From Dawn to Dusk, Slaving Away

Occasional visitors to the site might have noticed something like a dramatic pause in our postings this week - and though I can think of a multitude of excuses, I'll not list them here. Suffice it to say that the workweek started at 3:00 a.m. Monday, and continued at a relentless pace through through Friday. On top of the usual efforts, which accelerated to force an 8 to 7 schedule most days, we were also asked to attend business dinners both Monday and Wednesday, meaning I didn't make it home until very late.

Given the dramatically reduced hours at home and behind the laptop, the blog was one of the first things to be neglected.

In the winter months, it isn't too uncommon to leave for the office in the dark, and return home in the dark, with my body escaping the ravages of natural light. It goes to explain the rising rates of depression and listlessness many feel around the holidays, as increasing demands come as invigoration from nature slips away.

For me, it can at times be overwhelming, as even when I leave the office late, I know there's much more to get done, as the count of e-mails in the In box is higher than when I had started the day, and I may never reach a point where I feel I have caught up. Weekends are not much better, as, while they may seem inviting, they instead serve as 48-hour countdowns to when the cycle starts again. Every second not spent on catching up on work, instead of a respite, seems wasted, and as the hours tick by, the stress adds up, nearing a point where it's not a question of whether to act on projects, but selecting which one should get the highest priority, as they all fight for attention, or even worse, which ones, if neglected, will draw the least wrath.

Is there a break on the horizon? Maybe. I don't anticipate 3:00 a.m. start times and dinner meetings to be de riguer. But there will always be demands on my time, and with the sun not doing its part to rise early and set late, it's literally us against the world.

Listening to ''I.R.A. (Original Mix)'', by Dariush (Play Count: 19)

Gone In Sixty Seconds: Taking On Telemarketers

At the office, our desk phones show how long you have been on a call from the time you pick up the receiver, to the time you put it back in the cradle. From "Hello", the seconds begin to tick forward, and often, this clock can be used as a challenge, to see how quickly I can get the person off the other line, especially when their goal is to sell me.

Though I respect professional telemarketing and the need to promote products, I'm way too busy with real work, and way too accessible via other methods to be troubled by the typical cold-caller. Therefore, I make it a goal, as soon as I realize I've fallen into a trap of talking to someone random, to get them off the line in less than a minute. If I haven't succeeded in that task, it's because they have something I might actually be interested in, or I've flat-out failed.

For the last six years, my phone number at the office has gone unchanged. Lucky for outside salesmen, this means that my contact information in any list from the beginning of the decade still works. Over the last four years, my name and number have been on our Web site, or on our press releases, and easily indexed by Google or other Web spiders, and I've found my data in pay-for-download directories.

I know I'm easy to find, so since I've made that part easy, I don't feel any special need to reward the cold caller with my time just because they achieved the very minimum of research, and too often, there's no way we would be buying what they're selling in the first place. So, we use a variety of methods to throw people off the scent, ranging from abruptness, occasional rudeness, to flat-out lies, if I'm too much in a hurry to deal with the morality of truth.

The easiest way to ditch potential vendors is to thank them for calling but say we are happy with our current vendors and aren't interested in taking on any more at this time. In other cases, I'll say our budgets are frozen this year, and to call back in three to six months. However, this delay tactic often means I'll get piled on later, when their sophisticated CRM tools remind them I said to call back. Those calls are obvious. "Hello, Louis, we spoke in May, and you said to call you in November to talk about..." Great. Do I owe you money because you took a note, and got an Outlook reminder? Thank goodness I'm not bound by that rule.

Alternatively, I'll bounce them to somebody else in the organization, but as I'm just as cognizant of their time as I am of mine, we'll just throw people off course completely. "Oh. Our IT guy? Well, we had a contractor, and he just left. I don't know who handles that now," or... "We don't have a full-time events person on staff. Try calling the main line." After a while, they usually get frustrated, and go away. You can tell which ones are good salespeople, and which ones would rather be running their own printing companies, design houses or ad sales. The ones that start off timid and scared are easy bait. They know you own them, and you can make them feel like dirt. "Oh, you're in luck! You know why? Because we've already got a vendor who does that, and you won't have to waste your time talking to me!" Lucky them, huh?

I know. There's probably a special circle of hell for people like me. But down there, next to the lawyers, we'll have the telemarketers, and we'll finally be meeting face to face.

Listening to ''Flesh'', by Jan Johnston (Play Count: 5)

Business Trip: Off to Tampa, Florida Through Friday

It has been a little while since I had to hit the road to take on a trade show or work event, but in less than 12 hours, I'm scheduled to fly from San Jose to Tampa, Florida for a conference I've attended four times in the last five years, searching for potential customers and prospects - some we've met before, and some we may be meeting for the first time.

At 7:00 a.m. sharp, our Delta jet will fly eastward to Atlanta, before angling south to Tampa, the final destination, where I'll be through Friday morning, when again, at 7:00 a.m. sharp, we turn around and try it in the opposite direction. That's right: 4:00 a.m. Pacific time.

My body is already dreading it, and I'm letting the caffeine seep out of me, in an attempt to get enough sleep tonight that it all will work out. We hope to continue posting throughout the trip, and to stay wired. Otherwise, I'd probably have to be hospitalized for withdrawal.

Listening to ''Cold Fusion'', by Perry O'Neil (Play Count: 1)

Am I Exempt From Casual Fridays?

This morning didn't feel like a button-down long sleeve shirt and slacks day. Vaguely anticipating the A's were not going to be in a good way in time for their afternoon game against the Tigers, I thought I'd show my colors in the office by going casual, wearing jeans, an A's shirt and ballcap. But somehow, all my A's shirts were in the laundry, so I instead grabbed an old t-shirt out of the drawer, and headed off to work, not in my usual fare, but something more appropriate for your standard Silicon Valley engineer. Yet, given the reaction, you would have thought I'd shown up shirtless or with a buzz cut.

In my senior year at UC Berkeley, when I was trying to pull double duty by attending classes and working in the Silicon Valley, it was common that I'd show up to lectures or class discussions in a button down shirt and slacks, while the rest of my classmates were the definition of casual. I had mentally moved on beyond graduation, and so had the wardrobe.

Since graduation, I've tried to appear professional, sometimes to belie my youth - in an attempt to be taken seriously, and have consistently dressed the part. In fact, in the summer of 2001, when I asked for a week off from work, I was told by my boss that he wouldn't sign the vacation slip unless I showed him a store receipt proving that I had purchased at least one pair of shorts. Truth was, I didn't have any until I met his demands.

As a result, today's incursion into jeans and sneakers land raised quite a number of eyebrows around the office, as did the fact I hadn't shaved, and showed up slightly scruffy. Many made comments - one saying he confused me for one of the engineers, while another, with a smirk, thanked me for "dressing up." Amusingly, even in my dressed-down state, there were others in shorts and sandals, or t-shirts in various stages of wear and tear. But because I had broken with what they expected, I was the subject of discussion.

At some level, this is a good thing, as I've forged a personal brand that includes the professional business look. While it was fun to make a one-day break from this, even if just to see the reactions, but I don't anticipate it happening on a more-regular basis in the future. The Tommy Bahama shirts and kakhis quota can be consumed by the rest of more casual corporate America.

Listening to ''Falling'', by Liquid State (Play Count: 13)

The Evolution of Transparency in Job Seeking

As recounted on this blog a few times, my first entrance into the real world job market was one where I didn't come in with the knowledge necessary to appropriately state exactly what I wanted to do or how much I felt I deserved to be paid. Green behind the ears, and not yet holding a college degree, all I knew was that I wanted to work in technology in the Silicon Valley, and hoped I would be paid enough to cover rent, food and transportation.

Even after changing jobs twice, and seeing my salary increase to a level I was happy with, it became apparent that I still wasn't working with a full deck of cheat sheets. No sooner was the ink dry on one contract but I inadvertently learned from the HR manager that I had signed below the range they expected to fill the position, and the range extended a full $30k higher. Before even finishing my first week at the new job, I knew I had undersold myself once again.

As years have passed, the tools available to job seekers have dramatically ballooned, with professional networking sites like LinkedIn, focused job services like MktgLadder (for those of the marketing persuasion), Salary.com, to give the range of salaries for those with similar titles in your zip code, and now, an open search engine from indeed.com that without requiring any paid subscription, returns average salaries for titles and City/State combos.

Now, instead of walking in with a 2-page resume and hope, you can walk into an interview with a 2-page resume, a host of online references and a raft of business connections, and a very precise expectation of what you'll be asking for - based as much on the salaries of your peers as your previous history. Makes the potential for being laid off in a Valley where nothing is guaranteed seem that much less scary.

Listening to ''L.E.F'', by Ferry Corsten (Play Count: 6)

Web Office: OfficeCube: What Might Have Been

Speaking of OfficeCube, my curiosity got the best of me - to see if there was any hint out there on the Web as to what our plans at 3Cube were, and only through Google's cache can we get anywhere to discuss OfficeCube itself, though some of our media coverage from the early part of the decade remain up for only the most ardent of communications application service provider afficionados.

As we find in a press release from early 2000, we had announced, "PhoneCube and FaxCube are the first two members of 3Cube's growing family of online office services soon to be combined in one office portal called "OfficeCube," an entire suite of integrated virtual office productivity solutions to be announced in the first half of 2000."

Those were exciting times. Unfortunately, as we know, the best products don't always make the best businesses, and though I still believe in those early products' features, functionality and promise, the customer traction was never there.

For more on the 3Cube story, here are some obscure gems:

InformationWeek: Innovation (October 2000)
TMCNet: FaxCube and PhoneCube review (January 2001)

Listening to ''Live @ DI.fm'', by DJ Irish (Play Count: 1)

The Myth of 9 to 5

I have to admit this is likely biased due to my career having been dedicated to Silicon Valley and a series of private companies at various stages, but it's clear to me that the concept of getting in at 9 and being done at 5, Monday through Friday, is dead. Simply put, if you're not on an hourly wage in which you punch a clock to indicate when you started and completed your tasks, and you are instead salaried, you have an obligation to support the company - no matter the time or the day.

By agreeing to be a salaried employee, the company pays you a certain amount per year - with benefits - based on your expected output in that calendar year. Whether you put in 35 hours at the office, or 135, they are going to pay you the same. And in theory, you are making just as much money per hour while you sleep as you do in the hours spent in your cubicle, attached to a phone, in front of your computer monitor. This means that if you leave the office on a Friday, at 5:01 p.m., and your boss calls Saturday or Sunday, you should hop on that task, period. And just because it's Saturday or Sunday, or 9 p.m. on a weekday, you should be no less connected to your goals and the company's goals than any other time.

I've always operated under the assumption you should give your full efforts. The company, looking at your talent, your record, and your attitude, assumes a certain level of output, and they make a bet that this combination is worth a certain amount of investment on their part. They've selected you - at a certain price - over your peers at identical or lesser pricing. Subsequently, it's your job to prove to them that they either paid adequately for your services, they paid too much for your services, or that you should be paid more.

If your intent is to move up the corporate food chain, to achieve higher status, or to get paid more, you need to exceed expectations. You need to overdeliver on your tasks, gaining you notice by your peers and management, and honestly, the competition. One of the best things that you can do is learn that the competition knows you by name, and would overpay to have you work for them instead of your current employer. One of the more interesting things that happened to me just in this last month was when a VP at one of our competitors called me directly at my office to ask if I was interested in jumping ship and working for him. Though interested to learn more about his company structure, my biases toward our product and corporate inertia were too much to overcome.

But what this reinforced for me again was that if you do throw away the 9 to 5 label, and work to and beyond your salary, it is noticed. You owe the company your fullest efforts, and you owe yourself the opportunity to progress - not to meet the minimum expectations and coast, for then you are most certainly expendable.

Want to talk about work? Call or e-mail any time. After all, while on salary, I'm always thinking about it, and what we can do next to overachieve.

Listening to ''Lie to Me'', by Depeche Mode (Play Count: 6)

Abort. Retry? Fail.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out, the whole portable iPod strategy didn't pan out this evening. Typically, I utilize my 60 Gigabyte iPod as the primary hard drive at the office, and unmount it to take home - either for more work, or for what it was originally intended - as an entertainment device. Yet, today, as I had planned on putting additional late hours slaving over presentations, I hooked up the iPod to the laptop only to find the presentation I had put hours into at the office was back to its original state - updated at mid-day.

Apparently, I had saved the presentation onto the corporate network, and for some foolish purpose, had continued operating on that file instead of the local iPod copy. So, I booted up the Dell PC and connected to the corporate VPN to retrieve the file. While I had found it, with my updates, it too was not salvageable, saying I needed a higher version of Quicktime, simply to view some of the images I had thrown onto PowerPoint. Yuck. Needless to say, I scrapped it, and am now going through and recreating the slides again - but with a different process, to avoid those issues. And yes - this time, we are saving to the iPod. So frustrating!

Listening to ''Linking People'', by Giuseppe Ottaviani (Play Count: 1)

Competition: Know Thine Enemy

It's a human tendency to hate that which is different - those who act a certain way, prefer one sports team over your personal favorite, vote for political parties contrary to your preference, or purchase products that you don't care for. In business, the highly competitive pressures to take your share of the market can lead to generalizations on who the competition is, what they stand for, what they represent, and how anybody who would choose to select or think about buying their products is either a fool, was tricked, or has signed an exclusive deal with the prince of darkness.

But, just as with Microsoft, as I mentioned in an earlier article, if you drill down through the global organization, you can find that your competition - the enemy - is comprised of individual human beings with similar desires to yours - to be happy, to be successful, and in most cases, to promote a product that delivers benefits to customers. While at the office, I can give you a long list of reasons as to why our product is better than the competition, and an extensive reference list for people who have chosen our route to solve their needs, I understand the human element, and through the years of going trade show to trade show, I have built up relationships with individuals who sell on the other side of the aisle - people whose products may differ greatly, but target similar markets, sometimes the same companies or opportunities. I recognize the faces, the mannerisms and the stories, and they often know people I know, or we may have shared experiences from different perspectives.

This week it was more evident than ever. Not only did I get the chance to talk to the CTO of one competitor and the Sales VP of another, but I was reunited with former colleagues of mine who in some cases I hadn't seen since 2002 or 2003, who were now working with the same gusto they once gave our business, but with new logos on their company-issued attire. In some cases, they've prospered at their new companies when they had struggled with us, and in others, they used success at our company to springboard to the next opportunity. This doesn't make them bad people, and it doesn't mean their technology is "evil". It's just different. These are people too - some driven by the almighty dollar, others for a new challenge or a new title, but still pushing forward nonetheless, and were I to see them as hell-bent demons, nobody would benefit.

In industries such as ours, the smallness of the market and the number of companies participating means you will most certainly see people again - as colleagues, competition or partners. To blow people off, and show your bad side in the name of competition cannot win long-lasting happiness and success. It's more than trading business cards and 10 minutes of your time - instead its about investing in the future. And if you just so happen to find out a tidbit that helps you compete today, go fight and win.

Listening to ''No One's Driving'', by Dave Clarke (Play Count: 6)

Event Season Starting: Off to San Diego

Tomorrow morning, and way too early... I'm headed off on a flight from San Francisco to San Diego for an industry event, and make it back here by Thursday. Now, while some might claim I am getting the chance to get far away from the incessant rainstorms we've had here in the Bay Area, even weather.com is conspiring against me to make this not happen - forecasting showers for the San Diego area both tomorrow and Tuesday. But we'll press forward and do our jobs the best we know how anyway. After all, it's not as if the rain will reach the exhibition floor. And if it does, we'll definitely have other issues to discuss here.

Listening to ''Let Men Burn Stars'', by M83 (Play Count: 5)

Business Trip Eve

Tomorrow afternoon, we fly out to the East Coast to Boston for two days, and then on to New York. For some, that would mean tonight would feature mad scrambling and packing, tidying up, and checking of the Weather Channel multiple times an hour. For me, the sense of insecure panic hasn't taken over. It usually doesn't - at least unless I think I'm in danger of missing the flight (which usually means I'm only 20 minutes early). In fact, I don't even like to pack for a trip until the morning of, just so I can put that part of a trip off as long as possible.

Besides, the sooner I get the carry-on luggage out and start going through the closet for things, the dog tends to get suspicious, and from what I understand, she gets incredibly needy when I'm away. I don't know why that is particularly, especially as she lived here before I did, but that's what I've been told. The longer I can keep the fact I'm leaving a secret from her, the better off we'll all be.

Last year I tacked on more than 25,000 miles with United, flying out not only to Boston and New York, but to Orlando, Seattle, Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, to name a few places. Unfortunately, this week's trips are on American, and I don't have any kind of frequent traveler plan with those guys yet, so I'm basically screwed. That probably means I'll be in the middle seat of the middle row of the middle plane - and the cardboard I'll be passed as a substitute for food will have holes in it... and ... okay, I lied a little. I've already checked the weather, and it is going to be frickin' cold. We think it's cold here, just over 50 degrees, but Boston's a balmy 35 degrees now, on the way down to 28, and we don't get in until after 10 tomorrow night. Yuck. And no good excuses to go either. No Red Sox. No Fenway Park. Just business.