Uncategorized

LearnVest.com recently conducted an interview with me and posted the following article – http://www.learnvest.com/2013/04/advice-from-an-insider-how-to-move-up-the-corporate-ladder/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

LearnVest.com is a fee-based personal finance website that helps people, especially young professionals, get their personal finance together and excel. The website started out targeting young women but have expanded to marketing to men. [Tony comment- Money doesn't see gender difference.]

I direct your attention to the article’s comments. You’ll see them anyway therefore I’d like to comment on the comments.

First off, I totally understand the “rage” and “cynicism”. Women aren’t the only ones feeling helpless and frustrated at trying to crack the “White Men” club and the glass ceilings. Basically anyone who aren’t “white men” are on that boat. That includes Asians like me. Let me take that to another level, anyone not in management are out of the club. That includes non-managerial white men.

Further, the commenters missed out on some solutions. By being so fixated on rage, they will likely never read my book and miss the fact that I wrote the book to help people just like them (women, minority, non-managers, etc.) to mooove ahead.

Lastly and on that note, it is a shame that I had no control over what LearnVest.com published. I seem to have gotten a guilty rap by association. The article does look like an advertisement for my book. The fact is that I encouraged, offered, and proposed to the LearnVest.com editor to print some of the content of the book (at least to their paying members), offer the book at a discount, give some books away, and other brainstorming options. I wanted to give their members more value. It’s nice if my book sells. That just means I have more money to donate to charity causes. But as I told LearnVest.com, my primary interest was to get visibility with their help and the win-win would be to give their members (who are the perfect target audience for my book) valuable information.

Nevertheless, I was very encouraged by LearnVest.com’s evaluation of my book (the writer and editor actually read it) and thus their interest in an article. I’m grateful for LearnVest.com’s interest and support to help me get the word out. As they say in the PR world…any PR is good PR.

The other day I was talking with a Professor friend (Mark B.) who teaches (of all things) Engineering at University of California Irvine. We got on the subject about risk-taking and how there are so many books and articles written recently on this topic; how organizations and especially employees are not good at taking risk. Most of the books and articles are directed at business disciplines like project management and implementation, decision-making, cost-cutting, efficiency, sales and marketing tactics, etc. Mark described his belief that the main reason employees/people are not good at risk-taking is because people have been conditioned since childhood to “play it safe”.

Mark elaborated…at the start of every semester, he gives his students “the talk”. The talk has to do with un-brainwashing them from 19 years of SAFE. Mark goes on to describe how we/society raise kids to follow direction, be rewarded for completing exactly what they’re told, that only good grades matter, and as one commercial put it — “stay within the lines”. We don’t allow our kids to explore, try things out (within boundaries and limits of course so health and infringing on others don’t occur), and be rewarded for doing something different and novel. We train them to conform. Conformity is good. Conformity is rewarded.

Engineering is in fact a great place for risk taking. How can we tell students about the many great discoveries achieved through experimentation and even by accident while at the same time we force them (and reward them) to follow rigid rules all the way through their schooling? Mark shares how he has to breakdown 19 years of the student’s comfort and put in place an atmosphere that encourages risk-taking, all the while within the university system that perpetuates the same old paradigm of the not taking risk.

There’s a whole research and more articles about the implementation…the how-to…in developing, providing, managing for risk-taking. I’ll get to that later. But for now, Mark’s comment was a real conscious-raiser for me.

Much has been made about Sheryl Sandberg’s book and crusade about how women are holding themselves back in the workplace “by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands and pulling back when we should be leaning in.” Irene Corner, chief executive of HSBC USA uses the term, “sticky floor”–asserting that women who remain in lower-tier jobs because they don’t proactively try to climb the corporate ladder.

I had the longest session so far with the MBA group at CSUF. They had great questions such as — “what are your thoughts about recent articles and books on the topic of “failure”. I’m all for allowing and even rewarding for people to fail (aka. taking risk and allowing for innovation). However, what I haven’t seen much is how managers and organizations are going to implement this. This would require massive and radical changes in culture all the way to the shareholders. Allowing for failure is easy to talk about. Perhaps these new MBA grads will figure it out!