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Chapter Three:
Survival

So far we have covered TRAVEL and TECH. There are a few more categories of things I believe I need to cover in order for this book to qualify as a "survival guide." All of these topics will aid in your career survival:

{3.1} SELLING

As this campy excerpt implies, in most people's minds to travel on business is to sell. That's why the question "Are you a traveling man?" is followed by "What line are you in?" in this story. So you can be sure that if you tell people you travel on business, they will think you are in sales. If that makes you feel uncomfortable, then consider this: you are in sales. You are representing your company, and if that representation has a negative effect on future sales you won't be around for long. Conversely, if it has a positive effect, you will be a hero.

{3.1.1} Everyone Is In Sales

But it's more severe than that. In a high-tech company, virtually everyone is in sales: the programmer, the accountant, the lawyer, the receptionist, the marketing department, customer engineers, customer service reps, even the janitorial staff. All have the power to make a positive or negative impression on a customer, and so to influence sales.

Many techies respond to hearing this news by screaming, "Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!" Often they have seen the sales staff as objects of derision, or "the enemy" in certain struggles. Much techie humor (like in Dilbert [ISBN/ASIN: 0740721941], User Friendly [LINK_3-3] and even the Silicon Valley Tarot [LINK_3-4]) uses sales people as a convenient target. There is often a sense of moral superiority, that sales people are somehow inherently crooked, or at least parasites, while engineers are the ones who engage in the heroic struggle to truly create value. Well, I'm here to tell you that you need to get over it.

Revenue is the lifeblood of any corporation. Even during the hysteria of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, when a company didn't need profit to have a huge market valuation, it usually still needed sales. Most of the accounting scandals in the early 2000s involved attempts to fraudulently boost sales numbers. They wanted to boost them because true sales numbers prove something: that people are buying what you sell and are willing to pay what you charge.

Without sales people the world would stop. Even when people know they need something and they have the money, they will procrastinate on buying. The hungry sales person with a monthly quota will facilitate the buying, help the buyer get in touch with the benefits of the purchase, and ease their way through the buying process, all the while putting up with any petty — or not so petty — annoyances from the customer, and ultimately get it to happen sooner. That's what they're paid for. It happens millions of times a day all over the world. It drives the global economy.

Once in my career I worked at a high-tech startup company whose president had been a fanatical champion of sales. Unfortunately, due to a merger/acquisition that turned combative, I only briefly worked in the same company as him. But I heard tales of his glory days. How he would fire people, and after they'd cleaned out their desk and taken the box to their car, he walk out to the parking lot and tell them he'd give them one more chance. What he "fired" people for most often was hindering sales in any way, shape or form, or even failing to help enough. All other activities of the company, especially engineering activities, could be put "on hold" to divert resources resolve a sales-related emergency. And you know what? Engineering was sometimes late (often, actually) but the company sure sold a lot of product quickly. If it hadn't been for the fact that they lost money on every sale they'd probably still be in business today.

More recently I worked for a well-funded high-tech startup that did not have a strong "sales culture." There were four founders of whom two ended up — after the Venture Capital (VC) funding — as vice presidents of engineering and operations. The CEO and VP of business development were later investors. None of them was willing to "own" sales, and so they went through a series of VPs of sales, none of whom had much clout. The end result was that sales activities were a low priority and didn't have powerful advocates. (The VP of marketing was similarly a noninvestor.) Engineering, operations and business development were the power centers. As a pre-sales technical support person at headquarters, I saw how salespeople were denied access to corporate technical resources — including often basic information — and fought a few frustrating and often unsuccessful battles on their behalf.

The board had set up an annual bonus system, for all employees except commissioned sales people, that depended on both engineering and sales meeting their goals. Engineering put out four software releases a year and met their goals. Sales came in at approximately zero per cent of target. That was a huge red flag to me. All the engineers thought they weren't getting a bonus. The attitude I kept hearing was "Why should we suffer for something we had no control over? We did our jobs." I kept telling people, "Sales is everybody's job." If I had been the the CEO I would have had a company-wide meeting to announce the lack of bonus, and ask each person to look into their memories of the last year and ask themselves, "When was I asked for help from sales that I didn't give? When was I too busy meeting my schedule?" But instead the CEO leaned on the board and got a 50% bonus paid anyway. I thought this sent the wrong message. But five months later it didn't matter: the company was insolvent, and the VCs were auctioning off the laptop computers and Aeron brand ergonomic chairs to get far less than pennies on the dollar for their flushed investment.

If the whole idea of focusing your company's resources on sales seems repulsive to you, then I suggest that you leave the world of institutions whose web addresses end in "dot com" and go find a "dot gov," "dot edu" or "dot org" to be a part of. But bear in mind that you will be leaving the arena in which most value is created and in which you can help make a difference about how much value that is; in these other institutions you will all be hoping for good economic times (without any control over them) because you will depend on commercial organizations indirectly but totally for your abundance.

Important Safety Tip:
Sales is King

{3.1.2} Dealing With Customers

If you're going to be a help and not a hindrance to sales, the first thing you need to learn is how to conduct yourself around customers (who have bought your product) and prospects (who might buy it). I'll generally refer to both groups as customers here.

Salesman of Hosts

He's incapable of speaking in complete sentences; he's addicted to bullet-points. In fact, he actually thinks in bullet points. That's what gives his head that bumpy texture. If he uses the phrase "enterprise-wide solution" one more time, slug him. Gloss, abbreviation, shallow understanding. Reversed: absence of guile.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.1.3} Sales 101

We're slowly sneaking up on the dreaded topic of "selling." But now it's time to take the plunge. Since everyone is in sales, that means you too, so you might as well get better at it. Here is my crash course is selling technique and strategy, my "Sales 101" course in a nutshell:

{3.1.4} Dealing With Sales People

If you're a very technical techie you may find it difficult sometimes to understand and to deal smoothly with sales people. But you can be sure that your career can depend on this sometimes rare subtle skill. Here are some tips I've picked up.

Important Safety Tip:
Sales people are really
"the hand that feeds you"
that you shouldn't bite.

Four of Disks

Oh, the joys of quantitative information. So little room for argument. Such ease of interpretation. No wonder engineers and managers mistrust each other so; they live in completely different worlds. Measurement, critical evaluation, performance review. Reversed: ambiguity, resistance to the inevitable.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.1.5} What It Means To Be a Sales-Oriented Techie

Most of my thirty years plus as a traveling techie have spent in pre-sales technical support, in jobs called variously "Systems Analyst," "Systems Engineer," "Sales Engineer," "Pre-Sales Engineer" and "Applications Engineer." (They all amounted to the same thing.) Early on I frequently found myself at cross-purposes with the sales force I was supporting, and was confused to how this happened. One of my first bosses in this adventure called me, with some derision, "the Answer Man," in reference to how I kept volunteering information that he preferred I'd stayed quiet about. This was tough for me because all during my education, from kindergarten through college, being "the Answer Man" had been a good thing, and in my experiences as a technical writer and later a programmer, prior to my pre-sales jobs, I was always rewarded for having the right answers and plenty of them.

Eventually I got a clue, and developed an intuition for when to keep my mouth shut. But only recently have I been able to put into words what I have learned. The best way I can think to explain it is by the following fictionalized example:

Let's say you've been working for a high-tech company for a while, and you've concluded based on conversations with prospects that feature XYZ would be a good addition to your product. Maybe some of them have even asked for it specifically, and you've passed this information on, to marketing (who are supposed to be writing the specs for new product releases — like that ever really happens) as well as to engineering directly. Let's say you've also talked some engineers, and/or done your own analysis, and you know that it wouldn't be that big a deal to add this feature. But marketing said no; it wasn't part of their "vision" for the direction of the product. And engineering isn't interested for their own reasons (probably because the feature isn't "elegant" enough — read "fun enough to implement" — for them).

The next thing you know, you find yourself in a pre-sales meeting with a major prospect that asks for feature XYZ, and the sales person tells them yes! You are furious. You want to blurt out that the product doesn't have the feature, even though you already told them customers want it, but nobody would listen to you. This is a good time to shut up. Consider the following:

  1. Contradicting a sales person in front of a major prospect could cost you your job.

  2. You already determined that the feature isn't that hard to add.

  3. In the real world, this is how products get improved, not through marketing's "vision," but from major customers making demands.

  4. Don't get sidetracked by thinking this is an "integrity" issue. Such situations do exist (like when the product can never be made to do XYZ), but this isn't one of them. If you are honest with yourself, you will realize the real issue is your ego — why won't they listen to you? Patience, grasshopper. If you keep on being right about this kind of thing, they will start listening.

(P.S. — If the company won't back up the sales person and add the feature to win the account, find another job. This company is doomed.)

I honestly believe that I aced a job interview and got hired on at least one occasion because I represented myself as a "sales oriented techie," using an example similar to the one above.

{3.2} UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE

In the 8th grade I took a class called "Vocational Guidance" designed to help us kids decide what we wanted to do "when we grew up," and design our high school curriculum accordingly. We were told that it would help us narrow down the choices if we could determine whether we wanted to work mainly with people, things or ideas. I picked ideas, which may help explain how I ended up in software. I have found that most techies are inclined towards things and ideas, often to the exclusion of people. But if you are to be a traveling techie, you have to work well with people as well, whether it comes easily to you or not. Often techies discover they must make a remedial study of human nature in order to advance their careers.

Unfortunately psychology is about the most inexact science there is. A lot of what passes for theory is gibberish — at least in my analysis. But over the years I have run across a number of what empowerment guru Tony Robbins calls "clarifying distinctions" which I'd like to share with you here.

{3.2.1} The Institutions of Psychology — "Follow the Money"

I was fortunate in college to take a marvelous survey course in psychology, "Psych 1," from an outstanding teacher named Michael Kahn at the University of California at Santa Cruz. One of the clarifying distinctions he shared with us is the fundamental differences in institutional structure and funding between the three main types of psychology practiced at the time.

All three of these domains can be credited with making contributions to humanity, by either easing suffering or adding to joy, but none offers a detailed, compelling and verifiable model of the human mind and how it actually works — in my humble opinion.

{3.2.2} The "Meta-Model" of NLP

I was also very fortunate in college to have two teachers named John Grinder and Richard Bandler who were in the process of developing and writing about a new approach to psychology they called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Initially their research was inspired by the work of two "supertherapists" named Milton Erikson and Virginia Satir, who practiced hypnotherapy with remarkable results but seemed unable to train anyone else to duplicate them. Grinder and Bandler — a linguist and computer programmer — studied films and audio tapes of these two at work, and from this body of data developed their theories of how the results were achieved. One of my favorite stories of Milton Erikson told of an occasion when he was on stage working with a series of patients being brought to him, almost like a faith healer, performing what is now called "brief therapy." When a juvenile delinquent teenage boy was brought up, Erikson asked him, "Will you be surprised when your whole life turns around next week?" The boy replied, "I sure will!" Erikson then dismissed him. His assistants thought the great therapist had decided not to work with this boy, but a week later he — as well as everyone around him — was surprised when his whole life turned around. Grinder and Bandler identified this techniques as a "presupposition." The way the question was posed presupposed the coming change, and they boy accepted it by answering. NLP consists of a catalog of such linguistic techniques for affecting change.

One of the things I find compelling about NLP is its intense pragmatism. Rather than proposing a model for the mind, the authors embrace what they call the "meta-model," which holds that whatever works is worth studying. The most accessible introductory book on these techniques is Frogs Into Princes (1981) [ISBN/ASIN: 0911226192], in which they offer this observation:

I find NLP to offer a cornucopia of practical advice on dealing with people, as well as a bracing tonic against the sillier extremes of psychology.

The most famous person working with NLP today is Tony Robbins, who you may have seen in Infomercials selling his self-improvement books and tapes. These courses are definitely valuable, but unfortunately these days Tony doesn't teach NLP techniques, he merely uses them. (I'll discuss his offerings below in section 3.4.7 "The Secret of Self-Improvement.")

{3.2.3} Categories of People

Over the years I have run across many systems for categorizing people, and I have found none of them to be definitive but almost all of them to be useful. The most important lesson in studying ways to categorize people is that not everyone is like you. It is also important to remember that these are all generalizations, and in the final analysis, we are all unique individuals. (I hope I'm not going to get a lot of "nastygrams" from people defending their gender or age group or geographical location, accusing me of being discriminatory. That isn't my intention here; I only want to help my fellow techies become better at noticing and taking into account the differences in people.)

Two of Disks

A disembodied brain hovers in deep space, with only disks for company. Okay, so it's a metaphorical image; the point is, you know this person: someone who's adept with computing but kind of undersocialized, out to lunch, and "spacey" in a inexplicable way? Might also have an exhaustive knowledge of all the Star Trek characters and spin-off TV programs? Disconnection, selective vision, detachment. Reversed: Point of view so broad and all-encompassing as to be useless.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

That said, here are some of the more useful categorizations I have found.

{3.2.4} What Motivates People

In Motivation and Personality (1954) [ISBN/ASIN: 0060419873], psychologist Abraham Maslow identified a hierarchy of needs that humans have: when each is level satisfied we go on to seek the next level. He describes these levels of needs:

  1. Physiological: hunger, thirst, bodily comforts, etc.

  2. Safety/security: out of danger.

  3. Belongingness and Love: affiliate with others, be accepted.

  4. Esteem: to achieve, be competent, gain approval and recognition.

  5. Cognitive: to know, to understand, and explore.

  6. Aesthetic: symmetry, order, and beauty.

  7. Self-actualization: to find self-fulfillment and realize one's potential.

  8. Self-transcendence: to connect to something beyond the ego or to help others find self-fulfillment and realize their potential.

I have found this to be a very good guide to what motivates people, and I know a number of effective sales and marketing people who find this analysis indispensable.

For an extremely pragmatic approach to the same question, a number of folks in the direct marketing industry recommend Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) [ISBN/ASIN: 0688128165] by Robert Cialdini.

Stock Options

Your incentive is held in chains, prisoner of the company. So, it seems, are you. Kill enough time and your options will vest, unlocking their value. Will they be worth anything when the time comes? Uncertainty, expectation, misgiving. Reversed: captivity, servitude.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.2.5} The Importance of Character

One more facet of personality seldom mentioned by psychologists is character. Advice columnist Ann Landers put it succinctly when she said, "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." A more esoteric analysis was spoken by the character of elder bond salesman Lou Mannheim in the movie Wall Street (1987) [ASIN: B00003CXDB]. He asserts that when a man stares into the abyss, there is nothing looking back at him, and at that moment, he finds his own character. That is what keeps him from falling into the abyss.

The way I like to think about is that, using Maslov's hierarchy of needs (above), character raises priority of category 8, "self-transcendance," or more specifically the subset of that "need" that we call "honor," to a level above all the others.

However you define it, character counts, and in seeking who you choose to associate with it should be your highest priority. For as George Washington said, "Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation, for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company." (I apologize for the incessant use of "men" to mean "people" in all of the above quotes. Our language is slowly catching up with our consciousness in the area of gender equality, and these quotes are archaic in that regard, but still "right on" otherwise.)

Important Safety Tip:
To thine own self
be true.

Salesman of Disks

Start with a little Dale Carnegie, add some Tony Robbins, some fire-walking, and a slice of some musty, well-aged EST. Garnish with words like "synergy", "value chain", and "incent." Finish with hairspray just prior to serving. Bon Appetit! Annoying, formulaic rhetoric. Reversed: garden-variety stupidity.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.3} YOUR PROFESSIONAL PRESENCE

A long time ago, when I was a programmer who didn't work much with customers, I was drafted into the pre-sales world; I certainly didn't volunteer. One day the general manager of the division I was in called me into his office and told me bluntly, "From now on, the only job available to you here will require you to wear a suit every day. Don't ask me why, and don't ask me why I'm not requiring any of the other programmers and engineers to do this. You decide if you want to keep working here, and if you do, show up tomorrow in a suit." Needless to say, I did, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Still, I didn't really appreciate the importance of my professional presence until my second pre-sales job a few years later. My boss in that job asked me, "Have you ever had the experience of doing some good work and having everyone in the company assume that another person did it, and give them the credit instead?" I had. His point was that it is human nature to want to give rewards to people who look like they deserve it, who "look the part" so to speak. The most extreme example is in Hollywood movies, where the intelligent ones — the writers — craft witty lines for the attractive ones — the actors — to deliver. The lesson (which I finally did learn) is that you sometimes have to work on the packaging to make yourself easier to accept as a winner. Most recently an ex-Navy sales guy put to to me this way: "If you want to get ahead you have to do an acceptable job and look sharp, and you'll usually beat out the person who does a great job and looks like a slob."

By the way, I took the name of this section from the title of a book, Professional Presence: The Total Program for Gaining That Extra Edge in Business by America's Top Top Corporate Image Consultant (1991) by Susan Bixler [ISBN/ASIN: 0399517863]. It's not as "total" as I would have liked, but it is definitely useful.

{3.3.1} Your Body

I had an idea in high school for a science fair project which I thankfully never attempted. It was called "Human Excreta" and and consisted of a large pegboard with an outline of a human body in the middle. Around the periphery would be little bottles containing samples of the various substances that humans excrete, each with a line going to the orifice or region from which it comes. I shared this idea with my wife one day, and her comment was, "So, this was your plan to make sure you never had a date in high school?"

If you think about the list of excreta from healthy humans (not to mention the various things we excrete when we get sick in various ways), sorted according to how gross and disgusting people find them, the list starts out with tears, hair, saliva, sweat and blood, and progressively gets worse. Along the way we encounter the "sand" from our eyes, rubbed off skin, ear wax, tartar and plaque from our teeth, snot and other forms of mucus (including "boogers" which must have a scientific name, though I don't know it), dandruff, "toe jam," flatulence, and — ...and I'll bet most of you wish I'd stop this right now.

My point is that nearly none of the human excreta are very popular with normal humans. Leaving aside the most intimate relationships — between lovers, parents and children, caregivers and their patients — most of us can tolerate tears from someone we know well dripping on us, or a hair accidentally falling into our mouth, but that's pretty much it. When it comes to strangers, we'd just as soon it all stays far, far away from us. I don't know why, but on average techies seem to lose track of this fundamental fact more often than their more socially oriented brethren. My simple rule of thumb is: practice hygiene and grooming such that there is no evidence that you excrete anything.

It has been argued that western civilization is overly obsessed with cleanliness. (Come to think of it, it has usually been "hippies" who expounded this theory to me.) But then again, the 19th century discovery of the germ theory of disease, and the relationship between lack of hygiene and epidemics like cholera and bubonic plague, sure seemed to hasten Europeans' adoption of that weird Japanese custom, the hot bath.

Another important refinement is that you want your grooming to give the impression that your mother raised you right. If she didn't, make up for it with your own efforts. Don't wait for a hygiene or grooming issue to exhibit symptoms, like dandruff or bad breath or body odor. Schedule your grooming. Brush and floss your teeth, wash your hair, cut your nails and clip your nose hairs on a schedule designed to prevent anyone from noticing you ever had any need for these activities. And make sure there is someone in your life, who you trust completely, who will tell you if you've slipped up.

On the road, shower at least once a day, always in the morning, and again after physical exertion or spending time in uncomfortable heat and/or humidity. Don't be shy about suggesting a shower break to coworkers traveling with you; if you think you need one they'll probably appreciate it, and might love a shower too.

Stay healthy if you can, and stay home if you're sick. Recognize that being around sickness of any kind usually gives people the "willies." Remember that if you have a cold or flu the first day or two are when you are most contagious, plus if you stay home and sleep you will probably get well faster. (You may think that coming to work with a cold makes you seem like a truly brave and committed worker, but if you come in sneezing and coughing and spraying germs everywhere and you get the whole office sick you're being a jackass.) If you wake up still sick on day two, go to the doctor. That's why they gave you a health plan. (Don't use your sick days as days off, though, like to beat the lines at the ski resort. Every one will know, trust me on this. That's what vacation days are for.)

Important Safety Tip:
In your grooming habits
emulate Barbie and Ken.

{3.3.2} Accouterments for Grooming and Health

In Chapter One, "Travel," I suggested that you stay "always packed" for a rapid departure, and that you include a grooming kit and a medical kit. Here is what I like to carry in each:

Grooming kit:

Women of course will need a few more items; you know what they are.

Medical kit:

{3.3.3} Your Clothes and Accessories

An early reviewer of this book suggested that I was taking a dangerous risk of "getting no respect" by using words like "booger" in a previous section, breaking a strong taboo against discussing "gross" subjects. Unfortunately, I think they needed to be discussed. But I am taking a much bigger risk in this section by talking about the system of "class" in America, since it is a much bigger taboo, in my opinion. Again, however unfortunately, it must be discussed.

I have found the most definitive and useful book on the subject to be the above-quoted Class [ISBN/ASIN: 0671792253]. This information is important as background because most people use their "instincts" (which is a misnomer — they're not innate, but really unconsciously learned attitudes) to guide their selection of clothes and accessories. You pick up these "instincts" mostly from the class you are in, and they will typically only help you impress others of similar class.

Fussell provides this anatomy of the American class system:

  1. Top out-of-sight
  2. Upper
  3. Upper middle
    ________________

  4. Middle
  5. High proletariat
  6. Mid-proletariat
  7. Low proletariat
    ________________

  8. Destitute
  9. Bottom out-of-sight

The lines represent barriers that especially tough to cross, at least in the upward direction (so called "glass ceilings"). Where Fussell uses the Marxist terminology "proletariat" we today hear the more American euphemism "working class." We also hear "white collar" for middle class and "blue collar" for working class. We almost never hear "lower class" because, hey, who wants to be lower? (I do notice, though, that in the hilly country I live in, elevation correlates very closely with class. The upper classes can be found on mountain top estates surrounded by razor wire, while the destitute live in homeless camps in the willows by the river.)

In terms of relevance to your choices in clothes and accessories, the most important news in Fussell's Class is that upper, middle and working classes each have their own scales of status, which are rather unrelated. Television helps perpetuate class myths, especially with nighttime soaps like Dynasty and The O.C, and music videos in the hip-hop genre, which cater to middle class and working class fantasies of wealth, respectively. Case in point: is a huge diamond wedding ring a status symbol? How about diamond cuff links? Not to the old-monied upper classes. They don't embrace the notion of "bling." It is worth noticing that most of what passes for "top drawer" among the middle class, such as the subject matter of the popular The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) [ISBN/ASIN: 0894801406] by Lisa Birnbach, is really upper middle class. (Even a clean and waxed car, let alone an expensive and "classy" European car like a Mercedes, is a middle class conceit. The upper classes couldn't care less about cars, as long as the driver is there to pick them up at the right time.)

Another source of myth-busting is the history of fashion. Almost all of what passes for "dressy" today began as a casual alternative to more formal wear. The tuxedo, regarded as formal by high school prom attendees, is really only semiformal, and began as a "sportswear" alternative to true formal wear (i.e., top hat and tails) at a private country club called the Tuxedo Club. Even the standard business white shirt with collar and cuffs grew out of a craze for wig-free "peasant wear" in the court of King Louis XIV in France, as an alternative to the frilly dress shirts and powdered wigs worn at formal court.

That said, it is important to recognize that being a traveling techie is pretty much a middle class job. Living on what you earn knocks you right out of the upper class, and working hard at your job keeps you out of the upper middle class (unless you are a CEO or head of an institute of some kind.) The toughest challenge for a techie is to avoid being perceived as "blue collar" because you are sometimes called upon to fix things, just like a refrigerator repair person.

Fussell's specific advice in this regard includes the following. Men should avoid:

Women should avoid: Both should avoid:

An invaluable resource for selecting business wear is Dress for Success (1975) by John T. Molloy [ISBN/ASIN: 0446385522]. He claims to be a "wardrobe engineer" because he doesn't rely on his or anyone else's opinions or "instincts," but instead actually tests clothing for reactions. For example, he has resoundingly concluded that beige raincoats are middle class while black raincoats are working class, by gauging how much money a man in a suit and raincoat could panhandle in New York's Port Authority bus station with a sob story about a missing wallet and needing bus fare to the suburbs, among other tests.

For all business wear Molloy recommends for men a wool suit in blue or grey with a white or light blue dress cotton shirt and solid, striped or simple pattern silk tie; for women he recommends a wool skirted suit with silk blouse in similar colors.

A word on regional differences: in my experience the only region that can export its local styles of dress with positive effect is the northeast. If you live in Texas or Colorado and favor hand-tooled belts, silver buckles, cowboy boots, western shirts and string ties, it's probably hurting you even at home, and it will sink you elsewhere. (Just add a cowboy hat and you can be a laughingstock.) Ditto for seersucker suits, light pinstripes and white shoes in the southeast. Double ditto for anything "business casual" that seems to be acceptable in California, such as polo shirts and khaki pants with braided brown leather belts. One prominent Silicon Valley CEO never deviates from his standard "look" which includes blue jeans; I've been told by a salesman who witnessed it firsthand of how this wardrobe has gotten the CEO thrown out of executive offices in Manhattan. (This may help explain why the company doesn't have a bigger market share in enterprise computing.)

When it comes to accessorizing I like to approach it the way painters, decorators and set designers do: think about foreground and background. I have found people will judge you by your shoes and your pens (also your hair and fingernails, your wallet, and your watch). That's why I buy my suits at JC Penny but my accessories at Nordstrom's. Always carry an expensive-looking pen to use; never use a cheap disposable ball point pen you got free at a trade show or hotel. If you must point at a screen during a presentation, bring a telescoping metal pointer or a laser pointer; never point with your finger. A watch should be simple and not gaudy; avoid too many "gizmo" features.

If you work with a sales person make sure they are on the same page as you with wardrobe. Work on them if they're a slob: loan them some of the books I recommend, and get them to asking other sales people for fashion advice. But when it comes time to hit the road, you shouldn't be more dressed up than they are. It will just confuse people.

If you are true techie this probably all seems ridiculous to you. Shouldn't your work speak for itself? But bear in mind that people are going to judge you according to status symbols unconsciously; they won't even know they're doing it. It will affect your credibility and how much respect you garner. Try it and see.

There will be times with people razz you for the suit, or even just the tie. Take off your jacket, and even the tie if you like, and drape them over a chair. Even with this reaction, though, I assure you the impression you made was better.

I also want to emphasize that you can wear whatever you want on your days off.

Important Safety Tip:
Make sure your little details
send the right message about you.

{3.3.4} Your Car

The fundamental thing to recognize about your car is that it serves two rather incompatible functions: luxury carriage and mobile office. On the one hand you may be called upon to shuttle prospects and other corporate guests around, in which case your car should be immaculate. On the other hand, it often is your base of operations for making cell phone calls, referring to your files (paper or computer) and a plethora of auxiliary roles for other life support functions, such as a picnic spot for fast meals, and even a cabana for quick-change requirements and a bed for naps. (If you're thinking "Why would I sleep in my car? That's for homeless people," consider that the time may come when you are driving at night and feel drowsy. An hour's nap at a highway rest area could save your life.)

To be realistic you need to prepare for all of the above. Here is my strategy. First of all I keep my car as clean as possible. I like to have it detailed frequently. I keep a litter bag handy. I carry a camel's hair brush for removing the "cruft" that always seems to accumulate in places such as the little slits in the dashboard and in the gear shift. Handy-Wipes and Armorall (for rubber and vinyl surfaces) and a general cleaning fluid like Formula 409® (for everything else) are also essential. I always have a small plastic trash can in the back seat for anything that suddenly becomes messy, such as a sack lunch that begins to leak when the orange inside is crushed. (Or a solution may become a problem if the Formula 409 bottle bursts open!) I also carry large garbage bags in the trunk for similar but bigger emergencies, and a 12 volt mini-vacuum for general cleanup of the floors, which can't help but accumulate dried mud in wet weather and dust in dry weather.

I carry a few small lap blankets as a hedge against being stranded without shelter; one can double as a pillow while the other keeps my shoulders warm. After many attempts to perfect my skills at eating while driving I have finally made a hard and fast rule against eating in my car; it simply tempts fate too much, and it's too tough to get grease stains out of my ties. If I'm really in a hurry I'll drive through a fast-food and then pull over and eat standing up using my hood as a table, or if it's raining I'll just go inside. The minutes lost are more than made up for by the minutes saved by not having the occasional exploded burrito to deal with. I also like to carry a spare suit in a garment bag as a hedge against the unexpected unknown stain attack.

When the time comes for me to pick up the CEO at the airport, I toss the lap blankets, the plastic trash can, the garment bag and any other loose items into my trunk, give the car a quick once-over, and I'm good to go.

The CEO

Power, strategy, planning, leadership. Though inept with technology, he is adept at cultivating deals and relationships with other CEOs. He does this on his telephone - one of the few technologies he has mastered. You cannot see his hands. Who knows what he holds in them? His demeanor is closed, reserved. He will not look you straight in the eye, for fear of giving himself away. He will always wear a suit. If he does not, beware - he is trying to be somebody else, and trouble always results. Reversed: subterfuge, prevarication, deceit, betrayal.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.3.5} Your Presentation

The most important aspect of your professional presence is the way you present yourself to people. I know it's tough for you to change this because it is something you do in real time, with little conscious control, but there are things you can do about it. Here are a few:

Important Safety Tip:
Just about everything celebrated by poets
can cause you problems at work.

Salesman of Networks

The cocky salesman exudes confidence in his $3000 suit, basking in the afterglow of a big sale. In fact, he'll brag that he never reads, has no idea how to use the product, but can sell anything. Don't spook him with a coherent thought; he may become alarmed and stab you with his Montblanc. Brashness, incorrectly placed credit. Reversed: there is an imposter in your midst.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.4} CAREER STRATEGY

In just about every job you will ever have you will have a manager; the good ones will act as a coach and bring out the best in you, others may "demotivate" you and provide an influence against which you will have to work to excel. But even under the best of circumstances your manager will only manage your current job; it falls to you to manage your career. Here are my tips on career strategy.

{3.4.1} Make Sure You Give a Hoot

Simply put, it is very hard to do a good job if you don't want to. Four years into my career I was fired from a job. I was doing telephone customer support and writing technical manuals in job D. I hated the customer support work. Interestingly, I was immediately hired back as a consultant to finish the writing job, but they got someone who loved it to take over the phone support.

It was in that job that I met a salesman who gave me some excellent advice. He told me about a cartoon he's seen in a magazine, of a bunch of slaves shackled to the oars of a Roman galley. One of them is whispering to the guy next to him, "Pssst! Don't row!" He the salesman explained, "Your problem is you don't want to row." He advised me to do what it takes to "want to row."

I thought about this for a long time. The situation of a galley slave is quite severe. But if they don't row, it doesn't improve their situation, it keeps them from gaining strength from the exercise of rowing, and it causes the other slaves to have to do more work.

After I digested the lesson I took a class in "crewing," the rowing of eight man shells. I learned that this is a sport where a team really depends on each other; if one person doesn't show, nobody can play. Weight is such a consideration that the hull is eggshell thin (you can punch a hole in it if you step in the wrong place), and yet there is a ninth crew member called the coxswain whose job it is to face forward (all the rowers are facing backwards) and steer, and shout commands to the crew. This taught me how essential leadership is. I also learned that the nine people in a shell can go faster than any single rower in a lighter boat.

But my attitude did not improve quickly enough, and I was sacked. (As a consultant I took a surfing class. I learned that a surfer can go faster than a shell, but not sustainably, and when you succeed there's no one to celebrate with.) I made sure my next job was in a field I love, 3D computer graphics, and I was very successful in it. (I even did telephone customer support for a while, and enjoyed it in that field.)

Recent studies of employee morale and productivity have shown that higher morale results in higher productivity (no surprise there) and also that morale tends to grow over time to a peak after a few years and then often falls off quickly. This is explained by "burnout" but also there is often a strong component of resentment; employees frequently feel that the company owes them something for their hard work and sacrifice that they haven't gotten, and become mired in bad feelings.

The best defense against burnout that I have found is to use a buddy system. Just like in running and other endurance sports, it pays to have someone who is pacing you. When your energies are flagging, your buddy can urge you on, and vice versa. This makes it easier to find your second wind.

The problem of resentment is best prevented by clearly communicating your expectations to your management. If you feel the company has failed to keep its promises to you, it's time to move on. Don't keep working in the resentful state; it's bad for you. Just like an engine has a "power curve," so do workers. Stay in your peak performance zone. This is essential to your long-term career.

Another essential point: never take a job in the first place unless you believe the company's products genuinely help people by contributing to solving their problems. Working for a sham company will eat you alive.

{3.4.2} Make Sure You're Soaring With Eagles

As we saw in the last section, unless you're going to "surf" on your own as an independent consultant, you need to be part of a "crew." The trick is to make sure it's the right crew. A popular motivational poster (well, maybe it's anti-motivational) says "It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys." So, don't do that. Surround yourself with eagles. Pick a winning team. How can you tell a winning team? They win a lot. They inspire you. You respect them. It's an old tradition in the workplace to claim that your boss is an idiot, but that doesn't mean you should do it. If your boss really is an idiot, "fire" him or her — find a new job. Otherwise, let your boss help and inspire you. You'll be glad you did.

In the late 1970s the United States Army was in quite a jam. With the fall of Saigon, shortly after president Nixon resigned in disgrace, morale was at an all time low. Drug abuse among soldiers was rampant. Overall effectiveness was poor. The only military mission authorized by president Carter, a rescue attempt of American hostages in Iran, failed badly. The Pentagon commissioned a study on what could be done to increase troop morale. I was privileged to be given a look at it. One of their biggest conclusions was that being a part of a "regular" unit composed of "standard" personnel with a "typical" mission was a huge morale sink. Conversely, taking a group and telling them they were "special" in some way — special skills, special selection criteria, a special mission — increased what the French call esprit de corps and boosted morale and effectiveness tremendously. That's what you should be aiming for.

Important Safety Tip:
Find your special team.

{3.4.3} Make Sure You're Competing

Business is by nature competitive. Elsewhere (in Chapter 2) I emphasize the importance of cooperating with other techies in order to expand your resourcefulness. But you need to make sure you're being competitive, too, because others are certainly competing with you. This results in a paradoxical situation I call "coopetition" which is simultaneous cooperation and competition.

Competition can be constructive or destructive, depending on whether you are trying to improve your performance or reduce that of others. I highly recommend that you concentrate on the constructive type; you will gain the moral high ground, and it's better for the whole system. Also, notice that you can compete at many levels: within your company for resources, opportunity and recognition, within your industry between companies for customers, publicity and quality employees, and within the whole economy for investors and public mind-share. Just because your coworkers are closest to you and you see them more (as the say, "out of sight, out of mind") don't lose track of the fact that the bigger competitions are the more significant in the long run. If your company wins big all of the employees will probably benefit.

The key to competing is to understand the rules, and then win by the rules (by bringing out the best in yourself), and if that doesn't work, by moving to change the rules so you can win. British wit Stephen Potter wrote the above-quoted Gamesmanship, followed by its three sequels, all of which are hilarious catalogs of techniques for changing the rules on the fly. Study his ingenious techniques; just don't push them too far.

I have a trivial and fictional example that I dreamed up, but it seems so apt I'll share it with you. I imagine that I have a friend who I am always competing with to see who can have the best vacation. One year he tells me how he took his family camping at the beach, and I respond that I took my family to Walt Disney World in Florida. The following year he tells me he took his family to Disneyland Paris, and I say we spent our vacation in Mexico City helping to dig ditches for a new water system for an orphanage. The following year he brags that they flew to India to help victims of the Gujarat earthquake, and I confess, "The kids were getting tired of all the travel, and complained that we didn't spend enough time together as a family, so we just went camping at the beach." Notice that although I ended up where he started, I still managed to "one-up" him. (This circular quality of the game is a trademark of Potter's gambits.)

The business equivalent of this approach is epitomized by the rise of the Plymouth Voyager minivan, which beat its competition first on cargo capacity and wheel base, and later on the number and placement of cup holders.

{3.4.4} Be Realistic About How Indispensable You Are

There's an old saying in business: "If you want to see how indispensable you are, put your hand in a bucket of water, and then remove it and see how big a hole you leave."

Earlier I have recommended that you leave a job under several different conditions — if you don't believe in the products, if you've stopped caring how good a job you're doing, or if the management seems to be on a collision course with failure. But don't think that you can in any way "show them" anything by leaving a job, as in "I'll show them!" One way I think about this is that if you pull up a weed, it's good for the other weeds. If you think you're indispensable and you leave, that will make those who stay more indispensable. It might conceivably actually be the case that they can't survive without you, in which case the company might even perish, but in all my years of experience — as well as those of others I've talked to — I've almost never heard of an "indispensable" employee being called and begged to return. A popular one, yes; a vital one, no. (The one exception was after a complete change of management.)

A related caution is: don't expect a job to be loyal to you just because you're loyal to it. Employees sometimes feel an emotional attachment to a job, and this is not in itself a bad thing, in fact I recommend you work to form such an attachment; it's good for your morale. But don't let that blind you to the fact that decisions about you will likely be made by your bosses in an unemotional way — it's "just business." This asymmetry is because you're a human being and can afford to be emotional, but a company is an aggregate of parts of human beings, and has a legal responsibility to its owners to produce profits above all else. Don't let this keep you from being loyal, but understand that it's not a two-way street, and don't take it personally.

{3.4.5} The Secret of Hustle

I have found that in the long run hustle is rewarded more than anything else. These stories illustrate this:

  1. I don't know if this is true, but there is a tale of a job opening for a telegraph operator that was advertised in a newspaper. At the appointed time the office filled with candidates who were told to wait. As they sat around chatting a telegraph in the same room tapped out a message to the effect, "The first man to come through the door gets the job." Of course the business was looking for an operator who was so involved with telegraphy that he would "decode" any message he heard as a matter of course. Other candidates complained that it wasn't fair — they didn't know they were being tested. This is correct. Life isn't fair, and you're always being tested unwittingly.

  2. In high school my sister and I were the youngest attendees at a dinner celebrating the 199th birthday of the city of San Diego. The after-dinner speaker was an archaeologist who was supervising the excavation of the site of the old Spanish presidio (military garrison) in present-day Old Town. He told us there was a waiting list of archaeology grad students wanting to work on the project, and he was deluged with requests to join his team, all of which he refused. In the middle of the project he added a high school student; those on the waiting list wanted to know why they had been passed over for this inexperienced newcomer. The speaker explained that this student, after being turned down several times, went out and found a cow skeleton in a field that had been exposed by erosion, and excavated it according to the strict procedures of archaeological digs: laying out a string grid, digging using a spoon and a brush, and carefully documenting everything. After months of painstaking effort the student returned with all the documentation of this "dig." The speaker told us he recruited the student on the spot, because he knew any kid with that much motivation would do an excellent job.

These stories show how hustle can get you places better than any other attribute, including credentials.

Important Safety Tip:
Hustle!

{3.4.6} The Secret of Mojo

When I heard Jim Morrison of the Doors, in the song L.A. Woman from the album L.A. Woman (1971) [ASIN: B000002I2M] singing "got my mojo rising" I asked a friend what that meant and he said it was like a tiki that brings you good fortune, and also the good fortune itself. It turns out the word in English dates from the late 1920s when it was used by blues singers such as Blind Lemon Jefferson. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary [LINK_3-97] defines mojo as "a magic spell, hex, or charm; broadly: magical power" and says it comes from an African word for magic. More recently I have heard this word used to name an intangible attribute that keeps the bearer empowered, and without which they are disempowered. This is the meaning in the Austin Powers movies.

Another friend of mine prefers the word "gumption" which he picked up from Robert Pirsig's wry but wise book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) [ISBN/ASIN: 0553277472]. I've heard younger people use the term "on your game" as in the song "All Star" by Smashmouth, on the album Astro Lounge (1999) [ASIN: B00000J7S9] who sing: "Hey now, you're an All Star, get your game on..." A business associate of mine who works with Venture Capitalists (VCs) says they look for a quality they call "traction." The analogy is to off-roading — if you're stuck in the mud and "spinning your wheels," then "flooring it" and giving the engine more gas won't help, but if you have traction you can use more gas to accelerate.

Whatever you call it, mojo, gumption, being on your game or having traction, it is an attribute to be treasured. Keep track of what increases or decreases it, and always move to feed your mojo. Here are some things I have found are good for mojo:

Long ago a friend of mine whose advice I prized, because he'd become a millionaire while I knew him, suggested that I start each day by making the most difficult phone call on my "to do" list. I tried it and, boy! It sure boosted my mojo in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

Important Safety Tip:
Calculate costs and payoffs of mojo
just like time and money.

{3.4.7} The Secret of Self-Improvement

Some of the biggest fools I've ever met would insist loudly that they were "fine" and didn't need any improving whenever the subject of self-improvement came up. Mind you, I didn't have to recommend anything to them, or tell them I thought they needed any help; all I had to do was just mention that I was taking a seminar and it would set them off. (Interestingly, none of these people seemed happy or successful, even by their own modest standards, but their explanation for this always seemed to involve blaming others for what they perceived as unfair treatment.)

Conversely, all of the people I have met who were wildly successful were keen on self-improvement regimes of one kind or another. Some take seminars, some practice meditation, some go to mass several times a week and pray frequently, some say daily affirmations, some listen to inspiration or motivational audio tapes in their car, some read self-help books, and some do a combination of the above.

When I talk about these tools for personal betterment, two questions I frequently get are:

For the first question I answer, "yes."

For the second question I typically tell people that if they watch television or listen to the radio, nothing they encounter in a seminar or on a tape could possibly be nearly as bad for them as some commercials. (It's a lot like worrying about pesticides in your water when you smoke cigarettes — the government's tests on rats indicate that cigarettes are about forty million times more likely to give you cancer that the trace chemical pesticides in your water.) Advertisers spend billions of dollars trying to reach you with their message. I sometimes run into people who insist that advertising "doesn't work," usually the same people who insist they are "fine" when I mention self-help technologies. But businesses wouldn't spend the billions if they weren't getting the results. Advertising's mission is to create dissatisfaction, to make you some how unhappy with your life as it is, and then to offer a solution in the form of their product. You spend a lot of mindshare every day fending off these mental attacks, and many of them penetrate your defenses and work their unpleasant business below the threshold of your consciousness. (Maybe it's because I live in an area with a high density of biotech drug companies, but I am always hearing ads on the radio looking for people with clinical depression to participate drug trials. "Are you feeling low energy? Does nothing excite you any more? Do you remember when you used to enjoy doing things?" I swear, you can end up depressed just listening to the ads!) What seminars, books and tapes typically do is to use this same technology to propagandize you into being more self-actualized, more motivated, more empowered, more confident, and to have higher self-esteem, courage and resourcefulness. What could be wrong with that?

Another objection I sometimes hear is "How do you know what they're telling you is true?" I suggest that this is the wrong question. It's not about true and false. How do we judge a computer program? We don't ask if it's a "true" program. We judge it by the behavior of the computer when we run the program. Likewise, judge a self-help technology by how you behave after you use it.

If it helps you to depersonalize things, think if it this way: There's nothing wrong with you that needs fixing; this is just preventive maintenance, like changing your car's oil every 3000 miles. Sometimes I call it "mental floss."

The only caveat I have is that you should beware of any program that seeks to extract larger and larger sums of money from you, such as a series of seminars that grow ever more expensive. These programs usually work well, often remarkably so, but the practitioners are unethically trying to get you "hooked" on their services and the day will come when you have to rip yourself away, often painfully. (There's nothing wrong with an author or speaker asking you to introduce your friends to their product, though, as long as it isn't a requirement for you to use their technology.)

Enlightenment guru Werner Erhardt, who created the "est" training, used to tell people that they would realize the most incremental advantage from his seminars the moment they enrolled. This was true in my experience. The decision to engage a self-help technology is an enormously empowering step.

How do you find a good program? Ask around. Or go to the library and look in the section around Dewey Decimal number 158. Be sure to look in the sound recordings as well. If you're overwhelmed with choices, one good place to start is an audio recording called Self Esteem and Peak Performance (1991) [ASIN: 1559770295] by Jack Canfield.

Another useful technique is what I call "mentor-hopping." Most self-help masters are themselves consumers of the technology, and usually had a mentor early in their career. I have gotten great value out of the courses, books and tapes of Anthony "Tony" Robbins. (His 1992 book Awaken the Giant Within [ISBN/ASIN: 0671791540] is a great place to start.) In all of his presentations Tony acknowledges the great start he got in self-help from his mentor Jim Rohn. (His classic 1994 audio recording The Art of Exceptional Living [ASIN: 0671505882] is a fabulous introduction to his ideas and methods.) Jim mentions how inspired he was early in his career by one of grand masterpieces of self-help, Think and Grow Rich (1937, book) by Napoleon Hill [ISBN/ASIN: 0449214923]. Mr. Hill tells how he was first assigned the task of interviewing successful people and finding a common thread in their stories by the great steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (who donated funds for public library buildings to thousands of American cities and towns in the late 19th and early 20th century), so I suppose one day I'll see if I can locate some inspirational book by him. And so it goes.

Since most of these can be found in your local library, and the books are nearly always available also on tape or CD, so you can listen during commute time, there is no valid reason to make excuses about limited time or money keeping you from this valuable material.

{3.4.8} The Secret of Technical Retraining

The eccentric inventor/mathematician/philosopher Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller predicted over fifty years ago that "specialization" as we know it would quickly become obsolete with the advent of automation. He reasoned that as computers and robots took over the repetitive and programmable tasks, humans would be freed to work on the problems requiring creativity and generalized knowledge.

It has turned out he was only half-right, at least so far. Repetitive and programmable tasks have become automated. When was the last time you met a "stenographer" or a "file clerk" in this age of word processors and databases? But specialization has remained; it has just turned into "serial specialization." The idea of getting an education just once and then spending your working life using what you learned is what's become obsolete.

I do believe that we are being called upon to be more like the ideal "generalists" Bucky described, but it is virtually impossible to get hired as one. Specialized knowledge gets you in the door. This is especially true if you are hired through a recruiter, or "head hunter." If a company is looking for, say, a "RF Systems, Receiver/Transmitter and Broadband Engineer" (to take a randomly choses job listing) with "receiver/transmitter architectural knowledge to include noise figure, phase noise, sources of nonlinearities and spurious performance, PLL and synthesizer design," a head hunter will only be allowed to present candidates with that exact experience in their resume. (It is interesting to note that this job listing concludes with "must be able to manage developments across many disciplines." There's that generalist requirement again!) Someone without the exact experience might be hired, but only if they came through more informal channels and were well known to the hiring managers.

The trap is that if you are hired as a Radio Frequency (RF) engineer that's the job you will be doing until it becomes obsolete, and then you will be laid off. Companies seldom retrain workers at any level. In bad times they don't have the money, and in good times they don't have the time. Technical retraining is your mission, and you have to squeeze it in. Luckily there are more resources available to you than ever before. Bucky wrote in Education Automation (1962) [ISBN/ASIN: 0385011520] (excerpts from Buckminster Fuller's writings © 1962 The Estate of Buckminster Fuller):

This sounds remarkably like the present-day World Wide Web (WWW).

One complaint I sometimes hear is "No one will hire me without experience — even though I know the stuff I can't prove it, and I can't get the experience without being hired." The answer to that is, "Just do it." Use your knowledge to build a demo of some kind. I know two people who have done this recently with Java programming, and used their demos to get hired.

As an exercise I went through my resume and listed the specific technical knowledge that helped get me hired in each case. Here is what I came up with:

To my surprise, I found that in a majority of these cases I seldom or never used the knowledge in the job once I was hired! Instead I had to teach myself new skills once I was on board, and those are the ones I used frequently.

Important Safety Tip:
Keep re-generalizing and
keep re-specializing.

{3.4.9} Know Where You Fit

Robert X. Cringely is a tech reporter whose perhaps greatest work is the book-length history of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs and their invention of the Personal Computer (PC) industry, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can't Get a Date (1992). It later was made into a PBS television special Triumph of the Nerds (1996) [ASIN: B00006FXQO]. In the book Cringely provides some penetrating analysis of the evolution of high-tech companies, in the chapter called "On the Beach." It is relevant not only the the PC industry but to any form of high-tech, research-based market-building company.

Cringley identifies three phases in the growth of a high-tech company, using a military metaphor. The first phase is the invasion of the commandos. Cringely says they "work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist." In other words, they create a working prototype and invent a new market in the process. One of my favorite examples is the team of Apple expatriates who created WebTV with a tiny staff, got big companies like Sony to build the hardware, began signing up subscribers, and then sold out to Microsoft.

The second phase occurs when the commandos are replaced by infantry, who exploit the the opportunity created by the commandos. Cringely says "the second-wave troops take the prototype, test it, refine it, make it manufacturable, write the manuals, market it, and ideally produce a profit." He points out that "while the commandos make success possible, it's the infantry that makes success happen." Thomas Edison excelled in running this type of company.

The third phase Cringely calls "police," and others have called Military Police (MPs). They preserve order, in this case market share. The hallmark of this kind of company is middle managers, who chase off any remaining commandos and infantry. Author Eric Raymond says middle managers are "conservators of the stability of the organization." This is the stage most big high-tech companies are in, like IBM, HP and Microsoft.

A series of article on the Motley Fool site by Rob Landley from February 21, 2001 analyzes these categories from the point of view of high-tech investors. (See "How Companies Evolve" [LINK_3-105].)

It is important to know where you fit in this evolution, perhaps more than knowing what technologies you want to work with. In my own career I have found that across hardware and software companies, from scientific to commercial applications, on both coasts, the one commonality has been that I have fit best in a group of commandos just beginning the transition to infantry. This came home to me most dramatically when I was working for a company in the early infantry stage, with about 500 employees, and were bought by a Fortune 500 company. One simple but telling change was that instead of calling a friendly lady named Katie about all Human Resource (HR) issues, including health insurance and other benefits, I had to call into a low-rise building a thousand miles away staffed with hundreds of people in a call center all wearing headsets and fielding such questions in 8 hour shifts. I used to joke to my friends that I expected to get a memo some day soon telling me to turn in my stapler, and henceforth send all papers to be stapled out to a special office in Austin, Texas.

There was one trivial but indicative pattern I noticed after a while. Several companies I worked for had popcorn machines in the break room, and gave away free popcorn to all employees. (Typically, this was a big hit with engineers but not much utilized by management or accounting employees.) The point at which the company stopped being "my kind of place" seemed to occur within a few weeks of some "bean counter" deciding the company needed to save money by taking out that popcorn machine. I evolved a simple rule of thumb: I leave with the popcorn machine. In my latest dot-com job, I negotiated for for free popcorn (for all employees, not just me) when I interviewed for the job, taking it directly to the CEO. He agreed. The company never stopped providing the popcorn, but it never made it to the Military Police stage; it imploded in the dot-com crash in early 2001. (I was assured it wasn't escalating popcorn costs that did it in, but rather the sharp downturn on technology purchases market-wide.)

You need to determine where you fit, and stay in that "zone," using whatever indicators work for you.

Sea of Cubicles

An expanse of workers' cells touches the horizon in all directions, a parking lot of lost souls. Only the murmur of tapping keys betrays any life. You wander aimlessly, looking for J-347. But there are no numbers or markings anywhere. You are marooned. Loss of direction, inability to move or concentrate, necrosis, dissolution. Reversed: hazard and adversity, a great adventure.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.4.10} Invest In Your Personal Network

I first read What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers (1970-2014) by Richard Nelson Bolles [ISBN/ASIN: 1607743620] very early in my career, while searching for my second professional job out of college, and it gave me advice that has served me well ever since. (It has gone on to become the best-selling jobhunting book ever, and is currently available in a newly-revised 2014 edition.) One of the first things Bolles advised was never to look for a job in the paper because, in a worst case scenario, you might find one. This would be a job with extremely well-defined duties and requirements (i.e., virtually no opportunities for creativity and growth), in which you beat our a large number of competitors to be the highest qualified and/or lowest paid candidate. Of course you would work in fear of "rocking the boat" knowing that you could be easily replaced through another ad in the paper. Today it might make more since to replace "the paper" with "Craigslist" in this advice.

Alternately, Bolles suggests that you find a job through your personal network, preferably a job creating just for you, utilizing your unique skills and tailored to fit your personality, for which you have no competition, working for people who already know you well. Does this sound too good to be true? Well, it isn't. Recently a friend of mine was returning to the workforce after being an entrepreneur and then semiretired for decades, and asked for my jobhunting advice. I told him about Bolle's advice on using your personal network. He wanted to know how realistic this advice was, so I went through my resume and did a count. I found two types of jobs there: great jobs, where I stayed for years and prospered, and "sucky" jobs, which I stayed at for an average of six months. Luckily the great jobs were in the vast majority. But in every case but one (when I walked in the door just before a management change, and ended up reporting to a stranger instead of the familiar associate who hired me) I got the great jobs through my personal network, and the sucky jobs through more traditional and impersonal methods like ads (newspaper or web) and recruiters ("headhunters"). A few days later my friend found a job while attending a garden party in my backyard, while talking to a mutual friend. These kinds of jobs tend to work out because not only do they know what they're getting, so do you, and everybody's more likely to be comfortable with the arrangement and happy with the results.

The key to making this work is that you have to already have the personal network in place; you can't just "conjure it up" when you need in it. So invest constantly in your network of associates. Extend and accept invitations, attend conferences, work on volunteer projects, take classes, join technical societies and user groups, and along the way collect business cards and find excuses to stay in touch with people. Your mutual interests in technology should sustain most of the relationships. Remember that these are not quite friendships you are cultivating, they are extended professional relationships. (It's okay to make friends, don't get me wrong. I just have a higher standard of trust and intimacy for friendships than associates — but I don't neglect my network. Someone I don't know well enough to invite to a birthday party I may still call or email about some juicy bit of tech gossip.)

Important Safety Tip:
Network is a verb.

{3.4.11} Plan Your Career Trajectory

Most traveling techies I know love the work and would like to keep doing it "forever." But this is unlikely. It is mostly a young person's job. Though age discrimination is illegal, a senior techie can face a related problem which is perfectly legal: cost discrimination. As you get raises throughout your career, both in a given job and when you change jobs, you run the risk of eventually eventually pricing yourself out of the market. Meanwhile, though your experience will increase, your stamina, learning ability, memory and even eyesight will eventually begin to fade. (Farsightedness, whose medical name presbyopia means literally "old eyes," won't keep you from being able to read a monitor close-up because you can correct the problem with bifocals, but it can impede your ability to see over someone else's shoulder, which makes informal training harder to come by.) For these reasons you need to plan a career trajectory that will keep you moving upwards in earning power (you do want that, don't you?) while exploiting your strengths and avoiding your weaknesses. Here are some possible arcs in that trajectory.

Important Safety Tip:
Have a plan for
where you will be
in ten years.

The Garage

Historically, the Garage is the Valley's primary engine of creation. Big New Ideas are germinated in humble surroundings at odd hours. The moon smiles upon such exploration unfettered by corporate constraint. Though it may seem the Garage is outgunned by mammoth office parks and grand laboratories throughout the Valley, the deck of history is stacked against them; the real action has always been "in the garage" - perpetrated by pathologically independent individuals in ramshackle workshops having original thoughts. All that mighty commercial squabbling and NASDAQ turbulence is just the foam in the Garage's wake. Don't breathe the fumes. Creativity, inspiration. Reversed: megalomania, quixotic optimism, unrecognized opportunity.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

{3.5} PREDICTING THE FUTURE

A key factor in managing your career is knowing what's going to happen in the future. It affects your choice of technologies to learn, markets to be in, companies to work for, investments to make, and even types of jobs to seek. Of course the future is impossible to predict accurately; but that fact doesn't reduce your need to do so anyway.

Here in this final section are my recommendations on improving your skills at forecasting things to come.

{3.5.1} Study the Present

Of course, the present is really an instant in time, which makes it difficult to study. What I'm really talking about is the near past. (A standup comic tells how his girlfriend confronted him: "You said you were going to your friend Joe's place last night but I called Joe and you weren't there," to which he replied, "Why are you always bringing up the past?" This shows how when people talk about "the past" we don't expect them to include the near past.) What I'm saying is you need to pay attention to the world around you beyond the immediate needs of your life and job. That includes your tech sector, the general economy, your country and the rest of the world. It should be obvious why, but in case it isn't, consider that your stock options can be driven down in value by a terrorist act in a distant city, and that your career future can be impacted negatively by the rise of engineering services in a third world country. Here are some potentially relevant information sources you may want to pay attention to.

{3.5.2} Study the Past

In an exhibit at the California Route 66 Museum [LINK_3-183], in Victorville, California, I found a handmade museum exhibit which I later learned was made by Mr. Dan Harlowe, a schoolteacher in Orange, CA. It nicely showed the relationships between, and evolution over time, of several often-seen features of the landscape:

A similar tale of the evolution of right-of-ways is told pictorially in this poster by cartoonist R. Crumb:


"A Short History of America" by R. Crumb (order: [LINK_3-184])

The last three frames show three possible futures for this same scene.

Why should you care? If there's a road there now, what difference does it make if there was a rail bed there before? Well, for one thing, it may mean there will be a fiberoptic line there now or soon. I have found that in California, Arizona and New Mexico, the shape of the internet backbone follows closely the path of the old El Camino Real (Royal Highway) that connected the original Spanish missions to Mexico City. Or consider the question "How did the width of horse's behinds determine the size of the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) of NASA's space shuttle? From "The story of the Standard Gauge (An Urban Myth)" [LINK_3-185] comes this tale:

Some web pundits have challenged the accuracy of this tale; see "Was standard railroad gauge (4'8 1/2") determined by Roman chariot ruts?" by Cecil Adams [LINK_3-186] But from a newsgroup posting [LINK_3-187] comes this validation from Richard J. Solomon:

So, I hope you're getting the point here. Studying the history of technology will help you predict the future of technology.

Some tips on this activity: first of all, everyone will treat you like an oddball. Many techies will belittle your historical interests, while the people you meet in the pursuit of history won't understand your fascination with tech. A lot of the people who keep historical sites running are little old ladies whom like to wear bonnets, and are mostly interested in the "upper class" appeal of anachronistic buildings, fashions and furniture. Remember that your agendas are not theirs. Sometimes I like to explain that I'm not just interested in the past, I am specifically interested in the difference between the past and the present.

One thing I like to do in checking out an region's history is to try to find the oldest dam or mill in the area, as well as the oldest rail bed (of course). I also like to seek out answers to the question, "Why is this place here?" For example, for Minneapolis it's because it's the northernmost point you can reach by paddling up the Mississippi before you're stopped by a waterfall. For Los Angeles it's because of a geological accident that causes the underground flow of the Los Angeles River to emerge above ground at the Glendale Narrows, making it a popular spot for a Native American settlement and later the original pueblo of the Spanish. For many cities, like New York, New Orleans, San Diego and San Francisco, it's the harbor.

In learning about the history of technology, I have been attracted to the computer museums, which seem to a transitory phenomenon these days. There was one in Boston, The Computer Museum near the Boston Tea Party ship, where I spent quite a bit of time happily [LINK_3-188], which has now "bifurcated," with its exhibits going one way, to the Boston Museum of Science where they became the template for the Intel Computer Clubhouse [LINK_3-189], and its historical collection going another way, to the Computer History Museum in the Mountain View, CA area [LINK_3-190]. And there was one here in my home town of San Diego which has also perished, The Computer Museum of America [LINK_3-191], with its collection going to the library at San Diego State University.

In the way of other history museums with relevance to technology, I'm also fond of the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights [LINK_3-192], and Waltham, Massachusetts' Charles River Museum of Industry [LINK_3-193], and I hope to soon get to see the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, OH [LINK_3-194]. And there's nothing like the great historical parks, such as Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia [LINK_3-195], Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts [LINK_3-196], and La Purisima Mission State Historic Park, Lompoc, California [LINK_3-197], which maintain much of the lifestyle of an earlier time, complete with authentic animals and actors. Many of these are described in the coffee-table book Visiting Our Past: America's Historylands (1977) by Ross Bennett [ISBN/ASIN: 9991763066].

But if you can't get to any of these swell spots, you can still read. Here are a few recommendations:

books on history

historical novels

books on the history of technology

Four of Hosts

Four workstations visit with a distant relative. They listen to tales of a simpler time: fewer beans to count, no OS, zero maintenance costs, and best of all, no consultants. Simplicity, economy. Reversed: everything new is old again.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

Important Safety Tip:
As the twig was bent in history,
so will grow the tree of the future.

{3.5.3} Study the Future in People's Imaginations

Of course, sooner or later you'll have top take a look at the work of people whose job it is to predict the future: futurists and science fiction authors.

Important Safety Tip:
Life is a time machine
transporting you into the future —
anticipate your arrival.

The Next Big Thing

Innovation, insight, craft, and dumb luck all conspire in the conception and birth of the Next Big Thing. Empires will be built on it. Competitors will be ruined by it. The originator is seen wide-eyed with the first flash of recognition; perhaps he terrified by its promise. He will skip lunch and write a business plan. Reversed: obsolescence, hubris, a flop.

Silicon Valley Tarot
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.

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© 2014 Alan B. Scrivener