Find Opportunities Via Social Media

Thirty years ago a landmark academic study demonstrated that most people who get new jobs through networking with others almost always get those jobs not from their closest friends or colleagues, but from those they didn’t really know as well. This principle, known as the “strength of weak ties,” has become famous as social networks have proliferated and people have struggled to understand how to extract value from them. LinkedIn’s own Co-Founder, Reid Hoffman, referenced the principle in his post last year, about the two types of professional relationships you should maintain: allies and acquaintances.

If you’re looking for a new job (and half or more of LinkedIn members apparently are), then the weak-ties principal is worth paying close attention to. In fact, it’s worth knowing about for a lot of other reasons, also. If you’re a sales person looking for leads, or a venture capitalist looking for investments, or a corporate board looking for new director candidates – knowing how the weak-ties principle works can make the difference between success and failure.

Social networks are actually networks of networks. Your own social graph is connected to many other people’s graphs, but you and your closest friends’ graphs will have a great deal of overlap, because you know many of the same people. It is the connections between more distant, largely non-overlapping networks that are critical to making a network robust and resilient.

Albert-László Barabási, a highly regarded network theorist, used a massive trove of data to examine how easy it would be to disrupt a network. When he and his team analyzed the anonymous call records for a mobile operator serving about 20% of the population of an undisclosed European country, they found something very interesting. You won’t significantly damage a network’s ability to share information throughout the population by eliminating the most connected people. But you can significantly disrupt a network if you take out those who have the most connections outside their own immediate communities – that is, those who constitute the most network-to-network links.

The reason distant connections are more likely to connect you with your next job opportunity is similar: You and your closest friends and colleagues already know about many of the same opportunities. To discover new opportunities that you don’t already know about requires you to reach out to people who are not in your own immediate circle. You need to make connections to other networks, beyond your own.

The weak-ties principle has many implications for how you go about discovering opportunities for your business, beyond just a personal job search. For instance:

• One study of successful entrepreneurs found they were more likely than others to have “deliberately exposed themselves to different sources of information, by striking up conversations on trains, for example, or maintaining a diverse range of acquaintances, to increase the odds of stumbling upon an interesting opportunity.”
• Private equity investors who share information with others about possible investment candidates are able to access a wider network of candidates themselves.
• Venture capital firms concentrated in technology centers (like Silicon Valley, Boston, or NY) do better competitively because they are able to “cast a wide, public net” – in effect, harvesting their weak ties.

In future posts I plan to explore how this principle can be applied in more detail. We’ll talk more specifically about how to apply the weak-ties principle to getting a new job, getting a higher salary, finding a B2B sales prospect, generating more innovative ideas, hiring a new professional employee, or even recruiting a new board member. So stay tuned!

Article by Don Peppers

Unlimited Vacation Days: Treat Employees Like Adults

If you’re looking to improve your company culture and impact employee retention, it’s time to consider dropping your standard vacation day policy and taking a more flexible route. The unlimited vacation day honor system is sparking a wave of positive interest across companies and industries.

Many companies like Best Buy, Netflix, Evernote, Zynga, Red Front Events, and even my Web marketing agency Ciplex have all made the transition to unlimited vacation days--and it’s time for you to do the same. In fact, the average American employee leaves two unused paid vacation days every year.

Still on the fence? Take a look at some of the benefits of offering unlimited vacation time:

1. Establishes employee responsibility. Break away from the fear of being faced with an empty office, mountains of work, and unhappy customers--your staff may surprise you with their use of their new freedom. Offering unlimited vacation days is one way to show your employees you trust and respect them.

2. Acts as a recruiting perk. Are you looking to expand? One of the best ways to gain the interest of potential job candidates is to tout your perks. In fact, nearly half of working adultsreported they would be willing to give up some percentage of their salary for more flexibility at work.

3. Keep employees engaged and productive. Allowing your employees to take time off when they need it most encourages a more productive work environment. Instead of working when their minds are elsewhere, they’ll be able to give you their full attention.

4. Eliminates a sense of hierarchy. Does upper-level management have more flexibility with their PTO? Stop hierarchy in its tracks by giving your entire staff a fair shot at a flexible schedule.

Transitioning may still seem impossible, but I can assure you it’s not. Drop your fear of change and stop making your employees keep tabs in order to travel or fulfill personal commitments. Use the following steps to help you transition:

Step 1: Survey Your Employees

Get a feel for what your employees really want before you make the transition to unlimited vacation days. Start by educating them on what exactly unlimited vacation days are: a highly-flexible paid-time-off policy, not a free-for-all. Give your employees the necessary information to get them onboard and then send out a brief survey to get a feel for their interest.

Step 2: Craft Your Policy

At Ciplex, we offer unlimited PTO, not just vacation days. It’s up to you to create a policy most suited to your company’s needs--create a standalone vacation policy or add it onto the current PTO policy that includes both sick days and flextime.

Step 3: Establish Requirements

For a successful unlimited vacation day policy, you’re going to have to develop some basic rules. Start by requiring team approval -- not just manager approval -- for any employee interested in taking vacation days or PTO, set up a standard amount of advance notice for taking vacation days, a limited number of consecutive weeks of leave, and potentially frozen times of the year where a full staff of employees is crucial.

Step 4: Carefully Track Performance

If you’re still worried about lost productivity, keep a close eye on the performance of your employees in conjunction with your new policy for unlimited vacation days. At my company, I noticed a boost in productivity, engagement, and overall happiness in the workplace.

Step 5: Grow Your Policy

Good things take time. Survey your employees after a few months with the policy in place and see if they have any insight worth noting.

The benefits of unlimited vacation days are endless. Make the transition today and see how quickly your employees become more productive and engaged.

Do you provide unlimited vacation days? What prompted to you to make the switch?

Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley; Flickr

Article by  Ilya Pozin

One way to improve your creativity and Innovation

Earlier this week during dinner with a client I ordered tofu as a main course for the very first time in my life. I mean, up to that point the only tofu I’d ever eaten – ever – was at the bottom of the Japanese soup you get at a sushi restaurant.

But we were ensconced at the luxurious Lodge at Woodloch, in the Poconos, where the service is immaculate and the food is terrific, and I figured if anyone anywhere can do tofu in a tasty and exciting way, it will be these guys. So despite the fact that I was also highly attracted by both the filet and the duck, I ordered panko-crusted tofu served over steamed vegetables with a light chili sauce. And I was not disappointed.

I’m only telling you this patently self-indulgent story because my own “discovery” of a new experience for myself is directly related to the kind of discovery that goes into a business’s successful innovation process. And it all has to do with exploiting the theory of weak ties in networks.

Last month in “How to find Opportunities in Your Social Network” I reviewed the weak-ties theory. Your best new job opportunities, for instance, often come from the colleagues you aren’t very close to, because you and your closest acquaintances already know many of the same people. Any new job opportunities your close friends and colleagues know about are probably not news to you, while you're less likely to know about the opportunities your “weak ties” suggest.

The weak-ties theory also helps to explain the “wisdom of crowds” effect, in which a group of people with completely independent ideas can often come to a better, more creative or predictive conclusion than any single one of them acting alone, even the smartest member of the group. And one of the most important applications of the theory has to do with discovering new ideas for product and service innovations. Innovations come in networks, for the simple reason that all new ideas result from combining previous ideas and concepts. So technology itself is nothing more than a big network of connected ideas. But some combinations of previous ideas tend to generate more original new ideas than others. And this, also, relies on the theory of weak ties.

Your best new ideas, and a company’s most breakthrough innovations, will come when you tap your weak ties by interacting with the disciplines you know less about, or the experts you rarely consult, or the people you associate with less frequently. By contrast, the surest way NOT to have a creative breakthrough is to rely on all the experts you already know, and all the disciplines you’re already familiar with.

Consider the kinds of innovations generated by Innocentive, a crowdsourcing web site that connects hundreds of “seekers” with thousands of “solvers.” A seeker posts a problem and offers a prize or incentive to anyone who solves it. The problems posted on Innocentive are often scientific or technical in nature, but they can be anything that might benefit from a novel or unusual approach, as well. Most of the seekers are companies looking to improve their products or services and, not surprisingly, most of the successful solvers are engineers, scientists, and other technical experts.

Because of its structure as an explicit network of problems posed and solvers working to find solutions, Innocentive serves as a great laboratory for studying the kinds of traits and characteristics that mark successful new innovations. And, in fact, an academic study of successful solutions produced by Innocentive has found that a solver’s likelihood of solving a problem (that is, generating a successful new innovation) increases with the distance between the solver’s field of technical expertise and the problem’s domain. In other words, asDaren C. Brabham says in his new book Crowdsourcing, “a biologist may fare better than a chemist would at solving a chemical engineering problem.” And women, who are often part of the “outer circle of the scientific establishment,” have also been found to do better at problem solving than men do on this networking site.

So mix your teams up if you want to improve your company’s ability to generate new ideas, innovative solutions, and creative approaches. And remember that when teams are made up entirely of "experts" in a field, they're not likely to be particularly innovative. This is because as smart as your experts are, they probably all know similar solutions.

Instead, in addition to subject-matter experts, throw an engineer, a marketing manager, or maybe even a smart accountant or HR exec into the mix, and the "weak ties" that connect their disparate disciplines are more likely to generate a truly original and innovative idea.

And you can ratchet your own personal creativity up a step by simply by concentrating on enhancing the role of "weak ties" in all aspects of your life:

• Read a nonfiction book for at least 20 minutes a day (while you’re working out at the gym, maybe, or before you retire, or while having lunch at your desk).
• Make a new and different connection (online or off) with someone outside your immediate circle once a week, and find something to discuss that is of interest to you both.
• When you meet someone whose discipline or expertise you know very little about, spend some time trying to "get it" with respect to how they approach their own problems and issues.
• And if you want to learn more from a friend or colleague, ask them questions you're less likely already to know the answers to.

If you've never tried tofu, you're more likely to be surprised when you do.

What Not to Say When Negotiating Your Salary

When you think back to your last job offer, were you happy with the result? I'm not proud to admit the number of jobs I accepted without attempting to negotiate anything, only to be discouraged about the outcome later (thankfully, I've learned my lesson).

Which is why I'm grateful there are people in the world like negotiation expert Victoria Pynchon who help people — especially women — learn how to navigate the world of money and power. If only I had discovered her sooner.

Victoria is an author, attorney, mediator, arbitrator and negotiation trainer and consultant. She is also the co-founder of She Negotiates Consulting and Training and the She Negotiates blog on Forbes. Although Victoria's focus is now on closing the wage and income gap for women, she has been training lawyers and business people of both genders in mutual benefit negotiation strategies since 2005.

Here's Victoria's advice for what you should avoid saying when negotiating your salary or asking for a raise:

• "I’m sorry." Women tend to apologize for things they shouldn’t. I've been known to reflexively apologize to the furniture when I run into it. Apologizing in the negotiating room lessens the weight of your argument. Stay away from saying things like, "I’m sorry to ask for this, but I feel that I deserve a raise."
  
• "My market value is $90K/year but I'll take $70K." Don't discount your worth right out of the gate with language like, "My rate is $5,000, but I'll take $10." You are already being valued less than you're worth because you are a woman. Practice with a friend until you sound confident if you can't actually BE confident. (Fake it until you make it.)

• "Yes" (to the first offer). If you aren't in a position to make the first offer (and make it more than you're willing to take) then at least don't agree to the first offer given to you.Your employer expects you to negotiate and has more authority than the first offer made. Say, "I appreciate your proposal. I did a little research on my current market value [handing the proposal over] and it's 10 percent (or 20 or 30) more than that."

• "No" (if you believe you've reached impasse). The point of a negotiation is to drive the conversation to an agreement. Saying "no" closes off the conversation and makes it difficult to start back up. If your hourly fee is $350 but a potential client tells you he can only pay $200 per hour, instead of saying no, ask "What stands in the way of paying my fee?" Feel free to offer accommodations like payment over time or consider bartering services if that's possible. Always be moving toward getting the deal you want.

• Question marks (upswing) at the end of your statements. This tends to be a generational tick that Gen-Y women continue to misuse in business. "Like, I said to him 'I need a raise?' and he was all like 'You're lucky to have a job' and then... "
  
  No, no, no, no. Do not use teen slang in business.
  
  Not only does it tend to make you appear to be immature, it destroys any attempt to project an image of authority. The person with the greatest negotiation power is the person who appears to have the ability to walk away from the deal. I put the emphasis on "appears" because thousands of in-house and private firm lawyers - both men and women - answer the question "Are you in a weak bargaining position?" in the affirmative. Eighty percent of movie studio lawyers said they lacked bargaining power as did corporate executives, mid-level managers, high level consultants, and professionals of every stripe.
  
  Once again, if you don't yet possess confidence, fake it. Eventually you'll grow into your own power without having sacrificed raises and promotions along the way.

What have you learned about the negotiation process during your career? Has anything made it easier for you?

THE WORLD IS BECOMING RICHER

This month the most accurate source for global data on the size of the world’s economies got a makeover. As a result, we have measures of economic growth and relative income across countries that are better than ever. These numbers suggest something surprising: a world of ubiquitously increasing wealth, where predictions of Malthusian traps and permanent poverty look increasingly archaic.

The Penn World Tables, created by Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten at the University of Pennsylvania, were the first serious attempt to properly measure relative economic size around the planet. The researchers tracked the value of goods a country consumed, invested in, and traded using numbers that could be compared around the world and over decades.

This is a deceptively simple question. First, it requires comparing how much the same thing costs in different countries. That’s reasonably straightforward when it comes to such standard products as an iPad or an apple (the fruit). It is a lot more complex when it comes to services such as a restaurant meal, a taxi ride, or tailoring. In poorer countries, labor costs less, so the same level of service costs less, too—and your dollar (or rupee) goes further.

Second, it requires comparing what people are buying. The household subsisting on $2 a head in rural India doesn’t purchase the same products as a family living on 10 times or more in the U.S. The Penn Tables have to make an approximation of relative income based on the average of what people buy across countries. Finally, the new measure involves comparing across time. That takes valuing the goods available at different dates against each other—a 2010 Ford Escape against a 1980s Ford Escort, as it might be. Once again, people don’t buy the same stuff over time. The average American buys fewer spats and bustles than he or she used to but a lot more consumer electronics. The Penn Tables try to account for that change, too.

Any time economists compare incomes in different countries and years, they are making a raft of assumptions and calculations around these three issues—there is no one right answer on how to do it. But the Penn World Tables is the best effort we have, and the new version makes it better. In particular, it uses data on prices back through history in a way that makes incomes over time far more comparable across countries.

It is no surprise that the revisions and updates have shifted economy sizes. According to the Penn World Tables, China’s expenditure-side GDP was $10.1 trillion in 2010. Under the old methodology, it was between $9.3 trillion and $9.8 trillion; the latest World Bank 2010 GDP estimate for China is $9.1 trillion. U.S. GDP was $13.1 trillion in 2010, according to the Penn World Tables.

The good news for America-firsters: According to the new estimates, China’s economy was still smaller than the U.S.’s in 2010. The bad news: China was somewhere between $300 billion and $1 trillion closer to overtaking the U.S. than we thought. The worse news: If the growth rates of 2000-10 reported by the Penn Tables continue until 2020 for each country, China’s GDP will be $23 trillion compared with the U.S.’s $15 trillion. If China’s economy isn’t already the largest today, it is probably a matter of months, not years, before it rises to the top.

But more importantly, the new data reveal how much larger all the word’s economies have become over time. The Penn Tables provide GDP data for both 1960 and 2010, providing a 50 year window to view global economic progress. It has been considerable. Looking at absolute GDP, no country anywhere in the world for which we have data is smaller today than it was in 1960. The countries that saw the size of their economies less than double since 1960 contain just 80 million people—a little more than 1 percent of the planet’s population. A further 1 billion people lived in countries where GDP climbed by somewhere between two- and fivefold. That leaves 4.9 billion people—the considerable majority of the planet—living in countries where GDP has increased more than fivefold over 50 years. Those countries include India, with an economy nearly 10 times larger than it was in 1960, Indonesia (13 times), China (17 times), and Thailand (22 times larger than in 1960).

Around 5.1 billion people live in countries where we know incomes have more than doubled since 1960, and 4.1 billion—well more than half the planet—live in countries where average incomes have tripled or more. Nearly 2.2 billion people are in countries where average incomes have more than quintupled over the past 50 years. This includes the citizens of China, Japan, Egypt, and Thailand—all of whom have seen around an eightfold increase in average incomes since 1960.

Such long-run growth rates are unprecedented. Compare the crucible of the Industrial Revolution: Between 1820 and 1870, U.K. GDP per capita increased from $1,706 to $3,190, according to data from Angus Maddison. That’s an increase of 87 percent. If the U.K. had seen the same performance between 1960 and 2010, it would place the country 34th lowest in terms of growth out of the 107 countries for which the Penn Tables have data. The U.K.’s 1820-70 income growth is weaker than the performance over the past half-century of such countries as the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and Syria—rarely thought of as economic powerhouses.

Nearly 1.7 billion people planet-wide live in countries where the average income per capita was above $10,000 in 2010. That’s above the average income in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium in 1960. And more than 3.5 billion people worldwide—around half the planet—live in countries with a 2010 average income of $6,000 or above according to the Penn Tables. That’s nearly as high as the GDP per capita of Italy in 1960 and above that of Ireland or Spain in the same year.

It is still the case that half of the world’s population lives on considerably less than one quarter of the U.S. poverty rate—and they undoubtedly need more money to enjoy a good quality of life. But there is a lot of good news in the new Penn World Tables. They confirm that traditional Malthusian fears of national output constrained by resources have absolutely no basis in reality anywhere. They also suggest that concerns over widespread ‘poverty traps’—where countries are condemned to penury and stagnation by centuries-old institutions or culture or genetics—are more a figment of economic theorists’ imaginations than major factors in real-world economic outcomes. Nearly all the planet has got a lot richer.  And there’s good reason to hope the Penn Tables update fifty years hence will suggest we don’t need the qualifier ‘nearly’ any more.

Apple Says SVP Bob Mansfield “No Longer” on Executive Team, but Gives No Explanation as to Why

“Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of our wireless teams across the company in one organization, allowing us to innovate in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include all of our semiconductor teams, who have some very ambitious plans. As part of this, I am thrilled to tell you that Bob will remain with Apple for an additional two years. Bob has led some of our most challenging engineering projects for many years.”

– Apple CEO Tim Cook, October 2012

Early Sunday afternoon, Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president of technologies,disappeared from the company’s Web site, his biography removedfrom its executive profiles page without explanation.

Now, we know why. Sort of. Mansfield is no longer a member of Apple’s executive team.

“Bob is no longer going to be on Apple’s executive team, but will remain at Apple working on special projects reporting to [CEO] Tim [Cook],” company spokesman Steve Dowling told AllThingsD. He declined any further explanation, refusing to comment on the reasons behind Mansfield’s surprising move, whether he remains Apple’s SVP of Technologies or whether the company plans to appoint a new executive to that role.

The disappearance of Mansfield’s bio from Apple’s Web site was first reported by MacRumors.

Mansfield, a longtime Apple exec announced his retirement from the company in June of 2012 only to return to it a few months later in a new, larger role following a big executive shakeup. He agreed to stay at Apple for an additional two years, serving as SVP of Technologies, a position charged with overseeing Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams. Recently, he has been rumored to be working on wearable computing devices like the company’s mythical iWatch.

Which makes his sudden removal from Apple’s executive team and abrupt disappearance from the company’s leadership page all the more curious. Mansfield’s departure from the company caused some organizational pain inside Apple and the company paid a lot of money to bring him back — a cash and stock package worth about $2 million a month. That it would now move him off the executive team — whether it be at Cook’s request or his own — not a year later is unusual indeed.

What is the real purpose of INTERVIEWS?

Is the real purpose of the interview to weed out the weak, or attract the best?

Too many people, including a good chunk of corporate recruiters and hiring managers, view the interview primarily as a means to disqualify people. In the process, they miss a golden opportunity to attract stronger candidates, demonstrate the professionalism of the company, overcome errors made by weaker interviewers, and most important, hire top people who are more interested in career growth opportunities, rather than big compensation increases. Let me explain.

I just read a super-boring 85-page research report on the effectiveness of the employment interview. While their findings seem appropriate for active candidates, I suspect the people who wrote this report have never actually ever interviewed anyone for a real job. Worse, they probably never interviewed a strong candidate, who wanted more money than the budget allowed, had other offers to consider, wasn't desperate to change jobs, was already fully-employed, was recruited vs. actively looking, and wasn't all that prepared.

When viewed in this light, what's the primary purpose of the interview? Is it just to assess competency, or is there more to it? Since my 25-year stint as a independent third-party recruiter always involved the hard to find, hard to attract, and hard to hire types of candidates, I have some preconceived notions. The big one: assessing competency is essential, but not sufficient, and if you’re going to do it at all, you might as well do it right.

The Four Big Purposes of a Professional Employment Interview

One: accurately assess competency, fit and motivation. According to the research report cited above, a basic interview requires the following:

• Structure: you need to ask everyone the same questions in a logical order that minimizes the impact of biases and extracts the correct information. (Click here to request a sample of the Performance-based Interview we recommend that meets this criteria, including a white paper by a top labor attorney from Littler Mendelson validating its use. Here’s the full version if you don’t want to wait.)
• A job analysis: you need to know what job you're trying to fill if you want to determine if someone is competent and motivated to do it. (BIG NOTE: a skills-based job description is NOT a job analysis. A job analysis is an description of the work the person actually needs to do on the job. Here are some “how to” prepare performance-based job description articles.)
• A formal rating and assessment scale: specific guidance is needed to convert answers into some type of quantitative performance-based assessment (request sample).

Two: prevent good candidates from being improperly assessed. If you’re a recruiter you’ve experienced this problem first hand many times. It happens whenever a fully-vetted candidate you've worked hard to find, gets blown out because the hiring manager conducted a superficial or flawed assessment. If you’ve ever been on the interviewing team, you've experienced the problem second-hand. This happens whenever there is wide disagreement about candidate competency among the members of the interviewing team. It means most of the interviewers are using either emotion, intuition, or some narrow range of factors to determine competency, fit and motivation to do the work. One countermeasure for this type of incorrect assessment is specific evidence disproving the false conclusion. For example, assuming that a soft-spoken person lacks team skills can be disproved by describing the big, multi-functional teams the person has been assigned to and asked to lead.

Three: clarify real job needs, demonstrate to the candidate that the assessment is professional, and that the company has extremely high hiring standards. Candidates – especially those with multiple opportunities – react negatively to box-checking, overt selling, superficial assessments and interviewers who are clueless when asked, “what’s the focus of the job, and what are some of the challenges the person hired will face right away?” Conducting an in-depth performance-based interview using the Most Significant Accomplishment question eliminates these concerns. This structured approach not only clarifies real job expectations (the #1 driver of performance and job satisfaction), but also ensures the candidate fully appreciates the importance of the job, that he or she was properly evaluated, and that the company has high hiring standards.

Four: shift the decision to career growth rather than compensation maximization. Long ago I discovered that there was never enough money in the compensation budget to attract top performers. So I gave up trying. Now I use the interview to figure out if there is a big enough gap between actual job requirements and what the candidate has already accomplished. If this “career gap” (e.g., bigger team, bigger budget, better projects, more impact and exposure, faster growth, etc.) is big enough, compensation becomes less important. If the gap is too wide the candidate is too light for the job, and if the gap is too small, or nonexistent, the job isn’t big enough.

Bottom line, if you have more than enough top candidates to choose from, I guess an assessment process designed to weed out the weak would work. But at what cost? As for me, I’d rather attract and hire the best people available, not just hire the best people who apply. In my mind, that's the real purpose of the interview.

THE CREATIVITY COMPASS

I think this framework first came up in a conversation with John Maeda. The original observation was that artist and scientists tend to work well together, and designers and engineers work well together, but that scientists and engineers don’t work as well together, and likewise, neither do artists and designers. Engineers and designers tend to focus on utility and understand the world through observation and gathering the constraints of a problem to come up with a solution. Artists and scientists, on the other hand are inspired by nature or math, and they create through pure inner creativity and pursue expression that is more connected to things like truth or beauty than something so imperfect as mere utility. Which is to say, there are many more ways to divide the brain than into left and right hemispheres.

However, I think a lot of the most interesting and impactful creative works tend to require all the use of all four quadrants. Many of the faculty at the Media Lab work in the dead center of this grid—or as I like to call it, this compass—or perhaps they lean in one direction, but they’re able to channel skills from all four quadrants. Neri Oxman, one of our faculty members who recently created The Silk Pavilion, told me that she is both an artists and a designer but switches between the modes as she works on an idea. And to look at The Silk Pavilion, it’s clear she could easily qualify as either a scientist or engineer, too.

I think that there are a variety of practices and ways of thinking we can use to get to the center of this compass. The key is to pull these quadrants as close together as possible. An interdisciplinary group would have a scientist, an artist, a designer, and an engineer working with each other. But this only reinforces the distinctions between these disciplines. And it’s much less effective than having people who use all four quadrants, as the project or problem requires.

The tyranny of traditional disciplines and functionally segregated organizations fail to produce the type of people who can work with this creativity compass, but I believe that in a world where the rate of change increases exponentially, where disruption has become a norm instead of an anomaly, the challenge will be to think this way if we want to effectively solve the problems we face today, much less tomorrow.

Let the Kid Study Music, Already!

Two years ago, my eldest children (boy-girl twins) graduated high school. I remember standing in the lobby outside the auditorium after their last high school concert, waiting for them to join my husband and me. I had kept it together pretty well through the concert, letting at most half a dozen tears fall as I thought about all the recitals, lessons, pool parties, science fairs and other growing-up experiences that were now behind us.

On the wall outside the auditorium hung a framed portrait of the senior class. I studied it as I waited for my two performers to emerge.

Here's a kid my son played soccer with, back in third grade. This six-foot-plus beanpole over here used to ride his bike with training wheels down our driveway. Looking at 500 kids about to head off to their destinies, I felt the usual mix of pride, joy and sadness at the end of an era - but mostly pride. A father stood next to me, also surveying the faces of the graduating seniors.

"One of these kids yours?" asked the dad. "Two of them," I said, "this guy up here and this girl, down on the first row." "What are they going to do in college?" he asked. "They're both going to study music," I said. "Oh, no!" exclaimed the dad as he turned and walked away -

"More starving artists!"

How do parents across the country watch their children grow into talented musicians, see the kids' love of and gift for music, beam at countless concerts and marching-band performances, then suddenly balk when the kid says "I want to study music."?

How sad it is that we would cultivate a kid's musical flame for years, and then say to the kid at the critical moment, "Of course, your love of music is only for fun. You should study something practical in college - something safe, that will translate into a real career."

I went to conservatory after high school to sing opera. If my parents were worried I was on the road to starvation, they didn't give any sign. Maybe after my five older siblings, my parents had figured out that the best way to raise a musical kid is to let the kid find her own path. I didn't starve, and ended up in a combination HR/musical career that has more than met my financial and artistic needs. Yet every year at this time, parents call me in a panic.

"My kid wants to major in music!" they say. "Is it irresponsible of me to let him do it?"

It would be irresponsible of you, I tell them, to talk a kid into a practical career path that isn't his passion, just as it would be less than loving to talk a kid into a loveless marriage.

We are brainwashed; we believe that analytical and quantitative skills are the tickets to financial security, that people can't prosper doing what they love and that employers -- Big Companies, to be exact - will determine the course of a young person's life more than the young person him- or herself will. We would be horrified to think that our child ended up unhappy in love, trading security for passion.

Yet we tell our kids "Don't do what you love, honey. Don't major in music. Find something safer."

What sort of message is that to send a kid? "You're not good enough to pursue your first love?" Why instill self-esteem and the ability to get up again after a blow if our ultimate legacy to a kid is "Take the safe route?" Musical kids thrive in the real world, and who could be surprised? They have already surmounted some of the toughest challenges a kid can face.

Musical kids get called band nerds, geeks and Poindexters. Yet musical kids know about sitting on the bus in every kind of weather at five in the morning, practicing for hours, and feeling the sting of a flubbed audition or a hairs-breadth missed solo. They deal with those bumps in the road every day.

Musical kids are smarter than most. They could major in anything - yet they choose music. If the kid decides to switch to biochemistry in mid-stream, I promise you, the kid will not fail. Music kids outscore all other majors in grad-school entrance exams. Why not let a kid with options pursue his musical dreams as far as that journey will take him? There's no downside.

Parents worry that kids won't be hardy enough for the real world, and then perversely try to shelter them from the real world's blows by shuffling the kid into 'practical' college majors. Musical kids already know how to work keyholes, try things to see whether they work, and land on their feet.

My twenty-year-old trombonist has dozens of veteran jazz players' cell numbers in his phone because he plays with those guys several times a week in clubs around town, a year before he's old enough to drink legally. That's pluck and improvisation, real-world-style.

How do we equip a kid to make it in the post-employment world by insisting the kid choose a major that prepares him only for the very sort of big-company IT, Finance and Marketing jobs that offer no chance to grapple with the gig economy musicians operate in every day? That's not safety - it's just the opposite. Full-time, long-term employment is going away. How does a kid who's never learned to jump on opportunities, deal with bumps in the road and scare up a Friday night gig ever learn those new-millennium career skills?

Kids will thrive in the adult world to the exact degree that they get to encounter situations where the course is not clear, and where their survival muscles can grow. What better place to grow those muscles than on the path, pursuing their passion for music?

If the kid decides to trade in his horn or fiddle for a job at Oracle one day, I guarantee you that Oracle will hire him.

My daughter, the 20-year-old opera singer, has held a series of part-time jobs during her first two years of college. "My brain is split in half," she tells me, "after working at these entry-level jobs the past two years."

"How's that?" I ask her. "Well," she says, "on the one hand I'm horrified by the brainlessness of my managers in the retail stores and restaurants where I've been working. On the other hand, I don't worry that my vocal performance degree will keep me from earning a living. If you can think, if you can talk to people and if you can solve problems in the moment, Mom, I can already see that you're going to do fine."

She launched a music-theory coaching business this summer. Entrepreneurship and music go hand in hand, as there are virtually no full-time W-2 careers for musical performers
-- yet another reason to let a musical kid follow his passion.

Let the kid study music, already! The universe will not fail the kid. Imagine what your talented child will discover when his parents tell him "Of course we trust you to follow your heart, sweetheart. Isn't that what we raised you to do?"

QUIZ: DO YOU MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY?

As put forth by the Second Splendid Truth:

One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy;
One of the best ways to make other people is to be happy yourself.

Everyone accepts the Second Splendid Truth, Part A; the Second Splendid Truth, Part B often isn’t as clear to people. But to focus on Part A here – how do you know if you’re making other people happy? What are some signs?

Are the following statements true for you:

• Do people seem to feel comfortable confiding in you?
• Do people follow your recommendations?
• Are you a source of material comfort or security for someone else?
• Do people whom you’ve introduced often go on to have a continuing relationship?
• Do people seem to drift toward you? Join a conversation that you’re having, sit down next to you at a meeting?
• Have you recently been involved in the improvement or growth of an organization, group, or process that involves many other people?
• Are you providing opportunities for other people – job leads, blind dates, contacts in a new city?
• Do people whom you hardly remember go out of their way to greet you warmly? Say, the friend of your old roommate, or a former co-worker?
• Do people seem to want to connect with you — by making plans or by emailing, calling, or texting?
• Do people seem energized by you? Do they smile and laugh in your presence?

Notice some items that are not on the list:

• Do people remember your birthday?
• Do people give you presents (say, for Mother’s Day, or in recognition of an important milestone)?
• Do people express appreciation and gratitude for your efforts?

Even if you’re making people happy, they don’t always respond by making these gestures. (Which can be quite annoying.)

What am I missing? I feel like I’ve overlooked some obvious indicators. What are some other good signs that you make people happy?

If you'd like to read more along these lines, check out Happier at Home, chapter eight.