People in positions of power are afflicted with a severe problem: they don’t get yelled at often enough. Very rarely will they hear how they’re failing; how they can do better; or anything how their choices impact negatively/positively.

We as leaders need to be empathetic, willing and eager to hear what our colleagues have to say.

We as colleagues and coworkers need to be confident to provide direct, constructive criticism.

I err on the side that “the blame’s on me” whenever there is an internal issue, colleague matter, or generally bad news.

Here’s multi-billionaire entrepreneur Ben Horowitz’ assessment on messing up:

Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong. Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.

When people in my company would complain about something or other being broken such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened under my direction. Unlike a hired gun that comes in and blames all of the problems on the prior regime, there was literally nobody for me to blame. 

I’m not a CEO but I am a CoFounder of the company. Ben makes it hit home in his assessment of the challenges Founders/CEOs get every single day. It’s a great article and definitely worth reading.

I’m going to make a “call to action” for everyone out there – figure out one major problem in your career, figure out the various stakeholders and their stances, and plot out a plan to resolve. I know most people are not CEOs or Founders, but  you can be the “Founder” of your career.

Ultimately, the blame’s on me. It’s also on us. It’ll only get better when we work to make it better, and recognize we need each other to make it better.

The mantra is "Do Good, Be Good" not "Do Average, Blame Others"

We’re planning a few parties at D&T.

And there’s a good reason: every so often you have to celebrate your wins. I think Steve Jobs said that (one of the few quotes I’ll use from the man…)

It take a lot of energy to win anything. So many companies that are scrappy just keep their head down and rack up victory after victory, never taking the time to stop and reflect. Working in that environment will burn out the good people at your company.

So I encourage to have parties, do cocktails, and generally recognize people’s efforts as much and as frequently as possible (particularly when those efforts aren’t obviously tangible. It’s hard for the HR director to feel like they’re rocking it.)

Parties coming up at DOM & TOM:

•  Ladies Night out #2
• Cooper Square House Party (Name pending)
• Beach Haus Corporate Retreat!

Uh, YES Party Kat is on the list. Party Kat is the REASON there's a Party. Duh....

After graduating college (age 21) I worked the following jobs:

• Film Projection specialist at a movie theater
• Television writer at a children’s show
• Theater producer
• Art/Gymnastics teacher
• Bartender
• Collections agent
• Administrative assistant

It took me seven (7) career changes to get to what I wanted to do, which I didn’t figure out until I was 26ish. That’s averaging a more than job a year!

Here’s my thought on this: Quitting a job is depressing, irrational, and completely necessary

Fun lessons I learned:

1. ) Film Projectionist  – If you’re doing a great job, no one notices. If you’re messing up you’re the fall-guy. Avoid these jobs like the plague

2.) Television writer – Easily the least-creative job I’ve ever done and after you calculate the number of hours you’ve worked, you’re making less than $5/hour.

3.) Theater Producer – As with most Not-for-Profits, raising money is 85% of the gig, 13% is managing personalities; 2% is producing art.

3.) Art/Gymnastics teacher – I learned almost all my conflict-management skills here. You’d be surprised how reasonable five-year-olds can be, versus their adult counterparts (especially parents)

4.) Bartender – The most boring job that exists. What I thought was a glamour gig for a young 20-something was really menial and stupid. If you have skills don’t do this.

5.) Collections agent  (Revenue Management!)- If you run a small business, get good at collections.  And it takes a lot to do it – cajoling, begging, demanding, threatening, etc.

6.) Administrative Assistant – If you’re sitting in meetings, meeting interesting people, and getting mentored this is great. If you’re running for coffee please quit ASAP.

Not-for-profits tend to be poorly run; corporate America has GREAT benefits but uninspiring that I think it’s…..intentionally so; and there are very few people in the any industry that really knows what their doing or how to manage people effectively. Working for corporations is a selfish world, people.  It’s very often a selfish, short-sighted, incompetent world. Which is why I needed to keep quitting – I assumed that “no, no this isn’t how people really work. I’m just in a bad company/place/department/industry. I need to try something else…go where people are competent and like each other.” Grass was never greener.

Now, I don’t consider those gigs as a waste of time. I picked up valuable lessons all throughout.  There are no detours in life – I carried a lot with me at DOM &  TOM. Basically, don’t work with jerks, be respectful and humble enough to assign interesting projects to coworkers, and for the love of God don’t do boring.

At least this counts for school credit....

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Happy DOM & TOM day!

DOM & TOM day is a company-recognized holiday for everyone at D&T  to take a 3-day weekend in April. Because, April’s AWESOME and everyone should go out and enjoy this springtime

No update for today – hope you celebrate this beautiful day!

booyah!

My friend Rich has  a great story to share:

He wanted an 8 pack set of abs, so he started the Paleolithic diet. The End.

Bam – that’s it. That’s his reason. Eat better, live better, for better abs.

I love this story tremendously. See, in the story he feels embarrassed that he’s doing all these great, healthy, life-changing things for what is ostensibly a narcissistic goal of physical aggrandizement. And I say “so what?” So what if the reason is not “good enough” by other people’s standards? The results are still the results. You can get a better reason later – there’s always room for growth. But to start the path of healthy body and mind, sometimes you just need any flimsy reason to kickstart your journey. In fact, I’d bet that the more petty the reason, the easier it is to coax yourself into doing it.

I want to lose 20 lbs so I can get laid more.

I want to finish top of the class so I can coast next year. 

I want to earn enough money so I can check out Barcelona for three months. 

I don’t often hear people say “I want to lose 20 lbs so that I offset the prevalent diabetes that plagues the men in my family when they hit their mid-50s…”  or “I want to earn enough money so that I can volunteer my time for more altruistic causes…” (And yes, it’d be a great thing if I did hear that). Those might be the long-term goals; those might be the real reason why you NEED to struggle, but those reasons may not be what gets you started.

And that’s where I’m going with this article. The reasons you start something may not be the reason why you stick with it, and it may not be the best reason to do anything.

now this is happening:

I shudder to think that anyone imagined how powerful creating the Slinky would be on the world's children...

“Take risks, but keep your overhead low.”

“Crowdsource ideas, but work in stealth mode.”

“Work in an open floor plan to keep communications open but leave your developers alone.”

Is it me or does most business advice feel contradictory?

Here’s my theory:

1.) Specific approaches are valid at specific circumstances in the company.

So perhaps it’s valid to take a risk on a new project, but not take a big risk on a new hire. Fine, I get that.

2.) Advice evolves as the people’s judgement evolves.

So while I was rash and foolish in my youth,  these days my experiences have taught me to be more prudent. Or perhaps my definition of “rash” and “prudent” have evolved, and years from now I’ll look back and say “now I know better…”

I wonder if I’ll ever know “best” – Like, the optimal decision to make for any course of action.

In any case, we see that this matter of contradictory advice, and therefore decision-making, can severely undermind one’s leadership. No one wants to follow a waffler; and no one can really lead without a coherent message. So when a break from a previous stance happens, it’s imperative that the leader realizes that he/she is breaking from the previous course of action and communicates that effectively to their team. Otherwise….it’s just going to look like you have a schizophrenic leader who doesn’t know what he/she is doing or why.

Heads we all get an incentivized pay structure; Tails we get stock options and fixed salaries

“We, the unwilling,led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” 

— Mother Teresa

I remember first reading that quote when I was 16. In the past years I’ve seen it quoted by army personnel, sports teams, business leaders, religious groups – seems like everyone who struggles feels this way, sometimes. I always thought it was a denigration of spirit. To me it sounds like people are enslaved to a cause rather than liberated it, and by the opportunity to Do Good.

I don’t want people who are unwilling doing anything.

I don’t want to be led by people who are unknowing. If they don’t know, at least they should believe in a cause that’s worth the struggle.

Doing the impossible for the ungrateful is a given: no one can care more than you in the act, unless they’re doing the act.

Having done so much, for so long with no resources, does qualify you with a sense of mettle and purpose but not necessarily the skills to win.

I’d like to re-write this

“We willing, led by the believing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now strong enough to face anything with nothing at all.”

Just a thought for everyone else out there. I hope you are willing, I hope you are led by leaders who believe, and I hope you struggle enough that you’re not afraid to face the impossible with no resources.

She's one bad-axx mutha..... "SHUT your mouth!" Just talking about Theresa...

My father taught me that if you have enough will and enough time, you can out-last any opposition. If I see one problem with startups, is that they lose heart too quickly. They cave, they balk, they don’t have the battleship armor of emotional strength to weather the numerous setbacks that will inevitably happen.

Every business plan I’ve ever read (including the ones I wrote) have the same ending:

And when all this happens, we’re all going to be RICH!

Who writes a business plan that says otherwise? No one writes  “And when all this happens, there will also be unforeseeable and heart-draining frustrations, and we’ll all be hovering above survival…”

With D&T, we’ve been unbelievably lucky. I brushed off the original business plan and nearly lost it when I read  that the original goal was to become profitable by year #2, and to hire our first employee by year #3. We’re in year #3 now and we have 23 awesome employees. But this tremendous growth has its own trials – growth this fast “feels” harder than struggling with just a few people. It takes another kind of emotional endurance to figure out how multiple parties, in several cities, can work together.

Emotional endurance is a lot like physical endurance  – you need to train yourself rigorously to be ready for whatever comes. For me, I read as much as I can from others who faced challenges. Right now I’m on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Here’s a great quote that I read today.

Uncanny resemblance to The Most Interesting Man in the World.....

Words that everyone once used are now obsolete, and so are the men whose names were once on everyone’s lips: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried in oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon as a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.

I think of Steve Jobs’ legacy, Packard’s and Moore’s, and the other great technologists and this feels so prescient. We feel like today we are doing such important things, and yet when we look at the past it’s easy to flag in passion because we cannot possibly live up to the past glories. But here’s the silver lining that I think Marcus was getting at, the last portion –  So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.  

 That to me gives me the emotional endurance to outlast any adversity. Well, at least for today.

Coming to New York in 2001, I realized that the city had(has) a lot of energy. So much energy that I found these things out:

1.) You’ll lose an hour off your regular sleep right off the bat

2.) You’ll find a desperate craving to drink everything from coffee to clamato juice constantly, sometimes simultaneously

Before 4Loko, there was Budweiser and Clam juice

3.) You will have that “thing” or “things” which will ground you through the stress.

That “thing” is anything from exercise, drinking , sex, shopping, eating, smoking, video games, watching movies, gambling, artwork, writing, reading the Economist, etc. The list goes on and on, but what all these activities have in common is that they don’t have ANYTHING to do with the stress in your life, and they’re all relaxing or at least engaging in a different way.

Obviously some of these activities are better for you than others. I have a theory that you, and your body, don’t really care if it smokes or if it joins an indoor soccer league to relieve stress. Smoking is definitely easier and the reward is quicker, so sometimes that’s a more obvious choice. But at the end of the day, your body is just looking to relieve stress. Regardless if it’s vices or virtues: your body will gravitate to whatever it thinks will help take for you to get from A to B.

On my personal journey, I realize that if I’m going to make it for the long-haul, I need to replace my personal vices with activities that get the stress-relief portion of my day done, and will give me the energy to endure 12-hour days long-term. So for the past 3 months I chose exercise. I work out 4-5 days a week and recently took up biking to the office (now that the weather permits…)  I take a kickboxing class once a week. This summer I’m looking at doing gymnastics with my brother and (perhaps) some Ultimate Frisbee. I gained 25 pounds since starting this company in 2009, and I’ve decided to lose all that weight. Right now I’m down 9 pounds in 3 months. Which is progress, I’ll take that. Plus, it’s great with the stress.

Everyone already has their “thing” for stress relief. I’m concerned that a lot of people aren’t aware of their “thing” and so instead of choosing their solution, people falls into the activities that may not be ideal in the long-run. Diabetes and unhealthy diets plague both sides of my family. The primary reason is that a good portion of my family deals with stress via over-eating and drinking.

If I had one thing to encourage people: make a list of the things that are stress-reliefs and start assessing which ones you want to focus on and which ones you want to de-emphasize. Personally, I found that you can replace on activity for the other quickly, and realize you didn’t really miss the previous activity.