A Song of Strength

The activity of our souls is all-consuming, and the work of our hands comes from that source, like fire from a furnace. It’s like picking up the Wall Street Journal – it’s got some of everything, because everything matters.

The full-length caveman video for Three Doors Down: “Let Me Be Myself” was designated the offical video for the Rules of Work blog.

“I won’t be made useless; I won’t be made idle with despair.” I’ve decided to also designate Hands by Jewel as the official Rules of Work blog theme song. For some people, laid off, worn out, or pushed to the wall, and wondering whether you can reach down into yourself and find whatever it takes to go out again and look for work, or to offer your services up in the marketplace as a contractor, or to make a run at your own business, or just to face another day pillaging your inner resources for the calm, the wildness, the raw gut, or whatever it is you can find to keep swinging at the bag that is the daily grind, this is the right sentiment.

I don’t know what you’re facing. I’m facing the simultaneous thrill of running through an open field – the sense of unprecedented freedom – and likewise  dodging the sharp knives that are the temptation to fear, the attempted bludgeoning by paralyzing worry, and the raining arrows of  proffered self-doubt. Did you think otherwise? If you’re not tempted by these, I think I would worry about that. Why is it so hard to admit temptation? I think the religious traditions that prevail here treat temptation as a failure of character rather than a universal situation that clings to anything it can find – anything that moves anywhere at all, leaving us finally enticed by a desire for absolute stillness, which in medical terms is called a coma.

“Not to worry, because worry is wasteful and useless in times like these.” I think this song is perfect. I think it has all the ingredients a recipe for courage needs – beauty, tenderness, just enough defiance, and a firm resolution to prevail. Way to go, Jewel.

1-Click Refurbish Your Business PC

As we talked about in an earlier post, you can’t afford technology slow-downs (let alone melt-downs) with the equipment you use for work. There are three tools that are superb for keeping it lean, mean, and screaming faster than the day you bought it. What all of these do is clean your registry which, if you’re a Windows user, was full of crap from the moment you got the PC, and has grown exponentially more crap-filled since then. Some of them clean other things which get just as junk-filled – like your temp folder. Some go farther, scouring your hard drive for the detritus of software installs and software baggage. The criteria for each of these is simple: in my experience, they have cleaned thoroughly and consistently without doing damage. I won’t swear by any piece of software, but my experience with these has been quite positive.

Ashampoo Winoptimizer: This is the Swiss army knife of system cleaners. Great value, and they frequently offer this for $10 if you watch for it, though it’s worth the original price of $50. Try a free demo – you won’t be disappointed. Advice: don’t get crazy with all the tweaks this thing will allow. They’re good if you understand what you’re doing. If not, use it to clean, clean, and clean. The best thing they ever did in these later versions is include a “one-click optimizer”. I keep it on my taskbar. If I think I’ve lost any speed, I click it once, and keep working. By the way, it’s fast!

PC Onpoint: This is a single-function utility and it does it singly well. It cleans the registry. It has always seemed rock solid, high-end, professional (what some of us might tongue-in-cheek refer to as “corporate grade” – except, honestly, have more respect for it than that – this is good technology!).  It seems a little slower than Winoptimizer, but just a hair – a hair mind you – more thorough. Also, it has no tweak panels for you to hose your settings if you get click happy and aren’t geek savvy. My experience isn’t with the latest version, perhaps, but these comments were true as of a year ago.

Advanced System Care Free: This is a full-featured cleaner/optimizer that is also dead simple, once  you get the interface. Follow the ‘bouncing ball’ around the dial, so to speak, and it more or less takes care of everything for you, without you having to know any terminology. I have this installed on a family member’s PC. As a single, comprehensive, cleaning solution – especially since there’s a free version – it’s quite impressive.

Incidentally, I’m not intentionally excluding any other tools. I’ve tried a lot of them. But frankly, these in particular have been the most thorough, without causing damage to anything of mine, that I’ve experienced. In my experience, they’re the best.

That’s it. This is not primarily a blog about business tools, but when I find tools I like, I relay the information because what this blog is actually about is caring about your work. A friend and I looked at each other one day when lamenting a horrendous software choice on the part of a corporation and said, “in our own businesses, we won’t do things like this”. It isn’t just because we have a doctrine of technology. We do, but that’s beside the point. It’s because our work is a vehicle of meaning, as I can be accused of saying too often, and that means that we approach it, from a technological standpoint, differently than if our meaning came from some part at the expense of a whole – one project budget at the expense of a company, or whatever. So, if you’re using a PC – nothing wrong with a PC – remember, Microsoft didn’t invent them – they just dominated them for a long time, and that day is fast ending, then tools like these can help make using it more like driving a Mazda 3 or a Minicooper, and less like sputtering along in a Kia Sephia (ooo, mercy).

The real question is how many of you are going to go rogue and slip these onto your crawling, corporate workstation for a quickening test drive. Careful, Wilbur – there are eyes in them thar hills.

Backing up in a Blaze of Boring

I’ve tried nearly all of them, and settled on Backblaze.

Jungle Drive: I found it impossible to set up. Too many separate logins and setting up the connection between the software and the storage servers, albeit rock solid amazon servers, threw several hurdles at me. After a couple of hours, including forum entries, I gave up. If it’s this much hassle, I won’t do it. I just know I won’t. It’s like exercising or writing your book – if there are too many hurdles between you and it, it’s not going to happen.

Mozy and Carbonite: Similar services, some differences, but I was concerned about key things, including impact on system resources and security. They both seem like reasonable solutions, and I like the right click and add to backup capability that one of them provides. I’ve no real objections to them, other than the cost of getting a backup DVD if you want one.

Others: A plethora of issues too numerous to detail. Many of them are specialized – more for sync than backup. I found some with great security, but price was often a barrier. A few had technical troubles in their install/setup/registration process that just sent me away as quickly as I’d found them.

Backblaze meets several criteria that are an absolute must:

Content: They don’t care what you’re backing up. No one’s going to tell you that you can’t backup an .avi that your recorded with your own camera. I don’t ever want to go “Oh yeah, that’s one of the file types Carbonite doesn’t accept.” I don’t have time for that. I need to know my data, what *I* consider to be my data, is safe, secure, and accessible and darned sure not stuck in an on-site world where fire, flood, and theft can wipe me out.

Security: Your personal security key is applied prior to the upload, so even Backblaze would find it difficult to read your files. This is deeply important. If you can’t secure your files, you can’t protect your files from one of the key things that backups are designed mitigate – theft. Sure, someone can break into your building and steal your computer, but short of that, if you’re password protecting everything, it’s mainly important that your backups be secured from scrutiny. Backblaze triumphs here.

Ease: Setup and implementation is absolutely a no-brainer. In this category, Backblaze is in a class all its own. And this is important. I’ve got geek skills, but I don’t want to use them to think about my backups. Backups need to be so automated that I don’t have to think about them at all – they just happen. If I do have to focus on them, then they won’t be done consistently, and they lose most of their value. Backblaze says ‘you drive – I’ll keep the car maintenanced’ – it’s the virtual butler of backups. Ask yourself – if you’re not doing regular backups, why not? Isn’t it because there’s something you have to do? I let Backblaze worry about that.

Trust: This applies to all cloud backup services. I do an occasional backup of all data to an external drive, so yeah I’m insulated somewhat from cloud catastrophe. But it’s a formality. The latest version of everything is in the cloud. Mostly what I’m backing up is older documents that weren’t created in the cloud in the first place. In the future, when all that’s converted over, I’ll download the cloud content as my backup activity. Future utilities will back up multiple cloud accounts to one server, and to your own portable drive. I think the data loss stories people have seen around cloud data are frankly overblown. Compare it to the data loss experienced daily in corporations and homes, despite local backup plans, and it’s nothing – a drop in the bucket. The trust issue is a non-issue.

Some other things I like are that Backblaze is cross-platform. So I can recommend it to others, regardless of platform. And I like that BB will backup external drives (other services still struggle here), that bandwidth use is easy to throttle up and down if I want more resources, and that the cost is $5/month. You just can’t beat it.

This post is destined to be a little ‘blah’, and that’s exactly the way I want it. The backup system on my rig needs to be brain-dead simple and require the least interference and input from me. I want it so boring that there’s nothing further to say, because I think that’s what makes a successful backup – for business, for personal data, or whatever. I think we’re at that point, thanks to BackBlaze.

Today Only: Business Phone Under $25 – SIM ready – No Contract

I’ve reviewed this phone before, and now it’s available cheaper than ever (information courtesy of edealinfo.com):

Technology: The Sword between Personal and Corporate Life

The contrast is startling. Average of 5mb/sec internet connections in the US – average of 60mb/sec  in Japan [source] for about $25/month. South Korea, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Portugal… basically most countries that might deserve the term “wired” have faster, better internet.The US, birthplace of the personal computer and the internet, now ranks 28th in internet connections speeds. In terms of internet infrastructure, the US is to Japan and South Korea what North Korea is to the US. Likewise, the most wired country in the world, South Korea, which should have 1Gig/sec speeds by 2012, has 60-70% of private homes with broadband. They were there already when the US was at 34% – now 57%.  How does it feel to know that the “Rome” that is the greatest intersection of the information superhighway isn’t the home of Coke and Pepsi, but is on the other side of the known world – in fact, the home of sushi and Pokemon? Of course, if you add text messages and argue that we have superior skills in using the internet, the US looks like number one. But of course, that just begs the question – if we’re so good at using the internet, why don’t we have more of it, and a better internet infrastructure – instead of this dragging piece of junk. It underscores a couple of things – we can be frivolous and self-obsessed, and we think we’re wonderful, but we settle for technology that is to the rest of the world what the Yugo is to the Toyota. In fact, one is cautious to even discuss the quality of Chevrolets and Fords anymore, even if they are assembled in Canada with parts made in Japan, Korea, and China. In fact, the report claiming we’re “number one” – something we never tire of hearing – base part of the argument on the notion that we make better business use of technology.

Statistics schmatistics – supposedly, we’re first in class in technology in the workplace. But it doesn’t feel like it, does it? Not if you’re the least bit technically savvy. I’m not counting the people whose first experience with decent technology was in their company. I’m talking about if you’ve ever had say moderately good tech at home and compare that with the technology at use in the average US workplace. If you’ve experienced the slow PC purchased at 300% of  it’s street value, with some other corporation’s badge on it, plugged into a single monitor (how do these people do anything – once you’ve worked with two or three monitors, and have realized 300% increase in productivity, going to the average corporate office in the US is like a slap in the face – again, if the best tech you’ve known is at that office, I’m not counting you – you just don’t know) – and then to have productivity-draining software installed (from cripplingly-slow antivirus to ridiculously lame e-mail software – like Lotus Notes), and to have that pc plugged into a slow network, and then locked down with draconian security controls – blocking online productivity apps, tools and utilities, and even reasonably good e-mail – if you’ve experienced these things, you know that this – this sluggish, luddite, scared, ineffective and inefficient corporate version of being wired does not make anything number one. You go home, turn on the three monitors, boot a PC with enough RAM and other characteristics to fly into full throttle, and you know that the corporate US has got something terribly wrong. You work from home whenever you can, because frankly, you have better technology. If not, why not? You can build a box for $300 that beats the one on your desk in a corporate office. Of course, then you get on our speed-throttled US broadband environment, where ISPs charge you outrageous fees to lesson tinker toy limits on an unlimited-speed medium (fiber optic), and you’re dealing with the dichotomy: the corporate office is to your home computer what  your internet connection is to what a 12-year-old has in his bedroom on the technologically civilized side of the world.

These two disparities, though, may not be unconnected. In fact, contrary to what a Canadian professor claims puts the US on top, I venture to suggest that the barbarically mundane, prehistorically inefficient,  and backwater-slow level of technology we associate with our workplace and therefore with our work, in the US, is precisely why we remain in the virtual dark ages of broadband speed and penetration.  Two things are the driving force in our consciousness when it comes to technology – work and play – and frankly, it is work that usually pays the bills for us and for technology.

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet. — [Wall Street Journal, November 15]

The Wall Street Journal ran the above article on November 15th asking the question “Why can’t we pick the technology we use in the office?” The article points out that instead of locking down the capability of installing software or using cloud-based software, virtual machines (which have been around since the mid 1960s, and incidentally are not only inexpensive but have often been provided by Microsoft for free), allow users to install whatever they want in a way that is hard-pressed to affect company security. You want to use a macbook or use your own graphics editor or paint program, you can. Virtual machines are like bringing your own hard drive, except it’s insulated from the rest of the environment. Better yet, if you hire people you can trust, let them bring their own hard drives. Most companies that don’t allow this, while officially banning USB thumb drives, would be hard pressed to find a manager’s desk or pocket that didn’t contain at least one. The WSJ journal cites ignorance and cost concerns during this economy as the barrier – but cost concerns should be driving the demand for more creative solutions to enhancing productivity, not less. In fact, I find it more likely that the barrier is psychological – the need for control, the parental attitude of the corporation itself – “we can’t “let” people do whatever they want or there will be chaos”. “Chaos” is the word corporations use to mean “too much freedom” – which makes the argument circular – ‘we can’t let people do whatever they want or there will be too much freedom’. The article laments the time lost waiting on bad search techology – like using windows to search a shared drive, or using Outlook – miniscule storage (I would say because one corporation that is not technically specialized thinks it’s safer to store it’s own data than partner with a company that is technically specialized to store it for less in unlimited space – after all, your corporation’s network has never gone down, has it?). Time to clean out your darned e-mail folders again. Add to this bad technology purchase decisions – not just in hardware but perhaps especially in software. Corporations are routinely buying fairly useless, anti-productivity (top-down design), and obsolete software – requiring not only retraining but further productivity loss to learn how to use the new productivity loss.

All good points. The cloud, of course, we’ve talked about before. You continually hear bird flu warnings about how a company lost it’s data in the cloud, and yes it’s possible. I wish someone would track all the companies that are losing data every day because they (mis)manage their own technology. The cloud isn’t just up and coming technology, it’s up and soaring. At the very least, all the naysayers should admit they’ve been using cloud technology for a long, long time – whether it’s aol, yahoo, or gmail for their mail. They just aren’t used to thinking about it for storing documents – and they should be, because the documents are far less likely to get lost into a searchless oblivion, get version-hosed or overwritten or wrongly moved or renamed, or be inaccessible just when you need them than cloud docs. The last corp I worked for sentenced us to Lotus Notes and the smart people hooked up a gmail account and simply set it to send mail from the web. Yeah, gmail is SSL, so it’s secure enough for prime time. Given all the hacking and viruses they’ve experienced on their internal mail network, it’s likely far more secure. Gmail not only automatically scans all attachments for viruses before they are opened, it does an unparalleled job of weeding out spam containing those attachments in the first place. Besides which, it has google as the search back-end, a state of the art filing system that makes folders obsolete, and virtually unlimited storage (because it keeps getting larger over time – by the time you use that much, you’ll have more room).

Regardless of the technological prescription one prefers, or even the political or economic one, what has to change is the prevalent attitude in the US about work itself. Those comfortable with the level of technology prevailing in offices are the equivalent of those comfortable with the level of productivity in the US automotive industry in the early 1980s (the K-car era). Increasing the level of technology at work won’t work. What will, the WSJ article correctly assessed, is providing a platform where people can contribute their own technology understanding and choices. The era of the all-knowing parental corporation must face up to the fact that it can’t blog to save it’s arse, can’t effectively handle e-mail, security, or searches (unless you’ve bought a Google server or are using Google Enterprise) better than AOL did a decade ago, and has grown accustomed to reinventing the wheel and then using it for purely ornamental purposes. It must let go – not entirely, but not a little – it must let go a whole lot. And it must favor technologies which favor letting go over management attitudes that don’t. It must, in fact, re-envision management models, team structures, and definitions of collaboration that enchance technological choice for the sake of productivity and for the very security and cost savings it has always referenced to justify it’s stranglehold on the electronic desktop. Corporations must redefine, as well, the workplace cubicle not int terms of the file cabinet, the telephone, and the pencil sharpener, but in terms of the wired and wireless desktop. It must, ultimately, like Jet Blue, go farther and tear down the cubicle walls, in favor of home workers, open environments that don’t suggest the hoarding and protection of office supplies – a gesture mimicking the secretaries of decades past – but rather the interaction of technologies, eradicate the emphasis on personal space in the form of portable felt walls – mimicking the corner office mentality of executives from the Mad Men era, and create an environment where productivity is combined with connectivity to achieve ubiquity – not the “face to face” of the every Wednesday team meeting, but the “any time we choose” of useful chat systems with video conference call capability (like Google Talk and Skype) and the truly collaborative document environment (e.g. of Google Docs). Stop flying contractors around, putting them in hotels, and taxi-ing them to the office to spend most of their time in a closed room using a laptop, and let them work from a technological cockpit whenever possible, saving money and increasing effectiveness. That “little something” you get from being able to stick your head in and talk to them is just your pre-Skype nostalgia talking – it’s a myth, already put to rest by effective distance learning in the academic field.

People seem to think that technology is unconnected to the other aspects of corporate life like the cubicle and the collared shirt. But this denies that the workplace has meaning, just as work itself does. I worked at a corporation that filled the building with so many file cabinets that it couldn’t find places for people to sit, and ended up shrinking the cubicles and jamming people in like egg crates. Most of those file cabinets stand empty, or contain boxes of analog office supplies like white out. What are we in the seventies? But can they keep the network up? Oftentimes, no. Can they equip people to work at home when it goes down? They’re starting to ask the question, but come on – does it have to be one or the other? Technology is connected to how we think about what makes a team a team. Is it people who order bad pizza together once a week, or is it people that collaborate with maximum efficiency and keep the company they want? If it’s the former, then you have to jam a lot of computers onto an overloaded network and force everyone to use the same tech just like you force them to get lunch from the same vendor for that warm, fuzzy once a week get together. Technology is connected to how we think about management? Is it the micromanager who hires someone to book his appointments (a relic of eighties), or is it the team traffic control operator who facilitates effective application of resources? If it’s the former, you’ll have to be where he or she is, instantly accessible in person, and you’ll spend most of your time commuting to and from work, eating at work, and staying late into the evening and coming in on weekends. Who *goes* to the office on weekends? Isn’t that a commentary on the shackles that lock our technology to our desk, us to this albeit obsolete technology, and convince us that this is the world of work, because we’re all in it together?

Being effective in technology requires, as a matter of principle, creating a work environment in which workers can be trusted with nearly any responsibility that is within their realm of competence, in which superficialities take a back seat to productivity (I’m reminded of the coworker people complained was “weird” who, upon researching his stats, it was revealed he was 500% more productive than any of them) – since when did a collar, a clean shave, and a complete absence of personality make you a better contributor to the team. And in which the shroud of control, of domination, of mistrust, and of outright implied condescension (“we can’t let them have that much freedom, because then we’d have to give it to everyone”) is left behind in favor of expressions and measures of results that make technology the ally instead of the enemy. It’s almost as if some companies are suspicious that too much use of technology makes you a dangerous nerd who’s going to seize control of the system – and from themselves. Let go. And, if you want to be successful, the president driving us to faster and more ubiquitous broadband, by itself, won’t be enough. You’ll need to let go more quickly, let go of more things, and change yourself – change the very definition of what it is you do for the company, what your work is, and what it is for others to work for you.

Freedom Wears a Watchcap

What is home-worker fashion? One of the things I’m curious about, for those of you who work from home all or part of the time is: what do you wear for working? Pajamas? Overalls? Tuxedo? A speedo?

One of the wonderful things about working from home is that you can eat what and how you want. No more bowls of office candy or cold pizza delivery in the break room, if you don’t want it. If you want crab salad on crackers, that’s what you can have. If you want peanut butter on apple slices, you can go for it. Working from home is an opportunity to be healthy, pleasured, and comfortable in what you eat. You can even take a break at the gym or on the exercycle (or keep working, if you’re one of those with the netbook mounted on the handlebars). Likewise, if your thing is a mug of coffee with Irish Cream and a pipe, you’ve got that too.

You also get to listen to what you want in the background. Everyone realizes that. If you want wild, wailing women, they’re right there with you. Not the kind in your HR department, but the kind on your CD. If you want Dillon and Springsteen, they’re your work companions. If you want Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers in the background on NPR, they’ll happily keep you company.

One of the most comforting things, to me, is that you can also wear what you want. I’m currently wearing sweat pants, a painter’s t-shirt, a fancy warm overshirt, a cashmere muffler, and a watchcap. Why this getup, you might ask, and would I really answer the door in it? Yes, quite confidently. The watchcap because, if you’re from the North, you know that if your feet or hands get cold, you put on a hat. I keep the house barely heated to stay alert and save money, and I wear a hat to start, because I won’t want to stop and get one later. The sweat pants because I think men’s pants should move with you, not against you, when you work (think uncrimped), and I’m sitting in an office chair. The muffler because, besides the fact that I personally am incontrovertibly stylish, it keeps my neck warm. If there’s one thing that’s distracting to a brilliant thought in formation, it’s a chill at the neck. And the rest because it’s just comfortable.

So what do you wear? Do you do the tie at your desk no matter what thing, because it helps you with the psychology of it all? I did that when I was in sales, and I think it works. I felt professional, and I acted professionally. Clothes are a part of the mind’s picture of itself. They contribute to mood just like food and music do. Dressed to the nines, I felt confident, cool, sharp, deliberate, and sexy. Yes, sexy – that word we couldn’t say if there were an HR department in our home office. Sexy, despite the Victorian hypocrisy that prevails in corporate settings, is part of being effective too. If you feel sexy, you feel effective, potent, able to accomplish what you want and able to obtain what you desire. So dressing to feel sexy is a good idea too, as long as you don’t chase that rabbit too far and end up at your corner store hitting on cashiers during your break. I have friends that should slob up a little before they go out.  At least the married ones should.

Wear swim trunks and put the laptop by the hottub? Is it TV trays and night shirts? Are you “business casual” and, if so, do you have casual or Hawaiian shirt Fridays? Do you hammock up, like “The Todd” in Scrubs? Do you work in the nude? Is your attire now reflecting every sports team you’ve ever adored, from football jersey to fitted baseball cap? Do you wear whatever you passed out in the night before? Is it your chance to put on sequins and pearls? Are you dressed like Ozzie Nelson or Kramer in his apartment? I don’t actually want to know, tho if you want to leave a comment and tell the world, that’s fine. I’m more interested in whether you’ve thought about it.

What’s it like to be free? How does freedom dress? What does freedom eat and drink during the day?

In case you were wondering, I’m having minted green tea and have a movie  Sex and Death 101 keeping me company in a little window on my left. No, it has nothing to do with what I said above – it just happens to be my latest pick. Yesterday morning’s was a really awful horror flick, and earlier I was listening to an up and coming new artist (one of my wailing women).

Freedom. Here, freedom wears a watchcap.

Sell more than you save

Rule of Work: If you must choose, sell more rather than save more. Both are good, but it’s a matter of priorities.

As I contemplate “quitting the day job” (OK, so I’m not quitting – the project is at completion and I’ve finished – but I’m referring to not replacing it with another one), I am automatically cutting costs, and preparing to cut others. The obvious large chunks. Some of the small ones if they take no effort to dismiss.

The other night I spent an hour to save more than $100 in the coming year, for instance, and am feeling pretty good about it. It’s money I had no need to spend.  However, let’s analyze that. At $100/hour, someone who does contract work might be feeling pretty good. In fact, it might be tempting to say it’s better than $80/hour working. I’m not so sure. Cutting a cost didn’t enhance my marketing. It didn’t send me referrals. It didn’t add to my portfolio or create the potential to add value for added fees. All it did was remove something.

To further illustrate this, who of us hasn’t spent more than $100 on our marketing? If not, what are you waiting for – this isn’t Field of Dreams. How much would you spend to get a client? Per client? $100? I might. Especially if I was hungry, I might. So which would be better – saving $100 or getting a client?

I’m a fan of cost cutting. I respect cost cutting. I have to engage in cost cutting or my business will die and I will end up working for someone else’s business, helping them… hmm…. I won’t be helping them with cost cutting. Most likely, I’ll be helping them sell. That’s the only reason to hire me – I can sell at a time when businesses are cutting costs.

So the point is to turn that ability into an asset for one’s own business. All of us can sell, or else we employ really good people who can sell for us. But we’re all in the business of selling something. Products, services, or just our charm and good looks. Well, actually I don’t have much charm. It’s a question of focus. The focus, especially now, especially when this economy can rear up and try to scare us, and the temptation to make it about cutting costs pokes at us. Again, if we focus mainly on cost cutting and not sales, we’ll be out selling someone else’s widgets before long. This is exactly the time to be selling our own – to spend our “off” hours not dozing, not lazing around, not waiting for clients, and not even searching for that last penny to save. It’s time to beat the bushes harder than ever.

You remember the parable of the talents. I hate to use a religious metaphor so soon after having used another one, but it’s that or a reference to Disney, and they’re not making metaphors as well as they used to. You can bury that talent in the ground, and not spend a darned dime. You can cut costs so low that nothing costs you anything, and hang on to what you have. Or you can do what the righteous do. You can go out and invest. Invest in your business. And seek the reward that comes to the faithful steward. Remember, your business is something to which you have a responsibility to be loyal, faithful, dedicated. You owe it, in the same way you owe praise to whoever cooks your dinner. So  you can’t just bury the coin and sit on it. Faithfulness to your business means tend the crops, thresh the grain, bring in the new wine, and so on.

For those of you who are religious, I’m not saying your business is the highest good in the universe. It’s just the highest good when it comes to your work, if you happen to be a business owner, precisely because it belongs to the Chairman of the Board – and I don’t mean Frank Sinatra. Food is meant to be eaten, it’s for the good of your body and soul – it’s not for putting in a glass case and gawking at. Same thing with your business. Nourish it, tend it, and let it nourish you back. At least, that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m not really giving advice, even if I seem like it. So don’t go thinking I know anything about where the market’s going and all that. I’m pretty pessimistic about that. I’m optimistic about where I’m going, and partly because I choose to see this market as an opportunity. I’m really writing so I can ponder the things I’m going to do to not merely ride through, but to try to prosper during a flood. And if I borrow a religious metaphor or two, it may be because I find myself praying quietly “Lord have mercy”, because it’s an awfully audacious thing to set out to do and, if there’s something I’m afraid, of it’s pride. Arrogance? No. But pride, yeah – that’s one expense I can’t afford. What I can afford is the determination to market my work with more effort than I use to protect it or myself. It’s a risk, but this seems like a moment when gamblers bank on rules like this one which,  put another way is: sell yourself long when the chips are low. But I like to keep my rules metaphor-free: sell more than you save.

The Unseen Light

You know, the agonizing thing about knowing you can build a business, knowing you have the courage, the intelligence, the talent, is not having the right idea. Don’t get me wrong, I have a business, and it’s the right idea, and it has been, for where I was, where I am, and for a while yet where I’m going. It’s the right idea because any business that works is currently the right idea. But you know what I mean. I mean that one idea that’s stellar, that you’ll give yourself to and promote when nobody believes in you, about which you are willing to be arrogant (some will say obstinate), even in the face of all the people that say “what if” and “yeah but” and “you’re living in a fantasy world”. I don’t know whether that’s the voice of your parents, spouse, siblings, religious group, or whatever. If all of these are supportive, you probably have it all figured out already and don’t need this article. My confidence and sense of adventure and obdurate insistence on determining for myself how to see the world painted an early target on by back. So I’ve had to pretty much work on the great liberating idea while under fire.

The idea is everything, you know. That’s what we know, those of us who are still trying to come up with it. The idea is everything. If we could just have that one idea – the one that no one has ever had, or ever followed through on or, if you settle, ever done quite right. We know what we want. We want the unprecedented. And when we have it, that idea, firmly fixed in our heads, and when we know that it’ll succeed no matter what anyone says, then we’ll act accordingly. That’s when we’ll act.

But I have a theory. It’s a theory I’m working on, anyway. My theory is that all kinds of ideas are the right idea, if you are committed enough. Put a different way, I’m not sure that the idea comes first, and that you will have that certainty, that absolute certitude, and then you will press on against all odds. Sure, it has happened that way now and then. But my theory is that perhaps, most of the time, instead of this, instead of just knowing, and so being committed, you commit first. You commit without knowing. Not just without knowing your idea will succeed – but without even knowing what the idea is. It sounds crazy, which is a word ordinary people use to mean counterintuitive – against common sense – unprecedented. But that, tonight, is what I think. At least I’m willing to explore it. I think that you commit to going forward, with and how you can, to being governed by an idea and, if you don’t have the exact one yet, to going forward anyway with what bare, meager ideas you have. You choose the one that isn’t guaranteed to make you rich, isn’t a sure thing that you can see whole and pristine against the sky. You go forward with wherever and whatever you have and, I think, you find the idea while you’re in motion, not while you’re waiting for it to dawn on you.

Now I can’t prove this. It is quintessentially the example of non-linear thinking, and I for one am not the biggest fan of what a lot of people call non-linear thinking. But what’s the alternative? The alternative is to stay put and bleed or, if you’re slightly less dramatic about it, stay put and do absolutely nothing at all. I’ve seen animals that stay completely still, because they’ve been injured in some way, and they’re bewildered – they don’t know what to do. They will starve like that, and I venture to suggest that if you’re the kind of person that responds to this kind of writing, so will you. It boils down to either paralysis and stasis or else going forward without the slightest guarantee, but more than than – without that pristine shining beacon, that mountain of enlightenment, that tinkerbell of sanity standing out in front of you like the vocational nirvana that it surely is. I think, again I’m not sure, that some of us may find what we’re looking for by feeling our way around it a bit. And besides, some of us can’t wait. When the lightbulb of all lightbulbs does go off, if we haven’t built the groundwork, by building businesses, by venturing forth bravely against the advice of others, we won’t be the kind of people that will recognize the lightbulb and distinguish it from something dangerous and threatening.

All ideas, when you’re not acting on ideas, seem dangerous, seem like a threat to our safe ground, because all of them presume the courage to change, the willingness to risk what we know for what we don’t. All ideas, at first, seem like walking out over water with nothing but faith. But when you are living in them, when you have walked among the storms already, then you know. You have the assurance of things hoped for, to quote a saint. And that’s what we mean by the certainty that the idea we alone can fully see, despite the fog of naysayers, is true, will succeed, and merits our undying effort and commitment. I think, first, before we’re entitled to that pillar of cloud going before us, showing us the way, that radiant lightbulb of genius, we must respond to the small fire in the bush, the small inklings that our lives are more than we’ve made them to be thus far, and must take those first furtive steps into what seems like the desert, and barrenness, living perhaps only on the manna of our own self-belief, and deference and humility before whatever god we think turns the dawn into darkness and strides the heights of creation.

So. So, I commit to going on, into this sandstorm. Going on when a part of me wants to cry out “where is my food going to come from?” Not insanely. I’ll gather what I can each day, and conserve and preserve all that I find like the dearest friends. But the alternative, to continue to borrow a religious metaphor, is bondage back in Egypt. I don’t know how I’m going to live in the desert exactly, a year from now. But I have food for today, the courage and commitment to go forward, and I have what talent, what intellect, and what hands God gave me. Who really, of us, has more than this when, now more than ever, all illusions of security are being shown for the false prophets and dead idols that they are? I’m not going back to chains and servitude, to the lash and the mundane ordering of my life by the clock kept in corporate board rooms, building monuments to a foreign god who isn’t my own. Remember, this is just metaphor – I’m not preaching a sermon. But the beauty of religious history is that it lends itself so readily to a perennial understanding of the problems we face.

And aren’t we already a little arrogant or obstinate (or courageous) to think we’re the special people, the chosen people, the people who will break the mold, who will conceive of a life lived outside the cubicle walls, of an economic force that comes from our own fire, our own engine, and of an ethical and metaphysical determination, freedom, and self-actualization that comes from breaking with the world as most people describe it to us – from the stories of a people not our own – like Abraham coming out of Ur. And if we are that arrogant, why not a little more? Why take one self-righteous step forward and not be willing to take another? Why shout out freedom and tremble at pulling free of the chains? Let the silent stay in Egypt. Those of us who find in ourselves a voice that dares to say Pharoah doesn’t own us, to the wilderness! I don’t see the lightbulb with my physical eyes, ladies and gentleman. I’m not a liar. But I see it, there, just where I’m going. I see it with inner eyes, and know with a kind of stretching of the imagination and creativity and desire that it’s real and that, if I press on, I will have it in my head and and in my  hands and it will come out of my mouth. You can say it’s wish fulfillment but, actually, what’s wrong with wish fulfillment? I intend, I plan on fulfilling my wishes. That’s what I’m in this for.

I’m not a believer, as you skeptics are likely to label me. I’m more arrogant than that, remember? I have certitude. Obstinate surety, indifferent certainty – counterintuitive, unprecedented vision of something that doesn’t yet exist, and a theory that can’t be demonstrated to the minimal satisfaction of any empirical analysis. I have what some of you would call faith – though those of you that know me know that I don’t do anything on faith, and have no faith – but I’m not afraid to accept the analogy.  For those of you who, like me, tend to shy from anything the world calls faith, I’ll give you an insight. It’s not faith at all. I know something the skeptics and critics don’t, and it’s not contact with the spirit world or a high tech ouiji board – I leave that to the economic analysts of our time.  No, the thing that I know that none of the skeptics know, is myself. I know who I am. I have known for a while how I operate, and how I’m put together – how I work. Knowing how things work, that’s a kind of special interest for some of us, whether it’s for tinkering or just academic interest. I know how I work, and what I’m made of. I’ve taken it apart. And because of that, I’m not basing any of this on faith – I’m basing it on a kind of vocational insider trading, where the key component of the market is self-knowledge and self-determination.  I’m betting that some of you who read this have access to the same inside knowlege and, while I don’t intend to stick around in one place to find out, it’s my sincere hope you will make use of it and corner the market on amazing by continuing to take the first  steps toward awesome. I will see you, quite gladly, on the other side. I’ll see you in the promised land.

Designated Theme Video

This video can’t be embedded, but it has been chosen as the official theme video of the Rules of Work blog. A friend and colleague added the following verbiage:

It taps into everything you ever thought, felt and said about not “fitting in” when employed by a company. This video makes me think about…

• People who are smart but don’t do well in a traditional corporate environment.
• People who are creative but don’t do well in a traditional corporate environment.
• People who are ahead of their time, could deliver tremendous value, but aren’t allowed to.
• People with tattoos, funky hair, body piercing.
• People of different races, religions, sexualities, ages.

Fear, Loathing, Escaping the Cube

So when I first started building my business, I took a ‘day’ job. It was partly fear. It was. It’s hard to turn down a steady paycheck, healthcare, and the lascivious knowledge that somehow society supports your decision, where they seem to be bewildered by people who  break away from corporate life. It wasn’t a terrible decision, though. A job is a great way to capitalize your business. It’s a great way to shore up your resources, build your emergency fund, get your feet under you, and lend capital to your startup.

It was supposed to be for 10 months. A “contract” job, by which they mean you get benefits, you’re a full-time employee, but it’s essentially temporary – for a project. In this case, right up my alley – designing and training software and processes and being the face of the software rollout on the ground with the end-user population. As these things often go, though, it became two years. The business suffered. It suffered because I had to turn some clients away. I didn’t get to give it the kind of attention it needed. I throttled its growth, so I could keep doing what I was doing.

When the day gig started winding down, the temptation to look for another job was strong, I can tell you. For the same reasons. After all, you can never have enough capital, never really have enough in the emergency fund (it keeps getting hit by life’s emergencies), and when your primary peer base is employees who support what you’re doing – being an employee – you start sort of feeling the pressure to cave.

At some point, though, you have to cut the cord. Corporate life is like a mother that feeds you, true enough, but also ensures you never stray outside the front yard. As the project started ending, people would get sort of gentle and weepy-eyed on my behalf – you know, the kind of sympathy you get at funerals. “Are you going to be all right?” Imagine that too quiet, too soft voice like someone has died.  I have a low tolerance for that. What makes anyone think I’m all right being an employee? Is that what it means to be all right?

People respond differently when you tell them you’re leaving corporate life to do your own thing. Some like to insert the if’s everywhere they can. “IF you’re able to make it float. IF you’re able to last in this economy (they don’t realize that every economy is an opportunity).” etc. Others like to sort of glaze over and patronize, as though you’ve told them you’re quitting college to be an artist, or running away to join the circus. They figure it’s a phase, an expression of despair, loss, and grief at “losing” your job. Have they never been in a contract before? The whole point is for you to finish it, and for it to end. But the point is that they think you’re doing something self-destructive, like moving in with your mom and drinking a fifth of vodka every day, while you refinish wooden boats. Come to think of it, if it’s good vodka, that could be a business.

The thing is, at some point you either have to keep strangling your own business, or business plan, keep relegating it to the theoretical, actually lending creedence to its fairytale status, or you do in fact have to sack up, cut yourself loose from the dock, and float your boat out to sea. The sea is choppy, the sea is wild, that’s what they warn you about. It’s true. So true. But if you listen, what they’re really saying is, “the sea is scary”. They’re asking you to be afraid. They’re asking you to share in their own fear, to be afraid with them. After all, if we’re all afraid together, huddling in our cubicles – our cells, dreading the axe, the chances are some us will get a pardon. Gosh, I just can’t bear any longer to look at the world of work that way. Work is the fruit of a man’s loins, so to speak. Work is the product of his heart, his head, and his hands. It’s a glorious, sacred thing. The notion that fear enters into it, or somehow helps us, protects us, keeps us sane, stable, and safe is for the fainthearted who plan to spend all their lives living on another man’s dime.

Don’t get me wrong: if someone wants to be an employee, that’s fine. Some people prefer that you give them their work. I’ve no qualm with it, ultimately. I much prefer to be a contractor or self-employed or both. Contractors *are* self-employed, if they do it right. But the notion that the employee has to choose being an employee out of fearfulness cheapens being an employee. If you’re that, and you want it, do it without fear. When you’re laid off, when your project is finished and you have to move on, when your company goes out of business, you know that’s part of the deal. Don’t be afraid, be ready for it. Be on top of it. I’ve seen successful employees do this. I’m not knocking it. I’m knocking terror in the sacred place of our talents and the product of our souls. People say they don’t feel afraid, until you see the boat start to rock, and then it all comes gushing out.

But in the same way, fear has no place in the heart of a contractor or a self-employed person. It’s an enemy, a slow poison. Sometimes, not so slow. It’s like being chained to some invisible, impotent thug who only wishes to be a weight that holds you to the mundane, stifles your imagination, and does its best to convince you to be like other men – to join and imitate the huddle. And that fear will stifle your business, where taking a temporary gig to fund it and build it, in and of itself, won’t do so.

To those who are shaking their head in sadness for my departure – you can rest assured I’ll be fine. Quite fine. I’ll land on my feet, because I know where they are. And if I ever get hungry, I’ll see you again, using a job to pack my bank account for a business makeover, or a rebuild, or a new birth. But the very idea that I’d fail presumes only one thing – that I lack the heart to keep running at it, determined to prosper. I have a much harder time buying that fairytale. I don’t even see *how* one can fail if you only determine never to stop, never to give in, never to let up, until you have what you are after. And what’s the worst case scenario? That someone like me does this all his life, running at it, making a new start, pushing at it, building, building again if it gets knocked down, until his last breath. Frankly, that’s a heroic way to live. I’m pretty comfortable with that. I don’t plan on that to be the story, but I wouldn’t mind it and, honestly you don’t have the emotional stamina to put yourself to work if you don’t have the heart to work that hard.

I do. You do, some of you. Or want to. How on earth do people think these things get done? I’ve heard the myth – every business that survives and enriches its owners is the creation of pre-existing wealth or is an accident of history in a far off place where someone else – always someone else – stumbles accidentally upon an idea or a process that makes them ‘successful’. It takes a lot of faith to believe fairy stories like *that* one. Any decent survey of startups that have lasted a few years will show you that it’s *not* true. That happens, yes, but a lot of businesses, quietly making it, are just the product of someone so cantankerous, so obscenely arrogant, that he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t stop, and didn’t care what you thought about him (unrealistic dreamer and blowhard), even if he seemed pleasantly congenial during “team lunches”.

To those who think I’m unrealistic, what is real? Isn’t it what someone is actually doing? What I’m doing is real – it’s not imaginary. And what I will do will be real when I really do it. I’m not asking you to believe anything, let alone believe in what you can’t see. I’m not asking for anything at all. That’s the point. Be sympathetic, if you want. Be dubious, if you like. Just don’t be in my way when I’m working, because that and only that will give me concern. Just don’t call me late for dinner, in other words.

Now, in a blog about work, I’m not the point, per se. Not really. Nor is my personal history, and that’s not why I’m recounting it. Nor am I the paragon, holding himself up to suggest you live the righteous life that I myself am living. I’m writing a somewhat personal story because I think many of us are in the same boat, sharing the same goals and are surrounded by many of the same attitudes and… sympathies. And if nothing else, this is about more than encouragement. The blog is called Rules of Work. It’s about the principles of what we’re doing, and how we achieve it. We’ve written about fear in the past. “The mind killer”, as they say on Dune. So I won’t articulate that rule again. People who don’t get it just say “yeah, whatever, blah blah blah” (yes, I got such an e-mail). People who do, just need to know that many of us are unafraid. That courage is there to be found, to reach for. And that the fears of others aren’t the rule that must govern our lives. We are free of others’ anxieties, if we want to be.

You don’t have to burn every bridge. Like I say, I’ll get a job again, if I get hungry enough, and I’ll use it to fund a rebuild of my business. But you also don’t have to stay in the big “safe” boat (the news anywhere lately should tell you it was never safe and certainly isn’t going to be any time soon – smart people at least put a second iron into the fire). You can cut the rope, including the rope to all that emotional baggage that comes from other people, and just serves as an anchor to weigh you down. Nothing profound, perhaps. Just an alternative story – a different mythos than the one that’s coming over the top of the cubicle walls, or is in the mournful goodbyes if you’re leaving your gig. Be a rock star. Leave the stage just as well as you walked on.

Social Compact for Work Changes

Frankly, I find it hard to think of a recession only in terms of the numbers that matter to the people that got us into one. It’s still a recession, or worse (we don’t like the word depression), if people are hunting for jobs for 16months, qualified people with degrees are still losing their houses for not finding work, and applicants are having to go through eight interviews just to get a rejection letter. Replacing employee relationships with temp jobs isn’t a stabilization of employment (without employee-like benefits), either, so the numbers can’t always be taken at face value.

It may well be that what has happened to the workplace for job holders and job seekers is not temporary at all – but is unprecedented and isn’t going away, not really. Hard to predict at this point, but signs that some changes may be more permanent are the reduction in employer funded retirement plans with widespread elimination of matching, and reduction of health care benefits with widespread use of contractors to avoid such entitlements. Pay cuts might be temporary, and it might be just belt-tightening to cancel the company picnic or the Christmas party. But eliminating health care and retirement – that’s changing the employer-employee relationship substantially.

Now even employees, in some cases, are really just ‘contractors’ with unemployment insurance. If that! Cut someone down to four days a week instead of five, and they’re not full time anymore. They may not be entitled to much of anything.

Some shifts in the employer-employee relationship have been building for years, but the recession, by making companies acutely cost-conscious, has accelerated them.

“I think we’ve entered into a fundamentally new era,” says David Lewin, of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. He describes employers as “leery of long-term commitments,” including both benefits and pay increases. . . .

In some cases, employers keep workers, but not on the payroll. Last December, staffing company Spherion Corp. laid off Roberta Marcantonio, a 14-year veteran who sold franchises to local operators. It brought her back as a contractor paid by commission. “We didn’t need the fixed costs, because of the recession,” says Spherion’s chief executive, Roy Krause. “But we needed the skills when she was able to sell something.”

[Wall Street Journal, Oct 20, 2009]

When you combine a trend toward ‘trial employment’ arrangements, with the growing practice of filling out workforces with contractors on a larger scale, and the reduction of the kinds of benefits that signify a long-term relationship (the equivalent of an engagement ring for an employee), it seems as if the relationship of employee to employer may itself be obsolete, at least in some fields, in some jobs, for some populations, and that what we’re witnessing is a work-culture shift, not a setback, not a minor adjustment, and not perhaps a temporary redistribution.

The contractor ranks are swelling. After all, even the unemployed are what, ultimately? Contractors waiting for a gig. The question will be whether this is empowering, for most, in the sense that it’s more like running your own business, or whether it will be debilitating, so that being a contractor is just another word for full-time employee with no benefits. If the latter, it may essentially ruin contracting for a lot of people who thrived with it.  What I hope, with glass hope,  is that it’s more the former, and that a shift to enhanced fulfillment from work, and from the very character of a traded, value for value relationship, will enliven the world of work for more people than ever before. We’ll see.

Contractors vs. Corporations

The trend is corporations increasingly substituting contractors for full time employees. Besides not having to pay benefits, there is no unemployment security, fewer rights (e.g. medical Leave of Absence), and diminished job security. Use them and drop them – that’s the new mantra. It’s not just the economy, either, as though it’s coming back. There’s a fundamental shift, perhaps spurred by the economic crash, that’s changing the way corporations look at filling roles within the organization.

Mr. Elienberg wasn’t a Comcast employee, but a so-called independent contractor working for a separate company. This month, he sued both companies, for allegedly depriving him and other contractors of overtime pay and benefits by not considering them employees.The case highlights a perennial issue for employers that is gaining new prominence during the recession. Lawyers say employers are trying to avoid hiring full-time employees by tapping contractors, as workers seeking better pay and benefits turn to the courts. – [Wall Street Journal, Oct 19, 2009]

Undoubtedly, this will result not only in the kind of lawsuit being levied against Comcast, but also we’re likely to see pressure from individual contractors to achieve the kinds of rights once associated with unionization – basic rights. To do this, contractors may soon be seeking alternative forms of representation – alternatives to the traditional staffing agency. After all, staffing agencies are essentially the tools of the very corporations driving these changes. They take around half of your income, ensure that you don’t rock the corporate boat, and respond ultimately to the demand not of the individual (you’re not their client, the corporation is) but rather act as yet another corporation in partnership with the very forces reducing worker status and entitlements.

It’s not that being a contractor is undesirable. But being a contractor with no negotiating power isn’t going to fill the gaps for the newly unemployed, and glutting the contractor forces is liable to drive down opportunities and bargaining power for existing contractors. What is needed is perhaps not to defend traditional employment – arguably the corporations are right – traditional pre-depression employment may not just be in decline or recession, it may ultimately be dead – we just don’t see it yet. What may be necessary instead is to elevate and dignify the role of contractors traditionally at the mercy of staffing agencies by replacing staffing agencies with something new – a kind of empowerment engine for free agents. Stay tuned, if you like. This is something some of us are actually working on.