book on online networks and social software.

 He runs TheVirtualHandshake.com resource site, co-writes a column for FastCompany.com, and writes a personal blog, Brain Food. David holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA. Kaushal Majmudar, JD, CFA – Kaushal is President and Portfolio Manager of The Ridgewood Group, a value oriented money management firm based in Short Hills, NJ, that runs managed accounts and hedge fund investments for individuals and institutions.

Kaushal was previously an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

He is co-author of “Create the Business Breakthrough You Want: Secrets and Strategies from the World’s Greatest Mentors" and is working on his second book.

Kaushal holds a JD with honors from Harvard Law School and a BS from Columbia University.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path (which just launched a new blog) wrote a useful summary of the 360-degrees executive review process he uses for himself.

Social Software | Leadership and Management

Joe Hodowanes highlights “The 10 qualities interviewers look for when interviewing".

Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

FastCompany has just published an excerpt of our book on the ten basic steps necessary to take full advantage of online networks. The excerpt is called Leveraging Your Links. Years ago, when I interned for Procter & Gamble, we were told to never write a memo longer than one page. This excerpt is our book written on one page.

Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

From our latest FastCompany column, Online Golf Courses: How to design and run online networks for senior executives:

Let us say that you are a senior executive -- now, or hopefully in the future. You may be wary of participating in many of the online networks.

 Why? Online networks are typically much more accessible than face-to-face networks -- you don't have to fly all the way to Aspen to meet people at the ski lodge there.

As a result, they tend to attract a lot of the "have-nots." With no disrespect, the "have-nots" are the job-seekers, the recent college graduates, the pre-revenue startups seeking funding, and all the other people who are trying to get something, but have a small power base.

 The "haves" are people like you: the senior executives at prominent companies, the venture capitalists, and all the other people who are deluged with people trying to access them.

 There are two ways to design an online network to attract the "haves". One is to design it so requests to members must pass through social filters.

 That's the LinkedIn approach; I can only send a request to Bill Gates if one of our intermediary connections is willing to say my request is reasonable.

 The other approach is to make it hard to enter the network in the first place. For example, to join the International Executives Resource Group, you must pass a telephone interview, have a salary of over $150,000, and have at least five years of international executive experience.

more...:

Leadership and Management | Social Software

I had the chance to participate in the IRTS Foundation's panel last night on: "Marketing and Media Opportunities in Social Networking and Online Communities".

 Other panelists:

Manon Bone, Director, Sales, Friendster Scott Heiferman, Co-Founder and CEO, MEETUP Cem Sertoglu, Co-Founder and Former CEO, SelectMinds Laurel Touby, Founder, CEO, & Cyberhostess, Mediabistro.com Moderator Jack Myers, Editor, Publisher, Jack Myers Report and MediaVillage.com

My notes:

 Bone: friendster revenue is ad driven, not membership driven. heiferman: Meetup has few ads. We get money from our users: $19 per month per group. For that $, you're buying an easy way to find others.

Touby: mediabistro is a community for media professionals. Tv, books. No one is a direct competitor to them. Now have blogs, e.g. Tvnewser.com . only word of mouth marketing. 350,000 users today. Sertoglu. Corp. Alumni like their former coworkers, even if they dislike their firm.

Teten: gave overview of social software industry structure. Myers. How get ad agencies excited about social networking?

Heiferman. we don't want them! myers. myspace secret sparkle deodorant deal. When teen girls checked out the musicians who had signed up as brand promoters , they were invited to sign up to enter contest for new ipod. 30,000 did it. myers.

What's the problem if a needle company Advertises to a meetup of knitters? heiferman. 100000 people go to a meetup every month....there's huge market potential. cem. 80 companies run formal organized communities for their alums, many of them served by SelectMinds, which is an ASP.

 (DT: that's a tiny percentage of the total market.) Teten. The future is bottom up , 'open source' marketing, not top down.

What if marketing materials were published with a Creative Commons license, encouraging, rather than prohibiting, derivative works? Social software facilitates the participation of the market; people communicate/market to one another, instead of receiving a top down message. E.g., george masters' ipod ad.

Events | Leadership and Management | Social Software

Invaluable advice: 11 steps to a better brain. I'm just waiting to hear that Modafinil is becoming standard issue at all the major investment banks.

Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Are you interested in s-e-x? Would you say that publicly?

There are at least a few Silicon Valley executives who readily admit this in their profiles on social network site Tribe.net, or demonstrate it by the tribes of which they are members.

While some people are comfortable with a seamless blend of their business and personal lives, most people have some kind of boundaries between these aspects of their lives, a sort of faceted identity, as danah boyd calls it.

 In our latest FastCompany.com column, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, we take a look at three dominant categories of networks: social networks, knowledge networks, and business networks.

 While these rarely exist in isolation, any given community tends to have one dominant mode. Recognizing and respecting the dominant mode within a given group will make the group more receptive to your participation, and ultimately make you more effective in your interaction with the group. Read more...

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

The NY Times profiles legendary entertainment lawyer Bert Fields: Telling Hollywood It's Out of Order. Fields has never lost a case. My favorite part:

Even with the 35-minute commute from Malibu to his office in Century City, Mr. Fields says he still bills more hours than any of the 100 lawyers at his firm, Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman Machtinger & Kinsella, and he still returns home daily to Malibu to make lunch. A key to his efficiency is that he doesn't "do lunch," he said, nor dinner, drinks or breakfasts with clients. "I made a deal with myself many years ago that I would never socialize to get business," he said. "And I never have. Lawyers should get business because people think they're good lawyers."

Mr. Fields is truly a salesman after my own heart. Keith Ferrazzi/Tahl Raz in their book, "Never Eat Alone", emphasize the importance of getting business in large part because people like you and you are charming. Charm helps, charm counts, but Character and Competence trump mere charm every time.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

I've been quiet on this blog for the last month, because we've been completing a major redesign.

I'd welcome feedback on the completely redesigned site, Teten.com, courtesy of Jason Coward at OpenGeek.

In separate news:

 Are you interested in reading a preview copy of my forthcoming book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online?

If you write for a major newspaper, magazine, or other media vehicle...or if you run a blog with a significant readership...or even if you would just like to write a note about the book in your in-house corporate newsletter...then I would be happy to send you a copy.

 Or perhaps you know someone in the media who would be interested in the book? I'd be very grateful for an introduction! This will be the first mass market book about how people can become dramatically more successful by leveraging online networks: find a new job, new clients, or new business partners.

 More technically, this is the first mass market book about “social software": blogs, social networking sites, relationship capital management software, and so on.

 The CEOs of many of the leading companies in this industry have already raved about the book, including the CEOs of Military.com, Best Software, Ecademy, Cvent, Contact Network, and Ryze...not to mention Craig Newmark (founder of craigslist), Bob Cialdini (bestselling author of Influence), and Ivan Misner (Business Network International), among many others. My coauthor Scott Allen and I have submitted the 99.9%-final version of the book to our publisher, the American Management Association, and are now seeking reviewers.

 If you’re interested, please mail your name, affiliation, title, and mailing address as soon as possible to TMaster(at)Teten.com . Please note that we have only limited supplies of the bound gallies.

Extensive information about the book, including a blog and resource center, are at TheVirtualHandshake.com. If appropriate, you may also be interested in joining our Amazon affiliate program. Thank you!

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research | Social Software