GeekMBA360

It is a book I read last week: So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.

Why do I pick this book? It goes against the conventional career advice of following your passion, which is crap in my opinion. If you’re starving, following your passion is not going to help you.

Passion is one of the the most over used terms in career planning and management. This book is written by Cal Newport, an MIT trained computer scientist. He debunks the long-held belief that “following your passion” is good advice.

This book is a quick read but it reveals a new paradigm/perspective on building a successful career. If you are having issues with your job or career, you should check out this book.

I started this blog in 2008 soon after I learned about John Chow and his blogging success.

John Chow makes over $40,000 a month from blogging by writing a blog titled “I make money by telling people how I make money”.

He was banned by Google a few years ago because Google felt he was gaming the search algorithm. But, John Chow figured out a way to grow his traffic exponentially without Google. Eventually Google caved in and re-indexed John Chow’s blog.

John Chow’s one-person online empire has allowed him to live a doctom life style – he owns house in West Vancouver, BC, Yarrow Points, WA, and Newport Beach, CA – all are very expensive and NICE places. He works in his own terms, and he doesn’t work that much.

I’m sure many of you want to live like the way John Chow lives. The truth is that John Chow is a brilliant online marketer and entrepreneur. He knows how to grow traffic exponentially in a very short period of time and monetize the traffic.

He just released a new product called Blogging with John Chow. If you’re interested in building a second income online, live a dotcom life style, and retire early, you should check it out.

Imagine you are interviewing with a potential employer. Everything is going really well. The employer has told you that they would like to offer you a job. However, to give you a competitive offer, they need to know your current base compensation, annual bonus percentage, and stock options and/or Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) you own.

How would you answer this question?

Here is my answer.

“I really enjoyed the interview process with company X. Thanks for considering offering me the job. I’m very grateful for the opportunity.

With regard to compensation, I would like to get compensated fairly and competitively. With the amount of information that is available on the Internet such as Payscale.com and Glassdoor.com, it’s pretty straightforward to find out if an offer is competitive or not given the job candidate’s experience and background. At the same time, I also want to stress that I evaluate job offer holistically, including the job content, the company, people, etc. Compensation is part of my decision making process, but there are other factors that are important to me as well. “

It has been 15 years since I graduated from college. When I was attending UC Berkeley I walked a lot around the campus. Walking was my primary means of transportation.I played a lot of basketball. I was skinny. Things changed very quickly after I started working in the software industry. I sat in front of a computer from morning to night. As a young professional I ate out a lot which meant I consumed a lot of greasy and unhealthy food. I was working so much that I didn’t exercise much. As a result I added 30 pounds.

As a mid-career professional, everyday I’m feeling the demands on my time and energy from both work and family. Getting back to shape has become a top priority of mine.  

There are a lot of misinformation and gimmicky diets in the market. I have been doing a lot of reading and research on my own to figure out the best course of actions for me to lose weight and get fit.

The legendary Jack LaLanne once said that “Your waistline is your lifeline. It should be the same as it was when you were a young person.” A big part of my fitness goals is to lose weight and reduce my waistline. Fortunately I found a great program called Truth About Abs by Mike Geary who is a Certified Nutrition Specialist & Certified Personal Trainer.

It really works. Don’t let the title fools you — it’s a total fitness program focus on both exercise and nutrition. If you’re curious about his program, Mike Geary has released a free, 65-page e-Book Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean-Body (a $17.99 value).

This ebook, created by Certified Nutrition Specialist & Certified Personal Trainer, Mike Geary, details over 27 specific metabolism-boosting secrets that you can use to strip off your stubborn body fat faster and easier.  Contains unique workout methods and nutritional strategies to slash body fat and take your body to a whole new level of leanness. Click here to download or read the the ebook online.

I have to admit – some recent events I witnessed made me disgusted about certain individuals at work.

I don’t mean to over generalized but I cannot help not to generalize in this case.

They share a common trait:

• Harvard MBA
• Worked for 2-4 years in management consulting prior to attending business school
• Post MBA they worked for a couple years in management consulting or started in strategic planning function of a Fortune 500 company.
• They rapidly switched jobs 2-3 times in order to move up. In some cases they played geographic arbitrage – i.e. went to work for a really prestige employer in CA for a year, then moved to another big firm in Chicago for a year or two, and then moved to join a third firm in NYC. This year, he or she put name brands on the resumes, take advantage of less competition in a new city, moved up at each job.

The common impacts of these individuals:

• they have no clue about how to run a business
• they’re arrogant and only hire their own kind
• they run business to ground, and then they leave

what I have observed about these people:

• they care more about moving up than anything else
• they are devious and malicious – I’m the kind of person who like to give people the benefit of doubt. But I have been in enough situations with these guys that I know exactly what they’re made of. No, I’m not holding any sour grapes against these guys and gals – so far they haven’t threatened me in any way as I can hold on my own quite well.
• they are exactly what’s wrong with MBA education and management consulting – we’re cultivating a lot of selfish, ego-centric, useless, arrogant, malicious, devious, high paid consultants who don’t add any value to our society.

Too little time, too many great books to catch up.

Below is a list of books on my bookshelf – I won’t finish all of them during this long holiday weekend but I’m working on them!

• Mastery by Robert Greene. The eagerly anticipated new book from the author of the bestselling The 48 Laws of Power. What did Charles Darwin, middling schoolboy and underachieving second son, do to become one of the earliest and greatest naturalists the world has known? What were the similar choices made by Mozart and by Caesar Rodriguez, the U.S. Air Force’s last ace fighter pilot? In Mastery, Robert Greene’s fifth book, he mines the biographies of great historical figures for clues about gaining control over our own lives and destinies. Picking up where The 48 Laws of Power left off, Greene culls years of research and original interviews to blend historical anecdote and psychological insight, distilling the universal ingredients of the world’s masters.
• The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life. Don’t let the book title fool you — this is NOT a cooking book. This is the book about rapid learning and living a full life. This is the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t by Nate Silver. If you haven’t heard about Nate Silver, you haven’t been reading about the news.

Any books are you reading? I’d love to hear book recommendations from you my dear readers. Leave me a comment.

This is a true story.

Johnnie is a high performer at this Fortune 500 employer. He runs an important business line for his company. He has grown the business from nothing to over $25 million dollars in revenue in less than three years. By all measurement he should be promoted. Unfortunately he got passed twice for the big promotion. The reason from senior management? – “it is not just what you have done, but also how you have done it.”

Johnnie is rough around the edges. He holds people accountable. He is no non-sense. He is passionate about his business. He treats his job as his own business. In my opinion, those are great attributes. But, because he holds others accountable, he is perceived as socially challenged.

Johnnie is frustrated. He filed a formal complaint to HR. The HR director met with Johnnie’s boss and the VP who runs the entire division to discuss what to do with Johnnie’s complaint.

The VP opened the meeting with the following question:

“Can one of you talk to IT and get Johnnie’s corporate network login and VPN access for the past two years? If there is anything abnormal, I’ll terminate immediately.”

I won’t share with you the rest of the story; that’s for another blog post. I’d like to stop here.

Your employer is watching you. Your email, network logins, VPN access are constantly being watched. As long as you’re on corporate network, nothing is safe. When problem occurs, they will use any evidences they can gather against you.

You should never use your company phone for personal use. You should be very careful about what sites you’re browsing at work. You should never use work computer to write personal documents.

You’re being watched. You must protect yourself.

Every Christmas we travel from Seattle to San Francisco Bay Area to visit my folks. On average I spent over $1,500 for four round-trip tickets.

This year I’m only paying $100 plus tax for four tickets because I signed up for Chase Southwest Airline Rapid Reward credit card. The only requirements for getting the 50,000 bonus points are:

• $100 annual fees
• spend $1,000 in the first 3 months of opening my account – I basically used the credit card to pay my grocery bills for 3 months

Their promotion claims that one can get 2 round trip tickets for 50,000 bonus points. But, if your travel is relatively short distance (e.g. our travel from Seattle to San Francisco) and you book early, you can easily get four round-trip tickets for 50,000 points. All you have to pay is the $100 annual fees plus any applicable tax.

A big part of what I do is online marketing – I own substantial online marketing budget, and run campaigns in many channels such as paid search, affiliate marketing, display advertising, etc.

However, some of the best online marketers work for themselves and they are young. I like to tell people that online marketing is young person’s game. In fact, I hired a recent college graduates, and taught him the basics. He is our top performing online marketer now.

To keep up with the industry, I constantly keep an eye on the young online entrepreneurs who works for themselves – these guys might not have the pedigree or corporate background, but a lot of them have developed very interesting strategy, and really know how to grow traffic and sell things online. Some people think their tactics are “black hat” and unconventional. Well, it will be too late when you find it become “white hat” and conventional.

There is a lot we can learn from the work-from-home, young but successful online entrepreneurs.

Peng Jung is a young entrepreneur from Malaysia. He recently took a vacation in the U.S. While he was on vacation, he conducted a Click Bank case study. He would create one site and see how much money he could make from it while he was away from home. Twenty nine days later, he had $12,614 in his account! And he didn’t work much because he was on vacation!

He then launched Work From No Home system on August 3rd – the stats of this product since launch is truly impressive.

According to Alexa, the WorkFromNoHome web site is now ranked #4117 in the US, and #21,504 globally – that’s a lot of traffic!

On the Clickbank Marketplace, it is now ranked #2 in term of Gravity among all Clickbank products – Gravity is a key metric from Clickbank that measures how many people are promoting the products.

If you are into online marketing like I do, you should definitely watch the video and study his ad copy. His ad copy use the “long form” – it might look “spammy”, but according to several studies, it’s still the best format for direct response copies. I know it’s counterintuitive but it really works.

In the past twelve months, I had the opportunity to interact with a few very senior management people in Corporate America. They are absolutely at the top echelon of American corporations. The businesses they ran are in tens of billions. They make millions of dollars in salary, bonus, and stocks. They are portrayed in media as leaders.

Let me tell you something – I was not impressed by any of them.

They all know how to talk the talk – some of them are articulate. Some of them are not very good at public speaking. But, it doesn’t’ matter. They are all very good at doing the corporate talk – they speak at high level. They don’t get into the specifics. And they maintain the company line.

They made dumb decisions. But they found a way to explain things away. Some of their mistakes resulted in billions of dollars of losses. But they found ways to blame others while continuing to getting raises and promotions.

They are hungry for power. They cannot have enough of power. They need constant validations from their subordinates.

Sometime I wonder how these people end up at such high positions in corporate America.

It’s depressing and demoralizing to think about this – most of the so-called leaders in Corporate America are really not that good! No wonder there are so many corporate scandals, underperforming corporations, and frustrated employees!

Is there a solution? For one, I think entrepreneurship/small business will liberate a lot of smart, capable people from the dark side of corporate America.

Also,  I think there is a tremendous opportunity to “reform” corporations – each corporation needs to have higher level of transparency and accountability. The compensation difference between senior management and rank-and-file must be reduced. We need an equivalent of “industrial revolution” for the 21st century – I suppose we can call it “corporate revolution” – creating transparency, accountability, and pay equity, resulting in a true meritocracy.