"Why are Manhole Covers Round?" - WDYWFT?

Answer that question and you're on your way to winning a $50 Visa gift card, or a couple of other cool prizes courtesy of WhatDoYouWantFromThem.com. @WDYWFT is a website and social network for people who work in virtually any form of management. In contrast to sites like LinkedIn and Xing that focus soley on networking and recruiting, WDYWFT strives to provide information, guidance, mentoring and career growth strategies for managers at all levels - and it does that all, for free. The question, "What do you want from them?" comes from something that was told to Anna Smith, the site's founder, in relation to addressing people she worked with. That way one is always looking at how to resolve issues as opposed to putting people in an uncomfortable position. A very good management lesson indeed. One so good that it inspired Anna to inspire other managers, and become a mentor herself. Check out WDYWFT's website and Management Contest - and be sure to join the group. It's a working management forum that could use your knowledge, and perhaps, impart some.

I met Anna over a year ago when I was living in Munich - but met might be a stretch in that Anna and I have never personally met - rather, she had found my website, The Wild Wild East Dailies, courtesy of a friend in Germany who had come across our podcast and knew Anna would love the music on WWED Radio. So Anna contacted me in Germany from the US to see if she could feature our music on her site, and a friendship was born. I said, "Yes", of course. Anyone who likes the music I like is a friend of mine. The other interesting parallel here is that Anna is originally from Germany and I from the US - but we had changed places. Funny that way. Unfortunately, the WWED podcast went the way of Napster in that what I was broadcasting was applying a more than liberal shellac to the concept of 'fair use' and the copyright gods shut down my podcast provider. Too bad. But Anna and WDYWFT continue to survive and thrive and I'm more than happy to lend a hand if I can. Now, can you tell us for real, why manhole covers are round? Most creative answer wins!

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my previous blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies.

Business is the art of getting people where they need to be, faster than they would get there without you.

This one, from my old buddy Hugh MacLeod: "Business isn't conceptual rocket science. It's about making money, trading goods and services and basically getting stuff done. In spite of that, it's still something that confounds a lot of people. How do other people make money? Why are some people rich and other people poor? Why am I poor when I work so hard every day? I've done my fair share of wondering about all this.That's what this cartoon is about. What can YOU do about not only your journey, but the journeys of others. The latter seems more interesting, somehow..." This week I had the opportunity to write a client about what I could do for him - because what he was asking for isn't what he needs and it's not going to help him, so wrote to him about where he needed to be and how I could help him get there. I was once told to never tell a client what could not be done - but rather what could be, how long it would take and how much it would cost - so that's what I did, because it was the responsible business thing to do.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my previous blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies.

Squandering the Peace Dividend on War: The American Way

From Seth Godin today again, a post about squandering our national resources. You can read the original by clicking on the coloured type but I'm going to repurpose his writing a bit and make a few comments.

The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged.

I recall any great number of people loosing their jobs when the computer age finally kicked in to corporate America in the early 90s. I felt sorry for them. At Leo Burnett in Chicago during a large layoff of 250 or so (15% of the staff I recall) a number of soon-to-be ex-employees were structuring a class action suit claiming the company was remiss in not retraining them properly. I'm not sure that ever got off the ground but they were not incorrect. All along they had been doing what they were told, doing what they had been trained to do, following the old company manual. And things turned out poorly for them. I recall crossing one of the bridges across the Chicago River at lunch one day and seeing the men in the fireboat fishing a body wrapped in plastic out of the water. "Must be one of ours", a fellow Burnetter remarked walking by. Signs of those times.

It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't. We squandered the window, wasted the money and didn't rush to fill it with the sort of top-down industrial projects (like high speed rail and efficient new forms of energy) that could have changed everything.

I spent nearly half of 2009 and half of last year in Europe. France, Germany and The Netherlands for a short bit. It was positively enlightening. High speed trains everywhere. A 12 Euro ticket for my public transportation every week. Metro, S-Bahn or a tram or bus anywhere I wanted to go in Munich. Fast and cheap. Bill Clinton left America a surplus in budget after his term. That seemed to go away fairly quickly. If I studied economics, politics and military science would I find that a state of perpetual war and code 'Red', 'Purple', 'Orange' fascist fear tactics in a nation  were essentially good for economic and political stability in the long term? I'd be interested in reader's thoughts on that.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my previous blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies.

Buying pot in Vietnam. How much?

When I started my own business in Korea, I learned something that no multinational could help me do. They couldn't help me decide. They just wanted me to execute their corporate plan. Multinational companies don't like you making choices. But when I started my own company, I learned an important thing:

"Ask  the same question 3 times, until you get the answer you like".

So go to three pot dealers and tell them you'll pay, 50,000 dong. 3rd man will said okay (prices can go to 200,000 for the same product). Want to buy a house? Same negotiation applies. Want to buy a company? Same. Stop reading the company manual. It doesn't teach you how to decide - but price will. Your price.

On the art of the favour

On graduation from university my father and a number of other fathers rented out the top floor of our favourite pub, Das Fas, for our graduation party. Dinner finished at a nice hotel in town, the dads sent the moms back to their respective rooms and took the boys out for a beer - the imparting of wisdom from one generation to the next.

Bob Kirkhart, father of my roommate Tom had the best advice of the entire evening as I remember.

"The secret to being a successful businessman is simple", he told us. Mr. Kirkhart had sold industrial pipe his entire career and had been extremely successful as a pipe salesman.

"For the first twenty years of your career", he said, "Do people favours. And for the second twenty?", he continued, "Collect em'".

I'm a few years or so over the first 20 year period of my career, and wondering if somehow I had forgotten to do enough favours for people on my way up the ladder. I don't have people chasing me on Facebook or any of the other places I can be found by people I might have screwed over. But I've decided for sure, that I am definitely in the second have of that 40 year career Mr. Kirkhart spoke about - and would like to start living the way he described.