So earlier in the week I was on craiglist, looking at gigs.

Yes, gigs. Not jobs.

Part-time, temporary, and flexible, gigs represent a different lifestyle, different risk profile, and different rewards.  You can start them with a day job, and have the best of both worlds … there is just one small problem.

They don’t pay much.  Or at least, they often don’t pay much.

This article is about how to change that — to get the high-paying gigs,  while doing good, ethical work, that you can tell your family about with pride.

About Talent

The first thing I notice about Craigslist gigs is the types. Labor, Crew, and Talent.  Labor is back-breaking work that anyone in reasonable shape can do – moving furniture, delivering pizzas.  Because there is high competition for labor gigs — they are often cash-by-the-day, ideal for undocumented workers – the pay is extremely low.  Crew is the next level up; it not differentiated, but a smaller number of people have the special equipment (typically a camera or A/V equipment) and skills to do it, thus it pays slightly higher.  Then there is talent.

Talent is where the money is.

When a cameraman gets sick on the set of “The Counselor“, Bradd Pitts new movie, you get a new cameraman, maybe from Craigslist.

When Brad Pitt gets sick, the whole dang movie shuts down.  You lose a few hundred thousand dollars a day, and you get a world-class doctor in really really fast.

Talent gets the nice office, fresh bagels, and can command the kind of rates that you would hope they could command.

Maybe not $20 million for a nine-month movie shoot, but yes, Virginia, Talent does exist in IT.

Talent In IT

Last week I was in New York, city, doing a live video-shoot with my friend, Michael Steinhart, about Cloud Computing Security fr TheSMBAuthority.com.  Here’s a still from the show (click-through to watch the entire episode):

I’m not showing you the link to show off.

Actually, quite the opposite.  Look at me real carefully.

I’ve got a weight problem.  I have an acne problem.  My shirt, though high-quality, wasn’t wearing right; it was bunching at the bottom.

Somehow, this very non-Brad-Pitt like dude got to do a day of consulting in New York City at a ‘talent’ level rate.  It’s not my first one; in November, I was in Malmö, Sweden, giving a slightly ironic talk called “Building Your Reputation Through Creative Disobedience.”  Yes, there is video.

Again:  I am not Brad Pitt.

Now watch the SMB video.  If you are a real operator in technology, you watch a video like that and say “hey man, that’s introductory stuff.  wide, sure, but not very deep. Why … I could do that.”

Yes, you probably could.

How ‘Talent’ Works

When I look at the classifies, I see two general categories of talent.  The first is work that many people can do, there there is an existing market for, but most of us would find distasteful.  (We don’t need to get into it here, but it involves things that are probably best kept private, and no, don’t click those links at work.)

The second way is to develop specialized expertise that is a known quantity.

The last step is to offer the services on an as-needed basis. That means you trade some personal risk for the ability to negotiate each assignment separately.

“The Counselor” could have any unknown actor for a hundred thousand dollars, but with Brad Pitt, the movie is sure to be a hit.

It is better to be that guy.

Hey, I’m an old fat guy, and I have my moments.

It takes a bit of work, but we can cover it here.

More on the how next time.

When the director of the Central Intelligence Agency quits fifteen months into the job, that is news.

When that director is a retired Army general and former commander of US and International Forces in Afganistan, something is going on.

When the whole issue is due to email security and privacy … we are in unchartered waters.

The Quick Back Story

According to the Associated Press, general Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, that began shortly after his retirement.  While showing incredibly poor judgement and opening himself up to blackmail, this act was not illegal.

Again, according to A.P., Petraeus wanted to avoid a paper trail, so he and Broadwell shared an email account.  They would create draft messages and share them with each other, then delete the message, eliminating the trail of evidence.

Then things get weird.

A Tampa, Florida socialite named Jill Kelly starts receiving anonymous, harassing, private emails and complains to the FBI.  The FBI takes the investigation seriously, and, after a series of events, Petraeus resigns.  The primary theory is that Broadwell logs into Patraeus’s other accounts – perhaps they have the same password, perhaps he leaves gmail logged in – and finds email to Kelly, creates an anonymous account, and begins the harassment campaign.  The FBI works this backwards and eventually Petraeus is forced to resign.

Whew.  With me so far?

General Petraeus’s successor in Afganistan is Marine Corps General John R. Allen, about to be appointed to the position of supreme allied commander Europe … except the FBI found a bunch of “flirtatious” emails from him to Kelly as well, and his appointment is on hold.  (The New York Times referred to it as “hundreds of emails“.)

Now let’s talk about IT policy.

Implications on 21st Century Technology

When known for some time that What Happens In Vegas is unlikely to stay there – thanks to the smart phone, everyone has a camera and an internet connection.

One thing this new wave of technology gives us is the ability to melt down incredibly quickly.  Anthony Weiner, for example, sent an explicit photo and some inappropriate emails, and his political career was over.

Yes, Weiner was doing … other things, the real things that killed his career.  Twitter and the iPhone didn’t do him in, but they made it incredibly easy to create evidence in seconds – where a polaroid and a hand-carried letter might not.

A second surprise around the Petraeus scandal is the expectation of privacy.  By creating an anonymous account, our email harasser expected anonymity   Once the FBI got involved, all pretense of that was gone.  If anything you do online is trackable to an IP address, you might do well to consider it public.

There is at least one more unexpected twist to the story, because the investigation went wherever it found evidence.  By contacting the FBI, and giving them access to her computer, Kelly allowed the FBI to get access to all her email – including the records of General Allen.

Conclusions

I have no easy answers; records you thought you deleted have a way of showing up in system caches.

Except, perhaps, that this situation might be a good chance to take a look at your company’s policies about internet use, separation of personal and work email, about information retention and lifecycle management, or as a good story to use to encourage people into right behavior.

Or, perhaps, just perhaps, the Petraeus Principle will come to be about how to deal with failure with integrity – by admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for our actions.

This morning I ran across a blog post by Ben Horowitz about managers who don’t have one-on-one meetings.  In that post Ben drew a distinction between a ‘good organization’ and a ‘bad organization.’  According to Horowitz, people in bad organizations struggle to get anything done; the expectations are unclear, and the company culture fights any sort of forward progress.

Now believe it or not, I’m not going to say that, if you find yourself in a bad organization, you should immediately polish up your resume and move. There are just too many bad organizations for that; you’d be jumping ship every two months.

Instead, I’m going to assume that you are trying to stay, and hear some niggling, tingling voice in your ear that life is too short for this.

There are some things are are a bridge too far, that indicate, to me, it’s time to leave or transfer.  Here are my top three.

#1 - You get the reprimand that doesn’t make any sense.  

Large companies have policies to get rid of a problem employee; the written reprimand is usually step two.  If you get the reprimand, you have two options: Fight it through HR, or acknowledge the reprimand and create a personal improvement plan.

My experience tells me that people who fight the reprimand are gone in six months. Nobody really knows why, they just are.  If you want to stay, you need to work on a PIP.

The problem is if the reprimand doesn’t make any sense.  It is vague, or inconsistent.  Example: In my only written reprimand ever, I was rebuked for not providing a leader with a document while I was away at a conference.  I asked what document he was referring to, and he could not remember.

If the reprimand doesn’t make sense, then you can’t make a personal improvement plan.  You’ve got nothing to fix.

It is time to sharpen up that resume, or, in my case, look for a manager to transfer to who’s expectations were clear and consistent.

#2 – You Are (Highly) Criticized for Telling the Truth

At the same organization, year after year, I got feedback to improve my people skills.

I took that feedback seriously.  I read How To Win Friends and Influence People, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Getting To Yes, I went to seminars and sought feedback from my friends.

Eventually I realized that no matter how much you I dressed it up, the company was putting me in a position to tell “no” to very powerful people — people who expected to hear ‘yes.’

The problem wasn’t the form, it was the message itself.

When I looked around for examples of how to handle the problem, the main alternative was to either become a ‘yes’ man, or, in the words of Dilbert Creator Scott Adams, to take the ‘weasel way’, finding some excuse or reason to keep myself off the hook.

Which brings me to reason number three.

#3 – The Company Is Rewarding the Wrong Behavior

It is one thing to work in a failing system, to have rules that aren’t helpful and slow everyone down.   It is another entirely to work in a system where the people who are promoted are the game-players and abusers.

So take a moment and look at the people who have been promoted over the past few years.  How do they act?  Are you willing, and able, to act in that way?  Does that sort of behavior align with your sense of ideals and values?

If yes, then your situation is fortunate.  Stay in the fight, and keep me posted.

If you are not willing to act like that, but you are fine technically, you can probably keep your job … just don’t expect to be promoted.

If that isn’t enough — if you want that promotion — then it may just be time to move on.

Of course, those are just my top three reasons to think seriously about leaving.

What are yours?

Ian Rutherford is a technie; someone just comfortable enough in IIS, SQL Server, HTML and ASP to make a ‘real’ e-commerce site – or at least comfortable enough to learn.

Last time we talked about Ian’s back story, and left him with a tech support position at Pizza Hut Corporate Headquarters in Texas, learning the skills he would later use to start his own business.

Iwanted to ask Ian how he decided to move to colorado, start his own business and how it went.

It’s time for part II of our story.

Matt Heusser: How did you find yourself becoming CTO of the Catholic Store in Denver? How large was the IT department, and what was it like?

Ian Rutherford: Back in 1999 while I was working at Sprint Paranet doing website development I decided that I liked doing web and database integration but I really wanted to do something faith-based. I had already been working on websites since 1994 and  after watching Amazon take off, I figured that there wasn’t any reason that a Catholic store couldn’t have the same success on  a slightly smaller scale.I, with the eyebrow-raised agreement of my wife, decided to leave Sprint and start my own Catholic store since the technological world didn’t end in 2000. I decided to work on a fulfillment warehouse model to keep my costs low so I approached the largest Catholic bookstore in Denver about doing fulfillment for this  website I was going to build. The owner instead offered me a job building his website which I made into the largest on-line Catholic store in two years. When I arrived I increased the size of the IT department from zero to one and that is how it stayed until I left in 2002. We actually brought in a T1 and hosted the website on servers in an office closet.

Matt Heusser: Somewhere along the way, you and family decided to start your own Catholic store. What was that like? Would you consider it a vocation or a calling? How do you know that you made the right choice?

AquinasAndMore.com today

Ian Rutherford: When I decided to start Aquinas and More I was excited. I really thought that this was my calling. I wouldn’t call it a vocation, that’s what my family is. There was very little competition and I had the technical know-how (if not the business savvy). My family was supportive and my Mom, who I will never be able to repay, worked as a volunteer for countless hours while we did mind-numbing data entry. At the time, hardly any of our vendors were on-line so getting digital pictures, descriptions or any other promotional assets was almost impossible. We opened in October of 2002 with an initial investment of $12,000 and a 144 square foot office twenty miles from town. I’ll get back to you on the right choice when I’m more sure of the answer.

Matt Heusser: 2002 to 2012 is a long time. Can you tell us about the process of starting the business, especially the early years? Did you have any doubts?

Ian Rutherford: In early 2002, the owner of The Catholic Store told me that my contract was up and that I could reapply for my job but that he was looking for someone else who wouldn’t cost as much. I decided that wasn’t a good situation to be in so I decided it was time to part ways and start up my own business like I had planned to in the first place. I had about three months to build the customer-facing component of the site from scratch before we opened in October. Those were some very long days and nights of code writing and I am sure that a code reviewer would have nightmares about some of the legacy code still in the system. When we first started in our tiny office my team consisted of my Mom, a family friend and me. We had a web server, a database server, three workstations, a flatbed scanner and some utility shelves for product. We had also purchased an old jewelry case from a local church. We spent weeks just writing descriptions for items and learning the rudiments of using a digital scanner. During that first year we would wait for orders to print as they were placed and had our first “big break” when a publisher reprinted Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Wartime Prayerbook. We sold several hundred in a matter of weeks.

We finished part two of the interview with Ian taking the risk of his life; an on-line-only web store. Next week we close our adventure, with Ian taking the store to profitability, and even opening a a physical bookstore – with a lot of help from family and friends, and a few adventures along the way. We’ll also cover the advice he has for folks who see the path but have concerns about making the leap.

Last time I wrote about the CityTime boondoggle, that spent over $700 million from an initial budget of $68 million, and seemed primarily designed to separate the people of New York City from their money.

It seems most of the folks involved in the decision making process had *cough* incentives to ignore problems.

You can’t automate yourself out of this folks, nor, if your auditors are on the dole, can you audit or checklist your way out.

This is a problem that pure IT can’t solve.

It’s the settlement that blows me away, though.  Management of the city was willfully avoiding the truth for years at a time.  You don’t get to turn your back on a project, allow it to fall apart, then turn around and ask for your money back.

Or, well, I guess you do.

(The word you are thinking of, by the way, is probably “governance.”  That is the process by which the directors of an organization control it.  Governance is not a meeting, nor a series of reports, nor extra work inflicted on the organization; it is, instead, the process by which the leaders govern.  And it didn’t happen in New York City, and yet, somehow, the leadership is getting ~75% of their investment back.)

The Second Blow

Scott Thompson, then Yahoo CEO

Do you remember all those fear stories we had ten years ago when SARBOX  came out, that corporate officers were now going to be legally responsible for the content of the annual report, thus the IT team had to a do a lot of stuff that didn’t make much sense?

Well, it happened; Yahoo put out an Annual Report claiming it’s CEO, Scott Thompson has a degree in Computer Science, and he did not.  (His school did not have a computer science degree program until after he graduated.) After two weeks of going back and forth, with Mr. Thompson claiming his executive search firm inserted the claim into his resume, and them denying it, he has apparently told the board of directors that he has thyroid cancer and it is time to go.

Wait, throat cancer too?  Man, that’s tough.

If it’s true, that’s terrible, if not, well, that’s just pathetic.

The Takeaway

I don’t claim to be perfect.  In my youth, I certainly lied and cheated and stole and did things that I would rather forget.

Perhaps the difference was that I got caught, and disciplined, and learned from it.

In our roles in IT, we see people do wrong.  As hard as it may be, when you see wrong, and you take action and correct it, please realize: You are doing them a favor, teaching them that actions have consequences.

Catch them early.  Catch them when the mistakes are small.

It may be hard, it may be painful.

But it will be less painful if you stop the problem when it is small, when it is innocent.  Stop it when it is a happy accident, a little too much budget showed up in the wrong bucket, whoops.  Stop it someone gets the idea to repeat the tactic, turning a happy accident into fraud.

Again, it is a whole lot harder than looking the other way, but you are doing them a favor.

These headlines are sad, but mildly entertaining, because it isn’t our IT shop.

Let us all endeavor to keep it that way.

So I saw Dick Cheney, former Vice President of the United States, on USA Today this morning.

He wanted to talk about his new book, “In My Time.”

One statement Cheney made during the interview flabbergasted me:  He claimed the the interrogation techniques used by the Federal Government during the Bush Administration were both safe and effective.

Really?  Effective you say?

Come on folks.  Does anyone else remember the claim that Iraq was somehow linked to the terrorists of 9/11?  Or the claim that we had to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?

How about the claim that Al Qaeda had series of complex, secret underground fortresses?  (Follow the link; it is the secretary of defense explaining the fortresses to the American people on national television.)

None of that turned out to be true.

We got that information from people we were pressuring for information!

And we call our interrogation techniques effective?  Really?

From here to there

When I look at the story of this recent involvement in foreign affairs, it seems so familiar.  As if I’ve heard the story before.

Then I remember: I have heard it before.

Replace “American” with “conquistador” and “hidden fortresses” with “seven cities of gold”, and you’ve got essentially the same story: A technologically superior people from across the sea became convinced that the less-tech-savvy people have something they want, and they are willing to use advanced interrogation techniques to get the answers.

After hours, days, or weeks of saying ‘no, there are no seven cities of gold’, tired, beaten and exhausted, the people of the other civilization eventually give up and say “oh, fine. Okay.  The cities are three days ride to the east.  Will you leave us alone now, please?”

That said: this post is not about Dick Cheney; it is about you.

I am not setting to attack a man who served his country as best he could. In fact, quite the opposite: the most charitable interpretation may just be that Mr. Cheney made a certain type of classic mistake. That is, to be so certain you are correct, that the quest for information subtly becomes a quest for data to re-enforce your bias.

You may be going through it right now on a smaller level.

A more personal scenario

If, for example, you’ve never worked on a project that a deadline plucked out of thin air, then had a project schedule reverse-engineered to fit it, well, consider yourself fortunate.

If you’ve never worked near a boss, eager to please senior executives, who made up numerical targets for sales, or website adoption, then wanted you to make the plan to actually hit those numbers, again, consider yourself fortunate.

If you’ve never felt the subtle, or not-so-subtle pressure to hide mistakes, to slide messes under the rug, or to paint a better picture than reality, well … that’s good.

If you can manage to make your entire career without it, well, I’m curious if your company is hiring.

Human nature

Yes, these problems are worse when they involve the clash of entire civilizations.  They are worse when people are desperate for food, water, or shelter.  When we have the benefit of “just” squabbling over the annual raises, bonuses, promotions and stock options, things do seem a bit more civilized. (We do have our stories about Enron and Worldcom, though.)

Fifty years ago, in a little-known graduation speech at King’s College, the author and professor C.S. Lewis had this to say about the subject:

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is how it works in the IT shop.

How the conflict emerges

There are plenty of books about how to lubricate interaction between humans.  There are books about how to tell jokes, change the subject, compliment the other guy’s shoes; there a books about how to start the discussion from agreement and how to convince the other guy that your idea was his.

I know, because I read all those books, because I kept getting feedback that I was hard to work with.  There is, indeed, some wisdom in those books.

Eventually I realized the problem wasn’t my social skills; it was that I was being ordered to compromise on what I viewed as moral grounds and refused to do it.

Of course I was hard to work with.

I was the guy who said no.

There is more to come, but, for now: Here’s one way to deal with this issue

The Big Secret

The big secret, of course, is the secret.

The boss has a secret agenda to hit the date (to get a bonus), or to hire his contractor (to get the kickback), or to hide the number of failures in production.

You’re not the one with the problem.  You get to sleep at night.

The boss is the one with the problem.

The way to win the game is simple: You need to make it clear that, if the boss doesn’t come clean with this information you will.

It is that simple.

Along the way, you’ll need to create opportunities for the boss to save face, to slowly change the official story, to have the change in direction be his idea.

All of this is possible, it’s even easy.  All you have to do is remember one thing:

When someone else has an integrity problem in the office, and they want you to fix it, someone does have a problem.

You get to decide if that someone will be you.

One final piece of encouragement:  This is America.  You’re not going to starve.  Neither will your children.  Worst case, you have to downsize your life a little for awhile while you figure things out.

I know, I know, when the boss looks at you funny and you are trying to decide if you can afford that vacation in the catskills, it can be a tough decision.

Forget the vacation.

Think about what your children will think of you the day you retire.

Think about what you’ll think of yourself.

More to come.