Our elegant @ has been inducted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was working at BBN Networks (where he still works) on developing a communication system (between programmers so they could be connected across their computers) for Arpanet, a precursor to the Internet.  He needed a key on his Model 33 teletype keyboard which was not already in use by the programmers.  And the @ sign was brought forward from its obscurity.

Here’s a gem from the Smithsonian Magazine online:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Accidental-History-of-the-at-Symbol-165593146.html

And here is a post from Ray Tomlinson himself on this first use of the @ symbol:

openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html

I must say I am delighted to find these stories, and grateful.

A definition of globalization that I can understand and to which I now can relate:
Question:
What is the truest definition ofGlobalization?
Answer:
Princess Diana’s death.

Question:
How come?

Answer :
An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend
crashes in a French tunnel,
riding in a German car
with a Dutch engine,
driven by a Belgian
who was drunk on Scottish whisky,
followed closely by Italian Paparazzi,
on Japanese motorcycles,
treated by an American doctor,
using Brazilian medicines.

This is sent to you by a Canadian,
using American Bill Gates’ technology,
and you’re probably reading this on your computer,
that uses Taiwanese chips,
and a Korean monitor,
assembled by Bangladeshi workers
in a Singapore plant,
transported by Indian truck drivers,
hijacked by Indonesians,
unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen,
and trucked to you by Mexican illegal immigrants…..
That, my friends, is Globalization !

The USA’s birthday is happening, this 4th of July weekend, and I recall why I returned home to start my first (and current) consultancy so many years ago.

Finishing my first college degrees, and filled with youthful wanderlust, I set off to travel the world — my own private Walkabout.  I disposed of everything I owned (to avoid its pulling me back if things got tough), set off with a (very) little money and a lot of adventure-seeking spirit, and I wandered, lived, worked and explored in Europe, Asia and Australia for 6 years.

Then came that ennui, that strange feeling of being out of place and out of time, that signals you are done with the Road — the sudden yearning for a place, for something to call home, for your feet in the earth of your own kind.

This restlessness included wanting to settle in and contribute something sustainable, which for me would be the beginning of my consultancy.  Where to do that?  I could only begin such a venture in the U.S.  I had seen enough of the economies of other countries (and the gender biases) to know that, at that time, only the U.S. had enough economic infrastructure to allow the entrepreneuring I was envisioning.

Lucky me — I got to ride the emerging personal computer market from its formation through all its iterations to our current explosion of the Internet and all its culture of collaboration.

And it was true then and it is true today — the U.S. supports entrepreneuring better than anywhere else.  It is not just rhetoric, the “land of the free.”  And it is more than our culture of independence.  Our culture supports our economic structure, which supports the creation of wealth across many class lines, and the empire builders (particularly of current generations) give back by supporting the next new thing and the next generation of entrepreneurs.  Even in hard economic times, sometimes because of hard economic times, the American entrepreneurial spirit thrives.

Happy birthday, America.  Glad to be home.

As entrepreneurs, this information applies directly to us, as our choices are deeply based in individual choice and self-expression.

This autonomy in our lives can include control over our workplaces, choices of career or entrepreneuring, and pursuit of our dreams, whatever they might be.  Although wealth can lead to autonomy, wealth alone does not generate the same level of happiness that this freedom can create.  Wealth as an indicator of well-being levels off after personal needs are addressed.

Researchers at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand asked: What is more important for well-being, providing people with money or providing them with choices and autonomy?  Their meta-analysis of data from 420,599 people from 63 countries spanning nearly 40 years was written up in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published by the APA.

For more details and links from APA:

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2011/06/buy-happiness.aspx

For the article itself:

“What Is More Important for National Well-Being: Money or Autonomy? A Meta-Analysis of Well-Being, Burnout and Anxiety Across 63 Societies,” Ronald Fischer, PhD, and Diana Boer, PhD, Victoria University of Wellington; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 101, Issue 1. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/101/1/164/

Recently I was working with my close friend, colleague and client, Oded Noy, discussing our strategic work as Mentors with early stage entrepreneurs attending L.A.’s Founders Institute  http://www.founderinstitute.com/.

We agreed that the initial, hidden questions for all entrepreneurs are these:

“Why are you doing this?” and “How do you create value?” and “What will be the result of your contribution in 5 years’ time?”

Exploring these questions, removed for a moment from strategies and tactics, finance and operational issues, the entrepreneurs slow their minds and remember what had moved them in the first place to take the risk of their startup.They calm down and reflect.Then they smile, and the day-to-day pressures lift, and they become centered in the ideal they had first conceived.

Then we see the light that powers their way, because they have reconnected with the deeper meaning of their work.

Remember to check in on this light often.

]]> https://www.joeytamer.com/the-entrepreneurs-hidden-questions-of-meaning/feed/ 0 https://www.joeytamer.com/lessons-in-successful-hiring/ https://www.joeytamer.com/lessons-in-successful-hiring/#respond Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:56:17 +0000 http://www.joeytamer.com/blog/?p=1258 I once “watched” Steve Jobs pursue my close friend when he wanted to hire her. He was an unrelenting suitor. He was charming and forthright. Once he had her leaning towards saying “yes,” he set out to woo her husband to support the move. I watched his campaign from her first words to me, “Very flattering, but I don’t want to leave my practice, my house, my friends” to her ultimate joy that she agreed, and her marvelous success from the choice.

I recalled this story last week (4.7.10) when attending Dealmaker Media’s L.A. Strategy Series “Don’t hire your BFF” http://www.dealmakermedia.com/events/10.  Finding the right person with the best skills and a true fit to your organization’s culture is no simple matter, and a mistake is costly in time, money, morale and other company derailments that cannot be predicted. So perhaps Mr. Job’s ardent pursuit is a correct strategy.

Other interesting ideas were mentioned during this gathering, worthy of a short summary.

Hire folks smarter than you and make sure your hiring execs do the same.

• “A’s hire B’s hire C’s” was Jim Jonassen’s soundbite of the problem you must overcome.

Bring unusual and insightful questions when interviewing:

• What was your favorite failure?
• What was your worst hire?
• How do you see yourself in 5 years’ time?

Remember the importance of non-cash compensation, including:

• Acknowledgement and praise, both private and public
• Offering enough control to your hires that they can apply their maximum skills to any project
• Determining what motivates each of your hires, and giving it to them.

Consider what motivates different people and reward them accordingly:

• Task motivated people should receive reward compensation and be allowed to achieve their tasks’ goals.
• Analytic/intellectually motivated employees should be given the freedom to solve the problems set to them, then praised for it openly.
• Relationship motivated folks should be rewarded with personal or social time with the senior team, by way of acknowledging their achievement.

Thanks to Vince Thompson for his excellent moderation, and Jim Jonassen, Rich Battista, Brett Brewer and John Suh for their advice.

Approaching tax day, we need a light-hearted moment or two, and Public Radio International (PRI) offered one today (April 6^th 2010).  Here is the link to the podcast of anchor Marco Werman’s brief interview with John Keating of Foreign Policy Magazine:

 http://www.theworld.org/2010/04/06/tax-laws-around-the-world

On Thanksgiving, this gives me pause. I know there are hundreds of courses and seminars designed to empower and re-program our world view, to teach us a new “mindset” and change our behavior. Perhaps these work in some ways to give us new disciplines or tactics that remind us to behave with more integrity or to approach the world from a more positive view. This would be helpful, but I doubt these tactics change the underlying programming.

I think I chose to work with entrepreneurs because they tend to be fearless, optimistic glass-half-full kinds of folks. Egos, varying personalities and doubtful behavior aside, they believe in themselves and their vision, and their ability to prevail. They may be visited by demons in the night (http://tinyurl.com/yckwx38), but they do not see their glass half empty, much less poisoned.

So, before these pages go dark for the Thanksgiving holiday, I’d like to thank all the entrepreneurs out there, known and unknown, for adding to the world view of the glass half full and bubbling with opportunity. It is good to have company in this mindset.   If you know some of these, you might thank them while you pass the turkey this Thursday.

The PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, beautifully created by director/producer Ken Burns and producer/writer Dayton Duncan, is a moving portrait of the spirit of the American entrepreneur

John Muir dedicated his long life to the Parks. It is interesting that his wife Louisa supported his release from his management of her family’s 2600 acre ranch in California after only 10 years, returning him to his public pursuits.

Theodore Roosevelt supported the formation of the first National Parks and Monuments during his Presidency, at the urging of John Muir and others,

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. left his father’s company and dedicated himself to philanthropy, including the support of the Parks, and his design and building of Maine’s Acadia National Park’s 40 miles of carriage roads, to this day open only to hikers and bicyclers, horses and cross-country skiers.

Stephen Mather, an industrial millionaire, established the National Park Service in Washington D.C. to protect the parks.

Horace Albright, son of a California miner, lived in a room in Washington D.C.’s YMCA upon his arrival there, and became the legal assistant to Stephen Mather. He functioned as Acting Director of the NPS during Mather’s 18-month illness, later succeeding him as the 2nd Director of the NPS.

The early directors of the railways pursued the opening of the Parks to tourists and the building of hotels and tourist attractions, bringing in the people for whom the Parks were built.

Brothers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb built their photographic studio on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1904, photographing hikers and mule riders on their way down the Canyon, and just managing to process the prints by end of day when their subjects returned to the Rim at the top. Taking one of the first motion picture cameras down the river through the canyon (only the 8th such successful river trip known at the time), they produced the first motion film of the river and the canyon and each other, often in precarious moments. For 60 years afterwards, Emery’s narration, in person and on tape, was shown twice a day at their studio on the South Rim.

John Dorr, one of the wealthy “cottage” owners of Mt. Desert in Maine, rallied his friends, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to buy, donate and preserve the island from the results of the newly-invented gasoline-powered sawmill. He convinced President Woodrow Wilson to set aside 6,000 acres into what is now Acadia National Park, the first Park east of the Mississippi. Dorr became the Park’s first superintendent in his 70s, for 25 years, spending all of his inherited wealth over his lifetime on his passion. It is said there were funds for his burial only because his trust fund administrator hid $2,000 from him.

These stories from 100 years ago show the American history of these capital, political and social entrepreneurs, who represent as much of our national character as the Parks themselves.

Now that we have 24/7 access to communication, the technology is not only always on, we are also always on…on call for everyone and every message. I can’t remember how long ago I abandoned land lines for wireless-only everything, but I have had only my mobile phone for years now, and it is always on, California time.

Now, many of us are always on call for international clients, elders, kids or Lojack. Trouble is, we are on call in every time zone of the world. I had to train AT& T to stop sending me text messages to sell me upgrades at 3:00 a.m. My New York client did me a favor one morning sending me a message at 5:00 a.m. EST (uh, 2:00 a.m. in L.A.) en route to LaGuardia.

One Saturday, my colleague, using a new technology call JOTT, sent a note to me, translated from voice, which reached my email and my cell phone text simultaneously, at 7:00 a.m. I happened to be awake, but my husband was not, and the text message (3 of them to cover the message) beeped incessantly near our pillows.

I am not without blame – I once called the CTO of one of my clients on his cell, forgetting he was in Russia. Really woke him up!

I love the new gadgets; I love the availability of constant access. Most of all, I love that technology allows me to time shift and to be anywhere anytime. So, for etiquette’s sake, consider your technology, your message’s urgency, and your recipient’s time zone (which you may not actually know). Time shifting is the blessing of technology – allow folks to use it to suit their lives.