I was reminded last night that success doesn’t just come to you, and it might not necessarily be about hard work and attitude – like your Dad would always say.  To often we (the collective lot of us!) want to believe success is like the lotto – at least to often we hope to get success that way – one day you don’t have success, then the next day success somehow miraculously finds you!

Sorry. Doesn’t usually work that way.

But one thing we over look is how important success is to finding success.  Here’s what I mean:

Directions for Being Successful –

Step 1: Find a little success

Step 2: Find another little success

Step 3: Find another little success

Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 each day

Step 5: You are successful

I know, directions are hard to follow for some people, so let me give you an example.  You feel like a failure at everything – job is going well (or you don’t have one), relationships suck, you’re a little soft around the middle (i.e., fat) – basically you feel like a failure, nothing is going in the right direction.  Guess what? When you wake up tomorrow you won’t magically be successful – no matter how hard you wish it, pray it, want it.  You have to find some sort of success, no matter how small.  Maybe that success is eating one less Twinkie than you did the day before – yesterday I ate 8 Twinkies – today I only ate 7!  Don’t let someone tell you that’s not a success, because tomorrow I’m only going to eat 6 and before you know it I’m going to kick this Twinkie habit!

I works with everything.  Not recruiting enough candidates for your organization, can’t get anyone to pick up the phone and talk to you – today make one more call than you did yesterday – only 1 – that is a success, because tomorrow you’re going to do that again, 1 more than the day before – small success steps until you’re just one big giant bag full of success!

People who are successful and throw it in your face suck!  They suck because they act like they’ve always been successful, but they haven’t.  It came to them a little at a time, until they could no longer feel what failure felt like.  You see success is like a drug – you need a little to want another hit, it’s addictive.  That’s why you need to feed your mind a little everyday – we can all find those little successes each day – the key is to find them every single day – don’t miss.

I saw that Penelope Trunk running a training series called: Secrets of an A-List Blogger: A Week with Penelope Trunk, which I’m sure is a great training series, but the title struck me very funny!  So, let’s be clear so that Penelope and her gang of 20 somethings don’t come after me – I’m not making fun of Penelope, I’m making fun of the difference between the level of bloggers – A-List to D-List.

I have no idea what Penelope is teaching in her A-List series for Bloggers, but I can give you the D-List version and it won’t take you a week – let me spin you some knowledge in 3 minutes or less.

Secrets of a D-List Blogger:

1. You don’t have to be a good writer to be a good blogger – but you better have an opinion and a take on what’s going on in the world.  No one wants to read anything by someone sitting on the fence.

2. If sitting down to write a blog post feels like you’re back in high school and you have a writing assignment – blogging isn’t for you.  Writing should come naturally and easily – 99.9% of bloggers (especially those of us on the D-List) don’t get paid, so you better love writing and sharing your opinions.

3.  No one wants to hear about your cats – unless your Laurie Ruettimann – and well, she already captured that market.  What this means is, before you start to blog, decide why you want to blog and to who you want to blog to.  Laurie got the cat loving HR ladies – you’ll have to pick some other group!  I chose to go after the 17 HR people who don’t read Laurie – it’s a small audience, but they’re loyal!

4.  Creating content doesn’t have to be hard.  Fill up your Google Reader with great stuff, then pick out an article, drop a couple paragraphs from the article into your post, respond to it and give your perspective. Bam! The 15 minute post.

5.  If you want to create an audience and drive traffic – you better ask Penelope – I’m on the D-List – I still tell myself it’s about the love of writing and HR.  Please leave me a comment and tell me that’s what it’s about!  You can hang out in the community you’re writing in, via social media, and read, comment and interact to grow your audience, but to be honest it’s freaking exhausting – and let’s be real, you’re blogging, you don’t really care what other people have to say, just what you have to say – a least that what my therapists tells me!

6.  No one wants to read boring stuff and be educated (that’s what Wiki’s for), they want to be entertained for the 60 seconds they’ll spend at your blog – so Dance Monkey! This also means you’ll have to title your blogs in a provocative manner to get people to read your posts (i.e., 10 Ways to Nail a Stripper Interview – would be highly read over 10 Ways to Knock that Interview out of the Park – same content, different title, way different click thru’s).

7. Don’t listen to your critics, unless they’re a better writer than you.  Don’t worry, you’ll know if they are better.

So, there you go, just shy of the $195 Penelope is going to charge you – but hey – you only got the D-List version!

Forbes recently had an article titled “The 147 Companies that Control Everything“, put together by a Swiss think tank the study attempts to pin point those companies that are most connected to making “it” happen worldwide (and by “it” I mean “everything”).  From the article:

Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power…The authors of the paper did not publish the entire roster of companies with their study, but one of the co-authors, Dr. James Glattfelder, says the 737 companies that control 80% of the global economy will be available next week. The 147 are included in that group.

This concept really got me to thinking about the HR/Talent industry and which companies truly control what we do as HR/Talent Pros.  Yeah, yeah, we all have free will, but the fact of the matter is, these companies will determine what you do and how you do HR and Recruiting over the foreseeable future.  Don’t think so?  You’re wrong – we’re sheep – we follow – have you or anyone you know paid $5-8 for a cupcake in the last 2-3 years?  You couldn’t give those cupcakes away your mom made you take to school in 3rd grade. Now we have special cupcake shops, and TV shoes, and blogs – and they’re stupid CUPCAKES!   You’re a sheep – face it.  Now take a look at the list below so you can know what you’ll be buying or who you’ll be following over the next few years –

1. Google – Um, What?!  Yep that Google – whether you like it or not – the Do No Evil Empire is taking over and there is nothing you can do about it.  No one wants to give there employees free gourmet lunches, and let them bring their cats to work, and come and go as they please – it’s an HR nightmare!  But Google does it – so now you have to find some way to compete.  Doesn’t matter if you’re selling toilet seats in Oklahoma City – you’re employees read an article about Google now you’ve got to put doors on the stalls in the restroom – damn you Google!

2. Zappos – see Google – one night of Tony going a little too deep down the rabbit hole – now we have to “Find Happiness” for all of our employees  – damn you Tony!

3. Peoplesoft Oracle & SAP – These two giant ERP’s run most medium and large HR shops – which means every time they think you need something, they make a change and watch all hell break out across their client base.  The perfect example of the tail wagging the dog.

4. CareerBuilder …er, Monster – I know, I know – CareerBuilder is bigger – but ask any candidate looking for a job and first word out of their mouth will be “Monster” – better branding, better name recognition.  The basic framework of both companies hasn’t changed since the OCC (Online Career Center – check it out kids) launched in the early 90’s – I’ve got job, you need job, I post job, you apply for job, you get job.  Either way you’re buying because it’s the only way your “Post and Pray” recruiting process has any way of succeeding.  Don’t worry the Job Boards aren’t dying – mainly because we are too lazy to kill them.

5. LinkedIn – Linkedin did what neither CareerBuilder or Monster could ever do – they made it “OK” to post your “resume” online and not have your HR people lose their minds that you were looking for another job!   Now you can be working and job searching at the same time and there’s a good chance your short-sighted HR manager will actually teach a class on how to “spruce” up your profile.  But, really it’s all about “professional networking”…

6. Facebook – Not since windows Solitaire has there been a bigger time suck than Facebook at work, and one that more HR Pros have spend man-hours proving to their senior leadership is actually valuable – so please don’t shut our employees off – because we need to be more like Google.  Where LinkedIn succeeded, Facebook is on the verge of eating their lunch.  LinkedIn is cute with their 200 million users, Facebook has your Grandmother by the neck and won’t let go!  When Facebook decides to take down LinkedIn – HR – you’ll have a new master to bow down to.

7. ADP –   Seriously – do you know how many jobs were created last month?  No one does, not even the President – that’s why they ask ADP!  A Payroll service that got one of those Ghostbuster – StayPuft Marshmallow – kind of steroid injection – ADP now tells the biggest government of the free world how many jobs were created  – and we listen.   Gone are the days of Marge in your payroll office telling you, you will just have to wait for your check – ADP fired her and now does her same job faster, cheaper and with less errors.

8. Towers Watson and Mercer and Aon Hewitt – Like a bad HR law firm – the big 3 HR consulting shops give your senior leadership HR advice because you don’t have credibility.  What advice do they give them?  The same crap you’ve been trying to get your company to do for the last 4 years, but your senior leaders felt better about taking the advice from them after paying a six figure invoice, and listening to a 27 year old – 3 years out of Northwestern’s MBA program with a red tie, tell them how to run the people side of their business.

***Thanks to my friend John Hollon, over at TLNT, for helping me out with this very official list!***

Let me start this by saying Steve and I rarely got together for lunch or meetings (and by “rarely” I mean never).  That doesn’t mean many of us don’t have opinions on why Steve Jobs was a great business leader.  With the upcoming release of the biography ‘Steve Jobs” many details are coming out about his thoughts and feelings on many things including: Google, Bill Gate and President Obama.  From the PC World article: Steve Jobs Biography: 5 Tidbits You Need To Read –

We’ve heard before about how Steve Jobs purportedly felt betrayed by Google over Android and believed the search giant was trying to kill the iPhone with its mobile OS. But Jobs made his feelings about Android clearer to Isaacon, saying he was “willing to go thermonuclear war” against Google over Android, according to the Huffington Post. Jobs also referred to Android as “grand theft” of Apple’s iPhone and was purportedly willing to spend every last dime of Apple’s $40 billion cash reserves to get rid of Android…

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates grew to respect Jobs. In 2007, during a joint interview with the Apple chief at the D5 conference Gates commended Jobs for creating the first mass market PC, the Apple II.

Jobs, on the other hand, didn’t return the favor. In Isaacson’s book, Jobs called Gates “unimaginative” and someone who “shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas,” according to the Huffington Post. Jobs even said Gates was more comfortable in philanthropy, because of his lack of imagination. Ouch…

Apple is often admired for its advertising campaigns, and Jobs apparently offered to lend his marketing genius to President Obama by creating ads for his 2012 re-election campaign. The Apple chief made the same offer to the Obama campaign in 2008, but the partnership led nowhere after friction developed between Jobs and Obama’s then-chief strategist David Axelrod.

As some of these details come out, I think it gives us a great picture of why America had a love affair with Jobs as a leader. From my standpoint those include:

1. People want a leader who is willing to “fight” – publicly.

2. People want a leader who has an opinion.  A “real” opinion and is willing to share it – publicly.

3. People want a leader who has conviction – and willing to show it – publicly.  I might not agree with his politics, but I love the fact that as a leader of an enormous company he wasn’t hiding his convictions.

Too many times we have our corporate leaders who are so “cleansed”, so “vanilla”, so p.c. that they never really say anything.  It’s why we love all these CEOs from start-up companies, they have nothing to lose.  As soon as they “make it” they go through some PR machine that turns them into nothing.  It’s one of the most sad issues companies face as they grow and become successful – the “death” of the personality of their leaders!

Can’t wait to read the full biography, fascinating personality

Let me give you a couple things to ponder about Walmart:

-1% of Americans work at a Walmart

-$.36 = amount of profit per $10 spent at Walmart

-600,000 +/- (Number of new employees hired by Walmart annually)

-$15,000,000,000 (Yes that’s Billion) in operating profit.

-$10,000 (the amount of salary increase if Walmart spent every cent they made in profit and divided it equally amongst all of its employees)

So, What does this all mean?   It means that working in HR at Walmart might be the single toughest job in HR in the entire world.

Most Americans would believe that Walmart employees, the normal rank and file – store level employees, are underpaid – on average a full time associate probably makes about $20,000 per year.  Not to great of a living wage.  So, let’s play G*d/CEO and now you’re in charge.  We are going to give you all $15B in profit and let you go out and pay everyone more.  Do you really think going from $20K to $30K is going to change lives – pull someone out of poverty, move them into the suburbs?  No – it won’t.  By the way – Walmart isn’t a non-profit – so thanks for the raise, but the Board just fired you, because you don’t know how to run a company!

I not here to praise Walmart as the savior of our society – they do plenty wrong – like most big businesses who are trying to make shareholders happy.  I’m here to try and get some HR Pros to take another look and have some respect for some peers (of which I really don’t know any Walmart HR Pros – I just believe it’s on tough job!) who are making it happen each and every day, on a scale not one of us can imagine!  Let’s face it, working in HR shops at Zappos, Apple, Google, etc. aren’t really that tough. Yeah, I said it. Sure it was tough work getting on top, and it’s work each day staying on top – but trying being on the bottom for a while – try working for a corporation that is so tight on profit margins that you only have 3 cents of every dollar you bring in to do anything extra for employees – and when you decide to do something extra – multiply that figure by 1.5M!  “Hey, we want to give away a Thanksgiving Turkey to all of our employees”, equals a $25.5M grocery bill!   Makes your $4K budget for a holiday party look pretty good doesn’t it!

I love listening to the great HR Pros from the “Best Companies To Work For” – so much excitement and passion for their organizations. But, what I really like to hear – is how HR Shops in the not so great companies to work for pull it off, especially those of giant companies.   It really stops being HR as 99% of us know it.  It becomes an entire operation onto itself.  Walmart can make a benefit change, a design change, a selection assessment change – and entire industries are moved because of it.  We (the collective HR lot of us) decide we want to increase copays by $5 per office visit and it doesn’t even register as a change.

Love’em or Hate’em HR at Walmart is something that fascinates me.  We all get to listen to best practices of our peers and steal the best ideas and make them our own.  Walmart HR has no peers – everything they do is industry best practice, because no one is in their league from an employment standpoint in private industry.  When’s the last time they won an award in HR?

The Following is a Guest Post by Erin Palmer (also check out her bio below) – she contacted me and wanted to write a guest post, I said she could if she could make me laugh, she did – it took McDreamy to do it – here it is…

I was a nerdy kid by default. I had to wear gigantic red glasses when I was a child. Glasses that my tiny nose could barely hold up. Glasses that magnified my eyes to thrice their normal size. The point is, I didn’t stand a chance of becoming cool until I got my first pair of contacts in seventh grade.

What do my childhood scars have to do with buying Twitter followers, you ask? It’s pretty simple. When my birthday rolled around every year and my mom gave me cupcakes to bring to the class, suddenly everyone was my friend. The cupcakes bought me an entire classroom full of buddies, but as soon as the tasty treats were gone, so were my new pals.

Buying Twitter followers is like a real life version of the eighties classic “Can’t Buy Me Love.” In this film, a pre-McDreamy Patrick Dempsey pays a cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend in order to get popular. It works at first, but then it backfires (the way that only a gloriously cheesy eighties movie can). Poor Patrick Dempsey lost his real friends and his fake friends because his plan shattered his credibility. Purchasing Twitter followers cheapens your brand and can cause your actual followers to lose trust in you.

Twitter is about communication, so why pay for a following that won’t lead to genuine interaction?   Patrick Dempsey’s character was better off with his handful of loyal geek friends than the huge group of fickle popular kids that turned on him right away. Having thousands of followers that aren’t reading your Tweets is like putting up a billboard and covering the ad with a giant sheet. If no one sees it, it isn’t promoting anything.

Also, many of the sites that sell Twitter followers make you follow back. Nothing sullies a brand’s reputation faster than a bunch of followers hawking discount medications and “free” cruises. If you want your brand to reap the benefits of Twitter, then you have to do the work the old-fashioned way.    Tweet regularly and make it interesting and relevant. Reach out to people and companies that will find your brand meaningful. Reference eighties movies as often as possible (ok, so this might not work for everyone, but it will make me follow you).

Patrick Dempsey’s character makes a moving speech in the cafeteria when he realizes that what really makes a person cool is to be yourself. Tweet from the heart, not the wallet. You and your brand are special just the way you are.

This guest post was written by Erin Palmer. Help Erin prove that reaching out is the best way to gain followers by following her on Twitter @Erin_E_Palmer.  When she’s not watching bad eighties movies, Erin works with Villanova University’s online programs. University Alliance and Villanova University can help you earn your HR degree or HR certification. For further information about these programs, please visit http://www.villanovau.com.

I will by flying on 9/11 this year, I don’t seem overly concerned by this, just as I’m sure people in Hawaii aren’t concerned about going down to the naval shipyards on December 7th.  Dates and history have a funny way to making us do weird things – like not flying a specific day because a number of years ago an unthinkable tragedy happened on that day, so we now know that it’s a possibility it could happen again.  So, we schedule are flights for 9/12 thinking somehow it’s safer.  It probably isn’t.

I read an article this week that put the tragedy of 9/11 into perspective for me ten years later.  The writer is a local Michigan writer, and he relates the 9/11 tragedies with tragedies that many people face at certain times in their life.  In Michigan this past spring we had a young man die on the basketball court after hitting a game winning shot, when his heart stopped.  It made national news for many weeks, was covered on ESPN as his team went on to play in the state playoffs without their star players and friend.  It was heart wrenching (see the Wes Leonard story here).   From the CNN article by LZ Granderson:

“I didn’t tell him I loved him or hugged him or anything,” Charles said. “Now I won’t ever get that chance again.”

Sadly I hear some element of that phrase over and over again from mourners reflecting on words left unsaid, gestures not made. And even though we all understand in our heads that tomorrow is not guaranteed, it is so hard to live a life that illustrates that understanding in our hearts.

Over the next several days, our nation will spend a significant amount of time looking back at the morning of September 11, 2001, and how much that event changed us.

We will analyze the war on terror and relive accounts of that day from first responders.

Celebrities will talk about where they were when the towers were struck, experts will look at what we need to do to shore up our security and pundits will pontificate on whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have really made us safer.

Undoubtedly, there will be moments in which it will feel like overkill, and I’m sure some of it will be. But I believe these are important stories to cover, important questions of morality to ask.

However in the midst of this 9/11 media avalanche, we should be careful not to overlook the most important lesson from the attack, and that is not to take life for granted. You never know which day is your last.

Hug your children.

Hold your spouse’s hand.

Call your mother.

Like most people I’m fascinated by all the stories of heroism during 9/11 and I love watching them on TV, and it still today makes me sick to my stomach to watch in horror the planes hitting the towers and the towers coming down.  10 years later it still seems unreal this happened in America.  I agree with Mr. Granderson’s take in that many people face tragedy each and every day, and for those who never got a chance to say goodbye, when it seemed like just another day when you left in the morning – what we miss, what we really want back, is that opportunity – the opportunity to tell that person how we feel, to hug them, to tell them we love them.  When that is taken away – it’s a personal tragedy for all of us, because you live with that regret forever.

Don’t miss your opportunity today to tell those you love how you feel, take that extra moment to give your wife and kid a hug on the way to work, and stop by and give your HR Manager a hug – G*d knows they need it!

For those who aren’t big Major League Baseball (MLB) fans you probably don’t know what the “September Call-Up” or “Expanded Rosters” mean.  Each year on September 1st, as the MLB season goes into its final month, the league allows teams to invite players from their minor league teams and the roster number expands from 25 to 40.  For teams who are out of the playoff race, this allows them to give some younger guys an opportunity to perform on a larger stage.  For those in playoff races, or teams that have already solidified a playoff berth, the extra players allow them to rest some regulars.  For playoff teams these extra 15 players can’t play in actual playoff games, only in the final regular season games.

Ok, Tim – why the hell should we care about Major League Baseball’s September Call-ups?

In any HR shop I’ve ever worked in, or with any HR Pro I’ve ever had a conversation with – Succession Planning is always an issue HR Pros struggle with in their organizations.  Many times sports shows us there is a way that it can be done, you just need to find a way to tailor it to your environment, and I think the MLB gives us a window to how a competitive organization attempts to get this done.

Succession is difficult and costly, there is no way around it.  If your organization is truly trying to do succession and not spend money – it won’t be pretty and it probably won’t be effective.  To really know a person has the ability to step into someones shoes when they leave, you have to see them actually do the job.  In most organizations this just isn’t an option – how many of us have the ability to pull out a high performer from their current position, and put them into a new position, while the other person is still in that position?  Not many of us!  It’s just not a reality most of live in.

Baseball’s September call-ups is one strategy that you might be able to use within your organization.  While pulling someone full-time into a new position, might not be something you could do – could you do it for 30 days?  Before telling me you can’t – what would you do it that same person had a medical issue and had to be hospitalized or home-bound for a month?  You’d make it, you’d get by – that’s what we do in organizations.  The team would rally and make it work. So, giving someone a 1 month succession stint into a new potential role – full immersion – would actually give  you some decent insight to whether or not the person could actually handle that role in the future, or at least show you some great development needs that have to ensure success.

Is it perfect? No – but that’s why it works.  We don’t get perfect in HR – we get good enough and move onto the next fire.  We don’t get million dollar budgets to formalize succession and have a bench full of high performing talent to just step in when someone leaves our organization.  It’s our job to figure out succession, while we figure out how to keep the lights on at the same time.  I love the September Call-Up – gives me insight to the future of my team, shows me how someone performs in an environment that doesn’t pigeonhole them forever, and let’s me know if they show some potential for The Show!

In terms of one part of your corporate Compensation Philosophy you can be a Pay Follower, a Pay Leader or Market Rate.

You never hear Pay Leaders complain about Turnover…

You always her Pay Followers complain about how Pay Leaders can actually pay that much…

Those who Pay at the Market always talk about how money isn’t that important…

HR and Compensation Pros will always talk about how it’s not about how much someone makes, it’s about the total compensation package.  Ironically, those Best Companies To Work for – tend to have the highest total compensation packages and be Pay Leaders.  It’s a vicious cycle to get the best talent.  If your a pay follower you will never have the best talent.  If you pay at market, you will never have the best talent for long.  If you’re a Pay Leader you’ll have the ability to attract the best talent and the resources to hook them – but you still have to have the culture and leadership to keep the long term.

This is everything I know about compensation after 20 years of working in HR.

What have I learned?

I always try and work for Pay Leaders – otherwise you end up chasing your tail a lot within the HR world.

Consider yourself graduated.