Isabel Walcott Draves

Hiring for Innovation and Screening out Entrepreneurs

Yesterday I read an interesting article on LinkedIn by Lou Adler suggesting that traditional job descriptions are anti-talent. It resonated.

Today I saw a job posting on LinkedIn for an unspecified anonymous company that consults to large companies, helping them innovate and come up with new products. The job lists among its requirements successfully creating major growth, developing new products and services, taking an existing business into new areas, introducing new revenue streams to a business, building innovation from the bottom up, ability to work in a non-hierarchical, get your hands dirty style, and other such experience. In other words, they are looking for an entrepreneur, who has originated ideas, executed on them leading a team and built significant value where there was none before. This person will then teach other people how to do it. Makes sense.

Now here comes the weird part. In the section for candidates' backgrounds, they list the following types of work experience:

• Working in marketing at a large corporation
• Working in the venture division of a large corporation
• Working at a strategy consultancy for large corporate clients
• Working in the venture division of a traditional strategy consultancy
• Working at an innovation consultancy.

What's wrong with this picture? Where is entrepreneurship, the home run hitter of innovation, on this list? These roles aren't inventor-executor-leaders roles; they are analyst-and-explainers roles. The work experience they list doesn't lead to the work requirements they demand.

Reminder: Social Media is for People

I lately suffered a cruel reminder that social media is meant for people, not bots.  If you live under a rock and don't know what a bot is, it's a program that automatically does something online, like post to someone's Facebook wall.

Spam is always spam, and never welcome.  But there's something worse than just plain spam. If you are going to automatically post ads on someone's wall, say because they "liked" your company page, there are times that it's really not appropriate to do so.  For example, if someone just announced that their mother died, their wall is inundated with sympathy posts, and your bot posts an ad for your funeral parlor, legal services, party rentals, or consignment shop.  This looks grossly like ambulance-chasing, profiting off of someone's death, and taking uncouth advantage of the fact that their wall is receiving a high number of visits right then.  Spamming someone's wall with your ad at this time in their life could end up doing way more damage to your company's reputation than at another time, when it would just be a mere annoyance (or perhaps the person would be glad to get 15% off).  Highly unwise tactic, from a social media strategy point of view (and a common sense point of view).

And that's what I saw the other day.  Someone's bot posted an inappropriate ad at an inappropriate time.  Stupidly, I opened up my big mouth and told the spammer off, because I was outraged at this classless, hurtful behavior that I felt was an insult to my friend.  And here's where it gets weird.

The spammer contacted me with his own outraged excuse.  His story?  "I had nothing to do with that post... I have no control over those posts...My company software sends the ads out when it sends them out, it's out of my control".

Really?  You set some bot in motion and say whatever it does is "not your fault", and your excuse is, you "can't control it"?  Why are you even posting ads to people's walls with your bot in the first place?  Who told you this was a good idea?  Are you actually paying them?

The problem with robots is just that.  They're robots.  They're not people, and they can't tell when it's a really, really bad idea to do their little robot thing.  Which is why you should never use them to make posts for you in social media.  Social is called social for a reason.  It's for people.  The more people assign posting tasks to bots and then say their interaction with their facebook friends is "out of their control", the more social media will be ruined for everyone for ever.

If you want to tell people about what you've got going on at your business, post to your own wall, not theirs.  If you're posting to their wall, look around you first.  The atmosphere there determines the nature of your comment.  You yell across the ballfield; you whisper in the library.  For all you beginner social media marketers out there - it's a conversation you're joining.  Act like a human.

 

Write What You Know

I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm disappointed with Ann Patchett's latest book "Run".  An Patchett is a really good writer.  Her prose is beautiful.  So why pick a topic that she has such a deaf ear to?

All writing classes say "write what you know."  So why is Patchett writing from the perspective of three black kids, one from the projects and the other two adopted into a rich and powerful family?  Even if she's spent the last few years with kids just like that, how can she presume to know how to represent their thoughts on class, race and discrimination?

The whole thing just rang so false to me - and believe me, I love the author.  Her prose is always lovely, but she came across sounding limited here, like she never gets out.  You don't have to speak with many people of color about discrimination before hearing the phrase "you'll never understand what it's like" (usually spoken right after you say, naively, "I know just what you mean!")  So, Ann, how about some more books about the friendship between women, the pain and glory of becoming a writer, adult relationships, career self-doubt, and grown-up families?  How about books about quests and failures and success and patience?  How about some more books about what you know because you've been there?

I recently read Maya Angelou's "Heart of a Woman" (and wrote my thesis on "Invisible Man", and have read a bit of African American fiction over the years).  Reading about the black experience from a primary voice is much, more moving and convincing.  And helps you realize that as a white person you can never know "what it feels like to be black". "Run" was a presumptuous stretch that didn't succeed.  I also wholeheartedly agree with the reviewer I. Peters "Miezekatze" on Amazon who said, "Issue is piled up upon issue and not a single one is tackled in depth".

How Ironic!

The other day, the first wolf came to Massachusetts in a long, long time and we didn't give it a very warm welcome.  The grey wolf has been extinct in MA since 1840 (although one believed to have escaped from captivity was spotted here in 1918), so this was a rare and special event.  The nearest wolves live in Ontario and Quebec, leading experts to speculate that this wolf was perhaps a captive animal kept as a pet, or a hybrid wolf/dog.

However, it doesn't really matter anymore what it was, because it was shot dead by the farmer whose sheep the wolf was eating. He got permission first from a state biologist (because farmers' rights exceed other endangered species' rights by law in the USA).

"In 2003  the world sheep population was estimated at 1.03 billion head".  With the exception of Michigan and Alaska, the wolf is an endangered species in the USA.  "Species considered by the ESA to be endangered are considered to be at risk of extinction in all of or a large part of their range."

I noted this event with some sadness, but I didn't get around to blogging it until I heard this news: the world's longest-living animal, a 400-year-old clam from Iceland, was just discovered.  And -- need I say it?  Killed.  Of course, the news article isn't about how we killed it.  In fact, it doesn't even mention that we killed it.  It just says it was "dredged from the water" and then there's a picture of it split in half on a table.

An endangered grey wolf comes to Massachusetts for the first time in 167 years and a state biologist give the OK to shoot it.  Man just killed the oldest living creature on earth and the articles are all "we can't believe how old it was!"  I wonder how old it would have gotten had we allowed it to remain alive?  Is it just me, or is something about the way we treat our home and neighbors seriously messed up?

Boo to You!

Just taking a moment here to register a complaint that Ofoto -- whoops, I mean the Kodak EasyShare Gallery, which is a much better name, NOT -- as well as Snapfish, and Shutterfly, are practicing, lemming-like, a cluelessly poor customer service practice.

I recently got emails saying that these services were going to delete my pictures if I didn't hurry up and come buy something.  So, I hurried up and went to buy something, in advance of their deadline, and discovered that it had apparently been over a year already since I visited Ofoto and Shutterfly, since MY PICTURES WERE GONE.

This after all over the sites it says in huge letters that you get unlimited photo storage for free.  Let me tell you, you really have to look hard to find the part that tells you you have to buy something to keep your photos up there.  On Snapfish, I finally found it at the bottom of this page in the help section.

Anyway, so that deletion-unless-you're-a-customer policy is fine with me, if they had just been honest about it when I first signed up with all of them, which they weren't, because they likely didn't have the policy yet.  And probably they did try to tell me earlier, and my email had changed (most likely) or their messages got spam filtered (also happened but I check my spam filters) or possibly I just missed them, so you could even say that it's my fault that my pictures were deleted.  It's a stretch, but you could say it.

Here's what I have a problem with.  In a time where storing stuff is so cheap that companies are giving storage away for free all over the web, why did you lose all access to my photos  - even your access?  Don't you dingbats think that it's a better policy to simply hold them hostage if I miss the purchasing deadline, and charge me $50 if I want them back?  Did you have to actually delete them, as opposed to just making them inaccessible, if you hadn't heard from me in awhile?  I just think this is stupid.  It's a missed opportunity for innovative customer service and a missed opportunity for revenues. 

If you're in the business of storing people's photos for them, you should be in that business.  Period.  Photos do not have a 355-day shelf life.  So figure out a way to store them profitably, and if that means it's not free anymore if the user neglects to buy something, then that's what it means.  Which do you think makes me angrier: the fact that you have to make a living somehow, or lost pictures?

One Woman's Protest

Do you think women are responsible for runaway spending by our government?  I don't see many of them in high political roles these days, so I kind of doubt it.

So why would this ad (attempting to persuade us to vote against the gas tax in CA) prominently feature an open-mouthed, wet-lipped, big-busted blonde in a low-cut top playing with tons of money?

I'll tell you why: because some people stereotype women as having profligate spending patterns. 

You and I know better: in the average American home, more women than men are in charge of paying bills and balancing the checkbook.  The stereotypical image of profligate consumer spending is more accurately a man blowing his entire paycheck at the poker table or the bar or, better yet, buying a house and car that are beyond his means or investing in overblown stocks.

I wonder if the stereotype about women's profligate spending pictured there is behind the statistic that, although nearly 30% of US businesses are majority-owned by women, we only receive 3% of the venture funding.

Handily enough, they have a survey form right there, so you can check the "other" box and let them know exactly what you think of the picture they're using to promote their cause.