The Pragmatic Populist

Trick Questions

Some questions are just a trick. The interview process is full of these: there really is no right or wrong answer. The point is just to read something into which option you pick. My favorite of these is the famous one: “Which is more important to you: being liked or being respected?” As a [...]

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There is No Strategy if You Don't Manage Your Team

Last week I wrote an opening rant about “strategists.” In the comments that ensued, I am now inspired to clarify what I mean while I continue to write this series. I am not talking about consultants who are hired to help hone and build out a strategic vision for an organization; nor am I [...]

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The Reverence Gene

My husband constantly points out how irreverent I am. He does this mostly in a light-hearted, good natured way, but he still definitely finds it frustrating. He will often feel like I am being actively disrespectful to individuals or institutions that deserve my deference. The fact is that I am not disrespectful at all. [...]

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Where Are You Leading?

I’ve had an interesting few weeks. My husband and I have been dealing with a lot of things at home, hence my absence from blogging for much of the past month, and I have started a new project with the New Media (a.k.a. “web”) team at KXAN-TV here in Austin. Between getting settled into the [...]

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20/20 Hindsight – Transitioning a Services Company to a Product Company

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and [...]

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20/20 Hindsight – Getting Your Start in a Startup

People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could [...]

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20/20 Hindsight – How Early Career Choices Can Set the Stage

I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [...]

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Social Design for a Virtual Organization

At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for [...]

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The Value of the Role

If there is always one part of the early interview process that is a sticky wicket it is the, “What were you making at your last job?” question. This is a question that, particularly as someone who recently moved from NYC to Austin, Texas, is a problem to answer. The bigger problem is having this [...]

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Californians, New Yorkers and Texans

There is a strange phenomenon that Californians, New Yorkers and Texans have in common with each other that they rarely have in common with people from most other parts of the country: a sort of territorial, geo-centric affiliation. New Yorkers are routinely criticized by everyone else as being arrogant and thinking that New York is the [...]

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