Category Archives: Motivation

Who has been your biggest influence in your life?

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Great personal story to share today of a very cool interaction that happened this week.

So, if you’re reading this blog post you’ve by now guessed that I write a bit. This all started ten years ago and I have frequently told you to blame my great friend, Kris Dunn, who got me started in blogging, but there’s more to this story!

When I was a freshman in high school at Godwin Heights High School in Wyoming, MI (basically a neighborhood in Grand Rapids, MI), is when I really started writing. Godwin Heights was a blue-collar high school. We actually walked by a GM plant on our way to school. Our baseball field was next to the plant parking lot and the workers on break would throw the foul balls over the fence so we didn’t have to climb the fence.

So, ‘start writing’ is a bit of a stretch. I was forced to write every day by my freshman English teacher, Ruth Kemp. Ruth was one of those great educators, a throwback in public education to a time when individuals became teachers because they just love teaching kids. They would have probably done it for nothing if they could. Always excited to see her kids learn, and she was super passionate that writing was like any other skill if you wanted to be good, you had to do it every day, so she made us journal for fifteen minutes every day.

I didn’t matter what you wrote, but you had to write for fifteen minutes. To me, this was torture. At first I actually just copied articles out of magazines (which she allowed) but that got super boring. The other crazy part about Ms. Kemp (not a Mrs., never married) was she would comment on each kids journal. Sometimes just a word or two, sometimes paragraphs, even more than you wrote yourself.

Being a class-clown type, I wanted to see how far I could get her to interact with me ‘in the comments’ of my journal, so I started to make up random stories about people in the class. She didn’t bite, but instead played along and expanded the stories. Asked all these probing questions about my stories, etc. She got me to write more in a creative way and I was energized by her feedback and interaction with me, I couldn’t wait to get to the next class to read what she wrote back to me.

So, this isn’t the story I wanted to share, but you need the context. 

When my book got published last year, I tracked down Ms. Kemp’s address through the school, even though she had retired, and sent her a copy with a long letter explaining her influence on me. Again, she wrote back, and it took me all the way back to my freshman year of high school, her words, tone, energy were still exactly the same.

This week I’m flying out of the Grand Rapids, MI airport. I usually don’t, because it’s not the closest to my house, and it’s fairly small so no direct flights, but there was a direct flight of Minneapolis, so it was going to be easy. I probably go out of Grand Rapids 3-4 times per year. One of my high school classmates I had mentioned on social media a few years ago that Ms. Kemp was a volunteer at the Grand Rapids airport, so each time I fly through I look, but in years have never seen her, so I figured she probably didn’t do it anymore.

On Tuesday night I fly in at 11 pm. 11 pm airports are pretty quiet. Especially small airports. I’m walking from the gate to the parking garage and I spot Ms. Kemp, at 11 pm, standing at the visitor desk packing up her things. I hadn’t seen her in person since my senior of high school.

I walk up and she looks at me and says “Can I help you?” I say, “I’m Tim Sackett”, and she says “Of course you are!” And gives me a giant hug. We catch up, I get to thank her again for her influence on me in person, and I say goodbye. Turns out, that Tuesday night shift was Ms. Kemp’s last shift ever at the airport, and now she is fully retiring. It was done at 11 pm. She was packing up to leave for good.

We have some pretty crazy things happen to us in our life. The fact that I got to see Ms. Kemp again, probably for the last time ever, by a chance meeting in an airport at 11 pm on a Tuesday is insane. One of the biggest influences in my life, and call what you will, Karma, etc. , the universe let me have that moment. Student, teacher.

Enjoy your retirement, Ms. Kemp. You influenced countless blue-collar kids to be better than we thought we could be.

Career Confessions of Gen Z: Intent, Purpose, and Focus

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Last week, I wrote about the benefits of being connected to work. Not only the flexibility that can come from it, but the true edge it gives us to move throughout our day in the most productive way possible. Despite this, I didn’t mention much about the dark side. We lead these connected lives on an extremely slippery slope. If you didn’t read my last post, I promise this can be read as a standalone.

How do we ensure our connected lives don’t get the best of us? Be intentful. Be purposeful. Approach everything with a results-oriented focus.

I find these few words of advice are so difficult to follow. Each day, just when our minds begin to turn off, that familiar temptation takes over – to take a peek at what was left behind after a long day, to check in for just a minute. While that little peek always feels harmless, it sometimes leads us to see that colleagues are still working…er…maybe just looking busy. It makes us question whether or not we should be doing the same, or if we simply aren’t doing enough. Sometimes it feels like everything to us, when it may be nothing at all.

I’ve fallen victim to this before. At times, it has hurt my career and personal life, but just the same, there have been times some level of advancement can be attributed to it. All in all, I enjoy being connected to work, but it’s something that our generation would be wise to keep in check. It isn’t a danger only for millennial generations, but I think the temptation of connected busyness is stronger for those in the first 5-10 years of their career. The desire to impress is ever present and showing effort by staying connected feels like a key part of that. The lines become blurred so quickly, however, that it may take years to recover – if we ever will. Showing our consistent connectability to a job can become an obsession.

While it feels different, showing our connectability isn’t limited to work. You know the word, FOMO. It’s really the same thing in our personal lives. What a travesty it is for us to miss out on something in our personal network. When you really think about it, after work and play, there’s not much left. It becomes difficult to find the peace that we need to re-energize. Don’t get me wrong, the benefits of advancements we’ve made to live in this connected world are tremendous. Lives are consistently positively affected by these advancements. However, we shouldn’t overlook the unintended consequences.

In pondering all of this, I think we can take plenty of different actions to recover. As big business never fails to show us, mindfulness is now a foundational key to reducing stress in a connected life. That said, the ways in which we direct that mindfulness is extremely important. I really think it circles back to having intent, purpose, and a focused approach. Having intent and purpose in all that we do can help “weed” out some of the unnecessary tasks that tempt us to stay connected at all hours. Focusing on results can guide our thinking and eliminate the poorly directed focus on short term gain that may result from unnecessary tasks. By combining these three principles, we can stay on track and hopefully curb the busyness of our lives, without sacrificing personal and professional advancement.

 

Quintin Meek a talent consultant at Pillar Technology (part of Accenture Industry X.0). Also an active member of Detroit’s startup and tech community. Every day is something new and challenging, and I am learning more than ever before. I’m finding that I’ve become a lifelong student, and I’m excited to see how that continues to shape the road ahead.

6 Reasons Your Organization is Failing at Recruiting

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I’m out in San Francisco this week teaching a class on Talent Acquisition to some great Pros and Leaders who are doing all they can to learn more and help their organization succeed. The class is part of the process for SHRM’s Specialty Credential in Talent Acquisition.  Part of the process is two days of deep learning with an ‘expert’ instructor in-person or virtually. Apparently, the expert instructor got hit by a bus, so they tapped me on the shoulder!

The course is designed for corporate HR pros and leaders who want to get better at TA. This is modern material, designed to help individuals begin to build out a modern recruiting practice. It helps build a foundation in the right way on what best practice organizations are doing in their TA shops right now.

I love spending time with HR and TA pros who just want to learn and get better. Who want to help their organizations be better. It might be one of the funniest things I do all year! At the same time, it might be one of the most frustrating because I see and feel their struggles!

What I find is almost all organizations fail at recruiting for basically the same reasons. Here are those reasons:

1. We fail in recruiting because we are trying to be like everyone else and afraid to stand out from the other competitors for talent in our market. Yes, this is mostly employment branding and recruitment marketing, but it speaks to basic risk aversion we struggle to overcome in traditional HR. What I find is most c-suite executives welcome this risk, but no one is giving them options.

2. We are flat out not persistent enough going after the talent we want. Great recruiting is about pursuing great talent. I married way above my pay grade! The only reason I was able to land my wife was that I didn’t give up. We all want to be wanted. Most corporate HR and TA pros give up on pursuing talent because they initially say they aren’t interested. That should just get us going!

3. We aren’t letting potential candidates know who we really are. Guess what, when you come here you’re going to have to work and we don’t allow you to have pet pigs. Sorry. I mean, we’ll still have fun, challenging work and we’ll support the heck out of your development, but this isn’t a playground, this is a business. If that sounds like you, we will love you and you will love us! It’s okay to help some talent self-select out of coming to work for you. I don’t want to attract every candidate. I want to attract candidates who want us and we want them!

4. We hear your advice, but we just suck at actually executing it because we are busy. Too busy to get better. I hear all the time from leaders that they would love to do all this cool stuff, but they just don’t have the time. So, I ask, are you successful? No, we are broken. So, you would rather stay broken then fix your shop? Well, we still have to keep doing what we are doing. No, you don’t. You can stop. That is an actual option if you let everyone know you have a plan and this is the plan to finally get fixed!

5. We fail because we don’t fully believe we are responsible. Ouch, that one hurts me, because I’ve actually been fully in that position. Someone finally gave me the title but somehow I felt like I still wasn’t really in control. Turns out, I was, but if I wasn’t going to take control, others above me were going to, since someone had to. Ugh. Once I took control, everyone around me and above me gave me full support.

6. We haven’t figured out how to use our network for good. I’ve been royally screwed by people that I networked with, only to watch them f@ck me over and take (Hi! Z.A., you prick!). Yes, this happens. I’ve also reached heights in my career that would never be possible if I didn’t have all of you helping me along the way. I see way too many pros scared that if they share, especially locally in their market, someone will steal their great ideas and secret sauce. So, they don’t and they miss out on so much good in the world! Go share, exchange ideas, and keep doing it, especially with those who reciprocate!

To my first SHRM TA Credential SFO class – go out into the world and do better recruiting! Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to me when you need a little help!

The First Question Every Leader Needs to Ask Themselves!

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I’ve been blogging now for ten years. Writing every day for eight years. If you go around writing and telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.

So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five-minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve begun to change my approach, though, because I knew as they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do or would even want to do based on their special circumstances.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause and explanation, and sometimes from this, we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent leaders will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better and move in that same direction.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we, really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you, and you’ll be just fine!

Leadership Isn’t Raised on Promises

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I’ve had a lot of conversations with c-suite leaders recently who are concerned they do not have their next generation of leaders on their team. Let’s be clear, they have people on their team, but they do not believe those people are the future or at least they don’t believe they’re anywhere near becoming the future.

The folks in position are all well-meaning enough. I mean they want to be leaders and many believe they probably are leaders. They make all the leadership promises. That’s probably the first indication they aren’t ready. This is what their c-suite is feeling and hearing.

You see, leadership isn’t raised on promises…Leadership is raised on execution and outcomes.

Give me someone who can execute and I believe I can teach them to lead. Too often I think we look for leaders in the way we look for friends. Is this a person I and others would want to hang out with? Is this a person I can trust? Is this person nice? Do I get along with this person, and do others get along with this person? Would I follow this person?

I don’t need my leaders to be my friend. I need my leaders to get sh*t done. Can you get sh*t done without pissing off every single person around you, becomes a key element, right? There’s a balance. Sometimes I think we’ve gone too far on one side of that balance, and it’s not the execution side!

So, you want to be a leader?

Great, awesome, wow! Get sh*t done! The recipe is pretty clear and most fail:

  1. Clearly communicate what needs to get done.
  2. Find out why that will happen or won’t happen. Fix that stuff.
  3. Gain agreement of when and how this stuff will get done.
  4. Help move roadblocks and excuses out of the way.
  5. Follow up. Follow up. Follow up.
  6. Accountability.
  7. Stuff got done.

In my experience the best leaders never made promises, they just got stuff done. The promise leaders tended to go away at some point. Turns out most organizations don’t need promises, they need stuff to get done.

 

 

Is work fun?

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What do you think? Is work fun?

It’s really the question that keeps getting asked when we talk about the future of work, and employee experience, and employee engagement, etc. Do you believe that your work is “fun”?

Fun?

That’s the first problem, we really have to define what fun is. I mean if we are doing this all official HR-like, right!?! Let’s over-process and over-think this! What is fun? Is a scale for all of us. Is doing an employee file audit fun? Maybe not for you, but you know some of us like to get freaky, so no judgement on what you call fun!

Tyler Cowen has a new book coming out titled “Big Business” and in one section he asks this question: Is work fun? Here’s part of that section from the book:

To oversimplify by only a bit, they have to pay you to do it. And that suggests work is not in every way fun. Furthermore, for most people work is the main way that they interact with business on a daily basis, which means that business is associated with the activities that take some of the fun out of our lives. Bits of fun are drained on a very regular basis, often five days a week, but the paychecks arrive less frequently in most cases and often by the less visible means of direct deposit. So the stresses and tedium of the work are for many people more vivid than the wages they earn. And that in sum is one reason business is not entirely popular with the American public—or, indeed, with the public elsewhere in the world. Business is like the parent who tells you that you can’t have everything you want all the time.

Some recent studies and surveys illustrate the potential burden of work. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Alan Krueger measure our “daily affective experiences” by having people wear beepers that go off at irregular intervals, at which time the people record what they are doing and their feelings. You can think of this as a technique for measuring moods. But the researchers ask about more than just the subjects’ feelings at a given point in time; they also ask how happy people are with various aspects of their lives. The study thus considers both momentary pleasure and the overall feeling of satisfaction from a life well spent, because happiness isn’t just a single thing with a unidimensional scale. For this study, the researchers recruited 909 employed women with an average age of thirty-eight and an average household income of $54,700.

And what did the researchers find? The highest-rated activities, from most favored to less favored, were intimate relations, socializing, relaxing, and prayer/worship/meditation. In the middle of the list were watching TV, preparing food, and talking on the phone, among other mundane activities. The bottom five were childcare, computer/email/ internet, housework, working, and—dead last—commuting.

So working is next to last in terms of producing a positive mood, and that is sad news. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like work; it only means we like other things better. And in fact, when you drill down, the ratio of people who have positive feelings about work to those who have negative feelings is just over 3.5 to 1. (That’s not as good as the 5.10 to 0.36 positive-to-negative ratio for intimate relations, but sex always was going to beat out work anyway.)

I love the concept of because we get ‘paid’ to work, that in of itself tells you that work isn’t fun, because in almost all cases people don’t get paid to do things that are ‘fun’. No one is getting paid to take vacations to Disney World. No one is getting paid to sit on the beach and sip frozen cocktails with zero responsibilities.

Now, I know a lot of people who get paid to do some fun stuff as part of their job, but that’s a small portion of their job, not their complete job.

I think for most of us, there are some aspects of our jobs that are fun. It’s a balance between some truly fun stuff and some stuff we are just getting paid to do, which if given a choice we would not choose to do if we weren’t being paid.

Does this then lead us down a path as leaders and HR pros to how do we add little bits of fun into work?

I think it’s something to test in our workplaces. Not forced fun. That’s the opposite of fun. But true, in the moments bits of fun. That’s the hard part, right? How do we free our leaders, or teach them, to have fun with their teams in the moment? If we figure that out, that probably unlocks a ton of positive outcomes for our employees and our organizations!

If Your Company has a Chief Happiness Officer you Should Rethink Your Career Path!

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In the past three weeks, I’ve been pitched by some well-meaning PR person about a story on how Google, Salesforce, Zappos, Airbnb, etc., have “Chief Happiness Officers” and how important they are to corporate success. Or at least, how “Happiness” as a measure is important to corporate success.

I’ve been pitched this idea four times, primarily so I would talk about their client, Snappy, which apparently is a chatbot of some kind that asks your employee questions to probably gauge their happiness or something, and in turn, you can then turn to your Chief Happiness Officer to fix the happy that is broken. (BTW – look for my new book in 2020 – “Fix the Happy!”)

Snappy might be some awesome tech, but I don’t like the pitch. I think that pitch is broken, for the real world. The real world is not Google and Zappos. Those are unicorns. Real companies have real issues and making their entitled employees happy is not one of those real issues.

I want to punch every Chief Happiness Officer in the smiling face!

Seriously, how completely warped do you have to be to think you actually bring happiness to another human being, let alone an entire company of human beings!?!

Will Smith is my Chief Happiness Officer:

Turns out CHO’s don’t make employees happy. Employees make themselves happy. No amount of money, or time off, or Taco Tuesdays, or standup desks or seven flavors of Kombucha in the employee cafe, will make a person happy. Happiness is an emotion controlled by the individual, no matter the environment they’re in.

There are great stories of prisoners at Auschwitz that chose love and happiness in the darkest hours and circumstances that anyone could imagine. There are people who win $500M lotteries that blow their head off because of how depressed they are. A CHO can’t change that.

Chief Happiness Officers are what happens to organizations when leadership gets out of control. When we stop actually leading and managing the business, and we ‘become’ leaders. When we start believing our own bullsh*t to a level where we think we actually control the emotions of our employees.

Look, I get it. I also want to drink the Kool-aid and believe in Santa Claus. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful, fantasy-filled life?! But that is life. 99.99% of us have to work to pay bills. Within that, we can choose to be happy, or miserable, or somewhere in between and that actually might have many times in the same day. No one person is going to make me happy or miserable unless I make that choice to allow that to happen.

There you go. That’s my take. Chief Life Officer, out.

I’m Afraid of Being Me Too’d!

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For the last ten days, I’ve been at HR and TA conferences. It was the longest, consecutive run of speaking I’ve done in my career. Basically, in ten days I did a total of 14 sessions. I now want to crawl into a dark sensory deprivation chamber for a week!

If you haven’t seen me speak, I do some hugging!

At one of my stops, I had a fellow come up to me during a private moment and ask me if I was afraid. “Afraid of what!?”, I asked. “Well, you are doing this hugging thing and I’ve seen you hug people outside of the sessions as well, aren’t you afraid of #MeToo? (I added the hashtag, he just said Me Too’d) I’m afraid if I did that, I would be #MeToo’d!”

I might be super naive, but I said, “No, absolutely not.” I hug in a context around my speaking. It’s about rules, and rules of hugging. It’s not me, drunkenly throwing myself at HR Ladies, trying to hit on them. In fact, it’s the opposite of that, I’m telling them we have rules about this kind of thing! (half making a joke about us HR pros and our rules!)

He persisted. “Doesn’t matter, Tim, it only takes one who feels like they might want to make an example out of you!”

Yeah, still, hard No. I’m a hugger. I’m an equal opportunity hugger. I hug all pronouns, very comfortably.

I think someone who is afraid of being MeToo’d is probably doing some stuff that they shouldn’t be doing. I’m not saying that someone couldn’t take a hug from me and spin it, but I hope with all my being someone wouldn’t do that. I also hope I’m smart enough not to put myself in a position where anyone would even consider that a hug from me was inappropriate!

I’ve had a career in HR and I’ve investigated some pretty nasty stuff where people were willing to do some pretty bad stuff to each other, for a million different reasons, mostly around hate and anger. So, I think I know what someone, improperly motivated, is capable of. I still was uncomfortable with the conversation, because it made me feel like somehow this person was trying to lessen the power of #MeToo.

“Well, someone could lie!” Of course, ‘someone’ could, but we would need to ask ourselves, why? And in 99.99% of those cases, there isn’t a why only some dude doing something stupid.

I’m going to keep hugging. I like hugs. I love the feeling of hugging someone who hugs me back for real. It makes both of our days a little better. I’m going to keep asking those I hug if they actually want a hug. That’s one of the rules!

No, really, just keep being wrong!

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I was with some HR Pros recently and one of them shared a standard HR axiom about what we do as HR Pros in the vain of maintaining consistency. If we are wrong in the beginning then we just keep being wrong!  It sounds idiotic doesn’t!?! But you see it every single day in HR. At one point someone made a decision, for who knows what reason, and no matter what the reason precedence was set and through hell and high water we will keep making that same decision!

We are HR! We are HR! We are HR! (keep the chant going!)

I’m this person.  Well, I’m trying not to be. You see in my organization we do the same stuff.  If my recruiters exceed their goals we have various rewards that get – one of those is the ability to have a flex day throughout their week, where they can work from home or come in late, leave early, etc.  It’s up to them.  In our environment, that reward is worth its weight in gold!  But (there’s always a “But”) when a holiday week happens where the person is already going to be off for a day, we have said no flex day that week.  Seemed like a reasonable plan.

But was it?

A reward is set up to be a reward it shouldn’t matter if the person has a vacation, or has a holiday, etc.  I had to ask myself why do we do this, take this away just because of a holiday? I trust my people, especially those working their butts off to exceed their goals, so why take it away? I was wrong.  So, I decided to change it and do the right thing.

Do you know what the first reaction was?  Yep, it was “Wait” that’s not how we did it before. A very normal reaction we have as leaders because we want to deliver consistency to our teams, and I agree with that concept for sustained engagement but there’s one thing that should override this. When you’re wrong!

So, do you have the courage to stop being wrong?

Most of your peers don’t. They get caught up in groupthink. They get caught up thinking they are being “consistent” and that is good. But being consistent on doing something wrong is just being consistently wrong!  You have a choice, keep being wrong or start being right!  What will you do?

What Employees Are Most Receptive to Your Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t?

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I have to tell you I’m just in love with this headline for so many reasons, but probably mostly because everyone who reads it instantly starts shaking their head in agreement to someone they know who is ‘Pseudo-Profound’ and they know the employees who buy into it!

The best part of all of this is there was an actual study done! Yes, Academics finally doing important work! The title of the paper is – The Complex Relation Between Receptivity to Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t and Political Ideology by some researchers at a Swedish university. From the study:

Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullsh*t receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters…The results are supportive of theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in cognitive orientation, while also pointing to the existence of bullshit receptivity among both right– and left-wingers.

So, basically what they found was that the farther you are away from the center of moderate political ideology, whether conservative or liberal, the more receptive you are to pseudo-profound bullsh*t. If you tend to be super-conservative or super-liberal, you basically buy into bullsh*t more than others.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a leader who is trying to be pseudo-profound, we all know individual contributors who take over meetings also trying to be pseudo-profound as well!

It does speak to employee selection and leadership style. If you have a leader who you know tends to lean towards the pseudo-profound spectrum of bullsh*t speak you probably want to surround that leader with employees who will actually buy into their bullsh*t. Which means you’ll be looking for people who are farther away from center on their political beliefs but also probably have a bit of a lower cognitive orientation. I mean we want them to really buy in completely!

The reality is, this is how organizations, and countries, go very wrong!

I work with leaders constantly who will say they don’t believe their employees actually tell them the truth. Well, they are mostly right! Your employees are buying into your pseudo-profound bullsh*t and you selected them for that propensity, thus, they are telling you what you want to hear, not because they fear you because that’s all they are capable of!

It’s a really fine line. We want engaged, motivated employees. We want visionary leaders who can paint this picture of success and get everyone to buy in. But, we also don’t want people to follow blinding down a path that sends us over a cliff. At the same time, those type of employees are the most challenging to work with, so it’s easy to understand why organizations and hiring managers tend to pick those most receptive to pseudo-profound bullsh*t.

On a positive note, in ten years of writing, I’ve never got to write a post where I said bullsh*t this many times! Also, “Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t” would be a great autobiography title for me!