SOPA/PIPA and the Wikipedia Blackout

If you’ve been on any social network, read or listened to the news or tried to access Wikipedia today, you’ve probably noticed that there is a massive push to raise awareness and fight support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). I hope this is something you support. It is federal legislation that will could well open individual owners of websites (like aaronbushell.com) to liability should someone post copyrighted content on the site. My website could be shut down without due process. I could be fined or jailed as someone who supports copyright infringement. THIS IS NOT RIGHT.

If you go to any Wikipedia page today, you will see that they are forwarding all pages to their SOPA informational page. You can put your zip code in to get the contact information for your elected representatives. I highly recommend you contact them to voice your opposition to SOPA.

Critical Thinking

The most important skill you can have?  Critical thinking.

A friend recently sent me an article she had read about the importance of critical thinking skills.  The article discussed the failure of many businesses to engage in critical thinking, describing it as “an organized and disciplined way of thinking logically with clarity and precision by using an approach that’s fair and accurate and focusing on information that is relevant.”

It further broke down the components of critical thinking into four subtopics:
• Strategic thinking. This requires leaders to assess the business climate and make the right decisions about where a company is going.
• Creative thinking. Creative thinking is essential for problem-solving and growth. “If you think about it, everything that you touch, every building that you walk in started with creative thinking,” Hagemann said. “So it’s imperative that we have great creative thinkers in our leadership.”
• Problem solving. Problem solving is being able to assess a problem, cut it down to the bare bones and deal with it as quickly as possible, she said.
• Decision making. decision making is a often a test of character and being able to make tough decisions and have the willingness to be held accountable. “That intellectual fortitude and courage is also a very important piece,” she said.

I’m sure it is not entirely a surprise that critical thinking is, well, critical in business.  But how do you go out and hire employees who are critical thinkers and how do you train your current employees to think more critically?  I have an answer for both of these questions.

You must remember that the onus is management to train and develop your team to become more critical thinkers.  When I was managing a Bank of America branch, I had to face this task head on.  At the time, the bank had developed a deep focus on utilizing the teller team as the front line for recognizing sales opportunities and deepening the bank’s relationship with it’s clients.  One of the branches I managed had a great team, but they had never been challenged by management to seek out these sales opportunities.  The team was good, to a person they were intelligent, dedicated employees who wanted to be successful.  They just didn’t know how.

I started out by working behind the teller line with them.  During transactions, I showed them how to take a look at the customer’s accounts while they were processing the customer’s transaction.  I taught them what things to look out for- large dollar amounts in a savings or checking account, mortgage loans with a low balance or high credit card balances.  I taught them how to ask the right questions to customers as a part of their normal conversation to try and uncover opportunities.  It took time and one-on-one interaction with my employees, but they learned and they got better.  The results were amazing.  After two quarters, we had increased product sales by 38% and had reached 100% of the banking center’s sales goals, and we continued to do so for my remaining time at that banking center.  Even better, though, was that the center continued to be successful after I left, proving that it wasn’t just my presence at the bank that had caused the success, but that I had helped develop the critical skills in the employees that allowed them to continue their success even after I moved on to another banking center.

The point here is that I spent time with them and taught them what to look for.  After a customer left, I’d dialogue with them and bounce ideas off of them to help them better understand what we were looking for.  It didn’t take long before they knew exactly what to look for and because they knew their customers better than anyone else, they could easily probe to find even more opportunities.  Customer has an 18 year old getting ready to leave for college?  Student accounts and online banking!  Customer is trying to pay off credit card debt?  Possible consolidation loan opportunity.  It was amazing what they were able to accomplish with just a little direction and instruction and coaching.

So that is how you develop critical thinking in the employees you already have, but how do you hire good critical thinkers when you are looking to hire new employees?  I’ve got three ideas:

1.) Engage your team.  Again, your team knows what works and they know a lot more people than you do by yourself.  Make sure they are on the lookout for good team members to add to your organization.  I am of the opinion that if you find the right person, you should hire them regardless of whether or not you have an open job requirement.  The right people make or break an organization.  Why let that person go somewhere else when you NEED them working for you?

2.) Always be on the lookout for talent.  If I were starting a company right now, I can think of about a half-dozen people off the top of my head right now who I would recruit to come and work for me.  Some of them might say no, but the people I’m thinking of are those stars who really love a challenge and would be willing to work their butts off for a new startup.  You should always be in the mode where you are hiring.  People will leave your organization for all sorts of reasons and you never want to be stuck relying on the resumes that come in from Human Resources as your only source of potential candidates.  Did the guy at the mall who helped you with your shoes impress you with his attentiveness and customer service?  Give him your card, sit down and have a cup of coffee with him.  He might well be the next valuable member of your team.

As a post-script to that, building your own team makes the unit incredibly strong.  When you pull someone into your team because you recognize their talent and potential, you are hiring someone who will be more dedicated to you and harder working than the average candidate.

3.) When you get to the interview, ask questions that will require critical thinking of the candidate.  I participated in several interviews when I was hiring people at Bank of America and the one thing I could not stand was the standard interview trope, “Where do you see yourself in five years” and “What are your strengths and weaknesses”?  Even what many hiring managers consider to be “better” questions are still junk.  “Tell me about a time you were challenged at work.”  “How do you work under pressure?”  Seriously, any job-seeker worth his salt will have a canned response to your canned question and if he’s a half-decent employee, he’ll see right through your boring interview to the boring desk job behind it.

Try this on for size. “What do you know about (my company)?”  Has the candidate done her homework?  Do they know anything about the company, position or industry?  If not, you know you’re probably not looking at someone with the passion to do the job the way you want it done.

“What would you do during your first 90 days on the job?”  What does this answer tell you about the candidate?  Is this someone who wants to come in and “fix” everything right away?  Or is this a more thoughtful candidate, who plans to observe before jumping right in?  Will she build relationships?  This question can help you determine whether the candidate is a good fit for your organization along with giving you a good idea of how she approaches projects.

How do you personally define and measure success?
This is a two-part question.  The first part is intended to help you determine the candidate’s view of himself, and how much he has thought about what exactly success means.  The second part is to gain insight into how the candidate would measure success in your organization.  Most people have an idea of what success is but very few have a defined way to measure it.  Even if the candidate hasn’t thought about it before now, a thoughtful and well-reasoned answer will be a sign of a quick thinking, analytical employee.

What tools or habits do you use to keep organized?  Everyone says they are organized, but take a look at the desks of the people you work with to see if they really are organized or not.  Asking for specific examples of how the candidate stays organized will allow you a peek into what to expect from this person on the job.  If they can discuss actual, specific methods (like Getting Things Done), you probably have a good applicant on your hands.

What accomplishment in your career to date are you most proud of?  I had to think about this one for a minute.  I’ve had numerous successes during my career.  All of the ones I am most proud of involved being a part of a team.  My study abroad experience at the Berlin School of Economics popped into my head.  Of all of the projects I have ever completed, this one was probably the most challenging and time consuming.  I also thought about going into underperforming bank branches and teaching them how to be top performers.  But the one I settled on was very recent- completing and analysis of moving the Procurement process to paperless.  I spent a week working on a team that broke down the Procurement process from start to finish and we figured out a way to do the whole thing without paper.  Right now, we generate between 150 and 200 pieces of paper for a new contract and anywhere from 2-100 pieces of paper for each purchase order.  We spend hours putting the files together and even longer trucking these documents all over the facility to get signatures.  The team developed a way to eliminate all of this by making the process paperless, and in doing so estimated we could save the company a pretty big chunk of change.  That is what I love- improving the process to make everyone’s life easier and saving the company money at the same time.

Get the candidate to think “we can’t do that.”  This one is great for testing their critical thinking skills.  You want to pose a problem in which the easy answer is “we can’t do that.”  The average candidate will look at the situation and say that it can’t be done.  The great candidate will imagine some scenario where it can be done or will offer alternatives and trade-offs.  This is the type of person you are looking for if you want critical thinking skills.

Books I Read in 2011

Books I have read this year:
The Accidental Billionaires – Ben Mezrich
Blink- Malcolm Gladwell
The Five Disfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni
The Greatest Trade Ever – Gregory Zuckerman
The Quants – Scott Patterson
The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life – Alice Schroeder
Outliers: The story of success- Malcolm Gladwell
Fat, Forty and fired: One man’s frank, funny and inspirit account of losing his job and finding his life- Nigel Marsh
The Tipping Point- Malcolm Gladwell
What Color is Your Parachute? – Richard Bolles
The Hunger Games- Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire- Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity – David Allen
The Postmortal – Drew Magary
The Paleo Solution: The original human diet – Robb Wolf
The Gingerbread Girl – Stephen King
Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – John C. Maxwell
11/22/63 – Stephen King
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson

Still working on:
Boys Should be Boys: Meg Meeker
A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire – George R. R. Martin
The Litigators – John Grisham
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Dan Pink
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Stieg Larsson

Of all the books I have read this year, the tops on my list are:
The Postmortal by Drew Magary
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
11/22/63 by Stephen King

The Postmortal was probably my favorite read of the year. I am a big fan of Magary’s writing style and the book was great for pure can’t-put-it-down-ed-ness. Magary creates an all too feasible not-too-distant future where aging is a thing of the past and people can no longer die of anything associated with old age (disease, natural causes). The novelty soon wears off and humanity is faced with a world quickly approaching overpopulation, resource scarcity and possible armageddon. It’s not a particularly long or difficult read, but I loved it.

For sheer scope, the Hunger Games trilogy wins the best series of the year award. This is a book that grabs you right away and doesn’t let up for three books. It was gripping in places and touching in places. It is a young-adult book series, so it is pretty easy reading for the most part. That just made it easy to read the whole series quickly. I know there are other Hunger Games fans on the board and they will agree with me. If you start the first one, be prepared to read all three of them in quick succession.

11/22/63 was my third (or fifth, if you count the Hunger Games as separate books) read of the year. As mentioned in my review, it takes an incredibly tantalizing idea (what if someone could go back in time to prevent Kennedy’s assassination?) and then builds a complex world around it. The story spans generations- 2011 in the present and 1958-1963 in the past. It delves deeply into the story surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald and how he got to the window of the book depository on that fateful day in November 1963. But it also builds a world outside of all of that, the “normal” world that the main character lives in. It was long and drawn out in the middle, but I couldn’t put it down.

As far as biographies go, it’s easy to say that Steve Jobs’ bio by Walter Isaacson is the clear winner. It’s also the best-selling book of the year, helped in no small part by Jobs’ October death. It tells a strong, detailed story of Jobs from his upbringing in northern California to his first ascension to success as the head of Apple to his eventual downfall after being ousted from the company and his regenesis at the helm of Apple the second time around. It paints an interesting story of a man who did not bend his whims for anything, but it also a sad story. The reason Jobs commissioned the book was so that his kids would know why he was never around. Is that the price of leaving a lasting mark on the world? Your kids have to read a book to know who their father was? That is the lasting question I took away from the book. Is that sort of success worth what you give up?

All in all, it was a great year in books for me. I did not realize I had read/listened to so much until I put this list together. Here’s hoping 2012 brings me just as much reading pleasure.

What have you read this year? Please sound off in the comments!

Visualize Your Success

Over the last several months, I competed in a Humorous Speech Competition through Toastmasters.  I won my club’s contest, our district and divisional contests and competed against the winners of the other area, district & divisional winners at the State level.  After I completed my speech at each contest and while the judges were tallying the results, I was taken up in front of the audience and interviewed by the MC. One of the questions I was asked was, “What advice would you have for someone who is nervous about speaking in front of a group.”  I knew the answer immediately- visualization.

Visualization is a powerful tool where you use your mind to visualize yourself performing whatever task it is that you are nervous about.  For this particular situation, it would be visualizing myself in front of the audience, giving my speech. I would visualize walking up in front of the audience and rolling right into my speech.  I would visualize pausing in the right places and waiting for laughter in the right places.  I would visualize the audience laughing and clapping as I finished my speech.  And I would do that time and time again until I had so thoroughly visualized my speech that when the day of the actual speech came, I would not be nervous at all.  Instead, giving the speech would be second nature to me because I had already “given” the speech so many times in my head.

Visualization can be a powerful tool for success.  Often, we are the biggest obstacles to our own success.  Too often, we aren’t prepared for something and we go in thinking we can wing it and get away with it.  Often, we slide through by the skin of our teeth and think we were successful.  But when you look back, were we really that successful?  The person who prepared and practiced and knew his material inside and out is always better and more convincing than the person who “winged it.”

Professional athletes do it.  Heck, Superbowl MVP Aaron Rodgers revealed during the Green Bay Packers remarkable Superbowl run that he owed a part of his success to visualization.   Rodgers told USA Today, “In the sixth grade, a coach taught us about the importance of visualization.  When I’m in a meeting, watching film or laying in bed before I go to sleep, I always visualize making those plays.”  It works for him, too.  Rodgers was nearly flawless in Superbowl XLV but he has been even more spectacular this season and is the presumptive favorite for the regular season MVP has he has led his team to a 13-0 record (as of this writing).

Visualization is not something that takes a lot of time or effort, but it is something everyone should do on a regular basis.  It’s like the old adage, “practice makes perfect.”  Practice does make perfect, but just practicing won’t rid you of your stage fright.  But visualization will.  Practice will make your more comfortable with your speech.  It will help you internalize the words and will help keep you from stumbling through your notes.  But only visualization can help you recreate the scene in your head.  The audience of eyes staring up at you.  The lights, hot on your face.  The dryness you get in your mouth and the tightness in your throat right before the words start to come out.  If you haven’t visualized these things happening prior to your speech, they can throw you off your game and leave you scrambling to recover.  But if you’ve visualized it ahead of time you know that if you take a deep breath and perhaps a sip of water that the only thing standing between you and a successful speech is yourself.  Practice AND visualize and your next speech will be a resounding success.

What are your thoughts on visualization?  Please let me know in the comments!

We Love Our Shox

Cass and I both graduated from Wichita State University.  We are proud Shockers, and we are excited about the upcoming basketball season.  Although we live too far away from Wichita to get the games on cable, we still keep up with what is happening with the team and watch any televised games we can down here in Okie-land.  The Puerto Rico tourney was a rare chance for us to see the Shockers play on national television.  Even though they weren’t very successful, it was awesome to see our little midwestern team playing on ESPN.

This looks like it will be a good season.  Wichita State was ranked pre-season at # 39 according to Sporting News and is expected to place second in the Missouri Valley Conference behind Creighton.  I think we can probably go ahead and say that Creighton, as usual, will be our toughest opponent.

We had the chance last week to watch the Shockers in person as they came down to play Tulsa.  We met up with friends before the game and walked right across the street to the arena.  Wichita State showed up in force with a crowd full of people which gave the arena a good ole’ Koch Arena feel.  After struggling during the first half, the Shox came through in the clutch, winning by 10.

It was also Jackson’s first basketball game.  The boy had a blast.  He stood and actually WATCHED the game through the entire first half and sat on Cassandra’s lap and ate popcorn the second half.  It was a blast for the entire Bushell family.