“That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.

These aren’t ballpark guesstimates. Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet. “

This article really made me think: how am I spending my time? Am I spending time on things that is my calling and I can really make a unique contribution?

I have to say that I have a tendency to be very emotionally invested in my work. Very often when I get home, although I’m physically home I am still thinking about work.

As I’m getting a little bit older (I’m in my mid 30s), more and more I feel a sense of urgency – I want to work on things that really matters. Time is precious – why spend time on things that are not meaningful to me? why spend time with people who you don’t enjoy working with? Warren Buffet said that he chose to work himself because he wanted to choose whom he worked with.

I recently came back from two-week vacation. During the vacation I thought a lot about the importance to consciously knowing and managing how I spent my time everyday.

I’m actually very excited because I feel that a lot of exciting things are in the horizon, but I need to make it happen. I’ll share with you my learning and doing along the way

How are you spending your time everyday? Do you feel fulfilled and enjoyable? I’d love to hear from you.

After spending several weeks of reviewing the business metrics, we determined a very focused strategy. More importantly, we focused on building small wins. Our motto was every order matters – we tried to make a lot of small, incremental improvement in customer experience, marketing messaging, cost control, team effectiveness, etc.

We implemented a team dashboard that took a metric driven approach to run our business. Every week we reviewed our performance and tried to do something to improve our business.

Little by little, the business started to improve. Six months later, we were growing at 4 times of the average industry growth.

The interesting part is that suppliers starts to contact us to give us more favorable terms. We’re getting calls from marketing agencies for lower rates in exchange for longer term contract. We’re getting more brand recognition.

Once we started making improvements and building momentum, it’s like a snowball that keep rolling. The key is to maintain the momentum, and ride the wave.

Do you feel stuck in your career or your personal life? I suggest you to start DOING small things to make incremental improvement to your situation. Once the snowball starts rolling, the momentum will eventually carry you to the finish line.

Give it a try. Momentum is magical.

This book is enlightening because it explains to you the reality of corporate politics, and it teaches you how to play politics.

I know this sounds cynical, un-ethical, and depressing. However, we’re all humans. We cannot get away from facing politics. I’d rather to see more honest and ethical people to win the political games.

The further you’re up the corporate ladder, the more important it becomes for you to be politically adept. There is no way around it.

That’s why this book could be a game changer to many of your career. If you think you’re not good at playing politics, you should read this book.

It’s written by one of the most well respect researchers in this field, a professor at Stanford University.

The book is Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t

I had to admit that I hadn’t been a big fan of performance reviews in any shape or form in the past. In fact, one of the most popular articles on this blog is The Dirty Secrets of Performance Review.

However, my perspective on performance review, 360 feedback in particular, had changed a little bit lately. When 360 feedback is done right, it could be a very important and valuable tool for both management and employees.

Let me tell you a story. John is an experienced program manager at a large enterprise software company. He started working at his current company three years ago. During his six months, he was able to ship two products that had been delayed for a long time. His manager was really impressed. He felt really good about the hiring.

Another six months passed, and John just hit his one-year mark with the company. The manager started to hear complaints. It turned out that pretty much everyone who worked with John didn’t like to work with him. He was rude, abrasive, and had a tendency to rob  people the wrong way. In fact, the situation got so bad that several people had filed complaints with HR.

The manager had a meeting with John. When the manger raised the issues with John, he was completely blindsided. He felt that he was loved by everyone. In fact, he felt that he was very popular among his colleagues, and he couldn’t believe others’ complaints about him.

Fortunately, this company had a very experienced human resource team who care about its employees. The HR manager set up a 360 degree feedback loop for John, and introduced John to counseling.

In the end, John was able to change his behaviors, and significantly improved his interaction with his colleagues.

A key learning from this story is that people have different degrees of self awareness. Some people tend to be more “optimistic”, and feel good about themselves. Some people tend to be more self critical. But, our self perception could be very different from reality. For managers, if you’re not actively seeking feedback from others about your team members, you might be blindsided as well.

When 360 feedback is done correctly, it could provide well needed feedback to both employees and managers. Professionally, I have run into several personnel challenges in the past few years. Almost without exception, lack of self awareness is a key driver for the performance issues. Honest, direct, and fair 360 feedback could play a critical role in raising each individual employee’s self awareness, and improve his or her performance before it becomes too late.

If you have never implemented 360 feedback in your organization before, I have the following suggestions:

• Set clear objectives and expectation before you roll out the 360 feedback process. Ask people to be honest, direct, and fair.
• You should define who will provide the 360 feedback for a particular employee. Are you going to let people to self select reviewers? Or you want to designate certain people to provide feedback? Personally I like to designate certain people to provide feedback. Self selection might lead to employees mutually singing praises.
• Keep each feedback confidential.
• Implement a standard template or tool for the 360 feedback to standardize the process. If you have a small organization, a Microsoft Word template might be enough. If you have a sizable operation, you should consider to implement 360 feedback software package that enable your organization to gather and analyze 360 feedback more quickly and easily.

I have to admit that I’m neither a Seattle Seahawk Fan nor a USC Trojan fan. However, I really enjoyed this quote from Pete Carroll:

“I had been head coach of the New York Jets and the New England Patriots. In both cases, I was fired. I didn’t know if anyone would hire me again. I never lost faith in myself, I just wasn’t sure if others would believe in me.

Getting fired made me come up with my own philosophy of coaching, my own belief system of what it took to win. When I became head coach of the [University of Southern California] Trojans, I was given the autonomy to put my philosophy into practice. Over the next nine years, I had the time of my life. We built one of the most dominant football programs in the country—winning seven straight Pac-10 titles and two national championships. “

A lot of people don’t like Pete Carroll. Put aside your personal opinion about him, I do think that he made a very important point here.

You’ll not become very successful in your career if you continue to follow other people’s steps. You have to develop your own approach and system. It’ll take time, failures, frustrations, and many attempts. But, you need to maintain faith in yourself, and continue to work on it.

If you don’t give up, one day you’ll find your groove – things will come natural to you. You’ll find the winning combination that leverage your strength, experience, natural inclination, and all of the failures you had in the past.

If you haven’t found your groove yet, keep searching!

Here is my favorite quote from the article:

As an executive, Obama has little tolerance for what he calls "unforced errors" — mistakes that are entirely preventable. In that regard, McChrystal’s team had committed an unforced error on a major scale and at the most inauspicious time.

“Unforced errors” are no brainers. They are entirely preventable.

“Unforced errors” are shooting ourselves in the foot.

I think many businesses are struggling because they make too many unforced errors. They’re essentially shooting themselves in the foot while their competitors simply execute better.

In your personal life and in your career, have you had too many “unforced errors”? Have you taken action to minimize unforced errors for you and your organization?

Recommended resources:

• Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
• Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

When I use the term “brilliant”, I really mean it.

Two and half years ago, Jay started telling all of his family , friends, and co-workers to pull their money out of the stock market. He told everyone to put their 401K money into cash account. He said that a major financial meltdown was inevitable. For those who followed his warning, they didn’t lose any money at all during the financial crisis. They were very grateful to his advice.

Jay himself made a kill by shorting stocks.

Given his track record, he could easily get a job at a hedge fund company, and make even more money.

However, Jay has decided to quit his finance career and gotten into operational side of running a business.

I asked him: “why don’t you stay in finance? You’re doing really well. You can probably get a job at any hedge fund company given your track record.”

His answer: “What is the point? Those hedge fund guys didn’t add any value to humanity. They don’t create anything that benefits our society. That’s what got us to where we’re today.”

I’m very encouraged by hearing this kind of thoughts. When I was in business school, I had a hard time to understand why so many young and bright young minds wanted to get into investment banking — the money is great, but the hour is brutal, and the work is boring and repetitive.  More importantly, they’re not really creating whole lot of values to our society.

Okay, some people will say that banking help create liquidity in the capital market, and make capital allocation more efficient. But, let’s face it — most people work in banking to make a lot of money quickly; they’re not in banking for some noble causes such as allocating capital efficiently.

I believe that a big problem for American society is that too many of our young and bright minds are going into finance, instead of becoming engineers, doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs, researchers, etc.

We need more people who make things, serve others, and create values to humanity.

Is your work contributing something to the humanity?

Related posts:

• Do you have the gut to quit your job and work for free?
• What are your Non-Negotiables?
• Do you have an identity outside of work?

Excellent resources:

• Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work
• Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness

• Stumbling on Happiness

I recently interviewed Mr. Robert Yu, who is a fellow Cal Bear and received his MS in Biology from Northwestern. Like Marie Cheng, Robert also took the road less traveled, and got his MBA from Tsinghua University. Robert is currently working at Pfizer China.

Robert was very insightful and generous in sharing his journey.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy this interview.

Background
I was born in Hong Kong and moved to Vancouver, Canada when I was 6 years old.  I spent K-12 in Vancouver before moving to the U.S. for my undergraduate and graduate education.  I majored in molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley and did my my master’s in biotechnology at Northwestern University.

After graduate school, I moved back to the Bay Area to work at Recombinant Capital (now Deloitte-Recap), a small boutique consulting firm specializing in structuring deals and alliances for the biotechnology industry.

After 4.5 years at Recap as an analyst, I decided to move to China initially to study and improve my Chinese.  While studying Chinese at Tsinghua, I found out that the university had an international MBA program partnered with MIT-Sloan.  I applied, was excepted and after graduation, started working for Pfizer China in the strategic planning and business development team.  I am presently transitioning over to a new role within Pfizer China to support one of the business unit/commercial functions.

Why move to China?
My move to China was more initially for more personal than professional reasons.

For starters, my parents are Chinese and I grew up in a fairly Chinese household (my parents mostly speak to me in Cantonese).

Secondly, I came to the realization that having a poor command of the Chinese language for someone like myself was just unacceptable.  I just felt that I needed to know more about my family’s cultural heritage and of the stories and places that my parents spoke so fondly.

Thirdly, I have been visiting China since 1992 and have been enthralled and completely swept away with the pace of change in the country. I just wanted to be witnessing all these changes personally rather than be reading about them thousands of miles away.

One could say that my reasons for coming were personal/emotional/cultural and that ultimately, I had the fortunate luck of having a career here in China.

First job in China
My first job in China stemmed from a summer internship.  Between my first and second year of my MBA, I interned at the Pfizer China office.  I was not expecting them to invite me back but 6 months after my internship ended, Pfizer called me out of the blue to ask if I were interested in returning to support the strategic planning and business development team.  After a few rounds of interviews, I was offered a great role with the team.

Language and culture are probably the biggest challenges that I can think of off of the top of my head.

I have the advantage/disadvantage of being both a foreigner and Chinese.  I walk the delicate and fine line of both worlds.  I am expected to have perfect Chinese and understand all cultural subtleties (anything less and I would considered a sell-out) while acting as the “bridge” and conduit between the language and cultural divide.  Much of what is important is implied and not stated.  Nothing is ever 100% concrete so a large amount of flexibility is required.

The changes in China are so rapid that it is indeed a challenge to quickly adapt.  Be flexible and try to enjoy the ride.

Post MBA Plans, etc.
I am, for the most part, living out my post MBA plans.  I am working a great job in China for a multinational.  I don’t know if I will stay in China indefinitely.  This very much depends on what my job prospects are here in addition to my family needs.  I will be getting married soon and I do have to think about raising children in China.  I am not sure if I am willing to put my children through the grinder of the Chinese education system.  In a country with so many people, what is believed to be the most efficient way to assess talent is through rigorous examinations.  The pressures are immense and the fate of a child is often determined by a set of exams.

My advice is to learn Chinese and learn it well.  No employer will say exactly how much you need and often give vague requirements like “strong command, proficient” etc.  Ideally, it would be very helpful to be able to participate in discussions in Chinese. Having a good command of Chinese is not just for communicating within the office but also to live and really understand the day-to-day of China.  I would argue that one only gets a partial experience, at best, of China without having made a concerted effort with the language and culture.

As I have mentioned above, if you look Chinese, then your language requirements are a lot higher.  Granted, my observations so far have indicated that if you are sent from HQs to China, then your skills far outweigh the need for Chinese language fluency; however, if you are asking to come to China as oppose to being asked to come, be prepared.

Second piece of advice is to be flexible.  China is an ever changing place that requires a lot of flexibility.  Be prepared to adapt quickly.  At times, it feels like a roller coaster ride but that is part of being in China.

The job market is very competitive here.  Not only overseas Chinese (hua ren or hua qiao) are coming to work, but also returnees (hai gui: mainland Chinese born, bred and raised in China who left for overseas education and work experience) are also coming back.  They bring with them a high degree of professionalism and a broad and in-depth skill set as well as the language and cultural understanding on both sides of the divide.  The bar for entry is definitely getting higher every year.

Still, China is an ever growing place (GDP numbers have been in the double digit and is estimated to be around 8% for this year) so opportunities do very much exist.   Although the level of sophistication and professionalism is going up quickly, there still remains a big talent gap and shortage in China.  Just be very clear and focused on what you offer and are able to deliver.

The days of the expat packages/lifestyle are quickly dying.  They do exist but it’s reserved for the high level executives who are sent here from headquarters abroad.  If compensation is that important, then by all means, work a job at HQ for a few years and then be posted or assigned to China.  Keep in mind though that China is changing so quickly that by the time you return, your knowledge and understanding of China may not be as relevant (the pace of change is something like 1 year in China = 5-7 years in the U.S.).

Be prepared to manage your expectations.  Not all streets are lined with gold and just living in China is a true test of your committment to being here.  From basic things like setting up a bank account to ordering food, the simple daily and mundane tasks may push you re-evaluate your reasons for coming to China.  Yes, the major cities like Beijing and Shanghai have many of the comforts of an international city; however, once outside of the more developed Tier 1 cities, don’t be shy about witnessing and experiencing China in its true colour and light.

Related post:

• Foreign Young Professionals in China Mini Series #1: Interview with Ms. Marie Cheng

Would you quit your job and work for free in order to pursue your dream career?

This is not a hypothetical question. It’s exactly what Brad Stevens did.

In case you haven’t heard about Brad Stevens, he is the head coach of Butler University Men’s Basketball Team. His team is this year’s "Cinderella team" — a "mid-major" program (Butler University is a small school with a student population of 4,000) that has reached the pinnacle of college basketball. They’ll be playing Duke Blue Devil tonight for national championship.

Here are some amazing facts about Brad Stevens:

• He is only 33 years old. One of the youngest coaches ever to lead his team to NCAA final.
• After finishing college, he joined Eli Lilly as Marketing Associates in 1999. To keep his basketball passion alive, he worked as volunteer coaching assistant at a local high school, and helped his father coached the AAU team. 
• According to Wikipedia, “in the summer of 2000, Stevens was offered the opportunity to volunteer in the Butler Basketball office. He ran the idea of quitting his job at Eli Lilly by then long-time girlfriend Tracy Wilhelmy. She thought about it for two hours before telling him to go for it. ‘Now, it looks like a great idea,’ Stevens later remarked. ‘At the time, I thought it was something I really wanted to try.’ Tracy went back to school to get a law degree that could support the couple if things didn’t work out for Brad. ‘We were 23 and realized this was our chance,’ Tracy later said. ‘Five years down the road, we were probably not going to be in a position to do that. The more success you had at Lilly, the harder it would be to leave.”
• And the rest is history. Brad Stevens rapidly moved up the ranks in Butler Basketball, and became head coach at age 30.

Very few of us can go through life and honestly say to ourselves that we really love what we do.

A friend of my dad, who is in his 60s, once told me that one of the best thing could happen to a man is to have a job he is truly passionate about and keep doing it for a very long time.

Friends, I encourage you to listen to your heart.

Do you really enjoy what you’re doing? Are you working at Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, or other employers because it makes you look good in front of your friends and family and/or it is the RIGHT career move for you from a career management standpoint?

If you’re in a position to take a risk and try something you’re truly passionate about, I strongly encourage you to take the leap. Who knows — you might be the next Brad Stevens of your chosen field.

Related posts:

• The anti dot com path to success: A different way of living and working
• Don’t get stuck
• How my friend got a high-power finance job by walking his dog

Excellent resources:

• Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life
• Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success Playbook
• What It Takes to Be #1 : Vince Lombardi on Leadership

• Job offer #1 was from Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), a large professional service firm.
• Job offer #2 was from a medium sized, publicly traded enterprise software company. This company had about 600 employees, and just went public a few years earlier. It was a pioneer in the Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) space.
• Job offer #3 was from a hot startup called Silicon Valley Internet Partner. It later changed its name to Viant and went public during the dot com bubble.

I was really confused. I wasn’t sure which job I would take.

Andersen Consulting dangled a lot of carrots in front of its recruits. It offered the most money, and launched a full-court press. Right before my final exams, they sent me a "final pack" of snacks, stationeries, and other goodies. It was certainly a nice gesture and made me feel that I was wanted.

The enterprise software company was in a very high-growth market segment. The pay was average, but there were a lot of growth potential.

Silicon Valley Internet Partner was "hot"  and "yuppie" — a lot of young professionals left large consulting firms to join the company. They paid the least amount of salary, but they offered attractive stock options. I remembered that I was invited to a happy hour event. One of the managers was telling me that he left his job at Sun Microsystems because he felt that he could potentially make millions of dollars instead of hundred of thousands of dollars from stock options.

I was a naive, ambitious, and inexperienced college graduate. I really didn’t know which opportunity I should pick.

Should I go with the brand name, higher salary, training and development program of a large company like Andersen Consulting?

Should I follow the foot steps of many peers to dive into the dot com world?

At that time, I didn’t give too many thoughts to the medium sized company. I felt that it’d be either a large company or a startup. The medium sized company was less attractive.

I ended up joining Andersen Consulting because I wanted to have a big company brand on my resume. They paid me the most, which would help me pay off my college loans faster. I wanted to get more big-company experience before I jumped into the startup world.

I spent a little bit over a year at Andersen Consulting. Great experience. But, I realized that consulting wasn’t for me. But, I needed to figure out what to do next. I knew that I didn’t want to be a developer — I didn’t like to sit in a cubicle from 9 to 5. I wanted more human interactions. I wanted a role that was at the intersection of business and technology. After talking to a few people, I felt that product management might be a good career choice for me.

However, I didn’t have any experience in product management. I called up the medium sized software company. I told them that although I didn’t take their job when I graduated a year ago, I was still very impressed by them. I wanted to work for them, but in a different role. Instead of being a software developer, I was very interested in becoming a product manager.

They offered me a job as Associates Product Manager, working on a very technical product. I didn’t mind the highly technical nature of the job — it gave me the opportunity to get into the door of product management.

After this company was acquired by a large software company a year later, I jumped ship to a start-up.

So, my career path after college was big company to medium sized company to start-up.

Did I purposely "manage" my career to work that way? Not at all.

Would I recommend recent college graduates to follow my path? Not necessarily.

Let me share with you a few observations.

I still think there are a lot of values to work in large, established companies for a few years. I never regretted my decision to work for Andersen Consulting because it gave me great training and exposure to many things. By joining a big company, I might have missed the opportunity to become very rich — for example, one of my classmates joined Geo Cities, and made a truck load of money. But, I think luck played a big role in my friend’s path to rich. If you take a long-term view on career, having a few years of solid experience at a well-run large company is a worthwhile investment of your time and energy.

With that said, I do think that there is a group of people who simply cannot function in large companies. They will get really frustrated because they cannot put up with the big-company processes and bureaucracy. If you belong to this group, then by all means go to work for a small company. However, I think you should have minimum requirements for the small company you’re going to join:

• The people at the startup should be smart. You must feel that you respect them and you can learn from them. 
• The company has some paying customers for their products.
• You have seen their product or service, and you feel it’s useful and have a market.

All other considerations are secondary comparing to those 3 criteria. I think as long as you work for a startup that has smart people, has a product that people actually pay for it, and a product that you think has a market, you’ll be able to learn something that’s valuable.

Don’t be overly concerned about stock options and which venture capital firms are behind the startup. As someone who is fresh out of college, you will get very few number of shares of stock options. And even the most prestigious venture capital firm has probably one home run out of every ten investments.

One type of companies that is overlooked by a lot of people is medium sized companies. I define "medium" as companies that have a few hundred to a couple of thousands employees. They might be public companies, or they might be late stage private companies. They have grown to a size that they have put in some processes and structures. At the same time, they’re still fairly entrepreneurial.

Medium sized companies don’t have the prestige and brand recognition of large companies, and they lack the "cool factors" of start-ups. However, I think medium sized companies are sometime the best employers. It’s an overlooked group of employers.

One big advantage of medium sized companies is that they’re growing rapidly, and therefore there is a lot of opportunities for smart, hard working, and successful employees. At the same time, because of established product, processes and sales force, your risk is limited.

If I can re-start my career, I probably will choose to join a medium sized, high growth company.

Related posts:

• Career Reflection #1: First Job After College — Andersen Consulting (now Accenture)
• Don’t get stuck
• The first time I cried at work
• Your relationship with your parents have a lot to do with your career success

Excellent resources:

• The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great
• The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction
• The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
• Your Next Move: The Leader’s Guide to Successfully Navigating Major Career Transitions