Boston, The Matrix and Emotional/Experiential Vocabulary

I was listening to Pandora on the train heading to meet some friends after work about a year ago and "Peace of Mind" came on. I was walking down the steps of the Brown line stop at Diversey, and my heart skipped a beat, and then another, and then I got chills. I had listened to that song probably hundreds of times in my life, Boston's album Boston is one of my favorites. In all those times I'd heard it before, it had just been a good song that I could crank up in my truck while cruising through the Pourdre Canyon outside of Fort Collins. Though I had heard the words, I hadn't lived the experiences that it spoke about and so it was just a song. That day getting off the train, all the sudden I could empathize with the emotions; I knew what they were talking about. I could relate with the lyrics of feeling stuck and uncertain where to go next, wanting to run but staying where I was at. The lyrics reached out and slapped me because I’d finally had gained experience in life. Remember that phrase from The Matrix where Morpheus says to Neo “Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself”? When I was younger and I heard that line, it just seemed bad-ass. Later it seemed cliché in the sense that somebody was telling me I was too dumb to understand a concept (that was back when I was 21 and I was the smartest guy in the room with a 2.8 GPA to prove it!). Now I look back at that line and I get the same feeling as I did that day at the Diversey Brown Line. Not in the sense that I’m just a copper top powering my machine overlords (…okay, maybe just a little…); no in the sense that there is so much in this world that nobody can tell you about, you have to experience it, live it, touch it, feel it. It’s almost like you have to build an emotional/experiential vocabulary.

Just as an infant builds its vocabulary, she’s able to interact with the people around her more and learn more quickly as a result, maybe us young adults need to work on building our emotional/experiential vocabulary so that we can gain more knowledge from those around us. This is where I might again agree with LINCHPIN where it states that the US Education system is teaching us wrong. We focus so much of our learning years on reading, writing, math, spelling, derivatives, and the like. Then a few of us take art classes or music classes as electives. All those core classes, although critically important to build the necessary fundamental skills doesn’t give us the chance to learn how to cultivate our emotional/experiential vocabulary. We may read a book like The Invisible Man and explain to us why it’s emotional, and we might think we understand, but I’d bet you that just like me listening to “Peace of Mind” with the experiential vocabulary to understand it more, if we could be taught how to find that vocabulary, it would mean so much more. That’s where art comes in; it teaches you to get in touch with that emotional being inside of you.

Additionally, people like me get into the workplace and start trying to master everything and expect to go to the next level as soon as we’ve master the functional aspect, because that’s how we were taught. You took a class, you passed, you moved on. That’s the functional part of the job though. What about the emotional/experiential side? Do we even think about that part of our work? Does anybody even know how to explain what that is? It seems like such an amorphous concept, so perhaps that’s why so few people ever take the time to grasp it, play with it and understand it. I know that I have neglected it to date, but luckily I’m young and can attempt to see the matrix for myself!

I'm about half way through LINCHPIN by Seth Godin, and though I don't agree necessarily with a lot of the book's message, he has hit on some points that have made me question myself. More specifically, he's made me question the way in which I've approached situations. As an analyst at Accenture, whenever I finish a project it is my responsibility to try to find that next role that will help both advance my career and be in a position where I can rely on my skill set that I've developed on my previous projects. Though its not exactly like finding a new job, it is not too dissimilar. Just as you should find a new job, I must rely on the network that I should have created while with the company, I should have an updated and accurate resume spelling out my past project experience, developed skills and aptitudes, and if I find a project that interests me that I do not have a network contact to leverage, contact that project proactively to at least get myself out there. 


What I learned though on one of my previous projects where I was assisting with the onboarding process, is that with so many candidates coming through, and with limited time and resources to do screenings, each candidate was boiled down to their key words, years of experience, and bill rate. 

With the proliferation of massive candidate repositories which are driven off of key words, years of experience, and other metadata factors (think radius from work location, date of last resume update), how can one hope to become more than their metadata? How can one express their individualism, the unique talents that can’t be expressed by a data point? The people and companies that are scouring these databases are just like you and I; they are busy, strapped for resources, and a lot of the time just looking for somebody to fill a seat and contribute at least enough to keep the project afloat. One answer is to leverage your social network to find the roles that aren’t just looking to fill a seat, but to get a key player positioned to knock the ball out of the park. But what if you don’t have a social network to use? I personally have been on projects that have had very little in common with my work stream, or I have been fully client facing, getting little opportunity to network with my Accenture peers. To me, the question now becomes how do you make yourself ‘too big’ to miss? I don’t mean to hype yourself up to anyone you talk to, or to send out emails to everyone saying “look at me!”, because both of those avenues put you right alongside everyone else in our age group. This is a question that I’m dealing with right now. My solution is to try to learn from others out there who’ve walked my same path, and hopefully to gain insight. I ask anyone reading this to share theirs with me as I plan to share mine with you. I guess the first thing that I see for setting ourselves apart from the metadata monster is to re-humanize ourselves (which it turns out is networking). Hopefully as the days and months go by, I’ll be able to share some insight with somebody it makes a difference for, or find somebody that has the insight that finally changes the way I see something and opens a new world of possibility for me. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011 has brought me a lot to be thankful for! My family has stayed healthy; I have had a good job that I've enjoyed and have been able to make good contributions to; and oh yea and I got married to the love of my life! I'm so fortunate to have such a wonderful support base here in Chicago, back in Denver with my family, and now in upstate New York with my new family. It was so wonderful to have had both our friends and families here in Chicago to celebrate with us, and Chelsea put together a day that I will never forget. I am so lucky to have found a woman who not only loves me without question and puts up with my somewhat difficult personality, but also is so talented and beautiful. I wake up every day hoping she doesn't realize how much better she could do than me! To my friends, here and across the country, thank you for sharing with me your good times and helping me celebrate my own. To my family, thank you for always pushing me to see a world beyond the obvious, and handing me the emotional support I needed to always dust myself off when things didn't go exactly right. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Was grandma's oven too small?

As we approach the holidays, I'd like to share a story that the larger than life Andre Hughes at Accenture likes to tell (and re-tell, and re-tell again) but never gets old. The whole version, when told correctly takes about 10 minutes, three unsuspecting audience members, but I'll try to do it justice.

A girl and her mom are in the kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner. The little girl looks up at her mom after a while and says "Mom, why do you always cut the end off the ham?", the mom replies "I don't know, that's the way my mom did it, so that's how I do it. You should ask her". So the little girl, happy to take a break from peeling potatoes went to find her grandma in the living room. "Grandma, why do you always cut the end off the ham?". The grandma looks at her, a little confused as to why the little girl is questioning her technique says "I guess because that's the way my mom always did it. You'll have to ask her". The little girl, determined to find an answer goes and finds her great grandma out on the porch. "Great grandma, why do mom and grandma always gut the ends of the hams? Grandma said it's the way you always did it". Great grandma looks at her and says bluntly "I did it because the oven was too small to fit the whole ham!!".

So how many things are we doing every day without questioning because someone we learned from did it that way? Just because something's always been done a certain way, doesn't always mean that way serves a purpose anymore. Just some food for thought!

Loyalty - an outdated concept?

The last couple of decade have brought many changes to the way we do business and 'process' transactions. Smaller mom & pop operations have been replaced by mega stores or national and global chains. For the consumer, this often lowered the cost of goods, or guaranteed consistency (think Wal-Mart or Starbucks). Over the years though, we've lost the necessity or desire for loyalty. the mom & pops literally banked on their customer's loyalty, and each loyal customer meant ensured success. But the value of loyalty of a single customer is inversely related to the number of customers. If I have just one customer, I'm out of business if they don't come back or don't believe in my product or service enough to spread the word; their loyalty to me is invaluable. As my customer base builds though, the value of any one customer's loyalty is reduced. It's still important to cultivate that loyalty, my business may take a hit if a customer leaves, but I probably won't fail. There gets to be a point though, if the company is big enough that the value associated with any one customer is worthless and there is no benefit to continuing to cultivating loyalty at the individual level.

But will this paradigm hold true? As more sites or outlets become available for the individuals to express their individual opinions to the masses (think google ratings, yelp or angie's list), one customer's opinion can now be amplified. If the corner coffee shop has grown too big to have a tangible value associated with an individual customer's loyalty makes the mistake of treating an individual customer as such, that one customer can now express their sentiment across an entire connected population. What used to mean loosing a single customer and possibly a few of that customer's friends could now with the amplification effect of social media mean the loss of customers that have no actual connection with that original customer. I think it will be interesting to see how this new paradigm changes the way companies which approach customer service and the interaction associated with individual customers.