Productivity501 » Development

Effort vs. Ability

Mark Shead — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:16:01 +0000

Scientists did an experiment with a bunch of children where they gave them several tests that got increasingly more difficult. After the first two tests, they told the children that they had done very well. Group A was praised them for being smart and talented. Group B was praised for their hard work.

Next they gave them a very difficult test–so difficult that many children didn’t get a single question right. They then told both groups that they hadn’t done as well on this test and asked them if they knew why. The students from group A said that it must be because they weren’t smart enough. Group B said that it must be because they didn’t try hard enough.

That in itself is pretty amazing. Giving people praise for being smart basically backfires because it teaches them that success comes from being intelligent. Once they are faced with a situation where they fail, the logical conclusion is that they must not be very intelligent. On the other hand, praising people for working hard helps them stay focused on something they can control–their effort.

My 4 year old is pretty advanced when it comes to reading. According to a test we recently had her take, she reads on the level of a 10 or 11 year old. I’m not sure how accurate the test is, but I do know that it isn’t normal for a kid who isn’t even kindergarten age to read chapter books. (As a side note, one of my proudest moments as a parent was when I saw her 2 year old brother bring her a book and she sat down on the floor and read it to him.)

So is my daughter a genius? No. She has simply put in a lot of hard work. Of course not nearly as much hard work as my incredible wife who taught her how to read.

So back to the experiment. The scientists went ahead and gave the kids another test. This time one that was much easier. Up to this point the kids in both groups had performed about the same on the tests. There was no significant difference between them. On this final test, there was a wide variance in the scores. Members of group A (who had been told they were smart) did about 25% worse than group B (who had been told they had worked hard).

Why did this happen? Lets try to imagine the thought process of these two groups:

Group A – told they were smart:

Test 1 – Oh I’m pretty smart. Good for me.
Test 2 – Hm. They say I must be really smart. Maybe I’m smarter than I realized.
Test 3 (the hard one) – I did horrible. I guess I’m not very smart. Maybe I’m not even as smart as I originally thought.
Test 4 – I didn’t really try that hard because this test taking isn’t really for me.

Group B – told they had worked hard:

Test 1 – Hey they are proud of how hard I worked.
Test 2 – I did it again. I must be working pretty hard.
Test 3 (the hard one) – Not so good. I must not have worked as hard on this one.
Test 4 – I tried extra hard on this one and I think I did pretty well.

That is a pretty big difference just based a small change in wording isn’t it?

This is something I’m trying hard to be intentional about when it comes to my kids. I don’t want my daughter to feel like she can read because she is smart. I want her to feel like she can read well because she worked hard. I want her to feel like effort is rewarded instead of just success.

I’ve read some other studies that suggest this isn’t something that is limited to children. It works the same way for adults. If you are in management you need to pay careful attention to exactly what you say when you praise people. Make sure you are focused on their effort–not on how smart they are.

While I haven’t read any studies about self motivation, my experience shows that this is a good mindset to be in when it comes to your personal motivation as well. Don’t take too much pride in your intelligence and instead focus on your hard work. You know when you are really trying and putting out effort better than anyone else. If you can focus on rewarding yourself for doing your best, it places you in the mindset to succeed–even after having had a failure. If you focus on how smart or talented you are, it can actually make you do worse!

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Discrimination Against the Unemployed

Mark Shead — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:30:50 +0000

A reader named Susan left an interesting comment on Never Hire an MBA. She doesn’t like the article, but what I found interesting was this part of her comment:

Are you familiar with discrimination laws, well although there is not currently a discrimination law that would protect individuals from potential employers from discriminating against individuals who are unemployed, I am proud to say that I am one of thousands who have signed a petition against little minded people who discriminate against the unemployed.

I hadn’t heard of this before, but after a little research I found that some employers are including requirements in their job postings that basically say, “we only consider job candidates who are currently employed.” Some people are upset about this because they feel it discriminates against people who don’t have a job. Which it obviously does.

Why would you do this?

So why would a company do this? Well if you were wanting to hire someone and knew that you’d get hundreds of applications, wouldn’t you want to restrict those applications to the pool of people who would statistically be best for the job? Lets say you have 1,000 workers who all have identical skill sets. Half of them have a job and half were fired 9 months ago. If you randomly choose someone from the first group and randomly choose someone from the second group who do you think has a better chance of being a good hire? Lets say you repeat the experiment 100 times. Do you think you’d get a higher percentage of good hires from the employed group or the unemployed group?

Now regardless of what you think will happen, some HR departments think their chances would be a bit better with the employed group. If you have 1,000 employees, an excellent employee appraisal system and suddenly needed to let half of them go, would the people you lay off be random? Probably not. You’d try to let people go who are least tied to your ability to make profit. That doesn’t mean that they are all bad workers. If Sue’s expertise is in project X and you are about to cancel X, you’d probably let her go before you let Bob go who works on Z where Z is your main money maker. But you’d also let go people who aren’t as productive, who show up late, who are harder to work with, etc. Another reason employers might do this is because they realize that job skills can get out of date very quickly. Since a lot of people have been out of work for a long time, they may feel more comfortable concentrating on people who are currently employed.

So HR departments figure they would rather hire the workers that other employers can’t do with out–not because they think everyone in the unemployed pool is a bad worker, but just because they think that their chances of randomly getting a good worker from the employed pool are better. Is it fair to a particular individual? No. Is it completely irrational? Not as irrational as other decisions HR makes. Besides HR may be admitting that they have very little ability to do their jobs and find good job candidates. If they are going to select a job candidate at random, they better try to do it in a way that increases their odds.

What can you do about this?

If you are unemployed, what can you do about this? Well you can do try to find some petition to sign, but there are more productive options. Here is what I would do:

Take any job – Find a job where you will learn something and take it as a learning experience. I’ve always wanted to work for McDonalds for a few weeks just to see how their systems are organized. It wouldn’t make any financial sense from a salary perspective, but from a learning perspective I think it would be fascinating. You could get a job selling cars or doing some form of direct customer service. The idea is to build your skills by doing something. Now the problem with this approach is that unemployment seems to help people more if they wait for a high paying job. It basically introduces an artificial element into the employment process that keep people from going out and getting any job just to stay working, but that is an issue best addressed in a different post.
Volunteer – The next option would be to volunteer somewhere. Keep yourself on a schedule where you have to get up in the morning and go somewhere to do some type of work. If you are on unemployment, society is basically paying you a salary so do your best to contribute back while keeping yourself busy doing something. At the very least, volunteering will help make sure you are out meeting people and the best way to get a job is always going to be through someone you know.
Contribute Online – This is similar to volunteering, but getting involved in online community projects can be another great option. If you code, you can program for an open source project. You can help open source projects with their documentation, test for bugs, write up meeting notes, etc.
Learn – Read the top 10 books in your field that you haven’t had a chance to read. Take an online class or work toward a certificate or citation program or get started on some type of masters degree in your field. Look for things that are quantifiable that you can put on your resume.
Blog – Write about stuff in your field. You can review the top books about the area where you want to get a job. You can do interviews with people in your field and post them on your blog.

The point is, don’t be lazy. There are hundreds of things you could be doing to take advantage of the time you have when you get laid off–things that will significantly improve your chances in the job market.

Maybe the policy of not interviewing people who don’t currently have a job is a reaction to dealing with hundreds of applicants who have been unemployed for the last 6 months and have simply been sitting at home watching television. I best there wouldn’t be anyone making policies like that if everyone followed those five steps mentioned above. If you want to stand out in a job interview, make sure you have been doing things that show you are motivated and not lazy–even when you aren’t employed.

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Free Derek Sivers Video

Mark Shead — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:36:33 +0000

AppSumo has some free videos of Derek Sivers talking about starting, running and selling CD Baby. Derek wrote the book Anything You Want which I highly recommend–except the cover, I hate the cover. The free deal only goes for the next 60 hours or so. You have to sign up for an AppSumo account, but it relatively painless and doesn’t require a credit card because the cost is $0.

If you are interested in starting a business or helping run a business, I’d highly recommend getting this. You can download the MP3, video or PDF of the talk. I haven’t listened to all the videos yet, but I wanted to let readers know about it while there was still time to get it. If it is anything like the book it should be brilliant.

And once again, I can’t recommend the book (sans the cover) enough. I bought a bunch of copies yesterday to send to friends and business associates.

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Is an MBA a Waste of Money?

Mark Shead — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:00:33 +0000

Normally I’ve taken the position that an MBA can be well worth the money. Even my arguments that many employers overvalue MBA candidates suggests that the degree may be a very profitable career decision. My article Never Hire an MBA got a lot of attention. I was surprised at the number of people who missed the point of the article, thought I was saying that no one should get an MBA and tried to defend the degree. While there were some well thought out arguments, there were quite a few that were—well lets just say, less well reasoned. Take a look at them for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. Also keep in mind that I moderated quite a few of the really bad ones.

This kind of surprised me. Not that I didn’t expect anyone to disagree, I just figured a disagreement with a bunch of MBA grads would occur on a different level than what I was seeing in the comments. One particular MBA grad called me an idiot, I responded by clarifying my position and asking about his experience, his response was to find a picture of me and called me several other names. While it isn’t uncommon for me to have disagreements with people, this style of argument was something foreign.

Still I had to delete quite a few comments–not because they disagreed with me, not because they called me an idiot, but because they contained language that I didn’t want on my website and didn’t have any discernible point of view once the language was removed. I realize it isn’t fair or accurate to lump every business student into the same group based on the responses of a few individuals, but it did make me start looking into some research regarding the value of business degrees. My results were startling. For example, during the first two years of college, undergraduates who study business show the least improvement in their writing and reasoning skills of any major. If the same thing holds true for graduate business students, it might explain some of the comments I was seeing.

While we are on the subject of undergraduate degrees, I ran into another surprising statistic. The GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) is typically the test you have to take to get into an MBA program. Lets say you are trying to choose an undergraduate degree based on what will best prepare you for taking the GMAT. Wouldn’t you be interested in avoiding the degree that produces the lowest average scores on the GMAT. For example, if English or History majors got the lowest scores on the GMAT, you might want to study something else. You’d think that studying business would be a safe bet. It’s not. In fact, of all the different degrees, business majors get the lowest scores on the GMAT.

Let that sink in for a moment. What if pre-med students did the worse on medical school admission exams? What if pre-law students were the least qualified to get into law school?

So if the GMAT is a good indication of how well you’ll do in an MBA program and going through an MBA program is a good way to do well in business, then studying business as an undergraduate is the worst possible choice you can make.

Those seem like reasonable assumptions don’t they. Doing well in an MBA program should somewhat correlate with doing well in business right? One would think, but the book Personal MBA pointed me to some research that shows the opposite.

Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford and Christina Fong from University of Washington looked at 40 years worth of data to see:

If possessing an MBA correlated with career success, increased salary, etc.
If doing well in an MBA was useful in predicting how well one would do in business.

Their idea was that if an MBA degree was valuable, then people with an MBA should have more successful careers than people without one. And, if the skills taught in an MBA program were important to business, then people who had high grades should do better in business than their classmates who had lower grades.

They published their findings in The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye. Here are two quotes from that study that will give you an idea of what they found.

Business schools are not very effective: Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success, results that question the effectiveness of schools in preparing their students.

There is scant evidence that the MBA credential, particularly from non-elite schools, or the grades earned in business courses–a measure of the mastery of the material–are related to either salary or the attainment of higher level positions in the organizations.

But all this doesn’t really matter if an MBA lets you make a lot more money right? Even if you aren’t better at business, it might still be worth it. Pfeffer and Fong seemed to suggest that and MBA doesn’t necessarily give you a higher salary, but we all know that there are jobs that MBAs get that pay more than at least some other jobs. Lets say you make $85,000 before getting an MBA. After the MBA you make $115,000. Is that a good deal? Assuming you went to a top tier program, you’ll probably have less disposable income after graduating than before once you take your loans into account. If you are lucky you might break even after 12 years. Of course there is the chance that something extraordinary might happen and you’ll do significantly better. However, there is also the chance that you’ll have trouble finding a job and do significantly worse. Unfortunately the chances of a huge windfall are probably less than the chances of a poor job market.

I like the idea of higher education enough that I’m not ready to say that an MBA is a bad decision for everyone. However, the evidence seems to suggest that MBA programs and business education in general are not a good investment on average. That doesn’t mean it is a bad investment for you specifically. Lets say you go out and buy a single lottery ticket and win $10 million. Was it a good investment? Statistically, no it wasn’t. Practically, by all means!

Here are some takeaways that might be worth considering:

Choosing business as your “default” major is always a bad idea. If you choose business you need to have a very VERY good reason for it.
Quitting a job to go to grad school, significantly increases your risk–particularly with the growing number of high quality online master’s degree programs that wouldn’t require quitting your job.
Who you are is more important than your degree.
Networking is important, but you don’t have to pay $100,000 to network.

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Anything You Want – Book Review

Mark Shead — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:51:34 +0000

Anything You Want is a short book by Derek Sivers. Derek started CD Baby and eventually sold it to Disc Makers. CD Baby lets musicians sell their CDs online and grew out of Derek’s frustration with trying to find a solution to sell his own CDs over the Internet.

Usually when I review a book, I try to give enough information that Productivity501 readers can tell if they should invest in reading it for themselves. This is one of the few books where I feel I can safely say, “just go read it.” It is an excellent book and I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t learn something from it.

It took me a lot longer to review Anything You Want because I couldn’t ever find the book in my house. It turned out my wife found the cover very disturbing and kept hiding it where she couldn’t see it (and I couldn’t find it). Don’t dismiss it because of the cover. The kid buried in the sand was meant to evoke the feelings of isolation an entrepreneur feels while pursuing their vision. Maybe I’m just not artsy enough. The good news is, the dust jacket picture is really the only thing I didn’t like.

Derek recounts how he started his company with a focus on his customers that made CD Baby very successful. The book is filled with stories of things that worked well for Derek as well as things that didn’t work so well. Here are a few examples:

CD Baby put a lot of work into setting up the art for musicians CDs. If the musician changed their mind after everything was done, it meant that some employee had to redo everything. CD Baby instituted a “pizza policy.” If a client wanted them to redo a couple hours of work, they would be happy to–for a pizza. The client could call the pizza shop near CD Baby and order a pizza in exchange for the extra work.

This is a brilliant strategy. It only costs the client $15 to $25, but it puts a human face on the request and makes it clear that someone is going to be doing extra work to process the client’s change of mind. It keeps people from asking for extra work that they don’t really care about, while staying accessible to people who really need something changed.

On the failure side of things, Derek talks about how he let his employees setup their own retirement plan without really watching what they were doing. They ended up creating a profit sharing plan where the company’s profit was going to them instead of to the owner. When he stepped in and changed things, he became the bad guy.

Derek takes a very balanced approach to business. It isn’t about just making more money–he wants to be happy. This is an important perspective that you don’t always find in business books.

The book is very short, but full of good ideas and useful perspectives. If you want to improve a business, Anything You Want is going to be one of the best $10 investments you’ll make.

Anything You Want is available from Amazon in hardback, audio and digital editions.

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Effective Communication

Mark Shead — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:58:08 +0000

Yesterday we talked about influence. One of the primary keys to influence is good communication. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you can’t communicate them in a way that will connect with your audience and bring about change. In this post, we are going to look at three ways to communicate more effectively.

1. Be visual

I once ran an IT department for a non-profit with about 200 employees. In the work room we had a large color and a large b&w printer. The cost on the color printer was about $0.15 per page. The cost of the b&w was $0.015 per page. I kept trying to ask people to use the b&w unless they had a compelling reason to print color. When you are printing 50,000 toe 100,000 pages per month the $0.015 vs $0.15 made a big difference on the budget. A few casual visits to the work room made it clear that no one was listening. A good percentage of the paper being printed on the color printer was b&w or had unnecessary color.

I had my assistant get me 165 pennies to prepare for a meeting where I was going to try once again. I took 10 sheets of paper, put them on the table and said, “Here is how much this costs to print on the b&w printer.” Then I dropped 15 pennies on the table. ”Here is how much it costs to print these same 10 sheets on the color printer.” I then dropped 150 pennies on the table, making as much noise as possible and letting them roll all over the place and onto the floor.

After that, people started being more careful. Behavior didn’t change overnight, but there was a noticeable drop in the usage on the color printer. Dropping the pennies on the table made an impression–something I hadn’t been able to do before using just my words. Showing is nearly always more effective than saying.

2. Tell stories

Stories engage us. They turn words into images and thoughts into emotions. Story telling is a powerful part of effective communication. As we start getting into the swing of things for the next election, watch how stories are used. Coming out and saying that 75% of the population was helped by program X is almost meaningless compared to trotting out a husband, wife and two kids and telling their story as an example.

We are not wired to respond on a deep emotional level to raw facts and figures, but we do respond deeply to the emotion, failures and success of other people.

3. What people hear vs. what you say

After Obama won the election, the news crews were talking to people who were very excited about his success. One person interviewed was a woman who made the statement that now she wouldn’t have to worry about putting gas in her car. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about her mortgage. I didn’t watch everything Obama said, but I don’t think he made any promises to pay mortgages or give away free gas. I do know he did a pretty good job of conveying a message of hope, but what that lady heard and what Obama said were not at all the same thing. Here is the video:

While this may be a bit of an extreme example, it is vitally important to remember that what you say isn’t the important thing. What matters is what people hear. In many cases those to things can be miles apart. All of us hear things through our own set of biases, assumptions and personalities. When you are communicating it is easy to be so focused on what you say, that you overlook what people will hear.

(This isn’t meant to be any type of political statement. It is just the best illustration of my point.)

So, in summary, if you want to be a better communicator, be visual, tell stories, and concentrate on what people hear.

Some of my friends are involved in putting on a series of communication workshops starting in Vail this October. That is what got me thinking about this post in the first place. If you are interested in their event, checkout the Dynamic Communicator’s Workshops.

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Leaps of Imagination

Mark Shead — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:55:04 +0000

Einstein was a smart, but the world is full of smart people. What was different about Einstein that allowed him to come up with the theory of relativity? Simple. Einstein was able to take a leap of imagination. At the time, everyone believed that time was constant. If you and I synchronize our watches and I wait on the ground while you take off and fly on a very fast space ship, it was assumed that when you came back our watches would still match. It was such a fundamental concept that no one even bothered to question it.

However, Einstein realized that something didn’t quite seem right. The basis of his uneasiness with the modern theories came when he was 16 years old and began to wonder, “what would a beam of light look like if you were traveling along with it at the speed of light?” This led to other questions. ”If you are on a train going the speed of light and shine a flashlight backwards, would anyone be able to see it behind you?” ”If you shine the light forward from the train, would anyone see it in front of you?” “If the light was directed in front of a train traveling at 2 times the speed of light, we should be able to observe some light traveling faster than other light on earth, but that does not seem to be the case.”

So if the speed of light didn’t change, it must be fixed. But this introduces another problem. Lets say you are on an elevator that moves up and down very rapidly. You have a mirror on either side and “bounce” a beam of light back and forth and the elevator moves up and down. To you, riding in the elevator, the light seems to be traveling the distance across the elevator. However, to someone outside looking in, the light is traveling diagonally as the elevator moves up. So when measured from the outside, the light is traveling a longer distance in same amount of time than the light measured from the inside relative to the rest of the elevator.

Questions like this kept Einstein puzzled and most likely confused his friends. One day, he thought, ”If the speed of light is constant, what else can change? What about time?” And that was the leap of imagination that set Einstein apart. It probably seems simple now, but it was a huge step forward and a fairly unintuitive conclusion.

Einstein was able to come up with an idea that was unencumbered by traditional knowledge, common sense and day to day experience. This was truly a leap and required a great imagination. In many ways it relied on ignoring information rather than simply acquiring more data.

Many break throughs both small and large are the result of similar leaps of imagination. This is often what people refer to as creativity–the ability to think about a problem from a completely different perspective in order to find a solution that would be difficult or impossible to achieve in a step by step fashion.

So how can you make leaps of imagination to solve problems? Obviously it isn’t easy, but there are a few things you can do to increase your chances.

Write down your assumptions

This is a lot harder than it sounds. The assumption that Einstein finally questioned was something so basic that it wouldn’t have even made sense to list as an assumption. Listing your assumptions can help you recognize the constraints that you are placing on your thought processes.

Pretend you are someone else

This may sound silly, but pretending to be someone else can help force your mind to approach the problem from a different point of view and help you avoid getting stuck in a single channel of thinking.

Consider the opposite goal

Lets say you are trying to figure out a way to increase sales at your company. Instead of thinking of ways to increase sales, consider what you could do to reduce sales. This lets you better identify the variables that are associated with your end goal. Not every idea is going to be effective, but this process can help you find ideas that you’d overlook when approaching the problem from normal direction.

Make the problem tactile

Getting the problem into a form where you can touch and feel it is a powerful way to develop new ideas and new approaches. For example, you might reduce the problem to something that can fit on note cards, you might build a small model, etc. Anything you can do to let you look at the problem from a different point of view will increase your chances of having a leap of imagination to solve the problem in a novel way. Getting the problem into a form where you can touch and feel it lets your brain approach it in a physical spatial sense and can suggest solutions, analogies and approaches that will be difficult to come up with when it remains abstract.

Visualize in a different way

Can you graph the problem? Can you overlay it on other information that will help you spot trends? Can you colorize the data in ways that will reveal patterns and similarities? Giving your brain a new way to look at a problem is often the best way to avoid a rut and generate new ideas.

Conclusion

Being smart is good, but real geniuses know how to use leaps of imagination to generate creative solutions to problems. It isn’t an easy thing and there aren’t really any short cuts, but being aware of what you are trying to achieve can help you take steps to generate creative ideas and avoid getting bogged down with preconceived ideas and faulty assumptions.

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Do The Work – Review and Free Book

Mark Shead — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:14:58 +0000

Steven Pressfield is the author of a number of books including The Legend of Bagger Vance and War of Art. His newest book Do The Work walks you through a process for getting work done. This quote gives you a good idea of what you’ll find in the book.

Our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project, or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account. The enemy is resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why he can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.

Steven designed the book as a guide for finishing a project. While it is geared toward people who are working on a writing project, much of the content is readily adaptable to any type of project. Some of the points from the book:

The biggest thing holding you back is yourself.
Research often becomes and excuse for not producing something.
If you want to make something you have to dive in and start making it.
Over-thinking can hold you back.
It is more important to write (or create) something than to get it right.
Get it on paper and then edit or redo, but don’t let thinking and planning slow you down.

The book is short and can be read in about an hour. It is part of the Domino Project founded by Seth Godin. They sent me a copy to review.

Now for the free part. General Electric has sponsored the Kindle version of this book, so if you are interested you can get a free digital copy of it as long as you get it before May 20th. Don’t own a Kindle? No problem, you can get Kindle software for your phone or computer to read it as well.

Even if the book isn’t something you think you are interested in right now, I’d highly recommend getting the free version added to your Amazon account. The next time you are getting ready to start a big project you might find it is just what you need to get started off in the right direction.

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Personal MBA

Mark Shead — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:12:41 +0000

Josh Kaufman sent me his new book The Personal MBA. His “Personal MBA” started out as list of recommended reading for someone who wanted to really learn how business works, but wasn’t sure an MBA was really worth it. The list grew with input from others and now consists of this list organized by topic along with reviews of each book.

Eventually Josh decided to distill what he had learned into his own book and the result was The Personal MBA. I think the book is excellent. He first talks about his quest for learning how businesses really work and lays out a pretty effective argument that top MBA degree programs are:

A poor investment – If you use the things you learn in business school to evaluate whether to get an MBA, you’ll probably decide against it.
Have no correlation with your ability to make money or perform well in business.

These are interesting conclusions. In Never Hire an MBA I wrote that an MBA degree is often overvalued in the hiring process by employers who run small businesses. However, the fact that at least some employers will overvalue the degree seemed to provide a pretty good justification for getting one. Josh makes a very good argument and cites some interesting research. If you are thinking about getting an MBA you should at a very minimum read the first section of The Personal MBA.

The rest of the book tries to cover everything Josh has learned about business in his pursuit of self-education. The book is organized into 12 sections. Each section contains a large number of short chapters. The sections are:

Why Read This Book?
Value Creation
Marketing
Sales
Value Delivery
Finance
The Human Mind
Working With Yourself
Working With Others
Understanding Systems
Analyzing Systems
Improving Systems

Most of the short chapters have a URL that takes you to a link highlighting the key points, questions and a short video of Josh explaining that chapter. For example, here is a video on Social Proof.

The videos are different from the contents of the book, but they can be helpful if you are looking for a bit more discussion around a particular topic. They also serve as an interesting marketing tool for the book because they can be embedded and shared using social tools.

Whats great about this book is that it gives you a simple way to think more in-depth about all kinds of different aspects of your business. If you have a job or own a business, this book will help you. It is really a great resource. On the other hand, I don’t think the book does away with the value of the Personal MBA reading list. The list has a lot of great books. However, The Personal MBA book does a great job of synthesizing a number of ideas and bringing them together in one place. It offers a tremendous amount of value in only 400 pages of easily readable ideas.

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5 Simple Networking Tips

Mark Shead — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:00:47 +0000

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the importance of who you know keeps going up. Here are five tips for cultivating and growing your network. Note: I don’t advocate doing any of this to simply take advantage of other people. Networking only works if you are genuinely interested in the people you are trying to connect with. If you try to fake it just to get favors from people, everyone will know.

1. Use Social Networking Tools

Sites like Facebook and Linked In make it easy to find people you’ve known in the past. In particular, the ability to look at the friends of your current friends can save you a lot of time in hunting down acquaintances from school or previous employment. It is helpful to decided how you are going to use a particular tool. For example, you might decide to use Facebook for friends and family while Linked In is used for everyone you have had any contact with. If your social networking tool lets you give different people different levels of access, that might be another way to segment your relationships between closer people you know and your wider circle of people you’ve met.

2. “Ping” Your Network

Simply having people in your network doesn’t help you. You need to make a conscious effort to maintain some type of contact with each person at least a few times each year. You want to keep your name in front of them and you also want them to feel like they can contact you. It is a lot easier to give someone a call if you had an email from them last week than if you haven’t heard from them in 2 years. You can “ping” people by sending them a personal email, commenting on their status, sending them an instant message, sending an SMS, or giving them a quick telephone call.

3. Send Gifts

Gifts don’t have to be complicated or expensive. If you finish reading a book that you know someone in your network would enjoy, consider sending it on to them. One of my clients collects old fashioned marbles. Whenever my wife or I run across old marbles, we buy them and send them to her.

The point of sending gifts is to show that you value them and know who they are and what they like. You need to demonstrate that you pay attention to the details about their life. It is a way to help strengthen and deepen your relationship.

4. Send Information

Sending newspaper clippings and links to web articles is another effective way of deepening your relationship. I find it works particularly well to physically send stuff through the mail. Just make sure that what you send is highly relevant to the individual.

5. Share Your Network

Offer to make introductions with people you know. If someone in your network is looking to buy a house, offer to introduce them to a real estate agent whom you know would be helpful. If someone in your network is talking about moving to Germany, you can offer to put them in touch with someone who lives over there.

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7 Ways To Upgrade Your Brain

Mark Shead — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:39:03 +0000

If you like this article, please share it with your friends on your blog, email, a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, Facebook or however else you share links.

A person’s mind is their most powerful tool. Yet very few people take intentional steps toward “upgrading” their brain and trying to become smarter. Here are some scary statistics from an article in The Economist:

In 1991 a worker with a bachelors degree earned 2.5 times as much as a high-school drop out.
In 2010 a worker with a bachelors degree earned 3 times as much as a high-school drop out.

There is an obvious trend toward paying people who have “upgraded their brain” more money. This probably isn’t too surprising, but consider this:

42% of people who graduate from college never read another book.

Wow! 42%!? To me that says that a good number of people get out of college and just assume they have arrived–no need to work on getting any smarter. Obviously there are ways to learn other than reading books, but books have traditionally been and still are one of the main ways you acquire formal knowledge. If you aren’t reading, it is very unlikely you are growing. It is even less likely that you are actually getting smarter in ways that have value outside of the tasks you do on a weekly basis.

In this post, we are going to look at seven ways to upgrade your brain. They are:

Read
Get a degree
Seek out new experiences
Think
Practice
Write
Do things that are hard

Read

Reading is the primary way we educate ourselves. If you aren’t reading, you are doing yourself a huge dis-service. With only a few exceptions, I’d go as far as to say that if you aren’t reading your brain is dying. Reading is the fundamental bedrock of upgrading your brain and becoming smarter. You have to read regularly.

Not all reading methods and not all reading contents are equal. There is a very big difference between reading on a computer and reading a physical book. A few months ago I read a study that compared reading on an iPad or Nook to reading a book and the researchers found that people remembered less when reading from the iPad. It had something to do with the way we perceive a lighted surface vs. a reflective one. Perhaps because we associate lighted surfaces with TV and are less engaged.

Reading on the Internet is also quite different from reading a book. A book presents a clear start and end point. There are also more barriers to publishing a physical book than getting something up on the web. Chances are a book will have more thought behind it than an article published on a web page. In addition, it is much easier to jump from place to place on the web so Internet articles don’t typically require or inspire the same level of concentration as what you might need for an intense book.

I’m not saying that reading from the Internet is bad. The web is an incredible tool and gives us access to information that would have been impossible in the past. However, we need to take care to not let it crowd out our traditional reading. We also need to be careful to use the Internet for things that the Internet is good for and use books for things books are good for. The Internet is great for looking up a single fact–something that can take a very long time with a book. Books are great for deeply studying a subject. (Obviously there are exceptions depending on what you are researching, but this is still true in general.)

So what should you read? Here are some suggested categories:

Classic books
Books related to your area of your current expertise.
Books related to the expertise you will need to be competitive in 10 years.
Books on topics from a completely different field.

For example, a computer programmer might read The Scarlet Letter for category 1. A book on advanced features of their programming language for category 2. A book on business management for category 3 and a book on neuroscience or physics for category 4.

An entry level accountant might read:

Moby Dick
A book on best accounting practices
A book about preparing for the CPA exam
A book on social media

This type of approach will help make sure you are getting a well rounded reading experience that helps prepare you for today AND tomorrow. Obviously there is nothing to keep you from reading other books like current fiction, etc. However, if all of your reading falls outside of these four categories, you probably are reading more for entertainment than for upgrading your brain.

Get a(nother) degree

If you don’t have a college degree, get one. However, keep in mind that not every degree is equal. You can get a diploma without necessarily learning very much just like you can become very smart without getting a diploma. You need two things from a degree:

You need the recognition that comes from having a formal college degree.
You need the knowledge that comes from having worked hard at an academic pursuit.

Society has decided that everyone should go to college. Because of this people without a degree have a much harder time at getting jobs. Colleges have responded by lowering standards so a degree doesn’t mean as much as it use to–particularly from some institutions.

This is why it is worth putting the extra effort into getting a degree that is well recognized and that will give you the best educational experience. We will discuss choosing a good school later on.

If you already have a degree, the same thing applies. Get another one. To be competitive in todays job market, most people are going to need the training and recognition that comes from studies beyond the bachelors level. Usually a master’s degree is a good choice, but there are graduate certificate and citation programs that can be excellent options. Even if you are pursuing a master’s degree, a graduate citation can be an excellent stepping stone that gives you a way to quantify your education as you pursue your master’s degree. A resume that shows a graduate citation in X is better than a resume that shows you took some random classes.

When you get a degree, you are taking on the reputation of the school where you studied. The expectations that people have from a Yale graduate are different than the expectations of someone from a small community college. These expectations can strongly influence how people perceive you. If people think you are smart you will appear smart and they will think your ideas are good. (See this experiment for a better explanation of this phenomenon.)

This means that where you go to school can determine your ability to get interesting work. Having interesting work can be one of the best ways to upgrade your brain because it keeps you mentally active. So choosing a school is about more than just the academics and the educational experience. It is also about what type of opportunities it will give you and how rich those opportunities will be.

In the same spirit, you need to choose a school based on what type of academic experiences you will have. Generally you want to attend somewhere that you will be in the middle to top 75%. If you are the best student, you won’t have the same push toward your maximum capabilities. It is very healthy to have at least a few people in every class who can outperform you if you don’t try very hard. However, you don’t want to go to a school where everyone is so far above you that you can’t take advantage of the special opportunities that surround the academic environment.

If you are getting your first degree and just starting college, I’d suggest getting it in person at a traditional university–especially if you are a recent high school graduate. State schools offer reasonable tuition and can be very affordable. There is a local school here where one can pay for everything without loans while working full time during the summer and part time during the school year making minimum wage.

For your second degree, you may find that online degrees or some of the programs like an executive MBA are more suited to your social, family, career and employment situation. You have to be a bit more careful in selecting a school for an online degree as their reputation can vary much more than that of established traditional institutions. I would highly recommend pursuing something like my Master’s Degree from Harvard. It was very cost effective, fairly flexible and Harvard generally keeps a good academic reputation particularly compared with the reputation of some other online schools.

The real “brain upgrade” value of a degree is the way that it will force you diversify. You can’t just study the stuff that comes easy to you. A degree from a good academic institution is a well designed package to give you a well rounded education including studying things that you might not study on your own. My undergrad degree is in music composition, but I had to take a lot of classes outside of the topic of music. At my school I even had to take a physical education class and run three miles each semester in less than 21 minutes. To graduate you also had to prove you knew how to swim well enough that you wouldn’t drown should you accidentally fall in a lake. Obviously making sure I could swim wasn’t directly related to music composition, but it is part of what the college decided a well rounded person should know how to do.

At Harvard, I was studying software engineering. One of the required classes was on computational theory. It studies the theoretical aspects of what type of problems can be solved by a computer and what type of problems can’t. For the most part, it isn’t something you need to know to write typical software. However, the real value is in the way it changed my thinking. It forced me to learn a different area of mathematics. I can point to turning point insights I’ve had in areas unrelated to software engineering that were only possible because of the different way of thinking I learned in that class.

Seek out new experiences

Our brains grow when we do something new with them. If you aren’t doing anything new, your brain is not growing. Reading new books, studying new topics, going back to get another degree are all things that can help give your brain new experiences. But what about more mundane things? Here are some ideas of simple things you can do that will help give you new experiences.

Brush your teeth with your non-dominate hand a few times each week.
Read a section of the newspaper or a magazine that you’d normally never touch.
Go into a store that you’ve never had any desire to visit.
Draw pictures
Draw pictures with your non-dominate hand
Drive to work a different way.
Cook a type of food you’ve never had before.
Watch a few movies that are in a different language.
Attend a lecture on a topic you know nothing about.
Spend a few hours in municipal court as an observer.
Attend a city commission meeting.
Go to a restaurant that is primarily frequented by people who aren’t in your age group.
Learn to juggle. (I highly recommend this.)
Do your work outside for a few hours.
Strike up conversations with people you normally wouldn’t talk to.
Visit a library you’ve never been in.
Browse a section of a library that you’ve never been in.
Attend an art display in a style you don’t particularly care for.
Attend musical recitals for different instruments and a modern composer.
Take the stairs in a building where you’ve only taken the elevator.
Listen to a different radio station.
Spend some time reading in the room in your house where you spend the least amount of time.
If you have land or a yard, go stand in part of it where you don’t think you’ve ever been before.
Try out a different operating system. (Many can run from a CD. See Haiku and Ubuntu)
Go to a school board meeting.
Go star gazing.
Write a letter to someone you’ve never written to before.
Ask an older relative about the things they remember when they were your age.
etc.

None of those activities are likely to be life changing. However, each one will change you just a little bit and each one will give you brain something new to think about and process.

Think

We think all the time, but most of us don’t spend any structured, intentional time just thinking. We think just enough to start our next action. There is great value in taking the time to deliberately sit and think. One of the reasons we don’t do this is because it usually just becomes day dreaming. Day dreaming isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t as directed as what we are trying to achieve by sitting and thinking.

The funny thing about thinking is that there really isn’t that much information on how to go about doing it. There are books like How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci that are interesting but tend to focus on how to be creative less than on how to just think. On one hand this is disappointing, but on the other it makes sense. Thinking is a huge category and it is going to be very difficult for one person to explain how they think to someone else. What I’m going to do here is to try to give you some guidelines for productive thinking that work well for me. Obviously you’ll have to find what works for you and adjust things to fit your personal needs, but these should give you a start.

1. Decide what you are going to think about

To be really productive your thinking needs to be directed. Here are some things you might want to spend some time thinking about:

Your career plans and how to get the most out of your current job.
A business idea.
Personal goals – clarifying what you want to achieve and life and how to reach those achievements.

2. Find a quiet place without a lot of distractions

What qualifies as a distraction is going to be different for different people and may vary depending on what you are thinking about. A distraction free environment for clarifying your personal goals might be a coffee shop, but if you are working on coming up with a mathematical theorem, the same coffee shop might be full of distractions.

3. Write down what you hope to accomplish

Without a plan you won’t know if you accomplished what you set out to do. Get it down on paper to make sure you are clear what you want to get out of this “thinking session.” Your goal can be as specific or as general as necessary, but try to choose something that you can tell if you succeeded or not. Writing down “think about businesses” isn’t something that you can really quantify as having done or not–or at least it is hard to tell if you really accomplished anything. ”Come up with 3 ideas for a business I can run from home” is a bit easier to claim success.

4. Take notes

This may sound funny. Why would you take notes of your thinking? Getting something down on paper lets you see your though process much more easily than when it is just in your mind. Thinking is the process of interacting with information and getting some of that information out in front of you is a great way to focus and be creative. These don’t need to be formal notes. You can jot ideas, draw diagrams, doodle pictures or create mind maps to help clarify what you are thinking.

Practice

Musicians and sports figures constantly practice, but most other people never practice. If you can find a way to practice your skills, you can become better at what you do. Practice can make you faster, more efficient and better at your job. The trick is to find a small unit that you can repeat in a way that will increase your skill.

Here are some ideas of things you might be able to practice:

If you are slow at typing, practicing typing for 15 minutes per day can have a great return on investment.
Public speaking is something that can be practiced and good presentation skills are essential to many careers.
Writing is a skill that can be practiced. Few people wouldn’t benefit from being able to write a bit better.

Some fields even have competitions setup to help you practice. For example, TopCoder lets programmers compete to solve short programming challenges. Other disciplines have competitions or other ways that you can potentially practice.

Write

Writing is underrated. The discipline of getting thoughts from your head onto paper is very valuable and you can learn a lot simply by writing down your ideas and observations. Writing is the process of making your thoughts concrete and visible. it allows you to clarify what you are thinking and refine your ideas. Writing makes you smarter because it forces you deeper into a topic and shows you areas of your topic that you don’t fully understand. For example, I recently wrote a post about finite state machines to help clarify my understanding and make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything in the 5 years since I took a class on the topic. Not only was the exercise good for me by forcing me to think deeply about the topic again, but the interactions with people who read it and had suggestions, corrections or disagreements was personally rewarding.

I started Productivity501 in 2005 and the practice of writing on a regular basis has been extremely valuable to my career. I highly recommend starting at least a personal blog. A personal blog can cover pretty much any topic and gives you a way to get your content up where others can benefit from it and interact with you. It is a lot easier to have the motivation to write when you know someone might/will read it and a blog gives you that type of exposure without needing to do any type of extensive setup or expensive publishing.

Do things that are hard

I’ve talked about the importance of reading things that are hard, but the same concept applies to doing things that are hard. Doing things that are difficult raises your ceiling and increases your capabilities.

I’ve heard of basketball coaches that put a smaller ring inside of the basketball hoop during practice. This makes it a lot harder for players to make baskets during practice, but when the game comes and they are practicing on a normal sized hoop it seems much easier to make shots. They make practice harder in order to raise the bar on their performance when it really matters.

In some ways, this suggestion sounds like the suggestion to find things to practice and there is some overlap. However, doing things that are hard can involve doing big projects and larger scale work than finding something small that you can practice over and over again. If tackle writing a 100 page research paper, the 5 page papers you are subsequently assigned will seem trivial in comparison. A builder who completes a 10,000 sq. foot luxury home is probably going to find managing the construction of smaller sized homes much easier after they have stretched themselves to manage the larger construction project.

If you want your brain to be operating at its peak capabilities, you need to constantly be asking yourself, “When was the last time I did something where I felt truly challenged? When was the last time where I was seriously worried that I might fail?” If you haven’t had any of those experiences recently, you may need to seek out a difficult assignment or project in oder to make sure your brain isn’t becoming stagnant.

Conclusion

Your brain is your most valuable asset. Many people leave their brain’s development up to chance. If you want to safeguard against becoming stale and irrelevant you need to make a conscious effort to upgrade your brain, develop your skills and insure that you are moving forward–not backwards.

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Read Stuff You Don’t Understand

Mark Shead — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:54:34 +0000

If you want to grow you must push yourself beyond where you are at. Sometimes this means reading material that you don’t completely understand. Obviously you can’t pickup a book in a completely foreign language and expect to get anything out of it, but you can pickup a book on a topic where you don’t really have the right prerequisite knowledge to understand 100% of the content and still learn a lot.

Lets say you are reading something where 25% of it is completely foreign to you. By foreign I mean that you understand the words, but you don’t really understand what is being said. Many people would consider this a waste–because you don’t understand it. However, your mind is a marvelous thing and if you try to understand the contents, it will fill in the gaps. You may need to know A to understand B, but if you read B first it will still somehow remain in your unconscious and when you happen on A things become just a bit more clear.

When I was in high-school I learned a great deal about MIDI and electronic music simply by reading the specs out of musical instrument catalogs. When I started, I didn’t understand half of what was written in the descriptions, but little by little things started making sense as I pieced together a bit of information from one description with a snippet of information from somewhere else.

Even though it might be hard, pressing through reading materials that you don’t fully understand can be a very good way to gain comprehension in a new area. Obviously having access to the Internet makes it much easier to look things up. If you don’t understand a concept, chances are you can find a simpler explanation somewhere.

However, I wonder if this is always good. Sometimes information is so readily available that we don’t really bother to remember or even understand it. We trade the convenience of a Google search for the hard-won knowledge that comes from wrestling with a subject in a struggle for comprehension.

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Questions about Online Degrees

Mark Shead — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:15:57 +0000

Here are some of the questions I’ve received from readers about online degrees. Most of these were prompted by my post about getting my masters degree from Harvard’s Extension School.

So would you recommend the Harvard Extension School program?
~ Dana

Yes. If they have a degree that fits your needs and you can meet the residency requirement, the Harvard Extension School offers some of the best value in education that I’m aware of. Be aware that some of the students who are full time on campus have a negative view of the Extension School students. One of the main complaints I’ve heard is that it is too easy to get into the Extension School. Some students feels that their acceptance into Harvard validates their importance. The Extension School policy of letting everyone try to take some classes and then admitting students who prove they can handle the course work, seems a bit too open.

Personally I think the idea of admittance based solely on performance is probably the fairest way of handling admission to a degree program. The only reason I see for not doing that is if having large numbers of people taking introductory classes would somehow bring down the quality of the class. Interestingly this seems to be less of an issue with online classes than in-person classes. With Internet classes, one slow student can’t monopolize the classroom lecture. They may take more of the teaching fellow’s time, but since most communication is done over email, there tends to be an upper limit to this.

Also, most forms of financial aid aren’t available until after you’ve been admitted to the program so most students have a huge financial investment in the first classes. If they can’t make the cut, they are likely to drop out in the first few weeks while they can still get their money back.

Since you’ve done both an online masters degree and a go-to-the-university masters degree, which did you feel was more difficult?
~Leanne

Thats a bit difficult to judge. My first master’s degree was in music composition–something I had been studying for years. The online degree program through Harvard was focused on software engineering–something I had some experience in, but not nearly the same level of academic background. So it is difficult to compare them directly. As far as the classroom experience, I find sitting in a physical class with other students much easier than attending a lecture online. There is a certain amount of social momentum in a classroom that is hard to duplicate online. It is nice to be able to rewind a lecture if you miss something, but that still isn’t as useful as comparing notes with another student or asking the teacher a question after class.

I’m in highschool and I’m starting to try to select a college to attend. What do you think about going to an online school like what you did for a bachelors degree?
~Daniel

There are a lot of things you will learn outside the classroom by physically going to college for four years. I wouldn’t recommend getting your first college degree online. When I was in my mid 20s, I noticed that I could talk to someone for 5 or 10 minutes and generally tell if they went to college or not. At first I thought it was their academic experience, but looking back I think it had more to do with the social skills they picked up from attending a four year school and interacting with all the other students and teachers. These experiences are very valuable and I’d recommend not missing out on them if you can help it.

Have you ever had an employer not accept your online degree?
~Greg

I’ve owned my own company since before finishing my degree from the Harvard Extension School, so this hasn’t been an issue. However, if you are looking at an online degree program, this is one of the reasons I’d recommend going to a school with an established long running reputation. By long running, I’m talking about something that can be measured in centuries. You don’t want to get an online degree from a school that has only been around for 15 years and has a reputation as “one of those online schools”. You want a degree from a school that people have heard of well before the Internet came around. It isn’t that internet only schools are never good, you just run a greater risk that they may do something to damage their reputation down the road. This is particularly true of for-profit online colleges.

Does your degree from Harvard say something like “online degree” on it?
~Leanne

When I first applied for the program I asked about this and I was told that, “you get the same diploma as anyone graduating from Harvard.” It is the same diploma, but it says “Studiorum Prolatorum” which basically translates into “in extension” or “of extended studies” right under the name of the degree. Harvard diplomas are in Latin anyway, so it isn’t like people are going to be able to read anything more than your name.

That said, if you are trying to hide the fact that you took classes online, you are doing something wrong. Getting an online degree takes a great deal of discipline and you should be proud of that. An online degree gives you experience of working with distributed teams–a reality in modern work environments. Often an online degree will give you the ability to gain on the job experience that you wouldn’t have obtained otherwise. If you go to a good university, the fact you took classes online should make you more desirable–not less. (I’m specifically talking about Master’s degrees here. I don’t think online schools are a good option for your first college degree as I mentioned above.)

What’s kind of funny about this question, is that I have never had to show my diplomas to anyone. I take that back, I did have to send copies to my auto insurance years ago because in my early twenties, there was a small discount for someone with a graduate degree. I’ve never had to show any type of diploma for a job. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. There are probably employers out there that ask for it. I just don’t know anyone who had to show a diploma for a job–if they wanted to see proof of schooling they would probably want transcripts to see your grades.

The only place I’ve heard of someone showing a diploma to get a job was Frank Abagnale when he forged a diploma from Harvard Medical School. Even then I think I may be remembering something from the movie–not his actual story.

Are online degrees worth anything?
~Sue

We’ll obviously I think so, but asking “are online degrees worth anything?” is kind of like saying “is a blue car reliable?” It depends. Where is the car from and who is driving it? Are online degrees worth anything? Where is the degree from and who is getting it? The piece of paper you get when you graduate can’t do anything for an employer. It is the person who holds the degree and two people can have the same piece of paper but have very different skill sets.

Going to college is a way to help increase your skills and your employability. Simply attending classes isn’t going to automatically make you valuable. Simple getting a degree (online or not) isn’t going to immediately make you worth more. In this respect online degrees are no different than any other type of degree. And just alike any other type of degree there are schools that have poor reputations and schools that have good reputations. The nice thing about getting an online degree is that you aren’t limited to the schools that happen to be nearby–you can choose the one that has the best reputation for what you are wanting to accomplish.

What was the hardest part of getting your degree online. Specifically what did you find was more difficult with an online degree than your other graduate degree?
~Tom M

My online degree was in information technology–focused on software engineering. My other master’s degree was in music composition. It is a bit hard to compare the two because they are very different fields and I already had a bachelor’s degree in music.

For me the hardest part of an online degree was sitting down and paying attention. Fortunately the lectures were interesting and I had great teachers. If the teachers have of been boring or if I had of been taking classes without video lectures where I just had to read the textbook and other material, I would have been much worse. As I’ve mentioned the classroom camaraderie of an online degree doesn’t happen automatically and I didn’t really seek out other people who were going through the program until the end of my studies. As I was working on my thesis, I found some people who were a bit ahead of me on completing theirs and asked for any advice they had. It was incredibly refreshing to just talk to someone else who was going through the same difficulties I was. I should have started this early on and tried to keep in contact with people through the degree program. The problem with online degrees is that not everyone progresses at the same pace and if you want to develop relationships with people you have to really seek them out.

In talking to some of the teachers and advisors, it sounded like a lot of people really struggled with the writing aspect of the coursework. When I was working on my thesis proposal, my advisor told me that I seemed to be having a much easier time because writing came easy for me. I thought this was kind of strange, but evidently I was submitting a proposal, getting feedback, making the changes, submitting the corrected version and I was good to go, while other people were going through 5 to 10 revisions.

It sounds like a lot of people get through all the coursework, but then get stuck on the writing part of their thesis and never finish the program. Personally I think writing regularly for Productivity501 has been a huge benefit to me because I’m very accustomed to getting thoughts from my head out and into the computer. So starting a blog might be a good way to prepare for getting a graduate degree.

I’m not sure that online degrees are more difficult from the writing standpoint, but I do know that the support you get when physically working with your thesis director and thesis advisor is much greater in person than via email. Based on that, someone without good writing skills may want to do their thesis in person, or at least plan on making several trips to their school to work with their advisor and director during the thesis process.

The program I completed came out with a new option right as I was starting my thesis that would replace the thesis with a capstone course. I didn’t do this, but it looked like it might be something that was created in response to the difficulties people were having completing their thesis when they were doing most of their work online.

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Online Degree Programs

Mark Shead — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:14:30 +0000

Over the next ten years, I believe we are going to see an ever increasing shift toward online degree programs in areas where people have traditionally attended a physical university. There are a number of obvious reasons for this trend, but here are a few:

Low cost to scale – A well designed online degree program may have a high fixed cost, but a low-cost to add an additional student. The cost to provide a degree program to 20 students vs. 40 students requires a much smaller percentage increase than doubling the number of student physically coming to class.
Tighter focus on education – Online degree programs tend to be much more focused on the actual educational process with less of a focus on extra curricular activities. The university doesn’t have to be involved in finding parking spaces, dealing with rowdy students in the dorms or spending money on toilet paper.
Just in time education – It is hard to predict what you will need to know for your next job. Online programs let you get the training you need close to the time that you need it instead of spending four years and guessing what you should study.
Continual education – Many modern workers are going to find that they need to keep going back to school every few years to stay competitive and learn new skills. With continual education, it is a lot easier to get another online degree by doing work in the evenings or on Saturdays than it is to take another 2 to 4 years off work to go back to a traditional degree program.

The problem is that not every college or university is good at offering quality online classes. Online programs require a significant shift in the way teachers and students approach the educational process. The way actual coursework is conducted with online programs can vary dramatically from school to school and even class to class. Here are a couple ways universities and colleges present classes for online degree programs.

Correspondence style – These programs are basically run the same way older correspondence courses have been taught. You get a book, a study guide, some assignments and mail things back and forth with your teacher or the person administrating the course. The courses are “online” because you are using email instead of the USPS to send papers back and forth.
Forum interactions – Programs following this model are similar to the correspondence style, but you have interaction in a forum. The forum allows the teacher to communicate with the students to make assignments, post readings, etc. Students interact with the teacher and with each other. Often assignments will take the form of “Post your thoughts on X and comment on two other student’s posts.” Often the reading and book assignments are similar to correspondence course and usually there is no actual lecture to watch.
Interactive courseware - This is a step up from the forums with much more interactive and multimedia content available designed specifically for the specific class. These types of classes are usually pretty rigid in their structure because of the amount of time that goes into preparing the interactive content.
Video lecture for online students – This usually involves a teacher preparing a lecture and giving the lecture to a video camera so students can watch it. Sometimes the lecture will be done in real time. Other times it will be pre-recorded. Live classes may involve some type of chat to communicate with the teacher, ask questions, etc.
Lecture from a live class - This model involves videoing a real class and using that video either live or as a recording. Live classes may also include some type of chat component.

Learning Style and Course Presentation

The five types of online courses all require different styles of learning. There is a big difference between reading a book and following a guide and watching a live professor who is answering your chat questions. I tend to learn very well by sitting down with a few books and reading. However, I can do that without paying all the money for an online course. If I’m paying for an online class I want to have an actual lecture.

You have to make sure you understand your learning style and don’t assume that just because something works well for someone else it will work well for you. If you are looking at an online degree program, it is well worth your while to take a few classes to see if is a good match for the way you learn. Taking three classes from three different schools to see which online degree program is the best fit for you, may be a very good investment compared with getting halfway through a program only to discover that you simply can’t learn from the more advanced classes with the presentation options offered.

Many online degree programs will not allow you to transfer credits from another school. This is particularly true with masters degree programs. If you are taking courses from a couple different universities to decide which one is best for you, you’ll want to be strategic in which classes you take. You may be able to find a prerequisite course that will help you regardless of which program you eventually choose. Even if there isn’t an official prerequisite, you may be able to identify a class that will help prepare you for the actual program by giving you a better foundation than what you already have. Careful selection of your “trial run” classes can help make your course work significantly easier later on when you’ve chosen an online degree program and are working toward your degree.

Real-time vs. Pre-recorded Online Classes

Online degree programs that offer real-time lectures or have some component that requires you to be online in a video or text chat are starting to become more common. It wasn’t that long ago that the technology to make something like this work was very expensive and required the end user to have a lot of computer and networking experience. Now, setting up a video conference is well within the reach of most computer users.

Real-time has some great advantages. It gives you better interaction with other students and having the ability to ask questions as a lecture progresses can help make sure you don’t miss a concept in the first half of a lecture that is crucial to understanding the second half.

On the other hand, real-time interactions require that you be online at a particular time. Much of the benefit of online degree programs comes from the ability to work your classwork around a busy schedule of work and social commitments. If you have to be online at 8pm every evening, you have a fixed unmovable item on your schedule and everything else has to work around it.

The ideal setup is probably some type of hybrid where you can watch the class in real time and ask questions or watch a recording within the next 48 hours or so. If you live near the university, some online degree programs will let you show up for class in person when it fits into your schedule.

Another potential plus for real-time classes is that it forces you to attend at a particular time. Some people find that a class they can put off for 2 hours ends up getting put of for days and weeks. Of course if you tend to do this, the online classes are probably going to be very difficult to complete anyway, but be aware that along with the flexibility to schedule your class time comes the responsibility to actually get it done.

Social Aspects of Online Degrees

People who haven’t taken very many online courses invariable overlook the social aspects of going through an online degree program. Sitting in a real classroom with physically present teachers and physically present students offers social opportunities that are easy to take for granted. In a purely online class, you lose many of the social interactions like taking with students before class starts, comparing notes from the previous lecture, asking questions like “when is the next quiz” and all the little things that go into making your education socially fulfilling.

There were two particular events that I remember from getting my online master’s degree where I really noticed the difference of being present only on the Internet. The first one was when the Red Sox finally made it into the World Series (or won some big game). Evidentially there had been a great deal of celebration in Boston and the class after the game, the teacher made quite a few mentions of the event and subsequent celebration in the streets. The second situation was when a well known teacher was teaching a particular class for the last time. It was the same class he had taught to Bill Gates when he was a student and he was finally passing the torch on to someone else. The teaching fellows brought in a cake and some gifts and had a little party at the end of the last class. Obviously I was unable to download the cake over my DSL connection.

Neither of these things were a big deal. I didn’t feel that I was significantly missing out on some part of the classroom educational experience. However, the fact that I still remember them 5 to 7 years later highlights how much we are wired to thrive on shared social interactions. Sitting alone at a computer monitor watching hours of lectures can feel very isolated because you aren’t sharing it with anyone.

That isn’t to say that you can’t create social interactions online. It is possible, but you have to do it much more intentionally than you do when you are meeting in person. Here are a few ideas for minimizing this social isolation when taking online courses:

Try to connect with other online students and get their instant message ids. It is amazing how refreshing it is to be able to ask someone, “I’m having trouble understanding X. Do you have any suggestions?” and get back a message that says, “I did to. Try reading this page. It helped me get a better understanding.”
Meet teachers and teaching fellows in person if possible. Online classes can be more difficult for teachers as well. Giving them a face and handshake to go with your name can be very beneficial if you ever need to ask a question or get extra help.
Take the class with someone local. This could be meeting together to watch the lectures or even just taking it at the same time so you have someone to study with or interact with around the course content.

Some degree programs try to keep the flexibility of an online program while introducing more social relationship building by having week long in-person classes 4 times a year. This is ideal from a social standpoint because you are able to meet your classmates away from the keyboard, but it introduces the challenge of trying to put your non-academic life on hold for four weeks during the year and the associated travel cost. This type of setup is often used as part of executive MBA programs.

Reputation of Online Degree Programs

Not every school is created equal and not every online degree program has the same reputation. You need to be very selective and make sure you know not only what academic credentials you are obtaining, but also what academic reputation you are going to put on your resume for the rest of your career.

Right now, online degree programs have a bit of a worse reputation because some of the first schools to offer online degrees were diploma mills or schools known for dubious academic standards. While this may not be entirely fair and the stigma may wear off in the next decade or so, it is worth considering. One way you can minimize negative connotations that sometimes go along with an online degree is to make sure you attend a university that has a real live physical presents with in person teachers and students.

Established institutions with long standing reputations are generally going to be a good bet as far as the academic reputation. However, fewer of these types of schools offer online degree programs because they tend to be a bit more careful with maintaining their academic reputation than being on the cutting edge of educational technology.

Even going to a great school can’t shake all of the stigma attached to an online degree. Many online degree programs make it easy to sign up for a class, but hard to actually complete the degree. Since schools can basically scale up to take any number of students, your “admission criteria” tends to be the ability to complete the classes. If 100 students sign up for a class and pay the fee, but 75 drop out half way through the course, it really doesn’t hurt the school–they already have the money from everyone who dropped out. Obviously this type of strategy would cause all kinds of problems on a physical campus where the social element is a very important part of the educational process.

Since many online degree programs will let anyone sign up and take classes–regardless of their intelligence or discipline–there are people running around applying for jobs saying that they attended X or Y and generally damaging the reputation of schools. When Hilary Duff signed up for some classes from the Harvard Extension school there was a huge uproar about whether or not she should be able to say she was going to Harvard. As far as I know she took two classes and that was it–just like everyone else can. However, if you have people running around saying that they went to Harvard, but leaving out the fact that in truth they only enrolled, but never completed anything, I can see why it might give the online programs a bad name.

People who graduated from Harvard College often look down on the people who got their degree primarily by taking online classes and some of them would like to see the entire Harvard Extension program abolished. At first I didn’t understand this. Only a small percentage of people who take an online class through the Harvard Extension School actually finish some type of degree. It seemed to me that the traditional students were very safe from having the value of their degrees diminished. However, after hearing some of the arguments I realized that many of them hadn’t graduated yet. Some were relying on their admission to Harvard to validate their self worth. Having a school at Harvard that made it easy for people from all over the country to say they were “going to Harvard” or “taking classes at Harvard” was diluting the rare currency of admission to Harvard. They may not care quite as much once they graduate and the prize of their education becomes the degree rather than admission.

I was very happy with my degree through Harvard’s Extension School, but my point is to show you that there are people out there who are going to argue against degrees that are using an online model. If this is true at Harvard, then just think how true it is of schools that don’t have the same academic reputation.

There area number of schools that are marketing heavily to non-traditional students. Some have good academics others not so much. However, when you get into for-profit schools, you are going to have to deal with the reputation of these institutions. The reputation of University of Phoenix and the reputation of Capella University are good examples. Regardless of whether they are good or bad schools, they have reputation issues right now. Perhaps it won’t be an issue 5 years from now, but on the other hand pressures to make a profit could make their reputations even worse if they aren’t careful with their academic standards.

Since you don’t know what your career is going to bring, it probably makes sense to stay away from schools that have any chance of having a bad reputation either now or in the future. Large established state schools or private colleges with longstanding reputations are probably a safer choice.

Interestingly enough, choosing a school with a better reputation doesn’t necessarily mean choosing the more expensive option. Harvard’s Extension school often works out to be cheaper than University of Phoenix or Capella University.

Read the Fine Print

A lot of people get into trouble when pursuing an online degree because they don’t read the fine print. You want to watch out for things like residency requirements, limits on how long you can take to complete the degree, and specific order of courses.

For example, the degree I earned through Harvard Extension School had a one semester residency requirement. They also had stipulations on how many classes must be taken from Harvard professors (some courses are taught by industry leaders who aren’t members of Harvard’s faculty). There was also a 5 year time limit that could require you to retake classes take at the beginning of the program if they were out of date when you passed the 5 year deadline. After I started my courses they started a new rule that specified the order of some of the first classes you could take and still qualify to be admitted as a candidate for the actual degree program.

Every school is going to be different and it is important to make sure you understand all the little details. Here are some tips for making sure small but important requirements don’t come back to bite you:

Keep good records - Write notes about telephone conversations and keep printouts of webpages showing the requirements. Things are changing constantly and you need to be able to show that you were acting on the information that was available to you at the time by keeping good records.
Meet with an advisors in-person - If you can possibly talk to someone in person at least once for 30 minutes to make sure you can ask any questions and ask if there is anything additional you need to know, it may save you a lot of grief down the road.
Talk to other students – If you can find someone who has already graduated, ask them what they found that was hard or unexpected. Keep in mind the requirements may change, but it can still be useful to hear someone else’s experience.

Can You Write?

Most online degree programs are going to require a lot of writing. Many don’t require this until the final stages of their program. This is particularly true of master’s degrees. Many people are horrible writers because they never really had to do it in highschool. I’m sure you can see the problem. People get 80% through a program, hit the writing part of things and suddenly it is all 10 times as hard as it was before. That is why a lot of people get stuck writing their thesis and never actually graduate.

Writing is something that comes a bit more naturally for me–well maybe not naturally, but this website is approaching 500,000 words of text so I at least have some experience getting words from my mind into the computer. I didn’t really realize how big of stumbling block this is to some people until I started working on my thesis proposal. I wrote the proposal and sent it in, got back some corrections and that was about it. Later when discussing the proposal with the thesis advisor I was told, “The thesis shouldn’t be too difficult for you because you write very well.” I took that as a complement and didn’t think much about it until I later discovered that other students were sending back and forth revision after revision just for the proposal. Since then I’ve discovered that writing is extreme agony for many people and even when they do get enough motivation to write a page, the results require a great deal of editing to turn into something useful.

If you have trouble writing, make sure you understand what will be required before getting deep into the course. You don’t want to get to the end and find you’ve drastically under-estimated how much time will be required for you to produce the final paper that will meet the requirements.

Hard Online Degree Classes

I know someone who was trying to get a degree from a correspondence school. He completed all of the classes except for two. When he finished those two classes he would graduate. It turns out he had left the physics classes until the last. No matter how hard he tried, he could not complete those classes. It wasn’t for lack of effort on his part, but without the actual class structure and tutors to help he couldn’t grasp the materials. He was also working full time so he wasn’t able to just stop everything to work on school. In the end, he spent a great deal of time and money toward a degree that he was never able to complete and eventually exceeded the time limit to finish the program.

Make sure you know what the hard points are and give yourself some room for some failures. Keep in mind that what is hard for you may not be hard for others and vice versa, but try to get the best advice you can on what to expect.

I found the Theory of Computation class to be very difficult. Coming from a bachelors and master’s in music, it required a type of math that was different from what I was accustomed to. Half way through one semester I was earning a B, but I wasn’t grasping the materials enough to feel confident I could pass it. So I dropped the class and that summer took a math class that helped give me the proper foundation. It was still difficult, but I understood things much better the second time around.

When scheduling out your degree plan, make sure you expect to run into some similar issues and make sure you have enough time to handle any unexpected detours like that. Better still, try to take any classes you may need to give you an adequate foundation before the clock starts ticking on completing your degree.

Degree Alternatives

Most people are familiar with bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees. There are two other forms of graduate recognition that might be worth considering. Citations and certificates are not full graduate degrees, but they do offer you some level of academic recognition for the completion of fewer courses than would be necessary for a full degree. Often citations and certificates are more focused in their topic so they can offer a great career boost if you can find one that matches well with your line of work.

Typically a citation will be issued for 10 to 20 credit hours worth of work while a certificate would generally be awarded for 30 to 50 hours. This can vary by school. In some cases a certificate is about the same as a master’s degree but with out the thesis or capstone course.

If you already have a master’s degree, getting a certificate or citation can be a great way to show that your skills are up to date or to qualify yourself to work in a more specialized field. Certificates and citations can also help you get a prestigious institution on your resume without going back to school for a full degree.

If you are pursuing an online master’s degree, certificates and citations can be a very valuable stepping stone. If you can order your work so you can obtain a citation, then a certificate on the way toward earning your master’s degree, it gives you a great deal of protection should you need to abandon your master’s degree studies. If you get half way through the master’s degree program only to find that you can’t complete it, you’ll be a lot better off if you’ve earned a certificate and possibly a citation along the way.

This may take some careful planning, and your best bet is to talk to your academic advisor and let them know what you are trying to accomplish. In some cases you may have to take additional classes, but getting some type of academic credential early on may be well worth the extra work. Not only does it help insure that you get some type of formal recognition out of your studies, you may be able to use the certificate or citation to negotiate higher pay or obtain a better paying job before you obtain the full degree.

Not every school offers certificates and citations, but if yours does it can be a very valuable tool and insurance against unpredictable changes in the future.

Conclusion

Online degree programs have some significant advantages–particularly for someone headed back to school or who can’t afford to take a few years off of their job. Hopefully this post has given you some ideas of the things you need to consider.

If you are looking for more information, you might enjoy reading my post about my last master’s degree that I got primarily online through Harvard’s Extension School

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Executive MBA Programs

Mark Shead — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 03:39:53 +0000

When I wrote Never Hire an MBA, I think some people thought I was recommending against any type of MBA degree. This isn’t the case. If anything the arguments in that post would support the idea that an MBA is valuable. My main point was that employers need to make sure they don’t get blinded by the MBA credentials and make sure they are hiring people with more than just a diploma.

If you are an employee looking at an MBA, you have quite a few options. In this post I want to discuss executive MBA programs and how one of these programs might support your career goals.

Executive MBA programs are designed for people with experience who are in the middle of successful careers and don’t want to take two years off work to pursue an MBA degree. They are typically designed to have classes every other weekend. Traditionally executive MBA programs are paid for by employers looking to groom top talent for positions of higher responsibility. Since businesses are typically footing the bill for their best employees, universities generally price an executive MBA in the $75,000 to $150,000 range. However, with the down economy a number of students are funding the degrees on their own. An average of 36% of current students are paying out of pocket–a significant shift that has schools scrambling to better align their services with the needs of this segment.

Company funded Executive MBA

If your company sends people to an executive MBA program, it is probably a good idea to see what you would need to do in order to be considered for the program. Here are a couple reasons why:

It is unlikely you are going to get your employer to give you a $50,000 raise for the next two y ears, but if they are willing to pay for $100,000 in tuition, you significantly increase the value you receive in exchange for the work you put into your job.
The value of the degree stays with you for the rest of your career–regardless of where you work.
All things being equal, your employer is probably going to be much more inclined to try to keep you employed than someone they have not spent $100,000 educating.
The contacts you make in an executive MBA very well may be the source of your next job.
Employers generally like employees who are interested in increasing their skills.

Most of the time you are going to have to “sell” the value of the executive MBA to your superiors. It represents a significant expense for your company both in tuition and in the time you will need to be away from the office for classes. (Many classes are done primarily on the weekend, but encompass Fridays as well.) Having a good idea of what your company has done in the past can be very helpful in stating your position. If they have sent several people to expensive degrees only to have them leave six months after graduating, you may have to work hard to demonstrate why your case will be different.

Get a copy of your employee handbook and make sure you know what your company’s official policy is on tuition reimbursement. You’ll probably be asking for more than the base, default amount in the policy so you need to be prepared to explain the value it will bring to the company. You don’t want to focus too much on how the experience will benefit you personally. You need to demonstrate that your employer will benefit. If possible point out specific classes that will help make you more effective in what you can do for your employer. You also want to show how you can use class projects to work on issues your company is facing–thus leveraging not only your time, but the expertise and experience of fellow students and professors.

In some cases you may want to offer to give up some benefits in exchange. For example, you might give up a portion of your vacation time or a bonus in exchange for the company picking up all or some of the tuition.

Once an employer sees the value of the educational experience, their biggest concern is going to be that once you get the degree you’ll jump ship. Often they will want some type of guarantee that you’ll stay with the company or pay them back if you leave for another job. Here are a few things you can do the help minimize those concerns:

Ask well in advance. An employee who is asking about a program that starts in 9 months is demonstrating the expectation that they will be around for awhile.
Use examples of how the education will benefit the company over the long term.
If you are certain your employer is going to want to have a tuition payback agreement, it might be good to have an understanding of what is typical and bring it up early on. At the very least have an idea of what is reasonable so you can quickly respond if they ask.

Self-funded Executive MBA

If you are looking at funding an executive MBA on your own, you need to make sure you really do the return on investment calculations. A high end executive MBA program is likely to give you significant networking opportunities that wouldn’t be available in other MBA degrees. However, a good deal of the core class content is likely to overlap with traditional MBA programs. If your career plan is to benefit from the educational experience of an MBA you may want to consider a distance education program or online degree from a less expensive state school. If networking is a central component of your career strategy, the executive MBA might be a better option.

Other Executive MBA Students

Often the networking and interaction with other executive MBA students is one of the most valuable parts of the degree. Since executive programs target people with significant work experience, a great deal of the education comes from other students who all have different specialties and backgrounds. Most executive MBA classes are designed to take advantage of this by having students work on group projects in ways that encourage interaction and sharing.

As an increasing number of students enter MBA programs directly out of college. Executive MBAs help insure that classmates are going to have real world experience. Some schools work very hard to maintain this balance and even place individuals on a waiting list if their particular specialty is already over represented in order to make sure that everyone gets to experience a a diverse range of classmates.

The Wall Street Journal did a survey to find the top five schools when it comes to the peer interaction. The schools that made the cut were:

Villanova University
University of Souther California
Ohio State University
Washington University
Thunderbird

Executive MBA rankings

The Wall Street Journal also published a ranked list of the top executive MBA programs based on a number of weighted criteria. I’ve listed them below along with the approximate cost of each program. Keep in mind that this list attempts to reflect a number of different factors so the top choice on average may not be the best choice for you personally.

University of Pennsylvania Wharton $170,000
Washington University in St. Louis Olin $100,000
Thunderbird School of Global Management $90,000
University of Southern California Marshall $100,000
Northwestern University Kellogg $150,000
University of Notre Dame Mendoza $90,000
New York University Stern $140,000
Cornell University JOhnson $140,000
Columbia University $140,000
University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler $90,000
University of California Anderson $110,000
University of Texas McCombs $80,000
Arizona State University W.P. Carey $70,000
University of Illinois $90,000
University fo Michigan Ross $130,000
University of Chicago Booth $140,000
Ohio State University Fisher $80,000
Cornell University Johnson $140,000
Rice University Jones $100,000
Boston University $80,000
Rutgers University $80,000
University of Maryland Smith $100,000
University of California Haas $150,000
IE Business School $70,000
Vanderbilt University Owen $100,000

Other MBA Options

Executive MBAs tend to be expensive–particularly ones from the top schools listed above. If you are looking to further your education, be sure to checkout your other options. You can learn quite a bit simply by paying attention on your job and following some of the tips in On The Job MBA. Also don’t overlook smaller state university programs. Often the value of these programs is very high and their low cost make the risks very low. It is a lot easier to get a good return on investment on a $5,000 degree than on a $150,000 degree.

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