Phil's Career Blog

Or suffer the consequences…You don’t want to find yourself trying to untangle a huge ball of string at the end of your project.

Recently we talked about the importance of writing down your perception of any problem you are trying to solve. This time, I’ll focus on taking that problem and building out an analytical framework.

When I teach this material in my Critical Thinking class, I emphasize the efficiency and clarity you gain from a structured approach to problem solving. If writing the problem down (and gaining buy-in) is the first step, then defining (and refining) an approach is the second.

So why should I care about building an “Approach”?

Last time I emphasized the importance of defining “what is the problem/where are we going” by defining your problem and showing it to others to test and refine that definition. It’s critical, but not sufficient. Read the rest of this entry »

Friend Lars Leafblad and I had been kicking around ideas about how to collaborate digitally given our many overlapping interests when Lars suggested we look at each others’ resumes and read them as if we didn’t know each other and were looking to evaluate them for a position. I thought it was a clever idea and what follows is our exchange.

Ya’ll know me and many of you may know Lars, but in case, his profile can be found here. Big take-away is he is an executive search leader who sees a lot of experienced resumes, particularly in the public and NGO spaces.

Resumes: Lars Leafblad – Resume – January 2012  / Phil Miller Resume 

Note: I tried to figure out how to make the resumes cleverly appear in the post, but for readability sake you’ll have to click and they’ll open in a separate window.

Phil’s Impression of Lars’ Resume

As always for me, everything depends on context. I’m going to assume I’m looking at Lars’ resume as if I were another search firm looking to hire him. I’ll comment where I’d ask really different questions if I were hiring him for a different role (like leading an NGO). Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever gotten down the path of a project or some chunk of work you’re grinding on and thought “what are we trying to do here?”

Well you’re not alone.

I have taught “critical thinking” methods for years now to undergraduate, graduate and experienced professional audiences. The vast majority consistently fail to use a coherent and consistent method of problem solving.

I’m going to focus a few posts this term on some of the core tools and techniques I teach to help individuals and teams be more disciplined in their thought process. If you really engage them you’ll be more efficient and effective as a professional.

The first we’ll call “Problem Definition”. I mean this comprehensively. The core of the exercise is writing down the one sentence question or description of the problem as you see it. But to do that we’ll talk about other aspects of the problem  to think through and document to ensure that we’re not missing “knowable” things from the start. Read the rest of this entry »

(Here’s part 3 of 3 on some life lessons I took from my parents. Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 here.)

Lessons from what happened to them:

Dad and his job loss taught me 3 really big things:

Much like a geological or evolutionary timeline where there are breaks between eras, my childhood had a clear break in 1983. The recession led to his job elimination and he never really bounced back. Pre 1983, Dad was all the good things I have related. Leader, athlete, pillar, dynamic. Post 1983 , he was a shadow of himself and it really changed everything for the whole family. Read the rest of this entry »

(Here’s part 2 of 3 on some life lessons I took from my parents. Part 1 can be found here and Part 3 here.)

Durability of relationships – My dad went to boarding school. He was very tight with a group of 8-10 classmates and their wives. They took a weekend trip together every year when they retired and talked all the time. He was always their “class president” and he loved it. I think his buddies still revered and respected him. They also remembered his kindnesses 50+ yrs after they had graduated.

Two friends’ stories about my dad in particular stuck out to me.

1)    One buddy transferred in after freshman year and was Jewish (in a 1950s Protestant boarding school – they had services every morning). Dad defended him and helped him survive. Mel joked that mydad was really hard on him with practical jokes etc., but it was always in the spirit of INCLUDING him in the group rather than excluding him. Dad tweaking him and taking him under his wing was central to his acceptance at school and he never forgot it.

2)    Another buddy was brilliant but really struggled with the discipline and structure at school. He always felt like Dad’s friendship and riding him kept him in school. He never forgot it either and made a point of telling me the impact Dad had on him. Read the rest of this entry »

(Author’s note: This is another multi-parter. I couldn’t distill my parents influence down to 1000 words.  Part 2 can be found here and Part 3 here.)

Parents wield a powerful influence on their children. Whether it’s positive or negative, from their presence or their absence, their attention or aloofness; they are dominant figures in each of our development. My folks both passed a number of years ago and as my kids get older (they are 8, 7 and 4 right now), I wanted to capture the impact they had on my conscious self (I assume there are all sorts of influences it would take Dr. Jung or Freud to sort out as well.). What follows is an attempt to disentangle a lifetime’s worth of interactions, love, arguments and ultimately their collective impact with a little distance for reflection.

Profiles

My dad (Dick Miller) was a wonderful man. He was a leader at every level in his life. A four-year class president in high school, fraternity president in college, rapidly promoted executive and a church and community leader. He was intuitive about others’ needs and how to get a lot out of them. He was a great athlete into his 40s, particularly tennis. Read the rest of this entry »

After I wrote a recent post on whether it’s time to leave your current employer, a friend of mine made a great comment that I wanted to pass along. Their addendum to my list of factors was “have you lost the benefit of the doubt?”

My friend has gone through a gradual “falling out of love” at their firm. A few changes in leadership lead to subtle changes in vision and incentives and all of the sudden what was once a great, collaborative place has become fairly unpleasant to work at. When things change you can become “part of the problem” because you are aligned to the legacy culture and the new powers-that-be see that as an issue. Now the clock is ticking… Let’s talk about three implications.

First, at a personal level:

Well before you get to a breakup, there are little signals. The minor disagreement that people over-react to or the honest mistake that gets ascribed to lack of effort or caring. If you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about. The “canary in the coal mine” is losing the benefit of the doubt. Read the rest of this entry »

Deciding whether or not it’s time to leave your current employer is among the more pivotal moments in a career. Motivations to leave range from excitement about new things or improved compensation to frustration with a current employer’s unwillingness to promote. On the other hand, I see people toil on through bad situations where “the writing is on the wall”.

So when is it time to leave?

We’ll walk through evaluating the situation dispassionately to ensure a quality (rather than purely emotional) decision.

Note – I’ll stipulate that I’m talking about leaving a company, not just changing positions. Some of the same logic applies, but the company change makes it a relatively larger decision. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the joys of my job and life is the number of smart folks I get to be around. I gain a ton from their collective wisdom.  I picked up a gem this week from friend Chris Kopka. He passed on one of his colleagues’ distilled views of what it takes to make sales consistently.

It goes like this, “Conviction sells, Emotion buys, Logic pays for it.”

Perfect. It immediately struck me as exactly right and neatly sums up years of sales and marketing experience and it’s a bit Yoda-like in brevity (“No try, only do”).

In my experience, to drive through to a final decision you really need all three working at the same time. Like a three legged stool. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’m sure the whole world knows by this time, Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer this week. In reading through retrospectives and reflections, I saw this quote of his from his much discussed Stanford commencement address in 2005. I wanted to share it because I completely agree and think too few people follow it.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be  truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do  great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.  Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.  And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years  roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Too true. Be at peace.