Gone Fishin'

For the first Roth family in vacation in four years (another way of saying that my wife informed me that it was time, and they were going with or without me...) I found myself with a preparation conundrum which reinforced why I never do this...

We left Friday morning. This meant Thursday night turned into Friday morning as I frantically attempted to empty my desk. I went to sleep at 4:15 AM, 3 hours before I was supposed to get up, pile the family into the car, and begin to drive north for a 2 hour drive to a hike through an ancient man-made water canal through a cave, followed by another two hours to get to our hotel.

I have 4 things to say about this.

1. Coffee
2. Both of my children spent the entire way there screaming, "Yay, WATER HIKE!!!" My 2 year old son spent most of the hike neck deep in water and happy as a pig in- well neck deep water. My daughter, who is almost 5 spent the entire hike screaming, "I'm scared, hold me!!!"
3. Yes, the pictures will be on FB when I get back home and download them
4. I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but when I got married 8 years ago hiking 4 KM through a body of knee deep water in a cave while carrying a 50 Lb. weight in one arm and a 35Lb. weight in the other would have been a piece of cake. Now that there would be a practical application for such a skill, I'm completely incapable- a fact of which I was unaware prior to embarking on this trip- meaning that I'm going to spend the next 3 days holding my kids while hiking on rough terrain, and keeping a hand available to steady my pregnant wife, so she doesn't fall. Yes. We're dumb.
5. I know there was a five... Oh, yes. COFFEE!!!

Most of this detail is way too much information, but here is what you do need to know. Much of my incapacity was due to being up at 4:15 the morning we left, because I simply couldn't go until my inbox was clear- because my wife kidnapped my blackberry.

As I write this (everyone is sleeping, and I snuck out of the room to pick up some WiFi in the lobby) It's been 42 hours since I checked my email, and I find myself actually getting stressed about this fact. I think this might be the definition of an addiction. I need to have my fix, or I get edgy. Even if work is *THE* fix.

OK, gotta sneak back into the room now, but if i sound confused the next time a consultant tells me he has to move into industry as a "lifestyle decision," you'll know why.

And in case you were wondering... No rundown this week.

Facebook Vs. LinkedIn for Business Networking

Social networking and business networking are not the same. It's clear to me that Facebook is winning the Social Networking market. It used to be clear to me that LinkedIn rules the Business networking market.

But now as the Facebook/LinkedIn debate heats up, I find myself straddling the fence, which, I'm sure you know can get uncomfortable after a while, especially if there is barbed wire at the top. :)

Facebook is a lot more interactive (and easier to game, but again the topic of another post).
LinkedIn does a lot better job segmenting & valuating contacts, and gives more complete professional profiles, but has gotten so sensitive about Spam related issues that they have effectively turned-off half of the embedded capabilities in the network.

Here is what I wrote in a recent Facebook post (I'd share a link except for the walled garden implications, but that is for another rant, er, um, I meant post...) about my biggest facebook problem:
_______________________
I have 2 very distinct communities of Facebook friends- Social and Professional.

Sometimes I want to post an important business link, or items from my professional blog. Honestly, most of my friends don't care.

Sometimes, I want to share a stupid or funny link with my friends that may be inappropriate for the workplace.

So items that I might otherwise post, get left off in the name of caution, but if I could be sure that my content would get into the right hands, I'd be able to be less restrained in that regard.

One friend suggested maintaining two different Facebook accounts with two distinct networks for this purpose. But isn't that a lot of work with no real added value? Beside, the login cookie won't allow me to be logged into both, so I'd be constantly logging in and out.

The solution is simple: Allow us to create separate news feeds, and choose which activities go where. Friend notification can go in my general feed to all of my friends. My blog gets imported only to the feed seen by those I designate as professional friends. I can have a status for each group. When I post a link, I can choose if it is for my general, professional, or social feed, etc...

Now before everyone points out that FB is targeted to college and High School kids who don't have that problem- it is also a haven for young professionals and technology professionals, and today's college users are tomorrow's professionals, so this problem will aggregate.

Isn't this evolution obvious? Hello? Is anyone at FB listening?
_________________
Facebook needs to do three things to render LinkedIn obsolete, and none of them have a technological barrier.

1. Resolve the concurrent communities/profiles issues detailed above. (I have been assured by a reliable industry insider that they are working on a solution, though no timeline is being shared for a release date.)
2. Expand the professional entries in profile information. One of LinkedIn's remaining advantages is description/recommendation information for each professional experience entry. Facebook currently only offers company/title/tenure. By expanding the profile *AND* making it searchable (of course in accordance with user privacy settings), Facebook would match one of LinkedIn's only advantages in professional vs. social networking.
3. Search by degree. Most people won't want you to search through their friends, but might not mind making a referral to a colleague. Give users the options to make their professional network, personal network, or both searchable. No privacy issues, but LinkedIn would lose it's last advantage the 6-degrees concept.

Once these changes are in place, not only would LinkedIn become obsolete (or perhaps a small cog in the OpenID/Social Graphing spectrum), moreover the number of concurrent circles is limitless... I can publish separate information on FB to my friends, my clients, my candidates, my co-workers, my....

Weekly Roundup 8/19

Recruiting/Networking/Jobs

• More on LinkedIn Vs. Facebook for professional networking. Which portal is best for Professional networking? I've expanded on this idea here.
  
• Online Jobhunting and dating look the same.
• More great advice for Hiring companies.
• It seems that Guy Kawasaki is unlikely to hire an MBA any time soon.

Business

• VMWare stock up 76% on day of IPO.
• Free WSJ Online?
• iPhone- The 300-page cell phone bill.
• Stocks back up after fed cut.
• Skype service outage drops stock price.
• Does Six Sigma strangle creativity?

Technology

• More on OpenID/Social Graphing (Highly technical). Some of this accomplished here.
  
• Lawsuit challenges Google keyword ads.
  
• Are facebook data feeds a security leak?
• TripAdvisor acquires Where I've been. Or did they?
• IPTV straining bandwidth?
• Wiki-Jacking SEO-trend halted.

I guess you could call this thinking outside the box.

• Mark Cuban wants to take your house public.

And this was just to fun to pass up.

• Indiana tax protester pays $12,656.07 property tax bill in change and $1 bills.

Just to let you know...

• New book from Freakonomics author. I'll be reading this shortly.

Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Tom Glavine, & Job Hunting

I know, I know, you're thinking that this is that old Sesame Street clip... "One of these things doesn't belong here..." But as a guy who's two passions are recruiting and baseball, I can assure you that they're actually quite similar.

Most baseball fans rely on traditional, but irrelevant metrics like Runs Scored, Runs Batted In, or Batting Average. Recently, a trend called Sabremetrics, the baseball equivalent of a consulting case study, has stepped in to develop new metric tools to help make better business decisions around evaluating player contributions.

Runs Scored is a measure of what other payers on your team accomplish while you are base. Runs Batted In is a measure of what other players on your team do prior to your at-bat. Batting average is a binary statistic that accounts for successful and unsuccessful outcomes without parsing the degrees of success.

So our friends the math geeks have developed a tool called OPS (On-base Plus Slugging) which is an indicator of a players total offensive output measured in bases exclusive of the contributions of his team members.

League average OPS is .746, and only 10 players in history have managed a career OPS over 1. Barry Bonds is one of them. In fact, he has done it 4 times, and has 4 of the top 10 best individuals seasons in history measured by OPS. From the perspective of pure productivity, Bonds is easily the best offensive player ever to play the game.

Which is perhaps why so many people find him so offensive.

His defenders point out that he has never tested positive for PED (Performance Enhancing Drugs), and assert that he is innocent until proven guilty.

His detractors point to a mountain of completely anecdotal or circumstantial evidence, which is compelling, but certainly not conclusive. Arguments include his rapid weight gain immediately preceding his assault on the single season HR record, photos of the disparity between his rookie physique and his current one, and the content of a book called Game of Shadows, who's authors went to jail for refusing to disclose their source for illegally obtained Grand Jury testimony, in which Bonds claims that he "never knowingly took steroids," and went on to detail a cream he used made from flax seed oil which was given to him , by his childhood friend and weight trainer, Greg Anderson, who is now in jail for refusing to disclose the contents of that cream, among other things.

In the history of baseball 4 players have hit more than 60 HR in a season, and only one has hit more than 70. Barry Lamar Bonds hit 73- at age 36. That's a 22% increase one the record 61 which had stood for over 40 years until Mark McGuire (also now implicated) shattered that record 3 years earlier.

Here's what I know. Players' offensive capability over more than 10,000 players spanning 120 years has peaked at age 33. At 36 players begin to "drop of the cliff," a phrase coined for Willie Mays, who was productive right up until he wasn't- at age 36. He retired the next year.

Barry hit 73 HR at age 36, and just hit the 756th of his career at age 42.

I am convinced that Bonds has been chemically enhanced. There is no valid test for HGH, the most commonly used substance among MLB players. There was no testing AT ALL in MLB until 2000. And for those reasons, I am convinced that many of his peers, both hitters and pitchers were also juiced.

Every major rules change in the last 15 years has favored the hitter, from lowering the pitching mound, to shrinking the strike zone, diluting the talent pool with team expansion, smaller ballparks, and on and on... Offensive numbers are out of control, but I'm not convinced that steroids are to blame.

In fact, until Carlton Fisk began weight lifting in the mid-70s teams discouraged weight training on the theory that too much muscle mass would slow bat-speed a key element of power hitting.

The only proof we have that this "cheating" gave him an advantage is anecdotal at best and ignores many other factors in play.

So convinced that Barry cheated, and unconvinced that his cheating helped him, I say no asterisk is necessary.

In the same week that Barry hit his record breaking HR, Tom Glavine became the last pitcher who will ever record 300 wins, and Alex Rodriguez became the youngest player ever to hit 500 HR. Two records we can feel great about overshadowed by one that as a nation we are conflicted about.

This is what consultants do for business. develop and use metrics to redefine how we evaluate and operate to create more value, which in this case correlate to understanding. the other place where value correlates to understanding is the job market. What are other saying about this company? What is my career path there? How do my skills match up to the opportunity, and how will they develop once I'm there?

As a consultant, you are uniquely positioned to find the best opportunities and evaluate them critically.

As for my take on Barry and history, I sat my son, who knows just enough about baseball to scream "Go Yankees at completely inappropriate times, in front of the TiVo, and I showed him Kirk Gibson's homerun from 1988, a clip of my father catching the winning HR ball at the first game I ever went to at Yankee Stadium. I showed him the Yankees winning the world Series in 1996, and Cal Ripkin's 2131st game in a row. I showed him Mark McGuire hit 62 and 70, and Barry Bonds hit 73, and 756. And I didn't tell him about PED's or controversy. I told him to love the game, and remember the shiver down his spine- and I told him that when he grows up, he'll tell everyone that he got to see the last pitcher ever throw his 300th win, the same week that he saw Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th homer. When you grow up, I told him, Alex Rodriguez will own every major offensive record in the history of the game, and you'll get to watch him do it.

Weekly roundup 8/12

We're trying to keep a trimmer new format for the rundown. Tell me what you think.

Career & Recruiting:

• Hi-end career positioning and the Web.
• Great answers to 64 tough interview questions.
• See what current employees think about a perspective employer.
• Tech companies talk about attracting top talent.

Business & Technology:

• Eric Schmidt defines Web 3.0.
• New Facebook patent infringement claims.
• Google launches web-storage product.
• Guy Kawasaki on mistakes that kill software products. The commentary is frighteningly relevant to all business models.
• Two unconventional web 2.0 acquisitions this week.

I couldn't make these up if I wanted to:

• To file under "Man bites dog." Video start-up VEOH sues Universal Music for declarative injunction.
• Google marks it's own Blog as Spam, and deletes it from Blogger...

Must Read for Hiring Managers: Exclusivity and Search Firms

this article was so good, I'm quoting it in it's entirety from jrfent.com. I'd add to it, but it's so good that my comments would be superfluous, so without further adieu...
------------------------------

What is a Rat Race?

August 2007 - by JR Fent, Recruiter, Technology Professionals Exchange A rat race is multiple rats and one piece of cheese. It’s not a pretty picture. In recruiting, this happens when you have a client company asking multiple recruiters to work on one requisition. Some clients think that ‘the more eyeballs the better’ but this can be a huge detriment. Here are some of the issues: Annoying the best candidates. Imagine getting 20 recruiters calling you about the same position. (that you had little or no interest in) Making the candidates head swell. Let’s say a candidate is coming to the table and is now a little excited because someone is giving him the opportunity for a bump in pay or position. He has a new sense of ‘feeling wanted.’ Now a third, fourth, fifth recruiter is contacting him for the same job. “hmm”, he thinks, “I must be in better demand than I thought. I think I want more.” Now negotiating with this guy on salary and benefits will get tricky. Mathematical degradation of effort. Ok here goes… Let’s say you send your req to 10 recruiting companies. It’s not the first time that you’ve done this. So they know what to expect. Here is what happens at the recruiting company: The recruiting manager offers the req to a seasoned recruiter that understands the job. The ‘pro’ looks at the req, chuckles and says “no way – these guys sent this req to everyone”. He /she says “Give it to a rookie”, because he/she does not want to be in a rat race. The recruiting manager gives the req to ‘the rookie’. He/She is excited to have another req to go with the 15 others that he/she has been given to work on. The rookie runs an ad in the job boards and goes back to reviewing the resumes that came in from overnight job board action. In a couple days he/she will have candidates for this new req. The rookie now starts calling on the candidates that submitted to his/her ad on the boards. Two things come up real quick. 1) The candidates have already submitted to a vaguely similar ad and have been submitted by another recruiter, OR 2) they have not been submitted and the rookie is so excited that he/she has a ‘live fish’ that they don’t do any sort of screening and rush to get the candidate submitted before another recruiter finds them and submits them first. Now the hiring company starts to look at the submissions. Hmm – same candidates submitted by multiple companies, candidates that aren’t a good match to the requirement, and candidates with blatant lies on their resumes. “Damn those 3rd party recruiters!” Ahh, the rat race. Is there a good reason for it? I can’t imagine one. So here’s my tip to hiring managers: Give reqs to one recruiting firm at a time for 15 days. Tell them upfront that you intend on that. I would tell it to them like this “We need one of your most senior recruiter’s attention on this. We will give you 15 days with exclusive access to the req and to the hiring manager. The hiring manager will answer questions about the job, and give you feedback on each candidate immediately. What we would like in return is for you to send us your 5 best candidates, prescreened and well documented. After 15 days – we will decide whether to keep on the same plan or to bring in a different recruiter to work on the req.” As a professional recruiter I would have a better feeling about the client now. They are stepping up to the plate and expecting quality results. If I was the recruiter getting this call - I’ll be putting in 10-12 hours per day into this req until I have found them 5-7 quality candidates. I’m going to take the time to write and run quality ads (for semi passive candidates) and I’m going to dig into my referral network and into high quality companies for qualified candidates that need inspiration to ‘move’. In the technical arena the hiring cycle is about 90 days for positions above 90k per year. Coming up with great candidates in the first 15 days can close this down.

Weekly Roundup 8/5

Anytime an article is published entitled "Is Google On Crack" it must be my lead link by default.
And while I'm at it, to tech startups I love: Jott & 4Info.

Recruiting/Networking/Job Searching

• Facebook hires Youtube's former CFO. Does this signify that the company is not for sale?
  
• Survey finds that US midsize companies are not hiring.
  
• Payscale launches Gigzig, user data on salary, not furnished by companies.
• Michael Hyatt has some great points on effective email communication.
  

Business

• CEO success correlates to height. I'm 6"4 by the way.
  
• Starbucks to raise US drink prices. This one's gonna hurt.
  
• Investment firms are backing Dems in '08. Good for the economy, or betting on the winner?
• Judge unimpressed in facebook lawsuit.
  
• Apple/AT&T differ on iPhone sales numbers.
  
• Investment strategy for high earners.
  
• Study confirms that Ritalin stunts growth.
• AT&T CEO claims $10 DSL not publicized because "no one wants it." Um, What?
  
• Glen Kellman, CEO of Redfinn argues that entrepreneurship has a dark side.
  

Technology

• Web Search privacy battle heats up.
• New contextual music site launches. The author is a friend of mine.
  
• Review favors new Blackberry 8820 over iPhone.
• Microsoft to focus on web services and consumer devices.
  
• Joost to launch by year-end.
• Now bankrupt Amp'd Mobile spent VC cash on Porn. Who says were seeing a Tech bubble?
• Goldman Sachs and Oak Investment partners put cash into iCrossing.
  
• Facebook outage.
  

And for a bit of inspiration....

• A double amputee competes for the Beijing Olympics.