My experience is that collaboration can be very difficult, if not impossible, if a group isn’t working towards the same plan or goal.

A group or team can attempt to move forward without a plan or a clear set of goals, but the outcome, if any, isn’t likely to be very good or successful, and probably pretty painful.

Every group or team is different, complete with conflicting personalities, ideas, motivations and beliefs. I believe this kind of diversity makes the best kind of team, but if there isn’t a plan or goal to focus on, successful collaboration will be impossible, the differences will be emphasized rather than the common goals; chaos and piss-off will ensue.

I’ve experienced this many times, and I can’t believe how many collaboration and/or project managers still don’t understand this. The plan or goal will allow people to move past conflicts and differences towards successful completion of goals.

I walked out to where me and other guy would be working and sat atop a mound of soil that I had created the week before. I was fuming and just sat there in the early morning August sun, silent. The guy was working and he sensed my agitation, introduced himself, and asked what was wrong. We talked for a few minutes, but I didn’t really have much to say. I had no plan, and no prospects, and I was not only being cheated, but also taken advantage of. I had nothing. Knowing this I carried on for a few more days, and earned back the time to pay for the sessions, and earn enough time for another session, but the elderly southern gentleman, while old, was no dummy and quite an astute conniver. He knew I had no prospects and he kept sticking me up and holding the training hostage. It was starting to feel like indentured servitude, and pretty soon I would owe him more than he owed me according to his relative method of accounting.

After another couple weeks of this routine and horrific training, I had enough. I walked out of the training and into the office of the elderly southern gentleman. I didn’t know what I would say, or do, because I was young, and Detroit was a small town. Word in the A/V business could travel fast. I collected myself the best I could, and told him that I would be discontinuing the training. He gave me a lot of trouble, told me that he had set aside a place for me, and all this and that. I told him, that I would have to respectfully decline. I also told him that by my estimate he owed $50 and that I wanted to square up. He told me that he didn’t have any money and that I should be paying him for the privilege. I asked if he needed to go to the office or an ATM and get cash. He told me I would take a check for a lesser amount, I told him that I wouldn’t. He told me that I was ungrateful. I insisted that I be paid for my time. He told me I did a bad job and deserved nothing.

He tried every attempt at breaking me down. The elderly southern gentleman with his white suits and black cain, looking like some kind of senior knock-off, Leon Redbone kept up his act, until finally he told me that I was making a big mistake by leaving his employ and that word of my not completing things would catch up with me. He pulled two twenties and two fives from his wallet and threw them on the floor in front of me. I was broke. Not missing a beat, I picked them up and shot out his door in a single motion.

At the time, with no prospects and no opportunities, and also being young, I had no idea what I was doing. He may have been right for all I knew, but it didn’t matter. I had to make the choice. I had to do what was right for me. In the end, I never did break into A/V in Detroit, and not long after that I took a job as an administrative assistant. Work wasn’t great, but I did get to work with computers, pay was good, and I wasn’t sweating in the hot sun. While I don’t know how things would have turned out if I had stayed, things certainly have been better for leaving, even if it did take a long time to reconcile that.

Do you have any stories like this? I’d like start a featuring stories like this, contact me with your ideas.

All throughout our lives we’re faced with situations. Most of these situations don’t require much, perhaps some research, advice from parents or colleagues who’ve had to make similar choices before. We evaluate what’s before us and we make a decision to move forward. These are the easiest situations to deal with. However, sometimes, thankfully not all that often, situations arise where there’s nobody to offer advice, and your only guide is your personal ethical and moral compass. These are situations where you really have to sit yourself down and evaluate what you’re faced with and how it may or may not affect your life down the road. These kinds of circumstances almost always test your integrity, because there’s usually something fundamental and core to your being that’s at question.

The tenuous relationship between you and your integrity is the feeling when you’re at the crossroads of something in your life that’s big or has the possibility of becoming something very large if you don’t act swiftly and decisively. In situations like this there’s almost always a component sacrifice or loss that comes with doing what you know is right, but is neither comfortable or very appealing. It’s the conflicted feeling that is the tenuous relationship between you and integrity.

I remember one time, early in my career, as I was working trying to break into the corporate video business in Detroit. The economy was in the toilet, and there was a lot of desperation. The desperation became most apparent whenever I showed up to interviews. I was fresh out of broadcasting school, I had a pretty good reel, and I was still there like all the other new upstarts groveling at the feet of studio and post house owners trying to get any kind of job, even a coffee boy, that might allow the opportunity to get a foot in the door. After nearly a year and a half of interviews and few prospects I met an elderly southern gentleman (I say gentleman sarcastically, because he was no gentleman at all, but we’ll get to that) who was willing to give me a chance, but there was a catch… Isn’t there always?

He would give me a chance to work in his studio and actually work on the gear, but he’d only do it in exchange for me landscaping his house. The closest I had ever gotten to landscaping had been planting a tree when I was in the Cub Scouts. I explained this to him with the hope that he would have mercy and cut me some slack, and just let me in. Ha! No such luck, the elderly southern gentleman was willing to teach me. So the next day, on a hot August morning, I showed up with a thermos of water and two bologna sandwiches. The deal was for every eight hours I worked I could earn $40 that would be put towards a special studio program that he had worked out with his son, who actually ran the studio. And the $40 for studio time actually came out to only two hours of studio learning with the “chance” — I have to put chance in big fat air quotes — that I could get an opportunity to participate in a shoot or work in the audio studio, for free of course, but the chance to practice my craft. So let’s review, eight hours of labor for $40 that could be put towards two hours of studio time that *might* lead to a chance to actually do A/V work for free as an intern. It was a horrible deal, but I was desperate and hopeful. Sometimes, hope is all you have especially when you’re desperate. I sweated it out for several weeks, working roughly four days a week that culminated in a six hour studio learning time session each Friday. The lessons were not good. The yahoo son of the elderly southern gentleman was a washed up rock and roller who landed on the wrong side of the coke spoon too many times, and his feathered hair, straight from a Journey cover group, being tossed about as he covered the most basic aspects of audio, was doing little for me.

Still hopeful and still desperate, the first week-earned session had ended. Time to start back up again on Monday accruing more learning time. When I got to the site on Monday I noticed two things. First off, there was a guy already there, working, and a lot of the work that I had done the week before had been undone. I went to the office and asked the bleery-eyed elderly southern gentleman what happend to the work I did all last week. As he wiped the sleep from his eyes he told me that I hadn’t’ done a good job and he had gone and redone it himself… There wasn’t much to the job, it was mostly spending the day bent over pulling weeds and rocks out of a small field of which I had accrued nearly 15 wheel barrows full by week’s end. This guy was probably 90 years old, seriously, no joke, so I just stood there agog imagining this old man doing that back-breaking work. He told me that he apprised the new upstart of the project and that moving forward I would have company. He then went on to tell me that he would dock me for all of the previous week’s time, and so effectively, I was working to pay back the session of the previous Friday. I became smoking hot, and started to argue with him. He held all the cards. I walked out.

To be continued on Wednesday, 09/30/09…

Try everything and don’t be afraid to fail. That’s sort of been the mission statement of my life. No matter what amount of suck and inconvenience has been thrown my way, and no matter how many times I’ve had to alter the plan. When you’re building something that you want to succeed whether it’s a business, a band, or a book club, you have to keep evaluating, improving and most importantly moving with failure (and it’s avoidance) foremost in your mind.

Some people will tell you that failure is a state of mind, and you can’t even consider it. I think that’s crap. Imagine you’re running towards a cliff, but you’re in a state of great joy and optimism, wouldn’t you rather maintain your joy and optimism and avoid going over the cliff’s edge to your death? Hell, maybe some wouldn’t, but I would and you probably would, too. So I think that you have to be mindful of failure, and through evaluation and improvement you move away from failure. But to say failure is just a state of mind, and dismiss it, much like a lot of folks only want to hear the bright side of things, is just foolish… and yes ignorance is bliss, but when you’re out there trying to make a go of something you don’t have the luxury of ignorance because you’ve made a decision that you’re going for it, because the status quo just isn’t working for you. To that I say right on!

The best investment you can make is your in self. That’s what I’ve taken to telling myself and the countless family and friends who have been laid off, and after months of being on unemployment aren’t seeing any real opportunities coming their way. “It’s one thing if there are interviews,” one friend told me, “but when you don’t even have the hope of that after hours and hours of job hunting, it gets kind of depressing.” Yes, yes it does, I agree with that.

I’ve been laid off probably seven times, usually from small businesses, who were on their way out of business. I recall one job as a graphic designer where the electricity was turned off, and I lost all of an intense (and ill-advised) Photoshop layout, over one hundred and fifty layers. When the bill was finally paid and the electricity was turned back on I went at it again, and you know what it was a better design and came together more quickly, but that’s hardly the moral of the story, because in fact I was laid off a month later… didn’t see that one coming — HA!.

Being laid off sucks! It diminishes your self-worth, poisons your outlook on life, makes you resentful, and generally is just a sad time; unfortunately these feelings only intensify proportionate to the time you’re without a job or the hope of any kind of gainful employment. The suck train just keeps a rollin’… until you reach a point where you either crack, roll over and give up, or you decide that you’re not going to be a victim of bad times and you need to take control of the only thing you can, yourself. It’s no surprise that more millionaires were made during the Great Depression than any other time. The fight or flight instincts take over, and you decide I’m going to do fix this, I can do this for myself, and you do. You do, because the best investment you can make is in yourself!

Some of my regular readers may have noticed that the site has been changing over the last month or so. This really started with the merging of the Digital Imperative blog and my music/design site. I wanted to bring my career workinline with my creative and artistic work here at mattborghi .com. Since then I’ve been reading some of your comments, emails and past posts (of which this is post #90) and thinking about the editorial direction and content overall of The Digital Imperative. This week it became clear to me that while I might talk about Google, Twitter or Yahoo, or Web and Digital Strategy or communications, as well as posting videos or Mp3s of recent work at the core of my message is that of entrepreneurship. Whether you’re a corporate entrepreneur working inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company, the small business owner who’s reach is much more local than global or a Do-It-Yourself artist trying to gain a broader audience for your work — Entrepreneurship is an attitude.

It took me talking to a trusted colleague this week for that to become clear to me. We spent a good amount of time talking about what it means to be a small business and a small business owner. Entrepreneurship encompasses a series of soft skills, including ambition, persistence, organization, attitude and most importantly a belief in one’s self, but there are many other words that describe what an entrepreneur or entrepreneurship is.

I plan to spend more time talking about entrepreneurship and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Keeping in mind that my definition of an entrepreneur is looser than most. I define an entrepreneur as someone who works to put something together and is willing to take the risk for it.  This goes together with the newly-crafted editorial statement that I crafted for this site: The best investment you can make is in yourself.

So that’s the plan, and the direction I plan on taking with things. I’ll still be talking about social media, Web strategy, communications and the like because of course it’s absolutely the entrepreneurial spirit that drives one to undertake these things, especially as best practices are being written as we go. As always, I welcome your feedback, and look forward to the continued conversation.

We get opportunities,
however irregular
to make a difference.
Sometimes,
we’re able to step up
and take it on,
other times
life circumstances
are too much to bare
and we must stick with
what we’ve got
and where we’re at.
Life is a circuitous and
mysterious
journey will all kinds
of twists and turns,
experiences
and opportunities.
When your moment
comes,
will you be ready?

Success is based on appearance, not reality; I read this in Robert X. Cringley’s Accidental Empires and it was like a cosmic lightning strike to my being. I’ve always struggled with this, because success, so often, does in fact seem to be based on appearance rather than reality. The problem with appearances is that they yield nothing but a vision, a concept, an idea. But what do you do when the veneer of the appearance starts to crack? More work is required to keep up the appearance than to have done the thing that the appearance was created for or explained why it couldn’t be done and/or made other plans to begin with.

Appearance-based “success” that’s based on a tangible, is really what I’m talking about here, and to call this a success without any real tangible being delivered isn’t success at all. Successful relay of a vision, concept or idea, when the outcome is a tangible isn’t a success but rather a snow job dressed up as success. This is logic, though, however, and the human condition, through its very essence nullifies logic. So there it is. I’ve reconciled it, success is how things look not how thing are.

I’ll keep trying for success based on what is rather than the appearance, though…

Change is hard, there’s no question about it. Sometimes, even a change for the better is tough for a team or an organization to make peace with; and things are even worse if the change isn’t for the better. I’m not talking about the slow gradual change of degradation, as much as I’m talking about quick changes, and their short, sharp shock effect. These changes, while quick in execution, to some appear to be better and more effective (I blame this one to many Dog Whisperer episodes where the watcher begins these techniques on humans) have far-reaching effects that definitely effect morale and an organization’s culture.

In our particular epoch, this post-9/11, quasi-depression era that we’re living in, people are often running scared, and any change, one way or another, fuels core fears – loss of job, loss of home, loss of health care. There’s not a lot that we can do about this except to be mindful and sympathetic.

It’s easy to lose sight of the human element when you’re working on the digital strategy side of things. However, this sympathy and mindfulness of where your users live will help a great deal in developing a strategy that’s both successful for the organization and for the human beings that you’re hoping to connect with.

Doing the right thing isn’t easy; it takes courage, follow-through and a near-constant defense of what’s right. It’s not that people don’t want to do what’s right, but it’s not the path of least resistance. Sometimes, though, you can’t fight all the good fights, but rather you have to pick your battles strategically.. What will have the best outcome? What are the pros and cons? How would this  benefit the team, the organization, the world, etc… Sometimes this makes it easier to choose, sometimes not. Doing the right thing, often, is tough, but there’s personal solace in knowing you did the right thing. Somehow, this is what matters more than anything.