QTalks

I want it ALL and I want it NOW

My favorite job-hunting advisor has a funny take on the situation. I absolutely agree.

Ask The Headhunter: Those pesky women in the coal mine, 2008-Jun-26, by Nick Corcodilos

Women just keep causing trouble. You can’t figure them out, no matter how much you try. They just wanna have fun. They want a degree. They want a good job. They want respect. They want to earn as much as men. They want kids. They want to break the glass ceiling. They want corporate life to not suck. They want power. They want mentoring. They want time for their families. They want men who make a lot of money so they can hang loose. They want to go back to good jobs after having kids. They want equal treatment. They can’t stand stupid men. They can’t stand stupid women. They cause a lotta trouble. Jiminy, you can’t live with ‘em and you can’t… make sense of the corporate world when you realize women are the canaries in the corporate coal mine, and we’re all being gassed…

Avoiding the ol' Coconut Headsets

For a long time, one of my favorite business writers has been Rob May. He used to post frequently at a blog called BusinessPundit, which is now run by a different group of people. Today he blogs infrequently at a site called Coconut Headsets, where he commands a much smaller audience of people like myself who enjoy thinking independently about business. He took the title from the Cargo Cult phenomenon of primitive tribes mimicking technical equipment like radio headsets so they would have the power that radio operators had--to command planes down from the skies.

Managers wear coconut headsets when they blindly copy ideas, or grossly misapply them, instead of thinking through each situation to see if adopting a new idea makes sense. Leaders wear coconut headsets when they confuse cause and effect, like believing that happy employees leads to better corporate performance, when perhaps the real link is that better corporate performance leads to happy employees.

Rob recently went on a pretty civilized rant about business publications which make money by telling people what they want to hear. I agree with him and have found most of my valuable ideas recently in books that aren't about business at all: The Mona Lisa Stratagem, Spiritual Evolution, and Educating Intuition.

Coconut Headsets: My Business Magazines Lied to Me, 2008-Jun-21, by Rob May

My final thought is that the best place to learn is to look at unpopular sources of information. If you read what other people read, you will think like other people think. Relish the obscure, the contrarian, and the unpopular, because they can seed your thoughts with unique ideas. Always keep a skeptical eye and remember that media is frequently lying to you, even if they don’t always know it themselves.

Making Rebellion Work

After years of having my rebellious ideas rejected, I finally began to find role models who can make their rebellious ideas work, and one of them is Chip Conley. His company, JDV Hotels, is a hospitality business that includes a chain of California hotels, but his business goal is NOT to fill rooms. Each hotel has a distinct personality and his goal is to match hotel rooms and people. He truly creates a community where everyone, including employees, can find themselves.

Musings, 2008-Jan-2, by Chip Conley

After five years of phenomenal times for Bay Area hotels, we experienced a bubble burst heard round the world. Suddenly assets became liabilities. Someone once told me that all businesses have a start-up phase, a throw-up phase, and a grow-up phase. My goal in 2001 was to graduate to the grow-up phase as quickly as possible.

Burning the midnight oil reading Maslow and his iconic Hierarchy of Needs gave me the confidence to take a contrarian path in the hotel industry wreckage that was 2001-2005. Rather than purely living in trench warfare for half a decade, we decided to focus on the higher needs of our employees, customers, and investors. Creating peak experiences for these three constituencies helped us to create peak performance for my company. And, almost exactly seven years later, our annual revenues are triple what they were back then.

Where Emotions Come and Go

George Vaillant argues that our most 'advanced' human emotions, such as forgiveness and compassion, are actually among the most ingenious survival mechanisms developed by early mammals as they evolved. The real problem is that our human brain power keeps getting in the way of our base animal instincts.

from Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith, by George E. Vaillant, M.D.

The neocortex is the most recently evolved part of our brain, and its size relative to our bodies distinguishes us from the other mammals. Anthropocentric vanity has led us to place our more noble emotions within its huge, conscious, reasoning embrace. But our vanity has misled us. Many dogs, admittedly having been selectively bred by humans for these qualities, radiate trust, hope, forgiveness, and love, and some very brilliant scientists and theologians do not. When a beloved woman is weeping, both golden retrievers and two-year-old children will rush thoughtlessly, speechlessly, but empathetically to her side to provide comfort. In contrast, her highly educated physician may piously suggest over the phone, "Take two aspirin and call back in the morning."

In this book, he spends a lot of words worrying about the evolutionary value of spiritual faith, but for me, the big message of the book is the way he keeps reminding us that our positive emotions are the keys to unlocking love and happiness. It's miles away from the 'power of positive thinking' but demonstrates over and over again that when we focus on finding joy and caring for others, we allow ourselves to evolve into stronger, healthier people.

Pandora

I have tried a lot of music services, including Musicovery (which is very cool), but none have given me the level of day-in-day-out satisfaction of Pandora. I think they recently upped the rotation of popular artists, too. Magnatune is a strong company, but it's ONLY new music while Pandora is old and new. Use Magnatune when you want to buy something original!

Pandora Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music.

The Music Genome Project was founded by musicians and music-lovers. We believe in the value of music and have a profound respect for those who create it. We like all kinds of music, from the most obtuse bebop, to the most tripped-out drum n bass, to the simplest catchy pop tune. Our mission is to help you connect with the music YOU like.

Real Live Spiritual Journeys

I recently got caught at a dinner stumbling around trying to explain who Gordon Atkinson is and I felt guilty because I've been meaning to add him here. I was sort of waiting for a great post to link to, but really the joy of Real Live Preacher is all the little things, like these quotes:

• 'For Christ’s sake' packs a punch when you mean it literally....
• I longed for a spiritual journey and not a religious assimilation....
• Whether or not God exists is none of my business, really....
• I know it sounds crazy, but it feels like God is watching me when I nap in church, and I like that.

Gordon is a great writer as well as a spiritual leader. He's the kind of person you want to take along on a spiritual journey. I wish I wasn't the kind of person who's embarrassed to say that over creme brulee.

Real Live Preacher: The Preacher's Story, 2005, by Gordon Atkinson

The preacher grew up in a devout Baptist family in Texas. Some of you are imagining a domineering father and endless hours of religious abuse punctuated with occasional beatings. Not so. I have a great family. My parents were and are gentle Christians who put a premium on living a Christ-like life and helping the poor. We lived near the border, and my parents were actively involved with a group of Christians who were constantly throwing their resources at the piteous poverty that co-existed with us just on the other side of the Rio Grande. I spent a lot of time in Mexico as a young boy. The preacher knows the mingled smells of outhouses, kerosene, and poverty. It’s something you never forget. One year during a bitter cold spell my father and his friends showed up at the border with a load of blankets and coats. The forecast was for temperatures well below freezing that night, and they knew a lot of families were going to be cold. The Mexican government forbade them from entering. Some bureaucratic bullshit, I guess. My dad said his kinder, gentler equivalent of “fuck it” and became a smuggler on the spot. He and the others made numerous trips across the border that day in different cars with blankets, food, and jackets crammed under the seats and hidden in the trunks. My dad felt that one’s calling to serve God was higher than one’s calling to obey the law. For Christ’s sake, he and his friends couldn’t let children freeze. “For Christ’s sake” packs a punch when you mean it literally.

Cataillic Venus Hairse

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Originally uploaded by TheresaQ

One of my favorite Houston artists is Beans Barton, who painted an art car for Susan Venus of Venus Hair for the 2008 Houston ArtCar Parade. You can see more pictures of this car and others at the parade on my flickr account.

Art Car Parade

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Originally uploaded by TheresaQ

Last weekend we had our Art Car parade, and the weather was better than usual. We had 284 cars--too many for me to wait to see them all go by, but I had fun walking around and taking pictures.

Mark Albion Cuts a Path We can Follow to a Sustainable Career

Mark Albion has dedicated his life to nurturing a stronger sense of purpose and values among people who go to business school and start enterprises. When I went to school (in the early 80's) and started out, "business is business" was a mantra, and everyone was expected to check their individual values at the door. Over the last 30 years, I have seen media like Fast Company and schools like Sloan and businesses like Google begin to talk openly about being in business for something other than profit, achievement and power. Albion has worked hard to give us all a methodology and support us with a newsletter and a community that reminds us that we're not alone in our struggle to become a more values-oriented leader.

An excerpt from his latest newsletter:

In the late 1980s I wrote my first article in the field of socially responsible business. The article argued for a broader, stakeholder-driven corporate model rather than a narrower shareholder-driven model. ... My success was negligible. I'd written the article for a magazine called Executive Excellence, which led to a call from its publishing editor, Stephen Covey. ... He pointed out that corporate change would not take place because of pressure from the outside, like my arguments, but would require change from the inside first. That change would come from changing attitudes, goals and purposes of businesspeople.

Brazen Blogging

Honesty is a precious commodity and thoughtful honesty is even more rare. That's why I enjoy reading Penelope Trunk's blog (which has the same name as her startup business, Brazen Careerist). Penelope is brave in her choices and brazen in discussing them, so we all get to find out what she intended versus what she actually gets. Finally, I appreciate that she admits that work comes first. Family and friends are vital, but they have to fit around her work, and this is only partly because she loves to work, but also because she is a breadwinner. She takes that role very seriously, something I think more people should grasp. It's very honorable.

Brazen Careerist: Advice from the top: Marry a stay-at-home spouse or buy the equivalent, 2008-Apr-10, by Penelope Trunk

I just hired someone to take care of my house for $50,000 a year: A house manager. This is in addition to the full-time nanny I have. And the cleaning service. And the assistant I have at work. I know the first thing going through your mind is that I'm loaded and I'm lucky. But I'm not either: for instance, the house I live in is so small that I sleep in the kids' room. I chose a house like this because I think having money to pay people to help me maintain a sane household is more important than having tons of space for tons of possessions. Having to make choices like that is what makes this topic worth writing about. But I wasn't sure if I was going to write at all about hiring a house manager, so I tried telling someone in person first...