The Blogger Takes The Career Leader Test

Yesterday I took the Career Leader test, and discovered that I am best suited for a career in marketing or as an advertising exec. I have some serious reservations about the Career Leader methodology which I will discuss below, but for the moment I will focus on being an ad man. A friend once explained to me that creative people work in theatre… slightly more talented created people work in film and television… but the most talented creative people work in advertising!

I have always been reluctant to go into advertising for two reasons. As an optimist in the intelligence of mankind, I have always been skeptical that consumers will actually fall for pitches– are women so naive as to really believe that Shampoo X will give them silky soft hair that will make them more attractive, OR are men so naive as to believe that Shampoo Y will reverse the effects of baldness and give them richer, fuller hair? Moreover, assuming that consumers will buy the message, I’ve always wondered whether convincing people to buy stuff was really the best way to use my intelligence and skills.

Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam and Naomi Klein’s No Logo vilified branding and marketing for an entire generation, but a truce appears to have been reached under the rubric of socially responsible marketing. Marketers have raised the bar on ethics and nowadays promise not to advertise sugary cereals to kids, tobacco to teens, or SUVs to drivers. (Just kidding about the last one!) But seriously, were I able to satisfy my ethical hangups about advertising, would I be happy with a career in marketing?

My best friend quit his job as a brand manager because as he put it, he got tired of trying to convince people to buy more salad dressing. Obviously there are enough people out there who enjoy spending their careers trying to convince people to buy salad dressing, beer, automobiles, and shampoo to sustain the marketing industry. But am I one of them? According to Career Leader, the answer is “Yes”!

For the uninitiated, Career Leader is the Frankenstein offspring of modern management science cross-bred with those ridiculous career interest surveys that your high school guidance counselor may have administered. I remember taking one such test in 10th Grade by filling in oval bubbles next to yes or no propositions such as, “I would rather be an airline pilot than an accountant.” Back then I was pegged to be a salesman, so I must have tempted fate in pursuing my current career.

My beef with Career Leader and other pseudo-scientific attempts to determine career interest or aptitude, is their ignorance of subjective preferences and qualitative aspects of different careers. One might express an interest in becoming a lawyer, without an appreciation for the fact that lawyers spend most of their days reading and writing legalese with little client interaction or time spent in court. Others might think they want a career in non-profit work without realizing the challenges of constant fundraising and the organizational politics involved in NGOs or charities. In Kitchen Confidential Anthony Bourdain bemoaned the CIA-educated newbie chefs (yes Virginia, the other CIA) who hadn’t appreciated the 10 to 10, 7 day a week schedule imposed by the restaurant industry.

Career Leader is a miserable replacement for Vault guides, networking, internet message boards, talking to alumni, and reading up on an industry. As I reviewed my test report, I was overcome with a nauseating recognition of huckster techniques such as the Personal Validation Fallacy. If I had wanted astrology and fortune telling I would have stayed up late and watched an infomercial.

The Blogger Quits His Gainful Employment

“- What is this, your farewell speech?
-I’m going home.
-Your farewell to the troops?
-I’m not going home. I’m going to Wisconsin.”

-Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

I quit my job this week. I slipped in my resignation on the agenda of my weekly meeting with the company’s CFO, below a list of mundane topics such as insurance renewals. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my resignation ascended to the top of the list and became the only topic covered in the meeting. I then phoned the CEO at his summer beach house and broke the news to him as well. I was almost frightened at how well everyone received my resignation! There seemed to be a consensus that the company could not provide a great enough mentoring opportunity or provide me with enough challenging work to further develop my business skills, and so the break seemed perfectly timed for both parties.

I have watched in amusement over the past 3 years, the various ways in which friends and colleagues have resigned from their positions. It never ceases to amaze me, the extent to which intelligent people are able to self-delude themselves into thinking that they are irreplaceable, and that their ill-timed resignation will somehow inflict irreparable damage on their company. “They’re going to regret not giving me [that promotion/enough money/enough respect etc.]!”, goes the traditional refrain, however I have yet to see such regret materialize. No tears big guy– face reality. No one cares if you leave, and the company will do as good (or as bad) as it had been doing, after your departure.

And so with that sentiment at heart, I approached my resignation lucidly, with appropriate solemness but without sentimentality. No farewell speeches or mawkish “Cake Party” for me. Heaven knows everyone will breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the manipulative secretary with her voluntary collection envelope will not make her rounds on my account. For this is not a goodbye, but rather a beginning…

The Blogger Gets His New ThinkPad Laptop Computer

“The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.” -T2

My new T60 finally arrived 3 weeks late at my brother’s apartment in Manhattan, before completing a roundabout journey via New Jersey and Philadelphia before crossing the Atlantic. It is now safely chained to the inner drawer of a locked fireproof cabinet in my alarmed work office. There are 6 layers of security protecting my laptop, including machine-gun armed security guards at the building entrance. No, this isn’t part of some elaborate scheme inspired by the Jigsaw killer in Saw, but rather a function of my paranoia that one of my Opioid-addicted neighbours will break into my apartment and steal the computer before I move to France. I live in the null-hypothesis of what Americans term a “gated community”… a high-crime area.

Overall I’m pleased with the T60. It took me 1.5 hours from the time I opened the box to turn on the computer, set up my password and re-configure the Windows menus to the “Classic” desktop theme. The toughest part was the whole hour it took to disable the productivity tool called Client Security Solution. The Client Security Solution is a password-protected volume on the hard drive where users (especially U.S. government employees) are encouraged to store customer social security numbers and credit card information, so that when the boogie man in a black suit walks into your office and steals the laptop, you won’t need to issue an embarrassing press release about the loss of information. The Client Security Solution requires an additional login every time it wants to (I have trouble saying this without irony) mount your hard drive.

Despite the fact that I paid extra for a biometric fingerprint reader, the geniuses who designed the ThinkPad assumed that nothing would thrill me more than having to swipe my fingerprint AND enter a manual password everytime I logged into my computer. There are almost 300 pages of documentation in a dozen languages that come with the Client Security Solution, but nary a paragraph on HOW TO TURN THE DAMN THING OFF!

I came close to posting a message on NetVestibule to one or more technically- inclined classmates, but I held back for fear of having to buy Champagne. (The traditional punishment for asking a stupid or obvious question). It took a while, but my problem eventually self-resolved. That is to say, I figured out how to disable the Client Security Solution through trial and error after cursing Lenovo 20 times and swearing a blood oath that next time I’ll buy a Mac.

P.S. When I flipped the T60 over, guess what factory-origin sticker appeared? Lenovo Singapore!

For the geeks, here are my system specs and pricing:

Qty	Part #	Product Description	Unit Cost	Total
1	SYS.1953CT	CONFIGURED SYSTEM Serial#: L3CL687	$1,296.39	$1,296.39
	1953CTO	TP T60 SERIES 1 YR DEPOT TS
	42R9190	VBB NO INT.WIFI WL 3RD ANTENNA
	62P6054	VBB INTEGR.BLUETOOTH PAN
	42R9315	SBB INTEL CORE 2DUO PROC T7200
	46P4166	VBB MICROSOFT WINXP PROFESSION
	42R9421	SBB 15.0_XGA_TFT
	41W2060	VBB 1GB PC2-5300 667MHZ 1DIMM
	27R0300	VBB INTEGR. FINGERPRINT SENSOR
	41W5778	SBB 120GB HDD 5400RPM
	41W5783	SBB DVD REC 8X DUAL LAYER UB
	39T6651	SBB 9 CELL LI-ION BATTERY
	41W2071	SBB 1GB PC2-5300 667MHZ MEM.
1	73P2582	KENSINGTON MICROSAVER SECURITY Mfg part #: 73P2582	$33.15	$33.15

Sub Total	Sales Tax	Shipping	adjustments	Total
$1,329.54	$111.36	$0.00	$0.00	$1,440.90

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Blogger Discusses Stephanie Nolen’s “28: Stories of AIDS in Africa”

I am making steady progress in my pre-MBA self-study readings. I have elected not to attend INSEAD’s €1300 week-long pre-MBA course, preferring instead to design my own curriculum which I will discuss in a future posting.

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that I still have time to read non-MBA books in my spare time. I just finished Stephanie Nolen’s 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa an unrestrained look at the impact of AIDS on the African continent. Before I read this book, I had a poor understanding of the meaning of 20% and 30% adult HIV infection rates in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and little sympathy for those affected. The numbers seemed abstract and I eagerly shrouded myself in moral distancing paradigms. Not surprisingly, I was especially struck by Nolen’s book which is particularly effective at piercing the veil which we in the developed world draw to insulate ourselves from Africans with HIV.

Nolen puts a human face on the pandemic by introducing HIV-positive mothers, grandmothers, and working parents. The book is filled with bright, college-educated Africans, who were leading fulfilling lives and in many cases ambitious career paths not unlike our own, until they were struck by AIDS. Some are church-going Christians, community leaders, or members of the educated elite. Readers like me who are eager to play the ‘blame-game’ and rationalize some type of culpability or contributory failing which precipitated the HIV infection of the Africans profiled in the book are forced to examine alternative truths.

Monogamy is meaningless in the face of rape, genocide, and civil war. Nolen’s book forces us to confront the real-life human consequences of the arms trade to Africa; the patriarchal family hierarchies which deny women access to basic health care, birth control, and autonomy over their own sexuality; the unimaginable health care resource gap between the Western world and Africa; and most disturbing, the conservative ideology of Western foreign policy and faith-based charities, which prevents dissemination of live-saving accurate medical information and condoms.

I began to appreciate the fact that I am HIV-negative not because I am morally or intellectually superior, but through the circumstances of fate and luck of being born in a country where I have the ‘privilege’ of autonomy over my body, my sexual health, and access to medical information.

In many ways Nolen’s book is not necessarily about AIDS, but rather about the underlying factors in Africa which facilitate its transmission and prevent its medical treatment: rape, genocide, civil war, drug patent laws, misogyny, and racism. No one can be blamed for the emergence of the HIV virus, any more than one can place blame for the emergence of killer strains of the flu. Nolen’s book is a wake-up call for the role that our political, business, and church leaders have played in exacerbating the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

* * * * * *

Here’s a taboo question they wouldn’t dream of asking in a consulting interview: “Estimate the number of your INSEAD MBA classmates who are HIV-positive.”

ANSWER: Using the HIV prevalence rate in France as a benchmark (0.4%) there should statistically be 3.6 HIV-positive classmates among the total annual INSEAD MBA population.

I present this fact not to shock anyone, but to combat the ‘distancing’ tendency to estrange ourselves from what we may perceive to be the problems of the developing world. 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa has sensitized me to the human face of a global epidemic and opened my mind to the need for business to step up to the challenge and play a role in the solution.