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Can’t quit phunk driving cold turkey!


The New York Times just published a review of scientific studies on the dangers of driving under the influence of cell phone usage, or phunk driving), which is apparently just as dangerous of drunk driving.

The National Safety Council urges an all-out ban of phunk driving.

According to the Janet Froetscher, the council’s president and chief executive, “It’s the same challenge we had with seat belts and drunk driving — we’ve got to get people thinking the same way about cellphones.” The data support this view.

I am as guilty of phunk driving as anyone from urban California. I even plan to make calls while I drive. I have limited non-booked time with privacy, so I love to catch up with a distant friend or family member (or wait on hold with the bank) – I mean, I’m not doing anything else anyway! (Kidding. But not really.)

Recently I’ve had to cut back on phunk driving, but not because I such a good person or because I’m trying to.

It’s just that since I got an iPhone (favorite purchase EVER!) it’s much harder to place calls while I drive, even though I’ve tried different voice dialing apps like vlingo and Google Voice (you still have to look down to find the app and then check to make sure you’re calling the right person).

I cannot continue phunk drive that I know is endangering myself and others, simply in the name of time savings. It’s ignorant, immoral, and old-fashioned. So I’m setting a goal of tapering down to 10% of my current time spent phunken by the end of the year (can’t quit cold turkey!).

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Creativity within constraints: the six sentence story


A participant in a recent Haas@Work group I was facilitating (Amy Hornstein) pointed me to SixSentences, a blog for writers of six sentence-long short stories. The elegance and creative insight of some of these stories is incredible. They have even put together a book of these stories.

There are several benefits to working within this format:
* If I can write a story in six sentences then I’m more likely to write it
…and others are more likely to read it
* I will have to work hard to find ideas worth occupying my precious little space
…and I will have to be creative about how I communicate those ideas.

Like the others I describe in my work, this is a great example of creativity within constraints.

(Read Amy’s six-sentence story Lightness)

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Organizing your academic job market search

As many of you know, I’ve been on the academic job market this Fall, so far with success (multiple offers in hand at the moment, and more interviews on the agenda). Thought I’d share a process that worked well for me.

The academic job market is challenging in many ways, but I didn’t expect it to be such an organizational challenge. There is a lot of time sensitive information you will need quick and easy access to. Here’s how I organized my job search (I’m in Organizational Behavior at a business school but the general structure should be useful to most fields):

To start in May:

Make a master spreadsheet
I pulled down a few b-school ranking lists (FT, WSJ, BusinessWeek, USNews) and put them all in a spreadsheet, eliminated dupes, and included columns for info that was important to me (public/private, city, state, country, presence of a design school, rank for last three years, doctoral program, undergrad program). (I included other data that was already in the ranking tables I downloaded but ended up hiding most of it – when it comes down it you only need that much info if you get a job talk.) Scan the list – if there are ones you were considering but are not listed / ranked, add them now.

Prioritize
Next I prioritized the list where 2 (top choice!!), 1 (could be good), 0 (eh), -1 (no way in hell). Two schools even got -2’s, for personal reasons. Prioritization was very important in determining where to apply first, and which schools to spend more time on (e.g., ask advisors for connections, call peers there, customize cover letters, etc.). Even though most submission is by email it still takes a long time and the early bird gets the worm.

To start in JUNE (some app’s are actually due in July!), and continue into OCT / NOV

Once I had my list, I sorted by priority and began to search for postings.


Where to look for postings:
First scour the Academy of Management job board for their postings (paid service). There are SOO many postings there, it’s by far the most complete resource. Also, sign up for AoM job alert emails so you can find out about new listings and enter them into your spreadsheet as they arrive.

Next best thing was to search the school’s webpage but the location of the open position postings was so inconsistent that this was a big time suck.

I also looked at the Chronicle of Higher Ed but as every class before me has also concluded, it was basically pointless.

There are also some regional boards (NY, NorCal, SoCal) that I checked when I was dumbfounded for schools I really liked (e.g., Why doesn’t LMU – a small Jesuit school in L.A. – even have an HR page on their website?), but you don’t have to do this. AoM is the authority.

As you find postings for each school, add this data to columns in your spreadsheet:

1. due date
(if none is listed, mark n/a and assume it’s due in August or early Sept – yes, verrrry early! If all of your materials are not ready yet, send a cover letter and a C.V…. better to submit something than nothing so that they know are interested. My sense is that being from Haas can buy you some time if they know you are interested.)

2. full position name & department (so you can plug it into your cover letter)

3. posting text (seems like a lot but it’s soooo useful later to have it all in one place. plus, many schools take down their AoM posting and you’ll wish you’d saved it later)

4. three columns for place to send it: email, website, and snail mail. If email submission is okay (this is typical) you don’t need the other info. You’ll later send this list to the faculty assistant so s/he can email/upload/snail mail your letters of recommendation to them.

5. finally, create a new column for order in which to send applications, which is based on your personal preference and the deadline.

Now start crackin’ and write up those apps!

In terms of how to do a good application, ask your advisors for copies of their materials and good ones they’ve seen from others. Also, the Chronicle of Higher Ed website was a really valuable resource for me.

Is organizing all of this stuff just a waste of time?
No! The most important thing to remember is that things will begin to move at breakneck speed, so set yourself up to access and collect information quickly and intuitively.

Good luck in your search!

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Ordering Chaos: Reverse Outlining Useful After Freewriting

Sometimes I have so many thoughts written up but a hard time putting them into a concise argument. To create order from chaos, I have learned to love a technique called Reverse Outlining.

In reverse outlining, you start with all of your scraps and freewriting. Print it up, and chunk it into meaningful units (topics, or ideally steps in your logical argument – even if you don’t know how they’ll all fit together yet). For example, one of my paragraphs was titled “Constraints make being original feel less risky” and the next one was “…especially for people in low power positions.” Don’t worry about the right way to do this part. It gets worked out sort of naturally.

Now write out an outline using the titles you gave things. Here’s your reverse outline. Now save a duplicate version of the file, and play around with different ways to order the outline. This really helps with finding an economical and compelling way to make your argument – and the bonus is that you’ve already written a lot of the material!

Bonuses:
1. This process identifies that some parts are redundant, so you don’t have to edit them. This makes your writing cleaner and tighter and gives you more time to sleep and go out dancing. 🙂
2. It glaringly identifies gaps in your argument early on in the process – much better than identifying them once you’ve already crafted your elegantly phrased transition sentences, etc.

I did not invent this method but it works well. I’d love to hear what you think.