In a real sense this posting is about the difference between one-time innovation, as valuable as that can be, and serial innovation and the development of ongoing newness as a basis for ongoing marketplace strength. And I start this posting by repeating a thought I expressed in the posting title: everything was an innovation once.

That applies to the still new and fresh and to the tired and hackneyed alike. Every product, service, idea, implementation or approach out there or long since gone was a new innovation once. And if you stop with developing one innovation, with time it will simply become another standard option. And with more time and not necessarily a lot more it will move on from there to simply be seen as a tired old entry in the milling crowd, to the extent that it is considered at all.

Businesses patent their developments to retain exclusivity and to squeeze out unique value from them as long as possible, but patents expire, and even before that alternative products can be developed and marketed by others – and sometimes they offer sufficient newness and innovation so as to knock their older and still patent-protected competition out of the market.

Businesses keep formulas and production details as closely guarded trade secrets – the formula for Coca-Cola comes immediately to mind there, and baring a partial listing of its ingredients in the 1930’s that went semi-public that is still a closely guarded corporate secret. But competing products are developed anyway and the novelty and uniqueness of a trade secret protected innovation fades too. Just consider the numbers and volume of alternative colas on the market now. Yes, Coca-Cola still holds a significant market share for soft drinks sold, but they have plenty of competition and Coca-Cola has long ceased to be much of an innovation per se in its overall marketplace.

• The novelty and special value of any innovation fades with time. So businesses have to think and act as innovation factories if they are to remain cutting-edge, and if they are to gain and retain the market share and marketplace strength that offering unique value propositions provide.

Innovation and serial innovation can come from creative individuals who see the world for its potential and for what might be, and not just for what is already in front of them in it. Innovation can arise from the crowd and from the cumulative effort of many. Many businesses that seek to serially innovate use both approaches with a smaller number of team members coming up with initial concepts and implementation ideas, and perhaps many more working to flesh out the details to turn those starts into finished products. In this, true innovation can flow through entire, complex design and development processes and into production, marketing and distribution too. Apple Inc. comes immediately to mind in that context with Steve Jobs serving as their face of innovation for many years, even as many contributed to the flow of innovation coming out of that company.

This is the first installment in what at this time at least, I plan on developing as a short series. I am going to post a second installment in a few days looking at two very specific organizations: Xerox PARC and Menlo Park (and see Thomas Alva Edison.) I will go on from there to discuss developing an innovation pipeline, and one that does not dead-end, instead serving as a conduit to development and production. I also plan to discuss some of the issues involved in prioritizing what to develop and managing the rest, and with further thoughts on patents and trade secrets as due diligence strategies.

You can find this and related postings at Business Strategy and Operations – 2 (and also see Business Strategy and Operations.)

I wrote in Part 1 about committee charters, and about how effective committees have specific goals and about how they work towards them with specific priorities. I also noted that one of the principle reasons why committees fail is that even when they do start out with set goals and objectives, their purpose can drift – and they can be taken over by loss of focus and scope creep. This later issue is in fact one of the primary ways as to how a potentially effective committee fails. More and more extraneous activities and tasks and unrelated goals are taken on and before long no one there can actually tell you what, in practice, that committee is supposed to be doing anymore and certainly not from what they are working on.

But that said, there are times when a committee charter has to be changed and updated if the committee is to remain relevant and productive. Just to cite a few possibilities here, by way of example:

• If a key deadline is changed that is crucial to a committee and its charter, the charter needs to be updated to reflect this new reality. Its charter has to be course corrected so that priorities make sense and are still reachable within its new time frame.
• If an organizationally defined strategic or operational goal or need is changed that informs the committee charter then that charter may become irrelevant, and the committee in that situation should simply be disbanded. But if the overall goals of the charter are still important and of significant here-and-now priority, then the charter should be updated and corrected to reflect that. And this may or may not involve a change in the time frame and the deadline in which committee work has to be finished too.

Sometimes change is spurious and disruptive, and damaging to the capacity of a committee to actually accomplish anything of its intended purpose. Sometimes change is needed to make success even a possibility, and on time and according to real world strategic and operational need.

• How do you tell the two apart?
• Given that, how do you limit the former, and effectively revise a charter to complete goals in the face of the later?

In a way I have already at least strongly hinted at the answer of both of these questions in how I phrased the second of them.

• Scope creep is essentially always brought in as ad hoc change, and tiny increments that cumulatively add up – one small shift in focus and effort at a time. In this, scope creep is usually a committee’s version of death by a thousand tiny cuts.
• This is almost always done as if on the side and without being acknowledged for its impact, either as individual course changing actions or cumulatively on the “purpose” of the committee. Committee members still stay they are doing the same thing (only perhaps “larger”) even as they no longer really are.
• Changes that are constructive and supportive of that committee actually achieving its set goals are formally recognized and are drafted as planned out changes in a formal committee charter.
• And these changes are never simply determined ad hoc. They are strategically and operationally planned out for their impact on what the committee is to do, who needs to be on it to do that work, and how long they would have to re-plan and do it.

And I come back to the opening “bad committee” jokes of a committee being “a beast with many arms, many legs, many mouths and no brains” and this is a big part of where that operationally comes from. Ad hoc leads to everyone doing things and being busy but with no overall goals that all members coordinately work on.

Think of the badly organized and managed committees you have seen and worked on, and of the committees that you have seen fail in reaching usable goals. Chances at that they failed from falling into at least one of two traps:

• They did way too much that did not support or advance their stated original goals where they remained relevant – scope creep in its various forms, or
• They failed to update and course-correct their charter when external factors that defined their committee’s purpose changed around them – a failure to make or follow through on necessary charter revisions when that was called for.

As a final thought here, and as at least a partial antidote for both of these potential failings, never run a committee or work on one as if in a vacuum.

• Know who the stakeholders are who count on the committee successfully completing its tasks.
• Keep an eye on the context as a whole that your committee is functioning in and that it seeks to contribute to.
• Look for changes that might impact on what you do and that could call for course corrections where they would make sense.
• Use this perspective to make sure your are not doing extraneous work too, that might be of interest to you but that does not advance achieving the actual goals you should be working towards.

I am going to turn to the issues of joining an already existing committee and getting up to speed in contributing to it in my next series installment.

You can find this posting and others of this series at Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2. I have also posted extensively on jobs and careers-related topics in my first Guide directory page on Job Search and Career Development.

• The best management oriented mentoring is very here and now focused, and oriented towards capturing the lessons-learned potential of the moment – clarifying, prioritizing and resolving real world challenges currently faced.
• That does not mean that good advice should be or is entirely ad hoc or applicable only to an immediate circumstance, though. An important part of hands-on management training is in helping a less experienced colleague more readily discern when a novel, none-of-the-above approach might be needed.
• A lot of what a mentor shares that offers lasting value is generalizable, and helps the mentee to build a skills and experience foundation to work from.
• I return to the first bullet point, above, with that to stress the importance of real world applicability. Abstract lessons can offer value but only when there is sufficient leavening from real-world experience to translate them from the abstract to the directly here-and-now applicable.

With that I note that mentoring is only one approach for learning or for training in management skills, and understanding its role and value means considering it as it fits into this wider context.

• A lot of businesses offer employee training and that often includes options for picking up more basic, first-time management skills. But course work and certainly online and self-paced/automated programs with their multiple choice test questions do not offer focused, immediate feedback or insight in a way that working with a mentor in your own business can.
• I add into consideration online groups and the discussions and sharing of insight that they bring in this, and I do recommend crowd sourcing for insight that comes from a wider perspective of sources too. But even with that included, most online and standard management training courses can at most only provide a partial solution to the issues and challenges of training next generation managers.
• And I add that these programs and courses generally offer entry level management training only, and not middle-management or more senior management guidance. Mentors are essential there as management training at a higher level benefits from and even requires a more personalized focus.
• And I add that regardless of level taught at, most courses are fairly industry-agnostic and while that can be a positive, it can leave important areas untouched for any given manager in training and certainly as they seek to learn the skills needed for working more effectively in their specific industry or business-type.
• Organized courses can and do offer value. Peer discussion, face to face or online offers real value too. But even taken together, mentoring still can fill critical gaps. And the networking and connections building that mentoring engenders can offer value that lasts beyond any explicit mentoring-based training too, and in ways that supplement and complement other and more general business networking.

What of business degrees? The back story of the MBA is insightful in that regard. There was a time when having an MBA in and of itself meant higher salary and a higher position on the table of organization, with these increases coming fairly automatically for employees who successfully complete a degree program. More importantly here, this bump came to new gradates who did not have the leavening of real world business experience too, with their starting at a significantly higher average salary than their non-Masters degreed peers. Then businesses came to see that new MBAs who lacked real world experience did not bring that expected value with them from having their advanced degree. And this filtered back to the business schools that offered these degree programs, and they began to rigorously require real business experience as a program entry requirement; the last thing they wanted was to graduate new MBAs who would not be able to find employment commensurate with the costs and effort of gaining the degree for lack of marketplace-required credentials.

Partly this real world leavening means hands-on working and on a day to day basis in real businesses and marketplaces. But this also means learning from the experience and insight of others, and in the immediate context of the workplace where any advice or insight would be immediately validated or disproven by empirical experience.

And I finish this posting by noting, as stated in earlier postings, that mentoring should not always be from older mentor to younger mentee. And I cite a specific area where this can be crucially important in management training. Older managers who grew up looking at computers strictly as desktop or larger hardware, and who do not think in terms of everywhere and all the time connected of younger generations, need help in bridging the gap and in learning how to work with generation X and generation Y employees. Articulate and patient members of these new and advancing generations can provide essential management insight for working with these employees that can in fact be more valuable for a senior manager than their picking up new hands-on technology skills. And it is where younger mentor older, that the most overall value to the business can be found in this – and of a type that is specifically not going to be covered in management training courses offered through a business, or in general.

As I noted above, the next installment in this series will focus on mentoring and the development of leadership skills. You can find this series and related postings at HR and Personnel and further related postings at Business Strategy and Operations and its continuation page at Business Strategy and Operations – 2.

• That you find personally satisfying and enriching,
• That will give you skills and credentials in demand in the marketplace, and
• For which your school has a solid reputation.

All three points are crucial here and to pick up on the one that I wrote the least about in Part 1 to this, if you select a field that is in demand but it is something you would not be happy pursuing, then you have found a career path and a college major for entering into it, that you cannot thrive in. That cannot and will not work for you. Bur for the sake of argument in this half of this letter, let’s assume you find an area to major in that you enjoy and find satisfying, and that you could do well at. Let’s assume it is also a field and a degree major area that is in demand in the marketplace and for which your school has a positive reputation. So you would get good, solid training in it there, and your diploma would be viewed by prospective employers as holding real value. Internships and part-time work can help you set yourself apart from your competition with similar degrees and similar career path goals. Well planned work experience of this type can help increase your chances that you will be the job candidate hired for the entry level and career-starting job you would most want and in the right field and with the right employer.

What should you look for in a summer job or an internship, or in a part time job while still a student?

• For many students, work while studying, or while on summer break or during the shorter breaks from classes can be essential if you are to be able to afford school at all. So in the real world and facing real financial needs you do have to take what you gain here and now into account when selecting work opportunities. But the longer term job and career-enablement potential that you can cultivate and develop from work while in school is important too, and my focus here is on that source of value that you would gain from this.
• Working on a real job while a student can give you invaluable experience learning you way around a workplace and working with people who may be very different from you. You develop good work habits and better interpersonal and communications skills. And you can start to build a reputation for reliability.
• Working on a real job while a student can open doors to finding mentors, and sources of reference and recommendation. This work experience can help you build an initial professional social network and one that you should be actively nurturing and growing throughout your career. But you can start this process here.
• These are positive values and resources that you can find and built upon in any real job where you have to make a professional commitment and where you can contribute to business success – and even if your contribution does not involve experience directly related to your major.
• As a freshman you are a lot less likely to find work that would give you hands-on direct experience in your major area. But you can plan for and follow through on a work experience trajectory where you find and secure positions that successively bring you closer to working in your intended career area.
• That means getting a clearer idea as to what working day to day in that field and in that type of job is actually like, and what professionals actually do and how they do it.
• That means strategically building a potential reference and recommendations base that includes people who are working in areas closer to where you would be seeking your first post-college job.
• Ideally that means developing bullet point content for a starter resume that would highlight how you could begin offering value to an employer, and even when just starting out. Shorter learning curve requirements to get up to speed on a new job make a candidate much more attractive to a hiring manager. So look for work opportunities that can help you build a basis for those bullet points where you can legitimately claim to have worked on and helped out on tasks that you have seen, real world, to be of importance to employers.

Take some time off and recharge your batteries – don’t just work if you can afford that. But do not simply repeat the high school summer job experience – unless of course, you were already starting to seriously plan for a career then too.

And bring your work experience back to the classroom with you, and view and think about what you learn in class for how it does and in some cases does not connect to what you have seen there. Bring both your classroom and workplace experience with you as you talk with your professors, cultivating them for the insight and guidance they can share with you and as potential references and sources of recommendation. And do not forget that faculty members can be great networking contacts as many have both academic and workplace contacts and they can be of real help in your networking your way to that first real full time job.

You can find this and other material about jobs and careers at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and its continuation page, and with these open letters included at the bottom of those directory pages as supplemental postings.

I have noted many times that one of the roles and responsibilities of leadership is the development and convincing sharing of overall strategic vision. Leaders also carry distinctive management responsibilities so they have to work with, develop and share both strategic and tactical insight and guidance.

• Strategy tells where you seek to go.
• Tactics lays out the steps that you need to take to get there.

Put slightly differently,

• Strategy is about the bigger-picture and overall concept.
• Tactics are all about the here and now, and immediate and next-step details.
• Tactics are where strategy is implemented, and I will add challenged with the test of real world, empirical validation.

In the abstract this appears to be fairly simple and the distinctions drawn, clear-cut. In practice, finding the distinctions between strategy and tactics can be anything but simple and clear-cut.

• Managers who confuse the two find themselves drifting into patterns of micromanaging the teams they lead.
• Leaders who confuse the two find themselves drifting from the long-term organized and systematic in their thinking and planning, to taking a more ad hoc approach – and even when a longer term consistent vision and message would be more effective.

But real world events can and do at times render even that generality unreliable too. In times of change and uncertainty, the boundaries between strategy and tactics have to change and leaders have to be prepared to change strategy and strategic vision to meet new and even disruptively emergent circumstances. Old strategy can literally become obsolete over night. And recovery from that type and level of disruption generally means shifting to a here and now tactical response while longer term needs and opportunities are being discerned and clarified.

As a real world example, on September 11, 2001 every nonprofit in the United States saw its long term strategy and planning for revenue generation from the day before, fall into irrelevancy as those terrorist-highjacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania. Across the country, the expected funding sources that they were relying on for that year and the next redirected their efforts and contributions to the issues and challenges of this event and away from the nonprofit missions and visions their donations would have gone to. At least initially, every nonprofit leader had to go into crisis mode as they tactically developed a clearer understanding as to how this would impact on their organization. Then they had to develop new strategy to accommodate this new and suddenly more challenging fundraising climate that they were going to be operating in. And mission-directed programs had to be reconsidered, reprioritized and rescaled, or in some cases dropped or at least temporarily suspended. And they had to change and reconsider and change still more in this across the board and for all of their operations and projects.

• The boundary between strategy and tactics had to shift, and certainly when initially facing and reorienting through this challenge. And then that balance had to shift back as new longer term patterns of opportunity and need became clearer.

The boundaries between strategy and tactics can and do change, and even when major events are not acting upon them. Both can and do change and evolve in and of themselves too, and that can be slow and gradual or sudden. Effective leadership calls for the seasoning and experience to navigate all of this, and to bring the organization as a whole through this change too.

You can find this and related postings at Business Strategy and Operations – 2 and see also Business Strategy and Operations.

I started this series from the perspective of the individuals and organizations that go online to set up online member profiles and to, for whatever reason, market their presence. In the course of that discussion I at least briefly touched upon a number of perspectives as to how online social networking connections might be evaluated as to intrinsic value from the member perspective. I will be adding a few more points to that side of this overall discussion here in today’s posting too but I am primarily going to discuss the valuation, and more explicitly the monetization of social networking from the perspective of social networking and social media sites and businesses – the platforms that individual people and other businesses connect through as members.

As a starting point for that, I ask a fairly basic question, couched here in terms of two social media businesses that are currently in the news for going public: Facebook and LinkedIn. Speculation as to their actual value is as businesses, and overtly differently from that – what they would list as being worth from a stock sale are popular topics of discussion and certainly for people interested in either social media or in the investment marketplace.

• What is a social networking, or more generally a social media platform provider actually worth, going into an initial public offering (IPO)?

In a real sense the primary goal of this posting is to discuss some of the factors that would go into determining that value, and in coming to an arguably defensible position as to whether IPO share prices, at the end of that first day of trading leave this newly public business over-valued, under-valued or realistically valuated.

Valuation decisions are often made for social media sites on the basis of levels of public involvement and participation. This basic approach in fact traces in principle to the very first attempts that were taken pre- the first dot.com bubble-burst, to determine monetary value of online business ventures – eyeball counts.

• An online business would bring in X number of visitors in an average day or week, or as measured along some other benchmark timeframe unit. This number of eyeballs measured was cited as a surrogate measure of business marketing reach and value.
• But many and even most of these web site visitors would click away and leave just as quickly as they had arrived and with no thought of actively entering into let alone completing a monetary transaction. So claiming eyeball count as a measure of business value per se would be like claiming a bricks and mortar store’s walk through traffic was a measure of its financial value as a business – when walking through its ground floor was an easy shortcut for reaching a highly trafficked subway station and most people entering did so and left with that as their goal.
• So online businesses and their marketers began touting their numbers for sticky eyeballs – the count of people who clicked into a site and stayed for a while, perhaps clicking in deeper and to other site pages before leaving.
• Metrics like these were used in setting, and hyping valuation predictions for these early online startups as they prepared for the riches of IPO status, and with founders suddenly gaining on-paper wealth. But simply counting visitors per se did not and does not translate in and of itself into determining true, valid monetizable value for an online business. Simply visiting as web site – the online equivalent of strolling through and perhaps stopping to look a bit, does not readily predict levels of monetary transactions completed or the overall value of such transactions. And this disconnect between valuation predictions based on those eyeballs and what those visitors actually did on these web sites to create actualized monetary value, was one of the core factors that led to that first big dot.com bubble burst.

Facebook has 800 million registered members (mostly with free accounts) and if it has not hit that number yet it will very soon! As Yogi Berra would say, “that’s déjà vu all over again” as eyeball count monetization comes back, and certainly for events such as IPO’s and their initial offering prices and the stock prices reached in that first trading day.

Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn do offer premium, for-fee services and with annual ongoing costs to members for them. This translates directly into revenue streams and realized monetary value. But this is not an eyeball count per se, as much as a measure of cash register activity for the people who stop to shop. This is, however, the point where eyeball-like measures begin to translate into arguably defensible bases for determining true business valuation. And what of other realizable and directly measurable revenue streams?

These sites can and do sell advertising space on their pages. And that can and does include higher value and higher priced targeted ad placement based upon matching advertiser and product to the details of the member profile that those ads would be placed on. So a profile for a new mother who has joined online groups through the site that are oriented toward being a new mother, would have ads for baby products added into its page template, along with products that a new mother would want for herself. A young man who joined groups related to team sports would see ads related to sports equipment and paraphernalia on their profile, as would others who visited their profile page. And increased monetizable value would come from mining the details and data of those profiles and of member activity as a whole on the site. (If that new mother was a site member and logged onto the site when she visited the profile page of her sports fan brother, her targeted marketing ads might follow her there, and show on his profile page for her instead of the ads that would be targeted towards him. Ad placement can be very nuanced in this.)

This is an important shift in perspective and approach, where these online businesses begin to monetize not the head count of members but the information they provide and information that can be developed about them from their site usage. And this can be demographics-level data that is anonymous with respect to any particular user/member. It can be information that is directly connectable to specific members and their profiles but only based on commercialized use of information that these members themselves designate as publically visible and by their choice. Or it can also include commercialization of information that members provide but that they have not indicated as data that they want publically visible, and even information that they indicate only select others should be able to see or that only the site administrators should be able to see. And this is where Facebook has gotten into significant trouble and where it has gathered some very bad press (see Facebook and the Importance of Respecting Social Contracts.)

• The most valuable, reliable ways for a social media or social networking platform online business to actually develop reliable monetizable value is for it to capitalize on the monetizable value of the member/user information it has in its systems.
• And the more comprehensibly and thoroughly they do this with offers of targeted marketing and sales opportunities, the more value they can generate for themselves as they develop channels for selling higher valued ad space and as they directly sell member data itself.
• But this creates real potential for conflict of interest with those members, and particularly as social media and networking businesses begin tapping into more intrusive and higher value data applications.

I am going to turn in my next series installment to discuss how social media consumer/user side metrics and social media service provider side metrics do and do not correlate and connect. I am going to follow that with a discussion of influence metrics and how they can be used.

You can find this and related postings at Macroeconomics and Business. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business.

I want to start by noting that I use the word telecommuting in its widest possible sense here, where a committee member might be based in the “home office” for a given committee they are working on but they might be away at a distant physical location – anywhere, where they can connect in from online or via phone connections. Or they might be working full or part time at another office location of the same organization – or simply be visiting such an office and perhaps borrowing a temporary desk space there. And if a committee requires participation from an employee of a supply chain partner, or a consultant they might be physically present in the room with other committee members, or they might be distantly located and connecting in too. So for the purpose of this posting at least when I use the term telecommute or similar (e.g. telecommuting or telecommuter) I allow for any connecting in from outside of the committee meeting room, via online or other networked systems to participate. And in this everyone involved might be telecommuting, in effect to a virtual meeting room that only exists in cyberspace. I have participated in a number of committees and other working groups over the years that have been run entirely virtually in this way and frequently with participants geographically dispersed across multiple time zones, all actively present and participating. And that is as good a starting point as any – consideration of committee involvement across distant time zones and scheduling.

• I live in New York and generally work out of there, or at least in/from the East Coast of the United States. I have worked virtually and on an ongoing basis with people in Europe in one direction and on the US West Coast and beyond (e.g. Australia and Asia) in the other from there. It can get very difficult at times to schedule meetings that are not going to be inconvenient for timing for at least some members and on a regular ongoing basis. And it is not uncommon for meetings to be inconvenient for most everyone with some joining in at or after midnight their time and others so participating in the very early morning. Compromising to meet participant scheduling needs and fairness in this are very important, as is an awareness that this type of geographically dispersed committee can stretch or even break the boundaries between work life and personal/home life.
• So it can be very important to know when committee members all have to be actively engaged and for what. Entire committees need not necessarily be involved in every detail and in every committee-related meeting.
• It is just as important to keep track of which parts of the information development and sharing process of committee work actually have to be conducted synchronously and in real-time and which can be managed asynchronously and off-line, simply tapping into resources maintained in the cloud or by equivalent shared storage means.
• In this regard, email is still a valid tool and certainly where asynchronous connectivity and sharing are appropriate and where messages shared can range from short to lengthy, and with attachments. Keep older tools and formats in mind too as potential resources of value.

So this posting is about finding a balance in how information is managed and with what tools, that meets and respects the needs of the people involved.

Processes become very important here, and I turn back to a perhaps minor point I added into my last bullet point, above: “… and with attachments.”

• A committee and the business or organization that primarily or entirely owns it might have a policy that every shared document, drafts in progress included, must be stored on specific vetted server systems as organized into an interactive intranet and internally facing information architecture. Then instead of offering an attachment document and perhaps as a draft that is being worked on, an email would offer a link to where that document draft in question can be found, perhaps in a works in progress folder.
• But even when that type of policy is strictly adhered to, one committee member might wish to share some background information with another in explaining or clarifying their opinion on some issue, where that document would not be pertinent to the group as a whole and would seem more like extraneous clutter to others – if simply added into the shared documents pool.
• And many committees do send working documents and their drafts back and forth and particularly where only two or three members at most are actively involved in creating them. (Note: for this, always use tools that support inclusion of editing history metadata so everyone can see what changes where made and by whom.)
• My basic point here as to document sharing via whatever means selected, is that how that is done should connect into and be consistent with set operational policies so everyone knows how to do it and where to find it correctly.
• And this becomes particularly important when fellow committee members cannot simply walk down to the hall and into another office to get clarification – and when distance and other factors mean they cannot easily ask for clarification or information finding directions by phone or other synchronous means either.

I have been writing in this series up to now with a fixed, set committee charter in mind as a given. In my next series installment I am going to discuss charter revisions and committee problems and issues that can accompany that type and level of change. And I will also discuss the challenge of scope creep and development of open-ended and undefined goals out of what might have begun as a focused end-point objective.

You can find this posting and others of this series at Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2. I have also posted extensively on jobs and careers-related topics in my first Guide directory page on Job Search and Career Development.

I add that favoritism harms all – the people so favored included. They find themselves carrying responsibilities for which they are not suited and for which they are not prepared. So even when people who are so promoted have potential to grow and advance on merit into higher positions, favoritism can push them into positions of responsibility before they are ready, in effect setting them up for failure.

• Favoritism breeds a culture of mediocrity and a cynical workplace where cutting corners becomes acceptable for those who are properly connected, and where ability and drive are seen as a losing strategy.

Mentoring and a culture of mentoring are in a fundamental sense the opposite of favoritism. Mentoring, and certainly as I define and use the term, is about recognizing and cultivating potential to bring out the fullest ability of employees who are willing to take on greater challenges. There, training and advancement, and the opportunity to advance are predicated on ability and determination, and on a willingness to prove oneself and to do more.

This is my fourth installment in a series on developing management and leadership skills in others (see HR and Personnel, postings 81-83 for parts 1-3), and my goal here is two-fold:

• To clearly distinguish between favoritism and mentoring as approaches and practices, and
• To focus on mentoring as a core business practice and as a basis for a corporate culture.

A corporate culture built upon a mentoring system is one that is centered on developing and promoting greater organizational effectiveness through a process of enriching the lives of individual people in the organization.

• A culture of mentoring attracts the people you would seek out who would do more and better and who would do so collaboratively.
• A culture of mentoring provides a system for sharing, validating and continuously updating best practices to keep them best.

But what of people who perform best when given room to think things through and to develop and even prototype new ideas and new approaches on their own? This can include some of your most creative and long-term most valuable employees and team members.

• Effective mentoring and effective mentoring systems do not compel simple conformity and they do allow for and support differences in personality and approach.

So I tentatively add:

• A culture based on mentoring and mentoring-supported collaboration challenges those who would simply drift with a status quo, limiting their advancement through their failure to actively prepare to succeed in it.

I add this tentatively as a conformity and consensus forcing cartoon implementation of a mentoring culture would stifle, and in its own way be as bad as any favoritism-based system. It could in fact become a favoritism of the already accepted and known, as opposed to a favoritism of select individuals.

• Look for and encourage mentors who are younger than their mentees, and whose expertise and insight come from greater hands-on experience with newer and more cutting edge ideas, technologies and approaches, as well as older mentors who have longer-term experience and insight.
• Look for and encourage mentors who regardless of age, view the world differently than you do and who bring different and even challenging thought processes to the table when they work with others.
• Look for and cultivate your creative thinkers and builders, and with an acute awareness that they are not going to readily follow standard patterns or approaches – and your best will not.
• And support mentors and mentees in reversing roles, and even back and forth between individuals working together in this. Insight can develop and flow both ways, and it should.

How do you actively build a mentoring-based corporate culture? You have to start on a number of fronts. Organizationally, identify and break down the silo walls that block connectivity and sharing of knowledge and other resources, and that can sequester and locally promote favoritism. And welcome, include and involve diversity – and without automatic assumptions that those higher on the table of organization, or older should always be mentoring those lower and/or younger.

And as a final thought here, accept the fact that a mentoring culture is a culture of change as new ideas and approaches are created and shared, tested and allowed to prove themselves. Mentoring as a system, supports the rapid diffusion of knowledge and perspective, and of innovation.

I am going to turn in my next series installment to teaching management skills. Meanwhile, you can find this series and related postings at HR and Personnel and further related postings at Business Strategy and Operations and its continuation page at Business Strategy and Operations – 2.

Yesterday I wrote an open letter to students in the first two years of their college experience in which I focused on the issues of selecting a major (see Thinking Ahead as an Open Letter to the Class of 2014 and the Class of 2015.) My upcoming second posting continuation of that will focus on internships and summer jobs, and on seeking out and securing work experience that will help build a starting foundation for landing that first post-college job and in launching a career.

I write this letter to juniors and seniors who may have missed some of the opportunities that I write of in my two open letters to their younger peers.

• This may mean students who have pursued a major that does not clearly connect with a career path for which there are going to be jobs readily available.
• Regardless of major this may mean students who have not developed a resource base of experience outside of the classroom that would help them as they pursue that first full time job.

This letter is about building a career path foundation when you have to start without a clear set of guideposts that a potential hiring manager could follow, in seeing your value to them and their organization.

• Start out by really thinking through what types of job you want to pursue. Be honest with yourself about what you can bring to the table in preparing a resume and when meeting with others, and in both networking and in interviews. If you are thinking in terms of an engineering position but you do not have the core requisite requirement degree to be eligible, that limits your chances – unless you can demonstrate equivalent or better, and even in the face of set job description hiring guidelines.
• What can you convincingly present yourself as being able to do and prepared to do as a matter of skills and experience and what jobs call for that, that you would seek out as full time employment?
• Look at all of your skills – soft people skills, language skills and communications skills definitely included.
• Consider and apply for transition jobs that might not be precisely what you want but that would help you flesh out your resume and make you a better candidate for what you do want. This, I add, might mean taking a job more or less like what you would want but with a smaller organization that is run on a tight budget, where you would have to start out with a lower salary, without benefits or both. Or you might have to work odd hours or in some other way compromise your short term goals and preferences to gain longer term benefits.
• Join the appropriate professional organizations, and include online groups that are accessible through and maintained on sites like LinkedIn – professional social networking sites. This can help you network into the jobs arena you seek to work in, and it can also be an effective way to learn the language, the issues, the priorities and the basic assumptions of the people who already work in the field you seek to enter.
• Consider the above a description of a part of a job search campaign, directed towards some particular industry, type of business or organization within it, and position within that. And be prepared to simultaneously be working on up to six such campaigns. With time they may all come to focus within one industry, or other single grouping and that simply means you now have a clearer idea as to what you are looking for.
• Reality-check your ongoing efforts. Review your goals, and your job search strategy and its execution with people whose judgment you trust. Go over your ongoing experience in the search with them to find places where you need to fine tune or even significantly course-correct.
• Remember to keep in contact with your classmates and join your alumni association – and any relevant LinkedIn and other online groups that draw in members from your school. Fellow alumni from your alma mater who are working in the types of careers you seek to enter can be invaluable allies in your search and their value only goes up when these are people working at businesses you have targeted as great places to work too. Recommendations from within an organization can carry a great deal of weight in candidate selection.
• And be persistent and keep going. You may be starting from a weaker position then other candidates with perhaps more sought-after majors and/or internships in their backgrounds but you can catch up and excel.

As a final thought for this posting, review my other open letters as noted above, and I do recommend reading and trying the exercises in my job search oriented postings in my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development with most of that listed in its first directory page. This posting and other/recent open letters related to it can be found in its directory page continuation.

When you are just starting a journey it is not usually all that easy to think in terms of its finishing, and certainly when entering into as big a change in life as found when first starting college. And for perhaps the first time in your life you find yourself facing a widely comprehensive range of day to day and long term choices that you have to make – and certainly for students who find themselves living away from home and family for the first time. But for purpose of this letter, I would write of college and the college experience from the perhaps very limited perspective of preparing for a next step after, and with all emphasis here on that. And I want to focus here on two things – two types of detail that you can control and that to a substantial degree, depending on how you address them, can increase or decrease your job and career changes later.

• Picking the right major, that will both interest and involve you and also help you build a foundation for landing that first post-school job.
• Planning for, applying to and securing the right summer internships and other “real world” workplace experience for setting yourself apart from the graduating crowd when you do finish your degree and move on.

I list these issues as separate, but in fact you want to think through and follow through on them coordinately and so that you can build a solid foundation. With that in mind I begin with picking a major.

When you enter college you immerse yourself in a world of ideas and of knowledge sharing, and whether you see that range of opportunity around you or not. The opportunity is there, and all around you. From a perspective of interest and curiosity, all possible academic paths offer value and certainly to the degree they would enrich you as a person and as an individual. But some are in effect career dead ends with few if any graduates from them finding work related to their academic fields. And graduates of these programs are more likely to face difficulty in landing any job after graduating. A breakdown of current unemployment numbers for new college graduates by degrees majored in shows that.

There are other academic paths that are in effect job and career door openers. Right now and as I write this, new bachelors degree recipients with library science degrees, like those with medieval history degrees or literary criticism degrees are not faring well. Engineering degree graduates and particularly new graduates with currently hot specialties (e.g. mining engineer) are being signed up before they can finish their degrees with well paying jobs waiting for them, generally only subject to their successfully completing their degree programs and passing those last courses.

There are fads involved here. It wasn’t that long ago that virtually anyone completing an MBA was essentially guaranteed a better, higher paying job and right away after graduating. Then reality set in and the market became glutted with new MBA’s and businesses began to get a lot more discerning as to which MBA programs offered more value to them, with real, tangible value coming to them from having these new “experts” on-staff. So the perceived value of getting that MBA per se went down and has fluctuated up and down since then. The same will happen for any current fad degree that might be out there, mining engineer included. And some of the degrees that are not faring so well in the job market might see an upturn. So you cannot simply look at the recent past and set an absolute, immutable scale that degree major options could be pegged to, in set positions for all times – a “this is a good one” for jobs, and “that is a bad one” for jobs prospects. Still, with that set of caveats in mind, trends can be discerned.

Find out how graduates of the programs you are interested in have fared over the most recent four or five years. Note: it is very important that you get your baseline data here from your own school as well as for the marketplace as a whole. So for example, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has an excellent reputation for its mining engineering programs and has so for a great many years now. A degree in this area from a recognized-leader school would carry more weight and open more doors for a new graduate than would a same-title degree from a school unknown in this area that was just starting a new program in it.

• Look for degree program majors that are sought after and for which you have reason to believe will continue to be sought after.
• But also look to the stature and reputation of the specific programs that your school offers and with the success of its graduates as a measure of its success.

I am going to continue this open letter in a few days, there looking into internships, and summer and part-time jobs pursued and carried-through on while you are a student. And as a foretaste of that posting, I note here that finding the right work experience in this to add to your starting resume is not necessarily entirely about finding work in a business in your target career field. There are a range of factors and considerations that go into finding the best work experience while a student for meeting your longer term job and career goals.

You can find this and other material about jobs and careers at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and its continuation page, and with these open letters included at the bottom of those directory pages as supplemental postings.