Daniel O'Neil

So what do you want to do with your life?

Chris Guillebeau is back with a new book on managing your career. After he wrote about how to live the life that we want (The Art of Non-Conformity), how to start the business of our dreams (The $100 Startup), and how to create and chase our dreams (The Happiness of Pursuit); he is now tackling how to create the career of your dreams.

If you are set on starting your own business, stick with The $100 Startup. If you are working for someone else or unsure of which path to take, this is a great overall guide. Chris starts off by helping you figure out how to align your work dreams with your life goals--revising your script so that your actions actually lead you to be happier not just higher up the ladder. He covers the pros and cons of working for yourself, working for someone else, or figuring out how to do both.

 

This is an ideal book for someone either early in their career or feeling stuck. Chris does a beautiful job of showing the incredible range of opportunities that are out there and provides solid advice no matter which way you might want to jump.

Note that Chris was kind enough to send me a copy of the book in exchange for this unbiased review. However, since I am a fanboy of Chris', he knew that I would love it! 

 

Lying wasn't Greg Mortenson's biggest sin

On Tuesday, Greg Mortenson reappeared after the scandal surrounding his books and charity to apologize for lying. “I stand by the stories. The stories happened, but … not in the sequence or the timing,” Mortenson told Brokaw. If his only fault was rearranging the facts, then I would never have cared. After all, All Marketers are Liars Tell Stories.I don't mind that he changed the truth around a bit to make a good story.

What really upset me was finding out that he didn't run a charity focused on building schools in Afghanistan. Instead he ran a self-promotion company. Jon Krakauer's book, Three Cups of Deceit, was more damning of how poorly run the Central Asia Institute was than of the poor story telling. He showed how the Central Asia Institute seemed to exist more to promote and purchase Greg's book than to build schools. Rather than Greg's book being a source of income for the Institute, a large portion of the Institute's budget went to funding Greg's book tour and purchasing, at full market price, Greg's books. Many of the schools that were built weren't even being used.

As Seth tells in All Marketers are Liars, everyone tells stories that have shades of untruth to them. Rearranging the facts to make a better story is fine as long as the central story is true. The real lie that Greg Mortenson told was claiming that he was trying to improve education in Afghanistan. Instead, he was just trying to get rich. This is why the Central Asia Institute has lost nearly all of its funding.

By contrast, Kiva managed to survive largely unscathed when its great untruth was exposed.  Kiva claims to allow people to lend directly to small businesses in poor countries. Their website is full of stories of micro-entrepreneurs who need a little cash to grow their business. You can pick someone with a compelling story, lend them money, and when the loan is repaid so are you. It seems like a fun, easy way to help out. Except it doesn't work that way. Back in 2009, David Roodman showed that most entrepreneurs are funded well before their page even appears on the Kiva website. If the entrepreneur defaults on a loan, the intermediary organization that facilitates the loan repays it. There really isn't any link between the donor and the entrepreneur.

Big scandal, right? No. Kiva quickly admitted that this was indeed the case and that it was a matter of logistics. The entrepreneur needed the cash quickly. It didn't make sense to make them wait for funding to come (or not come). Yes, the intermediary organziations would repay loans but that was to prevent occasional defaults from disqualifying them from managing future loans. Kiva was in the business of funding micro entrepreneurs, just not quite how they had originally described it. So Kiva is going strong while the Central Asia Institute is nearly closed.

We all tell stories and no story is ever completely true. If the Central Asia Institute was doing great work in Afghanistan as Kiva is doing with microfinance, I would have easily forgiven Greg for playing with his facts. Instead, I feel as if his whole story was just a con.

Still Looking for a Good Book on the Haiti Earthquake

 

I seek out books on the Haiti earthquake in the hopes of finding one that captures what I experienced and perhaps helps me to understand it better. Instead, all of the books seem to describe a different event. Like the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, one author talks about the leg and another about the trunk. Perhaps all I know is the tail.

I had high hopes for two books that just came out: Jonathon Katz’ The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster and Amy Wilentz’ Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti. Each book captured part of what I experienced, but they each described a world that I didn’t know.

Jonathon Katz was an AP reporter that had lived in Haiti for a couple of years before the earthquake. His account of the actual earthquake and the events of that night were the most powerful part of the book. I found it to be especially spooky because Carolle and I had lived and been married in the house that collapsed under him. I had hoped that his book would show a strong understanding of Haiti and how the events unfolded. The best parts of the book were his description of the night of the earthquake and then his quest to find out the UN’s role in introducing cholera. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book felt superficial—more of a drive-by viewing of the disaster response.

 

Amy Wilentz’ book was the opposite. Whereas Jonathon Katz tried to tell a straight forward story of the disaster, Amy’s book seems to be more her grappling with the earthquake and its aftermath. The book reads more as a collection of thoughts than a coherent story. It is a very personal book as she openly wrestles with her feelings towards Haiti and journalism—is she helping Haiti by getting people’s stories out or is this just voyeurism? Her first book had been on the epic struggle to get rid of Duvalier and of Aristide’s rise to power. But Aristides’s presidencies were failures and Duvalier is back in Haiti. Perhaps it wasn’t such an epic time after all. Her book clearly reflects her personal struggle with the impact that she is having.

Both books skewer the disaster response provided by the international community. The subtitle of Katz’ book nicely sums up his view, How the International Community Came to Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. Amy Wilentz wrote “It’s fair to say that one of the biggest issues to rise from the earthquake’s dust is whether aid agencies and international development organizations can ever be trusted, either by the victim community or by the donors who fund them. Are they honest—do they know how to be honest; can they be honest and survive?” She goes on to complain that aid agencies are not effective at working themselves out of a job. 

Yes, it was confusing and there were some big mistakes made (the construction of the Corail camp out in the middle of nowhere being one—providing services in makeshift camps was another). Both lionize Sean Penn for running a camp as well as the pros. But if the pros are running camps as well as Sean Penn, doesn’t that mean that the “pros” were doing something right, too?

This is where both she and Jonathon Katz got it wrong. The earthquake response that I saw was an exhausting slog against incredible obstacles and through a bizarre maze. Although some of the early journalists seemed to have believed that Port-au-Prince had been completely destroyed, that was never true. Half of all the buildings in Port-au-Prince were not significantly damaged. Although President Preval’s government seemed to disappear in the first days after the earthquake, it soon reasserted itself. 

The biggest complaint against the work that the NGOs did is that we did not build a shiny new Haiti from the rubble of the earthquake. Yet that was never our mandate. As weak as the Haitian government was, it was still the national government. It was the only institution that could have declared eminent domain to seize land to create camps, widen streets, or enforce a new city wide master plan. Neither the NGOs nor the United Nations had this authority. When the government was unwilling to take these steps, no one could. But what’s the point in bashing the Preval Government? Its weaknesses were quite well known and documented.

I ran the  earthquake response for the Pan American Development Foundation, one of the larger NGOs, from the day after the earthquake until this past January. Of course I made mistakes—we were trying to move as fast as we could in a very complex environment and using whatever resources we could find. We passed out food and other goods that had been collected in the States to help the poor Haitians. I would much rather have received cash, but our local partners were happy to receive whatever we could give them. I would much rather have purchased local rice rather than receiving donations of fortified rice, but the imported rice was free and we didn’t have much cash. Our first attempt at home repair in the Jacmel area fell flat—we had budgeted too little money and the repairs were too isolated. 

We also had huge successes. We helped evaluate the safety of over 400,000 structures throughout the earthquake impacted area. This gave hundreds of thousands of people the confidence to return to their safe house and provided a blueprint for the repairs that were needed. We trained hundreds of engineers, masons, and contractors in improved construction techniques and used them to repair 10,000 houses. We helped neighborhood committees come together to determine how they wanted their neighborhood rebuilt.  We helped scores of microentrepreneurs to start small businesses.

In Dr. Farmer’s earthquake book, Haiti After the Earthquake, he seemed to believe that his organization was the only one to do a good job. I’ll bet a lot of us feel this way. My organization did a great job. It’s too bad that all the other organizations couldn’t do as well. Naturally some organizations did better than others. Unfortunately, most people who donated, donated blindly. They gave to the Red Cross because they always give to the Red Cross, even though the Red Cross’ reputation as a slow bureaucracy is documented after every disaster. They gave to Wyclef Jean because he is a famous Haitian, not because they thought that he had a professional organization behind him. I wish that more of the funds had gone to PADF and other organizations that were well established in Haiti, but I thank God that people did give.

Perhaps someday I’ll find a book that tells the story of the earthquake as I saw it—the story of a hard struggle to have the greatest possible impact as quickly as possible in an incredibly complex situation.

Our work wasn't perfect, but it was the best that we could possibly do and Haiti is better off for it..

How High Will You Fly?

Seth's new book The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? pushes us to fly towards the Sun. The question isn't "How high are you allowed to fly" or "How high do you dare to fly" but "How high WILL you fly." Seth pushes us to dare to do the hard, emotional labor of creating change. In our deeply interconnected world where anyone can reach out to anyone else, we don't need to wait to be picked. We can take the initiative and create the situation that we want to create.

You can read this book one of two ways. If you read it casually, it is an easy, fun read. There are many nice little bite size chunks and many parts that don't apply to your life--"I would never stoop to putting pink slime in ground beef." Or, you can take it as a challenge. You can read it with the intent to change your life--to stop waiting to be picked and to take your own initiative.

I am a Seth Fan Boy. I've read everyone of his books. I read his blog each day. I supported this book through Kickstarter as soon as it went up. As a result of this constant bombardment of messages, I am a better person. I speak up in meetings, I dare to write this public blog, and I have become a good public speaker.

One of the things that I love about Seth is that he is quite clear on his message. If you are happy with your life or don't want to put in the hard, emotional labor to change yourself; then don't waste your time with this book. If instead you dare to reach higher--to fly towards the Sun--then Seth is a wonderful guide.

Yes, this builds on Linchpin and Poke the Box, but it is more powerful. I would encourage you to read all three, but start with The Icarus Deception.

The $100 Startup

   

 

Imagine a life where all your time is spent on things that you want to do.

Imagine giving all your greatest attention to a project you create yourself...

Imagine that today is your final day of working for anyone other than yourself.

Chris Guillebeau’s new book,The 100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future ,is a wonderful guide to what it takes to make that leap.

I loved the stories of people who have successfully made that leap: the story of a suddenly unemployed salesman who grew a retail mattress business out of a load of surplus mattresses, the story of how a passion for map making led to a successful map making business, the story of a music teacher who built a software business. Woven throughout is Chris’ own story of growing his Unconventional Guides business.
 
In every case, the entrepreneur started the business with only a very small investment—the cost of a truckload of mattresses, the first printing of a set of maps, or a new camera. The traditional thought is that you need a lot of money to start a business. Chris shows that we all have the resources to start a $100 Startup.
 
Chris’ books are always very practical. After reading Chris’ e-book The Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself, I sold a few things on eBay and began looking for ways to earn a side income. After reading the Frequent Flyer Master, I earned 200,000 frequent flyer miles—enough for several round trip tickets. This one is no exception. He provides templates for a one page-business plan, a one page marketing strategy and even a one-page partnering agreement.

I also like how he provided financial information from the entrepreneurs. He told how much each of his case studies made in their first year and how it grew. These are not get rich quick stories. Many of the businesses started at around $60,000 for their first year. Yet many grew into the six figures in year two.

I have dreamed for years of starting a business, but only taken timid steps in that direction. I’m not looking to quit my job, only to diversify my income. The $100 Startup has given me not only the inspiration to push forward, but enough practical advice to help get me moving.
 

Warning: I didn’t have to buy this book. Chris sent me an advance copy for review. I have repaid his kindness by sprinkling this post with affiliate links both back to his site and to Amazon. I was thrilled last week when I received my first Amazon Affiliate payment. Sure, it was only $13.72 but, as Chris wrote in this book, there is magic in that first check.

Did Steve Jobs make Apple into a Great company?

In Issac Walterson's biography of Steve Jobs, Steve is repeatedly quoted in saying that he has strived to make Apple into an enduringly great company--one that will stand the test of time. Yet so much of Apple revolved around the cult of Steve Jobs and his "reality distortion field" that it is very hard to imagine Apple without him. So what is the chance that Apple will thrive in the post-Steve era?

In Jim Collins book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, he described the seven characteristics that companies who had made the leap from average performance ("good") to exceptional Performance ("great"). Under Steve Jobs, Apple exhibited all but one.

First who than what: Steve was fanatical about hiring the right people. Shortly after his return to Apple, he would hound someone to come to work at Apple if he taught that the person was right for the job. He was equally merciless in firing someone if he thought that the person was not performing. He always struggled to have only A players on his team.

Confront the brutal facts: Steve was brutally honest. Although he had a magical way of getting what he wanted out of a product, he never hid from failure. When products didn't work out (remember "Mobile Me"?) he wouldn't hesitate to kill it.

Hedgehog concept: Steve's greatest strength was his ability to focus like a laser on a few products. At his death, when Apple was one of the largest companies in the United States, its entire product line would fit on an average dining room table. He knew that Apple's success was tied to its ability to make a small number of truly great products.

Culture of discipline: Steve drove his team mercilessly to create the culture that he wanted. His team knew his vision and tried hard to implement it.

Technology as accelerators: Although Apple produced wonderful technologly, they never based their own business systems on cutting edge technology. They adopted web-based ordering only long after others had done it. Their best marketing was through their beautiful stores and traditional ads. They used technology, but did not follow fads.

Flywheel effect: As Apple produced one beautiful product after another, the cumulative effect of the other characteristics was clear.

He did everything right except for one thing. Although he was a Level Five leader that cared more for the company than his (quite oversized) ego, he did not prepare Apple for a successor. He did work closely with Tim Cook and hand the company over to him shortly before he died. However there is no cult of Tim Cook. Steve's hand was in everything that Apple did. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad could not have been built under anyone else's leadership. It took a CEO who cared passionately about quality and who had an exquisite sense of taste to make these into the masterpieces that they are. Tim Cook has a reputation for someone who gets things done, not for someone who makes great things.

In the conclusion of the biography of Steve Jobs, he is quoted as he talks about the downfall of other great companies. He claimed that companies such as Hewlett Packard fell apart when they were run by salesmen instead of product people. He said that is what happened to Apple in the 1980’s under Scully. Unfortunately, it seems that he has left Apple is just that type of hands. Bill Gates was quoted as saying that only Steve Jobs could have built a company that offered such complete integreation of software and hardware. When Steve was asked to name another company that so successfully offered the same level of complete integration, he couldn't come up with one.

Without a Steve Jobs to set the tone and vision, how could Apple continue to innovate so beautifully?After the last of Steve's products make it to market, will Apple be able to come up with a worthy sucessor to the iMac-Ipod-Iphone-Ipad family?

What do you think? Is it time to buy or sell Apple stock?

 

Steve Jobs did not wrestle with Uncertainty

The beauty of Apple's products was their singular, clear vision. Whether it is the iPhone, iPod, or Macintosh, the product was clearly designed with its purpose--Steve Job's vision of what the product should be. By contrast, Farhead Mohat's biggest complaint about his Android phone is that it seems to be designed by a committee. Although it is "the most powerful phone" on the market, people don't love it because they don't understand its purpose--and that is the beauty of Steve Jobs' leadership. He knew what he wanted and fearlessly pushed for that result. He didn't need focus groups or committees to validate his vision. He did not seem to wrestle with uncertainty. He boldly pushed forward and was right often enough.

I have been wrestling with leading through uncertainty as I read Jonathon Field's book: Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance. I have been fortunate to lead our Haiti office through a time of change as we have tried to move from being a good organization to being a great one. When I preordered the book, I was hoping for suggestions on how to be more certain that the path that I had taken was the right one. I thought the discussion would be on the importance of establishing a strong baseline and clear milestones to be able to track progress. Instead, the book talks about meditating and being comfortable with uncertainty. If I had merely read the book and put it aside, I would not have gotten much out of it.

Fortunately, the preorder deal allowed me to participate in a series of teleconferences and to listen to his interviews with two of the people highlighted in the book. What I learned surprised me. I learned that the ability to work through uncertainty--to neither run from it nor to allow yourself to be immobilized by the fear that it brings--is a rare and valuable skill. A key value that a strong leader brings to an organization is to reduce the uncertainty for the rest of the team by providing a clear vision--in effect absorbing the uncertainty so that others don't have to. After all, any path to great results cannot be a certain one or everyone else would already be walking down it.

I don't have Steve Jobs arrogance, but I find it easier to live with uncertainty knowing that not only is it critical to leading teams in new directions, but it is a service that I am providing to my team.

How do you deal with uncertainty?

Notable books on Haiti

Several friends have asked me for recommendations on books about Haiti. The following are books that I have read and would recommend. I have divided them into four categories (fiction, non-fiction, dubious but interesting, and coffee table books). I thought about leaving out entirely the books that I consider a bit dubious, but the all have facinating information. (Note all links are amazon affiliate links)

Fiction

The Comedians  by Graham Greene: Classics just never go out of date. This is still a great book about Haiti.

Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende: a moving portrayal of the Haitian revolution told from the point of view of a slave, her owner, and people both sympathetic to the revolutions and fighting against it. Note that the second half of the book takes place in New Orleans.

The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat: the story of the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican borderlands in 1939.

Breath, Eyes, Memory also by Edwidge Danticat: fictionalized story of growing up in Haiti.

Non-Fiction

Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti by Michael Deibert and Raoul Peck: a great overview of the collapse of the second Aristide government.

Rainy Season: Haiti-Then and Now by Amy Wilentz: a fascinating look into Aristide's role in the downfall of the Duvalier Government. It was written before Aristide's government collapsed and does not look into the darker side of what later happened.

The Immaculate Invasion by Bob Shacochis:  the story of the 1994 US occupation told by an embedded reporter. This nicely brings out the rambling, lack of focus that characterized the occupation.

Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American ;the autobiography of Jean-Robert Cade. Tells the story of the abuses that he faced as a child slave in Haiti. Knowing how many kids never escape form this fate makes it a painful read.

Mountains beyond Mountains : Tracy Kidder the fascinating story of Dr. Paul Farmer and the start of Partners in Health.

Dubious facts, but interesting reads

Anything by Paul Farmer: Dr. farmer is a hero for the work that he has done in Haiti and around the world. In his books, he plays fast and free with the facts to back up his own point of view.

The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic by Wade Davis: A supposedly scientific investigation into voodoo. I don’t believe the insights into how voodoo works, but it does have good insights into Haitian rural life.

Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola by Michele Wucker: provides a great, east to read overview of the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. However, the central thesis that the island is too small to allow for strong presidents to govern in both countries doesn't really hold up.

Coffee Table/gift books

Paroles et Lumieres-Where Light Speaks: Haiti (English and French Edition), by Hiebert; Phelps; Yates; Cav: A beautiful look at Haiti by two people who love it well.

Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey through Island Biodiversity  by Eladio Fernández: A beautiful catalog of the animals on both sides of the island.

What other books would you recommend on Haiti?

 

The 7 Steps to Great Projects E-Book

I received a series of great comments on the Linkedin group Chief of Party Exchange to my earlier post Notes to a Newly Appointed Project Director. I reworked the earlier blog post into a free ebook: 7 Steps to Starting a Great Project. It is a six-page essay that focuses on the first seven things that a newly appointed project director should do to ensure that his or her project starts off right and hopefully ends well. It also includes short reviews of six books that every Project Director should read. What do you think? What would include in an expanded version?

What would it have felt like to live through the Haitian Revolution?

 

 

The story of the Haitian revolution is a bizarrely twisted tail. The revolution began as an uprising by the slaves, became a civil war between the French and the mulatos (mixed race, free people) to a slave revolution. General Toussaint Louverture fought first for the French, then for Spanish, then for Haiti. Then when Haiti finally won its independence, its new rulers put the former slaves right back to work on the plantations. I tried to make sense of the convoluted story through a series of posts on the Our Border website. Isabel Allende has done a beautiful job of painting a picture of life during these turbulent times in her book, Islands beneath the Sea.

Island Beneath the Sea is the story of life in Haiti before and during the revolution and later in New Orleans as seen by a handful of different characters. The beauty of the story is how each of the different narrators shows how they view the world and what happens: the slave girl who stays with her master even though he repeatedly raped her because it is best for her daughter; the plantation owner who finds ways to justify owning and even beating slaves even though he knows it is wrong; a doctor who is outspoken against slaves but unwilling to admit that his mistress is colored. I was fascinated watching how each character saw and related to the outbreak and spread of the revolution.

My interest was in what happened in Haiti. I was disappointed when the characters all moved to New Orleans. The book kept me interested, but I was sorry that they never returned to Haiti.

Island Beneath the Sea is a great addition to the fictional narrative of Haiti’s history along with Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones.