Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 18, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

12:47

984 The Philosophy of Career Success

The fastest route to the management fast track.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope that you're doing very well.
	I thought I would take a little bit of a break from the political and personal aspects of applied philosophy and talk about how you can achieve greater business success in your career.
	And just a few points about me so that I can establish, let's say, the tiniest shred of credibility before we continue.
	I got my first job when I was 11.
	Back in, I guess, for what most of you in YouTube land would be, 1720.
	Putting the New York Times together in a bookshop on Sundays, which was great, because I got all the books that I could want from the bookstore for free, which was great.
	And, of course, honestly.
	And I worked through a variety of jobs after that, paper route...
	I was a waiter, I worked in a convenience store, and then I began temping, and then I got my first job as a COBOL programmer at a bank, having never taken computer science in my life.
	And then I founded a company, I rose to chief technical officer, sold the company, and then had a shorter stint as a marketing executive before Quitting real income and becoming a full-time internet philosopher, as you see before you now.
	So I have a little bit of experience floating up from the bottom to the top, and I thought that I would impart a few lessons that I learned along the way in the hopes of being able to get you greater satisfaction in your career and allowing you to really tap into your full potential, both from a career satisfaction standpoint and from the standpoint of income,
	of course, and money is nice. I, as a chief technical officer and as a marketing executive, I traveled all over the United States and parts of Europe doing presentations and closing deals, China and other places.
	So I hope that my experience rising from lowly bookstore employee to a fairly seasoned executive will be of some use to you.
	So I'm going to take an example that a listener at Free Domain Radio brought to me and asked me for my advice so that you can get a sense of how The approach that we take at Freedom Main Radio, the sort of philosophical Socratic approach that we take, can be very, very helpful for you in your business career.
	Philosophy is the all-discipline.
	It covers everything. And that's why, to me, it is the most exciting and fundamental discipline to grasp.
	So, this guy, Nate, he came to me and he said, look, I have this problem at work.
	He's a contractor in the IT field.
	And there's a guy, we'll call him Bob, Who works at the company he works at, that Nate works at.
	And Bob is continually not giving Nate the necessary information, the information that Nate needs to get his job done.
	Which means that Nate then has to go and spend hours doing research because he can't get a hold of this guy.
	The guy doesn't return his phone calls or says, I'll get you the information later and then it takes forever if it ever comes.
	So, Nate faces a significant roadblock in his career efficiency or efficacy in terms of being stalled by this guy who doesn't get him the information when he needs.
	So, there's a number of different approaches that you can take, that I've taken in the past, which can be helpful.
	I'll just touch on two sort of brief ones that are You can obviously sit down with a coffee with this guy.
	I wouldn't talk about the issues with him directly because people who are kind of difficult tend not to respond very well to the direct approach.
	But, you know, get to know the guy a little bit and so on and ask him if you can schedule maybe half an hour of his time once a week.
	Just try and work it at a horizontal level and I think that's a useful thing to do.
	If the guy does turn out to be completely recalcitrant, then you're going to need to find other ways to solve the problem because it is a problem that affects not just you but the Company that you work for.
	So I would sort of do the following if I were in Nate's shoes.
	I would go to Bob's boss if I was not able to make any headway with Bob.
	I would go to Bob's boss, but I would have documented already the amount of time that I'm spending doing research because I can't get answers from Bob.
	So let's say that I spend five hours a week doing research because I can't get answers from Bob and I'm being paid $100 an hour.
	Well, that's $2,000 a month that the company is losing in lost productivity and so on.
	So, what you do when you go to your boss, the important thing always, always, always, if you want to rise into the ranks of management, the absolutely essential thing is that you don't come to your boss with problems, but with solutions.
	You don't want to be that employee, you know, maybe you know these guys at work, right?
	They They're going to come around and they complain about everything and they're negative and they're a downer and there's nothing but problems.
	You don't want to be one of those guys, right?
	You want your boss to be happy when you come into his or her office.
	You don't want to knock on the door.
	The boss looks up and it's like, oh, that guy, he's got problems.
	He's going to bring my day down or whatever, right?
	And you also don't want to bring really nasty tasks to your boss, if it can be avoided.
	I mean, sometimes it can. But you don't want to come to your boss and say, you know, this Bob guy, he's just not giving me what I need.
	It's really frustrating. You've got to talk to him, blah, blah, blah.
	Because then the boss is like, oh, great.
	So now I've got to deal with a permanent employee who's got personality problems or...
	Getting along with people problems.
	And that's unpleasant. I got it documented.
	I got this ugly confrontation.
	And I've had to fire a number of people in my career.
	It's never that fun.
	It's never fun at all. So you don't want to, or even disciplining people, right?
	So you don't want to bring that to your boss if you can at all avoid it.
	What you want to do is bring to your boss something that your boss can use to actually solve the problem.
	So again, if I were in eight shoes, I would document how much time, multiply it by my hourly rate, and then you can also tack on a 50% overhead for, and it could be more, could be less, depends on where you work.
	For the office, the heating, the computer, the network, right?
	So it's $150 or $200 an hour.
	So it's $3,000 to $4,000 a month that is being lost because you can't get the information from this guy when you need it, right?
	So then, you've come with a problem and the problem is defined, right?
	The problem is defined in financial terms because companies are about money, they're about profit.
	So you come with the problem defined in financial terms.
	So it's not just you complaining that your job is harder to do, because frankly, your boss doesn't care.
	How hard your job is to do.
	I mean, maybe it'd be nice if they did, but, you know, your boss has his own career or her own career to worry about, and nobody wakes up in the morning who's not you worrying how easy or hard your job is, right?
	I mean, your boss is going to be very interested in looking good himself or herself, and that comes from you doing a good job and so on.
	But going in and complaining that your job is tough and you have to do a lot of research and this guy's difficult Doesn't motivate your boss that much, right?
	And you have to manage upwards, to move upwards.
	So, you go to your boss, and you've defined the problem in financial terms.
	Well, three to four grand a month is going down the tubes because I don't have access to this guy.
	And then, so you've defined the problem in abstract, monetary, impersonal terms, right?
	Impersonal terms. And then you come up with a solution, right?
	Because bosses love implementing solutions.
	They don't love getting problems that they have to try and figure out.
	So you also go to your boss and you say, look, if I can get a half hour of this guy's time once a week, like dedicated, across the table, no interruptions, FaceTime, then I can reduce the amount of research that I have to do from five hours to zero, or whatever, right? But let's just say five hours to zero a week.
	So, the way that I see it, half an hour of this guy's time, half an hour of my time adds up to $200, right?
	Times four weeks in a month is $800.
	So, we spend $800 to save $3,000 to $4,000.
	And managers, in general, prefer repetitive cost savings to one-time cost savings.
	Saying to a company, I'll save you $10,000.
	Once is not as good as saying, I will save you $2,000 a month, because that you can plan for.
	The rest of it's just kind of free money that's almost more work to manage the exception than it is to the benefit of creating that sudden inflow of cash.
	So you want those repetitive savings.
	You want to bring that to your mind.
	So now what's happening is you have defined the problem in objective terms.
	You've brought a solution which is sellable.
	In terms of the other person's responsibilities, it's sellable in terms of the money that it saves, it's productive, it's positive, it's all of these kinds of things.
	That is the kind of solution that you bring that is going to help you to move up in the ranks of management, right?
	People don't just...
	I mean, if you want to know what it's like from a management position, and I've mentored a number of people in my career, managers don't look down at the sea of employees and just, you know, eeny, meeny, miny, miny, I'll pick this guy and mentor him.
	What they do is they look for people who have initiative, who have the ability to define issues in business terms, right?
	Which is not, my job is difficult, or I don't like having to do all this research, or this is a waste of time, or this guy's a jerk, or...
	Those aren't business issues, fundamentally, right?
	I mean, business issues are, look, you're spending four grand a month here.
	If we do it my way, you're going to save over $3,000 a month, which is pretty good, right?
	And then, see, what happens is, if...
	If you hand this solution to your boss, right, that it's just about saving money and it's about being productive and it's about you thinking about the company's interests, right?
	Because this management is not supposed to be a good manager.
	You have to look at the big picture.
	You have to look at the company's interests as a whole and manage everything according to the goals of profit and growth.
	So, when you bring this solution to your boss, what you're doing, and if you can even package it, right?
	I mean, that's even better, right?
	Like, if you can package it, a spreadsheet, a presentation, whatever it is, right?
	You don't have to go overboard for something small, but then what happens is, The boss has some paperwork.
	Write it down, hand it to your boss.
	The boss has paperwork. So when your boss has to meet with Bob, the knowledge hoarder, then he can say, or you can suggest a meeting with the three of you together, right?
	But then the boss can say, look, this is not, you know, Nate has a problem with you.
	You've got to give him information, because that's not measurable, right?
	Where the problem is not measurable, the solution is not measurable, and nobody wants to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
	Right? So, if you say, because you can also say, look, I'm sure that Bob doesn't appreciate me interrupting him five times a week or ten times a week.
	If we get this stuff squared away once a week, that would be fantastic.
	If you need more than that, then it's ten minutes a day.
	Whatever it is, right? Whatever it is that you can work out.
	But then your boss can sit down with you guys and say, look, here's what I understand, right?
	That Nate is spending five hours, which costs us, you know, this amount per month.
	If you guys can have one hour, 45 minutes, half hour a week, whatever, then it's going to save us this amount a month.
	And you sort of debate this kind of stuff.
	And then, of course, Bob has the ability to say, look, I have no time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But then the boss, then you can say, well, I mean, I certainly don't want to displace higher value activities from Bob's list of things to do, right?
	So then you have a criteria, right?
	So if an hour of Bob's time that he's spending on some other task is generating less than...
	The savings that your proposed solution is going to generate, less than $3,000 to $4,000 a month, then clearly that task is going to get displaced or sent to somebody else who makes less money.
	So what you're doing is you're creating a rational and objective hierarchy of how you can prioritize, how your boss can prioritize these kinds of things.
	And that is how you bring solutions to management.
	And that's how you... Get into management.
	You get into management by bringing packaged, objective, rational, business-savvy solutions to your bosses so that they understand that you look at the big picture, that you can understand what makes the company money, what's really important, that you're thinking like a business person, that your objections are to inefficiencies, not to people, to loss of profit, not to personal issues.
	Because you've got to distinguish yourself from the sea of employees that bosses deal with.
	And once your boss realizes that you're already thinking like a manager, then you will inevitably move into the position of manager, which is a lot more satisfying than being told what to do all the time.
	So I hope that this helps.
	If you have any other questions or business issues, I would be more than happy to make this a regular feature.
	But I really hope that you will take this to heart and give it a shot.
	Define things objectively, bring solutions to management, not problems, and very soon, you will be in management.
	So, I hope this helps. Thank you so much.

▲