Update: 4/24/07

So I've officially crossed the one year mark working in Charlotte, North Carolina. I am now in my fifth year working in online advertising. How in the world did I get into this career?

More importantly, what have I learned? I've had great managers with very different styles over the years, and below are 10 points that have stuck with me.

1. People go, the relationships stay. This one is simple: the momentum of a long term partnership carries more force than a single individual. This goes both ways. If you are a new acccount manager with changes in mind, be patient. If you plan on abusing your leverage as a client, or you are a vendor and want to haze the new client, be warned. Your counterpart can have you removed from the account on a whim. Why? Because the relationship is more important than you.

2. When emailing, practice the good news sandwhich. One quality I don't normally associate with email is grace. To be graceful in business may have connotations of weakness, or worse, passive aggressiveness. However a truly graceful email gives the courtesy of introduction and consideration, delivers a bit of bad news in the middle and exits with reminder of good faith and potential upside that may come in the future.

3. Use silence in negotiation (particularly the beginning). When possible, let the other party speak first in negotiation. I'm not talking about who says "hello" first. I am referring to the numbers part. Learn to wait, and artfully pause after a price quote, and you'll find yourself in a much better situation than if you spouted off the first number that comes to you.

4. Talk about others as if they are standing next to you. Do this and you'll sleep like a baby. Recognize it in others and give them your trust. Engaging in gossip is about as thrilling as the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line. It's OK to read once in a while, just don't subscribe to them.

5. Managers clean up messes. This is a big one, because there is a long line of management jobs between you and the CEO. Odds are, you'll be a manager until you *gulp* retire. Not all of us get promoted to the big golf course in the sky after 10 years of service. Nope, we get promoted to another level of middle management. This is reality, and if you negotiate accordingly you'll continue to scale your compensation. What most people don't realize is the higher up you go in management, the bigger the messes you will be expected to clean up.

6. Always make it personal. And don't be fake. Life is too short to pick up the phone at work and pretend to care. Do you best to get to know the person on the other end of the line, email or lunch table. Relationship building will pay dividends in conjunction with hard work. Be the buddy who gets nothing done and this will blow up in your face.

7. Never kiss up and kick down. This one is harder than most people will admit. However, it is crucial in any vertical organization to be respectful of people who hold positions above and below you. It's counterintuitive to seek anything but number one, but your superiors will notice that you work well with others. Remember it's much better to be talked about in a positive light than talking yourself up in front of others, above or below you.

8. Under promise, over deliver -- but don't sandbag. Being conservative is good, but we're all in it to succeed. This is America right? Aren't we all entitled to be Rockefeller's if we put our minds to it? Wrong. Shoot for the moon, but don't promise pictures before you get there. At the same time, they hired you to try your best and that means really trying. Sandbag your numbers/goals and it will become clear early on that you don't have the capacity to self manage.

9. Learn to say no. Unless you work with a company of 10 people or smaller (and I have), learn to prioritize. If you have too many "high priority" items, either re-prioritize, request that a few items get moved off your plate, or flat out say "I don't have the time." Everything with your name on it is expected to be of good quality. Take on too much and two things happen: you get known as the workhorse and overall quality of output goes down.

10. Be honest. If you don't know, say so. Delivering luke warm news for weeks or months instead of catching a load a bricks in one shot is a huge mistake. This goes for clients, vendors and managers. In the end, the recipient of the bad news you've been harboring will thank you for hearing the news sooner than later.

Update: 4/22/07

Yesterday Andrew and I took some time out of our normal weekend routine to take part in the 2007 Walk for Wags -- a fundraising event for the Humane Society here in Charlotte. We thought it would be a fun way to give back to the community and treat Oreo and Holly for being such wonderful companions.

The event was great. It was the first time since we moved from Chicago that we saw so many dogs in one place. Below is one of the walk's participants who we met prior to the event. Gracie was a perfect mascot for the walk, dressed in a tie died t-shirt and a ruffle collar!

Here is a picture of Andrew and the dogs right before the walk started. As you can see, the event had a great turnout -- it really goes to show how special animals are to their owners.

Of course, Oreo and Holly had to lead the pack and take their place right at the front of the walk -- despite choking themselves on their collars. Below is a picture of them after everything was said and done. What a happy pair!

Update: 4/13/07

Kurt Vonnegut died this week. So it goes. His website has the most wonderful image. The sketch, like the one below was drawn by him.

I read the news at work, from an article that my brother B*ll sent my way. This isn't the appropriate venue for me to outline Vonnegut's life, or even post a book review.

This website is, however, my favorite place to do a little writing myself. So I'll do my best to tell you why I enjoy Kurt Vonnegut books so much. Everyone on the Internet loves lists these days, why buck the trend?

1.) Humor. To me, Kurt Vonnegut was a master of transitional sentences. I found a lot of humor in his ability to grab my attention with lines that start with "The way a person gets into this drawer..." or "But get this..." and my favorite "Listen:" It's funny to me that in most commentary about Vonnegut, his humor is regarded as "dark." I suppose you could glean that from snippets like "life is no way to treat an animal" -- if you really believe he was being serious.

2.) Love of life. A large part of Vonnegut's appeal to me as a reader, are his rarer moments expressing love and appreciation for life. More often than not, his desciptions of life are a reflection of a hopeless human condition, a sad affliction we all share. So when he contrasts that with a redeaming quote about music, if you're like me, your ears perk up: "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music."

3.) Apathy for life. Vonnegut was open about his confusion and discontent with things like war and corporate greed. Of war, he wrote "That war [Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress." My feeling is that he used apathy and despair, rather than love, as a device to bring his characters closer to reality. More importantly, I think he selfishly used it to bring himself closer to the reader.

4.) Fascination with the average joe. Characters like "Billy Pilgram" the main protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, is about as average as they come. I'm not talking about "Hollywood average," but people with real flaws who get a shot at something great, and (in a Vonnegut book), usually blow it. By humbly squashing his characters, they seemed a lot more real to me.

5.) Authentic Science fiction. Vonnegut knew his stuff, and his ideas for everything from aliens to faraway planets seemed believable. When I say "believable," I mean within the context of his stories, because most of this stuff was so bizarre there is no way it could ever be true in real life. One would think a great author who was an undergraduate at Cornell would have majored in English, but Vonnegut was a chemistry major. His love of science and technology can be wrapped up in this quote from his last book: "I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."

In sum, I love Kurt Vonnegut books because the author used humorous writing with a dark touch to humbly create real characters, and usher them into proportionally unreal worlds.

I read in the NYT article that Kurt suffered from depression and tried to kill himself once. I never knew that.

I do know that he invented an alien race called the Trafalmadorians -- they are shaped like toilet plungers with the suction cup down. They have one eye at the top of the plunger handle and can see in four dimensions, the fouth being time.

Obviously I don't think these little creatures are real, I find them hilarious. Vonnegut went on to write that Trafalmadorians could view the entire lifespan of a being in one look, as well as visit a deceased friend during a living moment just as if they were alive. They never feared death because they had an entire lifetime, though expired in one dimension, to visit and enjoy the departed in the fourth dimension. This is surely how we are to view Kurt's death.

Some would argue this kind of stuff occupies way too much of my brain. But I find all these books more than just entertaining. They are reassuring. I can't resist one last quote to capture this "The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is."

If that's not funny and true at the same time, I don't know what is.

Speaking of things that make me laugh... check out who is sitting next to me as I write this:

If you would like to read a exerpt of Kurt Vonnegut's latest book, I encourage you to visit Jackson Browne's website. I found this link buried deep in the comments of a Digg article that announced his death. I think the music is appropriate (I also really like Jackson Brown).

Update: 4/08/07

We saw Blades of Glory tonight -- and I whole heartily recommend you do the same. I don't know if I would have laughed so hard at home with a DVD, but I was crying in the final scene with the Flash Gordon background music.

Sometimes going out and seeing a good comedy in the theater can be good for the soul. Note this has an inverse relationsehip to cavities and cholesterol.

Update: 4/06/07

The Joost is loose. Joost is a *free* program that lets Internet users stream selected cable channels like MTV and National Geographic on their computers. It comes from the developers of Kazaa and Skype.

The interface is pretty slick, although the sound/video quality is just a little better than Youtube. That said, it didn't stop me from getting totally sucked into an episode of Laguna Beach. I know this would make my brother B*ll insanely jealous. He is a big Lagunahead.

Currently, Joost is invite-only, If you would like an invite to Joost, send me an email. I have five to start with, but hopefully I will get more soon so I can spread the love.

I got a funny email from Chris over at Foreman Eighty Six, where he posted a funny video of a couple guys singing the Carmen Sandiego song. The television show was garbage. But the game was sweet. Again I go back to Mobygames.com for a picture of the game:

Clearly I don't condone any of you singing this song out loud, ever. French author Voltaire would agree with me on this one, with his famous quote "Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

Update: 4/01/07

This Friday we went to our first Charlotte Bobcats basketball game with Ron and Kim.

We also took in some sights around uptown Charlotte -- Definitely a growing city! Per Eric's request, we hit up Blue for some drinks after the game. I enjoyed a "Table Martini" which was primarily whiskey, and turned out to be more excitement than I bargained for. But I enjoyed it.

During the game, our seats were in the second row (Ron locked in the tickets), and we were able to see how much bigger and more athletic basketball players are in real life -- at least compared to me and every other regular guy.

For a smallish city, Charlotte's Bobcat arena had all the amenities one would expect from a larger city like Chicago, including the inflatable remote control mascot:

That was about the most adventurous thing we did all weekend. That is, aside from renting Amazing Stories Season 1 from Blockbuster Online. Does anyone out there on the Internets remember Amazing Stories? It was a multipart series directed by Steven Spielberg that ran from 1985 to 1987.

If you don't remember it, here are a series of screenshots from the open sequence that might jog your memory:

And that's about it, hopefully you enjoyed Amazing Stories as much as me when I was a kid/adult.

Here's a pic of the dogs so you can gauge size. Holly is already outpacing Oreo, and she is only 6 months old. Oreo is 2 years old, and pretty much done growing, vertically.

Uh yea, she's gotten a little bigger since January...