How to Change the World

Toyota Brochure: Marketers Take Note

Toyota is a great company. When I was in high school in the 1970s, our family had a Corona. it was a pile of junk—I thought it was made of recycled beer cans.

Fast forward to the present: Toyota is kicking butt. The company stands for innovative engineering, high-quality manufacturing, and effective marketing. Compare, for example, Toyota’s hybrid engines (gas and electric) to GM’s solution to high gas prices.

Here is another example of Toyota’s excellence. This is a brochure about its hybrid engine. The document is informative, elegantly designed, and well illustrated. Companies should aspire to a document like this when they face the marketing challenge of selling new and complex products to “regular ole” consumers.

Toyota also has an interesting web site where people can custom-build a PDF. It starts here.

1. Run your cursor over “View PDF” in the upper right corner of the window.

2. Select a few topics in the next window.

3. Click on “View PDF” under the Prius outline on the right side of the screen. (But not the “View PDF” underneath this one—identical text in two places with different functions is a poor design.)

This starts a process that builds a custom PDF—pretty cool. However, in this case, the process gets in the way of disseminating information, but there are good uses for this capability. For example, when you want only one part of a long manual.

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Geek Week

Gadget Week never got rolling last week because I was on vacation in Santa Barbara, and it was difficult to recover from Career Week. :-) This blog is a potpourri of useful sites and cool gadgets.

1. Iinnovate is a collection of audio interviews with David Kelley, founder of IDEO; Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas; and Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital.

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2. Here is a list called “Top 10 Best Presentations Ever.” It includes Steve Jobs introducing Macintosh, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” Malcolm Gladwell on Blink, and Seth Godin speaking to Google about marketing among others.

   Addendum: Entrepreneurship Education Resources, School of Engineering, Stanford University. (Thanks to Ankur Jain for pointing out this resource.)

   Addendum: “Mother of All Demos” featuring Douglas Englebart demonstrating so many things that came to be. Doug, unlike people like me who get too much credit, does not get enough credit for how he changed the world. (Thanks to Christopher St. John for pointing out this resource.)

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3. This is Dave Taylor at the Affiliate Summit talking about business blogging. I loved one of his main points: Instead of making yourself crazy with search engine optimization, you could simply produce great content and let search engines do what they do.

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4. My buddies at EVDO Info took care of me by selling me one of the first Verizon 640 ExpressCards for my MacBook Pro. Life is good—it’s like the whole world is one big Wifi network with this card. If you own a computer that can use an EVDO card, you have to get one.

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5. If you get a 640, you don’t need to use the Verizon installer because has EVDO support built into 10.4.7. Kudos to Verizon for creating an Macintosh installer at all. Kudos to Apple for building in EVDO support. Here’s another review of it.

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6. Speaking of EVDO, I’ve been using a Motorola Q phone from Verizon for a few months. I gave up a Cingular 8125 because it was too fat; I never used the keyboard that slides out (I only read email on my phone; I never answer from it); and the Edge network is too slow.

   The Q rocks: it’s very thin and most importantly uses the EVDO network. EVDO computer and EVDO phone: life can’t get much better. Plus, a young black guy who was the doorman at a Soma bar asked me how I liked it. Is there a cooler experience than that for a fifty-two year old Asian American man?

   In fact, I liked this phone so much that I bought it even though I knew that it wouldn’t work in my office at Garage. “Can you hear me now?” Palo Alto could use a few more Verizon cells!

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7. Another good thing about the Q: there is a great web site that supports it. Check it out: Everything Q

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8. One last thing about the Q. It has a great collection of homescreens. I use one the enables me to see the number of unread emails, current profile, network status, battery status, and recently used applications. From the homescreen, I can change the profile, and the design theme is from the Counter Terrorist Unit in “24”—simple things make me happy.

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Book Preview: Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz

My buddy Andy Sernovitz, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, is coming out with a new book called, duh, Word of Mouth Marketing.

I highly recommend this book because it was so practical, tactical, and hysterical. Here are the ten ideas, stories, and recommendations from the book that I liked the most:

1. Companies could hire a customer service rep to cruise the Internet looking for kudos and complaints. When the rep finds kudos, he should thank the person. When the rep finds complaints, he should get it fixed. This is such a simple, effective idea—I doubt, therefore, that many companies will do it! :-)

2. Commerce Bank has a free change-counting machine in its branches that anyone can use. This beats the hell out of the machines in markets that take 7%.

3. A study by the Verde Group showed that people who heard about a bad shopping experience are less likely to go to the same store than the person who actually had the bad experience.

4. The most powerful word-of-mouth advocates might be the customers who have only done business with you once so far. They are the most excited; repeat customers are probably accustomed to the great product/service and therefore, ironically, less likely to talk about it.

5. The Prostate Net, a not-for-profit educational organization, contacted 50,000 barbers to talk to their clients about prostate cancer detection and prevention.

6. Incentives and rewards are likely to reduce word-of-mouth advertising because motivation becomes suspect. You can’t “buy” word-of-mouth advertising.

7. The Wynn Las Vegas resort gave free rooms to cabbies to generate word-of-mouth advertising via this very influential part of the transportation infrastructure.

8. Henkel Consumer Adhesives, the manufacturer of Duck Tape, sponsors a contest for college scholarships called “Stuck at Prom.” Is this funny or what?

9. A word-of-mouth campaign, brought back “Family Guy” from the dead (that is, cancellation). How many tv series have you heard of coming back from the dead?

10. Zappos has a one-year, no questions asked return policy for shoes. This boggles my mind although I’ve never heard of any woman return anything to Zappos.

Someday I hope to read about your kick-butt ideas in a book like this. Until then, your word-of-mouth marketing efforts will surely get a boost if you read this book.

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Startup Success 2006

This is a video of “Startup Success,” the Churchill Club’s annual look at what it takes to build a successful startup. This panel of five Silicon Valley entrepreneurs discussed the challenges and critical success factors necessary to reach the promised land. August 17, 2006.

Moderator: Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

Speakers:

• Lauren Elliott, Founder, Personal News Network

• Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn

• Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot

• Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah

• Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket

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Ten Questions with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL

Marten Mickos joined MySQL AB as CEO in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a startup to the second largest open source company and the fastest-growing database vendor in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a masters of science in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.

1. Question: How do you make money with an Open Source product?

   Answer: We start by not making money at all— but by making users. The vast community of MySQL users and developers is what drives our business.

   Then we sell an enterprise offering to those who need to scale and cannot afford to fail. The enterprise offering consists of certified binaries, updates and upgrades, automated DBA services, 7x24 error resolution, etc. You pay by service level and the number of servers. No nonsense, no special math. Enterprise software buyers are tired of complex pricing models (per core, per cpu, per power unit, per user, per whatever the vendor feels like that day)—models that are still in use by the incumbents.

   At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money. They are our evangelists. No marketing could do for us what a passionate MySQL user does when he tells his friends and colleagues about MySQL. Our success is based on having millions of evangelists around the world. Of course, they also help us develop the product and fix bugs.

   And the few times that they say that they hate MySQL, that helps us too because complaints usually contain some good suggestion for improvement.

2. Question: What changes in the Open Source community’s attitude have you encountered since you decided “to build a company” around MySQL?

   Answer: Interestingly, MySQL always was a company. When Monty and David started it in 1995 they made a commitment to open source and a commitment to commercial success at the same time. Monty and David didn’t build out the business themselves, but they did set the ambition.

   So we have always been focused on marrying the best of business with the best of free and open source software. It is not an easy line to walk, but it is highly rewarding. A few times we have erred to one or the other side, and then we have corrected our course.

   The great thing is that many open source supporters think it is fine that we make money. It makes them proud that open source can penetrate the corporate world.

3. Question: Do you compete head to head with Oracle or do you have different customers?

   Most new companies and new projects within existing companies are choosing open source infrastructure such as the LAMP stack. We don’t see competition there.

   We focus on the new applications and services that are being built for the online world: Web2.0, SaaS, and SOA but also new forms of datawarehouses and business apps. Our customers look for reliability, performance, scalability, and ease of deployment. They don’t look for overly complex products that take days or weeks to get going and cost thereafter.

   That’s why YouTube, Craigslist, Flickr, Habbo Hotel, LiveJournal, Technorati, Second Life, Trulia, FeedBurner, and Right Now are our customers and not Oracle’s. We believe the market we have chosen is the fastest growing part of the DBMS market.

4. Question: What’s the biggest MySQL DB?

   That’s like asking what’s the biggest Ferrari! What counts is performance and scalability. Omniture runs over 250 billion transactions per quarter on a farm of MySQL servers. Google uses MySQL for AdSense and AdWords. Other large installations include Wikipedia, Travelocity, Weather.com, etc. The databases can be hundreds of gigabytes. Sites run on hundreds of servers, some on thousands.

5. Question: What’s the weirdest use of MySQL?

   I wish I knew! We were used in the earth unit for the Mars rover. The special effects of The Lord of the Rings were based on MySQL. HotorNot runs on MySQL. Even the Oracle FAQ runs on MySQL ().

6. Question: What’s the most “mission critical” use of MySQL?

   Answer: I hope it doesn’t sound like megalomania, but so much of today’s online world runs on MySQL that it is difficult to pinpoint just one. Google and Yahoo run mission critical applications on MySQL. Nokia and Alcatel build mobile phone networks that run on MySQL. MySQL was used in various emergency systems during the tsunami in South East Asia and during hurricane Katrina.

7. Question: How does a company controls what’s happening to its product when the Open Source community is doing the programming and testing?

   Answer: All successful open source products are governed by fairly small groups of long-term developers. That’s the case with Apache, Linux, JBoss, and others. The same applies to us, and in our case the majority of the developers are full-time employees of MySQL. This is the group that decides on the roadmap. In doing so, we need to listen very carefully to the broad community, because if we do not serve them well, they may fork our product or they may move over to some other database.

8. Question: Is Open Source hindering innovation because it’s one thing to debug an existing product but it’s another to design a new one?

   Answer: On the contrary. I think the architecture of participation that is embedded in the open source philosophy is a superior innovation method. And it is not limited to software—look at Wikipedia. It just so happens that software developers were the first ones to adopt it in the modern world.

   The simple fact that everything you create is open for scrutiny by anyone else is a strong incentive to produce good stuff from the start. And the meritocracy of open source leads to faster innovation and thereby better innovations. It is a Darwinian system where over time the best solutions will emerge.

   Think about the market-leading DBMS company. They have 50,000 paid employees who are working hard to keep their product competitive. We have 50,000 product downloads per day. This means that 50,000 human beings who tinker with our product every day. These people have ideas, suggestions, praises, complaints and although not all of them send us emails every day, the good stuff tends to find its way to the core MySQL team. That’s how an open source project is more innovative and faster moving than a closed source team.

9. Question: Who fixes the most bugs?

   Answer: Our own team. You can actually see the stats by going here where we completely openly list all our bugs and the people who work on them. We get bug fixes from commercial partners and from users and my hope is that they will one day fix more bugs than our own team. It just takes a long time to learn the internals.

   As important as fixing bugs is to report them with sufficient detail. Because our code is open, users can file very specific bug reports where they point at the places where the bug is likely to be found. The value of this is enormous. Here is an example of a very useful bug report from a user.

10. Question: If MySQL ceased to exist as an organization, would MySQL the product continue?

    Answer: Software continues to exist long after companies fall by the wayside. In the past, customers had to demand source code to be place in escrow. Today with open source, users are not locked into a single vendor or platform.

    The MySQL source code is licensed under GPL so anyone can create a fork or pick up the torch at any time. Forking is very very rare, but it serves as a perfect method of keeping vendors honest. If MySQL were to develop the product in a stupid direction or not keep it competitive, the community could take over.

    The big questions is what happens if a closed source company fails. I think users are going to increasingly demand that their vendors open source their products. Just look at Solaris. That’s why I expect that all DBMSs will eventually be open sourced.

11. Question: What keeps you awake at night?

    Answer: I worry that we get caught in our own success and forget to reinvent ourselves. We have such a strong culture in the company that without realizing it we are sometimes saying “but that’s not our way of doing things” and then we miss out on some new opportunity.

    I also worry about software patents. It was a big mistake by society to believe that patents would have as favourable an effect on software as they had on various physical goods. Software patents stifle innovation, and one day we may see a nasty conflict here.

    But, in case you’re wondering, I am not worried about the current gorillas of the DBMS market. They are taking all kinds of actions like zero pricing, buying open source companies, moving up the stack, locking up customers even more, but these are not really working. I believe that over time all markets are rational.

    Also, I stay awake at night because I am doing conference calls with Europe and Asia!

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Ten Things to Learn This School Year

I’m on the campus of UCSB this week at family camp, and it’s inspired me to blog about what students should learn in order to prepare for the real world after graduation. This is an opportune time to broach this subject because the school year is about to begin, and careers can still be affected. This is a list of what I wished I learned in school before I graduated.

1. How to talk to your boss. In college, you’re supposed to bring problems to your teachers during office hours, and you share the experience of coming up with a solution. In the real world, you’re supposed to bring solutions to your boss in an email, in the hall, or in a five-minute conversation. Typically, your boss either already knows about the problem or doesn’t want to know about it. Your role is to provide answers, not questions. Believe it or not, but in the real world, those who can do, do. Those who can’t do, share with others who can’t do.

2. How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run. Unfortunately, it could be a while before you run meetings. Until then, you’ll be a hapless victim of them, so adopt these three practices to survive. First, assume that most of what you’ll hear is pure, petty, ass-covering bull shiitake, and it’s part of the game. This will prevent you from going crazy. Second, focus on what you want to accomplish in the meeting and ignore everything else. Once you get what you want, take yourself “out of your body,” sit back, and enjoy the show. Third, vow to yourself that someday you’ll start a company, and your meetings won’t work like this.

3. How to run a meeting. Hopefully, you’ll be running meetings soon. Then you need to understand that the primary purpose of a business meeting is to make a decision. It is not to share experiences or feel warm and fuzzy. With that in mind, here are five key points to learn about running a meeting: (1) Start on time even if everyone isn’t there because they will be next time; (2) Invite the fewest people possible to the meeting; (3) Set an agenda for exactly what’s going to happen at the meeting; (4) End on time so that everyone focuses on the pertinent issues; (5) Send an email to all participants that confirms decisions reviews action items. There are more power tips for running good meetings, but if you do these five, you’re ahead of 90% of the world.

4. How to figure out anything on your own. Armed with Google, PDFs of manuals, and self-reliance, force yourself to learn how to figure out just about anything on your own. There are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world. Actually, the real world is one long, often lonely independent study, so get with it. Here’s a question to test your research prowess. How do you update the calendar in a Motorola Q phone with appointments stored in Now-Up-To-Date? (I’ll send a copy of The Art of the Start to the first person with a good answer.)

5. How to negotiate. Don’t believe what you see in reality television shows about negotiation and teamwork. They’re all bull shiitake. The only method that works in the real world involves five steps: (1) Prepare for the negotiation by knowing your facts; (2) Figure out what you really want; (3) Figure out what you don’t care about; (4) Figure out what the other party really wants (per Kai); and (5) Create a win-win outcome to ensure that everyone is happy. You’ll be a negotiating maven if you do this.

6. How to have a conversation. Generally, “Whassup?” doesn’t work in the real world. Generally, “What do you do?” unleashes a response that leads to a good conversation (hence the recommendation below). Generally, if you listen more than you talk, you will (ironically) be considered not only a good conversationalist but also smart. Yes, life is mysterious sometimes.

7. How to explain something in thirty seconds. Unfortunately, many schools don’t have elevators or else students would know how to explain things in a thirty-second elevator pitch. Think mantra (three words), not mission statements (sixty words). Think time, not money, is the most important commodity. Think ahead, not on your feet. At the end of your thirty-second spiel, there should be an obvious answer to the question, “ So what?” If you can’t explain enough in thirty seconds to incite interest, you’re going to have a long, boring career.

8. How to write a one-page report. I remember struggling to meet the minimum page requirements of reports in college. Double spacing and 14 point Selectric typewriter balls saved me. Then I went out into the real world, and encountered bosses who wanted a one-page report. What the heck??? The best reports in the real world are one page or less. (The same thing is true of resumes, but that’s another, more controversial topic for unemployed people who want to list all the .Net classes that they took.)

9. How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

10. How to get along with co-workers. Success in school is mostly determined by individual accomplishments: grades, test scores, projects, whatever. Few activities are group efforts. Then you go out in the real world the higher you rise in an organization, the less important your individual accomplishments are. What becomes more and more important is the ability to work with/through/besides and sometimes around others. The most important lesson to learn: Share the credit with others because a rising tide floats all boats.

    What about freeloaders? (Those scum of the earth that don’t do anything for the group.) In school you can let them know how you truly feel. You can’t in the real world because bozos have a way of rising to the top of many organizations, and bozos seek revenge. The best solution is to bite your tongue, tolerate them, and try to never have them on the team again, but there’s little upside in criticizing them.

11. How to use PowerPoint. I’ve seen the PowerPoint slides of professors—it’s no wonder that most people can’t use PowerPoint to sell hybrid cars when gas is $10/gallon. Maybe professors are thinking: “This is a one-hour class, I can cover one slide per minute, so I need sixty slides. Oh, and I’ve written all this text already in my textbook, so I’ll just copy and paste my twelve-point manuscript into the presentation.” Perhaps the tenure system causes this kind of problem. In the real world, this is no tenure so you need to limit yourself to ten slides, twenty minutes, and a thirty-point font—assuming that you want to get what you want.

12. How to leave a voicemail. Very few people of any age leave good voicemails. The purpose of a voicemail is to make progress towards along a continuum whose end is getting what you want. A long voicemail isn’t going to zip you along to the end point of this decision. A good model is to think of a voicemail as an oral version of a compelling five-sentence email; the optimal length of a voicemail is fifteen seconds.

    Two power tips: First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people playback your message to get your phone number, and if either of you are using Cingular, you may not hear all the digits. Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an email that says, “Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.” Just say, “Tuesday, 10:00 am, at your office.”

One last thing: the purpose of going to school is not to prepare for working but to prepare for living. Working is a part of living, and it requires these kinds of skills no matter what career you pursue. However, there is much more to life than work, so study what you love.

Gadget Week: Review of the Honda Fit

The first time I had to park this car, I was behind a Suburban trying to get into a lot near Moscone Center. The attendant made the Suburban leave and then said to me, “There’s no room in here for a Suburban, but there is for you.”

Score one for the Honda Fit. It was the beginning of a good relationship.

Honda designed this car for the crowded streets and high gas prices of Japan. This class of car, between twelve and fourteen feet long, is called a “subcompact B.” The Fit is very successful in Japan and Europe where it has been available for several years. Honda recently introduced it to the American market with a high level of standard equipment.

The EPA mileage estimates for the automatic sport model are 31 mpg city and 37 highway. A Fit costs about $17,000. For this amount of money, you get a surprising amount of features:

• 100,000 miles to the first major tuneup
• AM/FM/CD player with MP3 auxiliary input jack (optional iPod link available)
• Air conditioning
• Drive-by-wire throttle control
• Paddle-shift automatic transmission
• Power windows, locks, and mirrors
• Five-door hatchback
• Front and side airbags
• Passenger-side occupant position for front airbag

It’s not exactly a chick or dude magnet, but it’s not an embarrassing econobox either. Plus, what do you expect for under $20,000? It is enormously practical and somewhat cool—perfect for the pre-funded Web 2.0 entrepreneur or someone who can’t get a job interview at Yahoo! :-)

The car is not very long. This is a Fit behind a hockey goal...which, in case you didn't know, is four feet tall and six feet wide.

The car’s strong point is the flexibility of its seats. For example, you can fold up the rear seats to get a large vertical space. I don’t know of another car where the second row seats fold up like this.

This is an adult mountain bike in the space behind the front seats.

Even more interesting, you can fold back the front seats, and they fit flush to the rear seats. This makes a long reclining space for two passengers.

For example, this boy is 5' 4" and 140 pounds. He’s sitting on the cushion of the back seat with his legs on the reclined front seat.

He can also lay down completely.

An important test for me was whether it could hold five people and a hockey bag and stick. No problem.

I kept loading things into it, and I was able to get all this stuff into the car: one adult mountain bike, one kid's bike, one 8' 4" SurfTech surfboard, one large cooler, one fully-loaded hockey bag, and one hockey stick. I was amazed.

The Fit has cool paddle-shifters for the transmission. This is as close as I’ll ever get to a Ferrari, I’m afraid.

The gauges are a lovely blue color.

This is the dial to control the audio. BMW owners: Eat your heart out. You don’t need a manual and night school to figure out this interface.

This is the car’s 109 horsepower, 1.5 liter four-cylinder engine. You won’t win any drag races, but it’s plenty peppy enough for city driving. Actually, it’s fun to drive in a “I don’t need a German car to prove I’m cool” way.

195/55 R15 all-season tires. Remember when a 55 series tires was considered the hot profile for a sports car?

My experience with the Fit started well at the Moscone parking lot, and it also ended well on the day I returned it when a college kid told me how cool he thought it was. Would I buy it for myself? Maybe, if it’s a third car: first car: minivan for eight people; second car: sports car for two people; third car: Fit for banging around town, leaving at the airport, going to somewhere that I know won’t have lots of parking. :-)

It’s certainly a great college car, and I would absolutely buy it for my kids.

If you'd like to buy a Fit, you can contact my buddies at Capitol Honda in San Jose. You can reach them via email here. If you’re not in the Bay Area, Capital Honda is part of UnitedAuto which owns 277 car franchises around the world. This includes twenty Honda dealerships in the United States, so they can take care of you in many parts of the country.

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TechCrunch Party Pictures

These are photos from the TechCrunch party at August Capital. If you'd like to zoom or see all ninety-one pictures, click on a frame (only thirty are previewed here).

If I got $1.00 for every time I heard “Web 2.0,” I would not have to work anymore. Low point of the evening: Kris Tate (founder of Zooomr) came up to me and said, “I first heard about you when I was four.”

So What Do I Know?

Stephanie Tate is the university relations manager for Yahoo!. (This is not her picture; it’s a stock photo from iStockphoto.) She took a look at my cover email and resume and critiqued them. Just to prove that I’m not easily embarrassed—and to provide the most value to my readers, here’s what she said:

I’ll pretend that I know nothing of you for this exercise (difficult as that may be) and just look at it through a recruiter’s eyes. :)

First, I’d like to see what you did most recently not at the beginning of your career—the more recent and relevant the better. I had to read to the bottom of both the cover and the resume to find the most recent and relevant. Recruiters have to read hundreds of resumes every week so I may not get through it to know that you are important.

The point of the cover email is to catch the attention of the “recruiter” and make me want to read further. It should call out items of interest that would otherwise not be covered in the resume. Your resume does some of that, but there are areas that are redundant to the resume.

The resume calls out the positions held and a brief description of the responsibilities. What it lacks is the “so what.” What I mean by that is that it needs to call out what the impact/benefit was to the company when you held those roles.

A couple of examples:

• You are the managing partner at Garage. I want to know that you were wise with the companies you backed and what happened to said companies. As far as I can tell you may or may not be a successful VC.

• At Apple you were the Chief Evangelist. I don’t see from the resume that it mattered. There are no achievements to speak of. Did it really make a difference for Apple to have a Chief Evangelist?

You are clearly overqualified for a Brand Mgr 2 position and if it came through the normal resume process I would consider it as such. However, because it is tied to a particular position of interest it has a very good chance of being read and forwarded on to the appropriate executive recruiter. If the position was not called out and just submitted into the database it would take a query to be found.

Overall, you could do quite a bit to improve your resume. Everything from the basics of resume writing to the finer points of telling me why you matter over the thousands of resumes I read.

I guess I won’t be getting this interview. I should have taken the interview when the company was looking at me as a CEO candidate. Timing is everything in life. :-)

By the way, this is the end of career week in my blog. Next week is gadget week.

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