Career Opportunities with Douglas E. Welch

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Books on Hold is a blog series dedicated to books I have seen in passing and requested from my local library. See more in the series at the end of this blog post. — Douglas

Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

From Amazon.com…

“If you said advertising, think again. People don’t listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He’s studied why New York Times articles make the paper’s own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.

Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you’ve wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread—for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you’re a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.”

* Discovered via KnowledgeBlocks

Previously in Books on Hold:

• Salty Snacks: Make Your Own Chips, Crisps, Crackers, Pretzels, Dips, and Other Savory Bites
• Pancake: A Global History
• Breakfast for Dinner: Recipes for Frittata Florentine, Huevos Rancheros, Sunny-Side-Up Burgers, and More!
• Blog, Inc.: Blogging for Passion, Profit, and to Create Community by Joy Deangdeelert Cho
• Nigellissima: Easy Italian-Inspired Recipes by Nigella Lawson
• Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future
• Meatless: More Than 200 of the Very Best Vegetarian Recipes (Martha Stewart Living)
• How to Boil An Egg by Rose Carrarini
• Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant by Amanda Cohen
• See more Books on Hold here!

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I am starting to ramp up production of my next Career Opportunities book and I am looking for a few good advisors/editors to help me make it as great as possible. This will involve “crowd sourcing” this advice — having a number of people look at and comment on what I am producing.

The next book is tentatively entitled “It’s Your Career After All: The Best of Career Opportunities – 2003-2012.”

This will be a collection of columns from the eight years since I produced “The High Tech Career Handbook” back in 2003. Additionally, though, I am looking to expand on the previous material with sidebars, comments, annotations, links and more. This is where the advisors come in.

I am looking for perhaps 10, dedicated, advisors to help me with the creation of this book. This number might change as I move forward, but I my thinking is that 10 people can easily coordinate and communicate both with myself and their peers over the course of the book’s creation.

At this point, of your work, I am offering a free electronic copy of the book and Advisory Board credit in the book when it is completed. That said, I am hoping that you will get more from your advisory role than just a book. I think the conversations we have around the various topics could offer a great chance to think deeply about your career and hopefully jumpstart you on to some unforeseen adventures.

To be clear, this will be a lot of work. Right now the collected Career Opportunities columns run to about 50K words. With the additions I already have in mind, I can foresee the final word count to be around 75K words. While I will ask everyone to suggest edits and corrections, I am, more importantly, looking for questions that need to be answered, expansions that bring more value to the existing text, new areas of thought to be explored.

Are you interested in joining me on this journey? Email me at career@welchwrite.com and let me know your level of interest in the project. What special qualities do you bring to the table? I would love to have a wide range of advisors — in age, in skills, in careers — so that the book provides as much value as possible.

Thanks for reading and listening to Career Opportunities!

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Books on Hold is a blog series dedicated to books I have seen in passing and requested from my local library. See more in the series at the end of this blog post. — Douglas

Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future

From Amazon.com…

“In a world where you can no longer plan or predict your way to success, how can you achieve your most important goals? It’s a daunting question. But in today’s environment, where change is the only constant, it’s a question everyone must answer. This is true whether you are an innovator or an entrepreneur, a manager or a newly minted graduate.

The first step, say the authors of this book, is this: “Just start.” In other words, take action now and learn as you go.

Written by a trio of seasoned business leaders, Just Start combines fascinating research with proven practices to deliver a reliable method for helping you advance toward your goals—despite the uncertainty that is all too common today. Babson College President Leonard Schlesinger, organizational learning expert Charles Kiefer, and veteran journalist Paul B. Brown share their own deep and varied experiences and draw from a source where striving amid constant uncertainty actually works: the world of serial entrepreneurship. In this world, people don’t just think differently—they act differently, as well.”

Previously in Books on Hold:

• Meatless: More Than 200 of the Very Best Vegetarian Recipes (Martha Stewart Living)
• How to Boil An Egg by Rose Carrarini
• Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant by Amanda Cohen
• Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making by Alana Chernila
• To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel Pink
• Risk Intelligence: How to Live with Uncertainty by Dylan Evans
• Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi
• The Naked Brewer: Fearless Homebrewing Tips, Tricks & Rule-breaking Recipes by Christina Perozzi, Hallie Beaune
• The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life by Margaret Roach
• Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich
• The Science of Good Cooking: Master 50 Simple Concepts to Enjoy a Lifetime of Success in the Kitchen (Cook’s Illustrated Cookbooks)
• Martha’s American Food: A Celebration of Our Nation’s Most Treasured Dishes, from Coast to Coast by Martha Stewart
• The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage 
• Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven (Author), Oof Verschuren (Photographer)
• Come In, We’re Closed: An Invitation to Staff Meals at the World’s Best Restaurants

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Books on Hold is a blog series dedicated to books I have seen in passing and requested from my local library. See more in the series at the end of this blog post. — Douglas

I work on “moving people” everyday. Whether I am moving someone from ignorance to knowledge, work to career, food to cuisine, or old media to new media everything depends on helping others move to a new place in their lives. I guess I have always understood this as “selling” even if I didn’t call it that. In this Daniel Pink offers some deeper insight into the what it means to “sell” and addresses some age-old myths about selling.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

From Amazon.com…

“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase.

 

But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges:

 

Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight.

 

Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.

 

To Sell Is Human offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. As he did in Drive and A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights. He reveals the new ABCs of moving others (it’s no longer “Always Be Closing”), explains why extraverts don’t make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an “off-ramp” for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds.

 

Along the way, Pink describes the six successors to the elevator pitch, the three rules for understanding another’s perspective, the five frames that can make your message clearer and more persuasive, and much more. The result is a perceptive and practical book–one that will change how you see the world and transform what you do at work, at school, and at home.”

Previously in Books on Hold:

• Risk Intelligence: How to Live with Uncertainty by Dylan Evans
• Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi
• The Naked Brewer: Fearless Homebrewing Tips, Tricks & Rule-breaking Recipes by Christina Perozzi, Hallie Beaune
• The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life by Margaret Roach
• Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich
• The Science of Good Cooking: Master 50 Simple Concepts to Enjoy a Lifetime of Success in the Kitchen (Cook’s Illustrated Cookbooks)
• Martha’s American Food: A Celebration of Our Nation’s Most Treasured Dishes, from Coast to Coast by Martha Stewart
• The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage 
• Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven (Author), Oof Verschuren (Photographer)
• Come In, We’re Closed: An Invitation to Staff Meals at the World’s Best Restaurants

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Books on Hold is a blog series dedicated to books I have seen in passing and requested from my local library. See more in the series at the end of this blog post. — Douglas

The inability to properly gauge and understand risks and act in a world of uncertainty is one of the biggest limitations in most people’s thinking today. It leaves people apt lash out in fear or worry themselves into sickness. I’m looking forward to read what this book has to say about developing a better understanding of risks.

Risk Intelligence: How to Live with Uncertainty by Dylan Evans

* Discovered via  Knowledge Blocks

From Amazon.com…

“There is a special kind of intelligence for dealing with risk and uncertainty. It doesn’t correlate with IQ, and most psychologists failed to spot it because it is found in such a disparate, rag-tag group of people – American weather-forecasters, professional gamblers, and hedge-fund managers, for example.

This book shows just how important risk intelligence is. Many people in positions which require high risk intelligence – doctors, financial regulators and bankers, for instance – seem unable to navigate what Evans calls the “darkened room”, the domain of doubt and uncertainty.

Risk Intelligence is a traveller’s guide to the twilight zone of probabilities and speculation. Evans shows us how risk intelligence is vital to making good decisions, from dealing with climate change to combating terrorism. He argues that we can all learn a lot from expert gamblers, not just about money, but about how to make decisions in all aspects of our lives. Introducing a wealth of fascinating research findings and using a wide range of real-life examples–from the brilliant risk assessment skills of horse race handicappers to the tragically flawed evaluations of risk that caused the financial crisis–Evans reveals the common errors in our thinking that undermine our risk intelligence. He also introduces a host of simple techniques we can use to boost our RQ, and a brief test to measure our RQ. Both highly engaging and truly mind-changing, Risk Intelligence will fascinate all of those who are interested in how we can improve our thinking in order to enhance our lives.”

Previously in Books on Hold:

• Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi
• The Naked Brewer: Fearless Homebrewing Tips, Tricks & Rule-breaking Recipes by Christina Perozzi, Hallie Beaune
• The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life by Margaret Roach
• Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich
• The Science of Good Cooking: Master 50 Simple Concepts to Enjoy a Lifetime of Success in the Kitchen (Cook’s Illustrated Cookbooks)
• Martha’s American Food: A Celebration of Our Nation’s Most Treasured Dishes, from Coast to Coast by Martha Stewart
• The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage 
• Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven (Author), Oof Verschuren (Photographer)
• Come In, We’re Closed: An Invitation to Staff Meals at the World’s Best Restaurants

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From A Gardener’s Notebook: A collection of essays

What is there about a garden?

Gardens can be beautiful or productive and are often both at the same time. Every gardener brings their own energies, their own attitudes, their own wants, needs and desires to their garden, making each one a unique statement on their creators. Whether you are growing vegetables, flowers for cutting or the world’s largest pumpkin, gardens can hold a special place in your heart.

Gardens can tell us a lot about ourselves, but we also end up communicating who we are to others through our gardens. One visit to my garden and you will see that I like things a little wild and not too tidy. You’ll notice that I garden with benign neglect — reveling in those things that survive and not worrying too much about those that don’t. My garden is a window into the very core of who I am. Sure there will be more to learn, but sometimes I think my garden is the best introduction anyone can have of me.

Join me in my garden!

The High-Tech Career Handbook: The Best of Career Opportunities 1998-2003

30,000 Words

Navigating the special difficulties of a high-tech career can be troublesome for workers, young and old. Career Opportunities, a weekly column for ComputorEdge Magazine in San Diego, California and Colorado Springs, Colorado, has addressed these issues for almost 13 years. While simultaneously developing his own high-tech career, author Douglas E. Welch has shared his insights, trials, setbacks and successes with his readers. The High-Tech Career Handbook collects the best columns from 1997-2003 into a book for all high-tech careerists, whether they are just starting out, building their career or looking for a new career in the high-tech world. Topics covered in the columns include getting your career started, ethics, fairness and the benefits of doing honest business, personal development, professional development, and the tips and tricks for transitioning into a mature career. 

Cultivating Your Career Reputations

11,000 Words

While we often talk about one, monolithic, Reputation – with a capital R — I believe that there are a series of reputations that make up the whole. This book will focus on the combination of reputations that make up your one, overarching, Reputation. By examining each of these reputations in detail, I hope you will find specific areas where you can improve your work, your actions and your thoughts so that your overall professional reputation grows. Why break your Reputation down into its constituent parts? It is often said that you can’t “do” projects, you can only do the individual tasks that make up the project and achieve the desired result. The same can be said for reputation. You don’t build your reputation as a whole, you cultivate the smaller reputations that create it. Each individual action builds your reputation in unique ways and each requires some thought as to how they relate to the whole. Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Reputations
• A Reputation for Fairness
• A Reputation for Honesty
• A Reputation for Trustworthiness
• A Reputation for Decision-making
• A Reputation for Empathy
• A Reputation for Helpfulness
• A Reputation for Compromise
• A Reputation for Clarity
• A Reputation for the Big Picture…and the small
• A Reputation for Balancing Work and Self
• A Reputation for Creativity and Innovation
• Conclusion
• About the Author

“I am deeply convinced of the importance and effectiveness of social media. Like the Internet itself, which made social media possible, social media allows you to expose your talents, your products, your creativity to a huge number of people all over the world. The “loose contacts” we make online are the beginning of what I call our own global family. This isn’t one unwieldy global online community, but rather our own personalized family made up of those that bring value into our lives. Our communities might overlap in some ways, but they will never be the same. They can’t be. We are all unique individuals so therefore our communities will reflect this uniqueness In fact, when our communities are too alike, we might be just following the crowd instead of building our own community.”

Social Media Self Preservation is now available in the Amazon Kindle Bookstore.

 An Audio Book version of Social Media Self Preservation is also available

*Amazon Prime members can “borrow” the book for free. 

* Kindle books can be read on nearly any computer or mobile platform including, Mac, Windows, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, and Android phones and tablets. Download Free Kindle Reader Software

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From Career Compass: Finding Your Career North…

“In order to fit in we might be denying our unique skills and the knowledge that could lead us to exceptional careers — not just an average one.”

Download a sample of this book, or buy your own copy, via Amazon.com.

** You can read Kindle books on nearly any device including your computer, tablet or smartphone.

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Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirkey

I am in the midst of reading this book and enjoying it a lot Shirley seeks to provide some background as to why people volunteer their time and energy on various Internet-conncected pursuits as varied as online communities, sharing Instagram photos and raising money for charities online. I am finding that I am highlighting quite a few sections to consider later, as I read.

It is important for every careerist to understand how this new hyper-connected world effects not only what we do, but who we are. Understanding the tools and the motivations that drive their use is a great career advantage that should not be ignored.

From Amazon.com…

“The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us for the better.

In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what’s possible when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.”

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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni

Dysfunctions is structured more like a short story or novelette than a traditional business book. This allowed me to get very involved in the story. Indeed, I believe a good story is always the best way to approach life and business. Whether you are writing a resume or trying to solve difficult business problems, a good story can illuminate the issue better than any combination of charts and reports.

The end of the book contains a more “business-like” restatement of the lessons, for those who want a more traditional review.

More importantly, I saw many aspects of my past business dealings echoed in the book. I think that anyone who is involved in business, in any form, has faced many of these same problems and issues. I requested this book from the library after seeing a short mention, possibly just the title in some magazine I was reading. I had no preconceptions about what I might find within, and I have been pleasantly surprised with the quality and importance of Dysfunctions.

While telling a good story helped to clearly explain the concepts, there were a few times when the characters came around too quickly to the lesson.The main character, a newly minuted CEO brought in to build a better executive team, seems a bit too assured with her process, but yet exhibits some moments of fear and regret.

Overall, this is a great book and I would highly suggest that it be recommended to your employees and your peers as a way of explaining how teamwork can and will develop if everyone is committed to making it happen.

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The Pursuit of Wow! by Tom Peters

While I don’t think I would ever pay the expensive fees required to attend a Tom Peters seminar in person, I am more than happy to read what he has to say. The constant instigator, Peters may say things you don’t agree with, but he will also make you think. My favorite parts of the book are the examples, using companies both large and small, that demonstrate how even the small things can have big effects. Peter’s bias towards front-line personnel is also heartening. I too believe that a company’s fortunes are made just as much at the front counter as they are in the company headquarters. Often, front-line personnel have access to important information that could help executives build their company, or in some cases, save it from destruction.

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