Cube Rules Interview: Scot Herrick (Part 2)
by David Zinger
This is part 2 of a 2-part interview with Scott Herrick. Scott created Cube Rules, an informative and helpful site for knowledge workers.
His topics often embrace elements of employee engagement. I asked Scott 6 question and he offered a wonderful range of responses. Here are a few tidbit from the two part series:
In order to differentiate your work and have a successful career, you need to consistently improve your skills, perform well in your work, and understand opportunities that are presented to you. Working in a cube is not a sprint, it is a marathon.
Destroying things is easy — you stop the function, layoff the people, take the write-down and move on. Building something is creative, requires persistence, requires budgets that reflect reality, needs support — it is hard, but much more satisfying.
Find time every week to distance yourself from your work and analyze what is working, what could be improved, and answer whether this is still the right position for your work.
4. How has being laid off yourself influenced your view of engagement and work?
I’ve been laid off twice in my career. The first was with Oracle in 2001 at the height of the dot com bust. The second was with Washington Mutual as part of the ongoing mortgage and credit crisis.
Before that, however, I worked for a Bell Operating Company (Ameritech) and watched the workforce dwindle from 105,000 at the breakup of the original AT&T to a low of 52,000 years later. That experience stripped most of the usual suspects out of me — a corporation has no loyalty, only people do. No job is safe, even if you are doing a great job.
Being laid off from Oracle taught me the need to have a great network of people that you can help. It also taught me that I needed to formalize my finances so that I had a year’s take-home pay in the bank to withstand the next layoff. It also taught me that loyalty to people matters.
Being laid off from Washington Mutual, something that was expected by me for over two years, has taught me to really formalize how I go about managing my career and work. It has taught me that, because of the “siege mentality” that comes from persistent layoffs, the culture you work in at a company makes a significant impact on your work engagement. It has also taught me that I am much more engaged with work when the work is building something. Destroying things is easy — you stop the function, layoff the people, take the write-down and move on. Building something is creative, requires persistence, requires budgets that reflect reality, needs support — it is hard, but much more satisfying.
5. You now offer a membership-only section for your site. What are the benefits of becoming a member?
I call it “Career Management Mastery.” Most career management sites, including Cube Rules, have short, one dimensional articles. It’s tough to get substance beyond the 300-word career management tip. If one is serious about getting good career management advice, bite-sized pieces of advice isn’t what you are looking for. Instead, you are looking for more depth. You are looking for how things connect. You are looking for something that is more than the theory that is usually touted on career management sites (“7 things to advance your career”).
For less than two lattes a month, Cube Rules Members get the deeper dive into five categories of career management: brilliant basics, managing management, networking, personal branding, and keeping the castle. Plus they get access to a monthly Layoff Central and Industries in Trouble report. In addition, a weekly “Early Warning” report that has CEO/COO level changes in companies. The reports allow members to easily see troubled areas so they can steer clear. The Early Warning report has the premise that big changes in upper management portend big changes coming for the company.
The free Cube Rules content — pretty good all by itself — will stay the same, including the amount. The membership content is layered on top of the current work. I just launched the membership portion of the site in July and I’m sure it will evolve over time.
In addition, I’m currently building on-line career management classes for knowledge workers that reflect the five categories of career management that I am now writing about for members. It has been a lot of fun and, importantly, fills a lot of holes around practical career management advice.
6. Could you offer a one or two sentence tip or encouragement to keep ourselves engaged in our work?
Find time every week to distance yourself from your work and analyze what is working, what could be improved, and answer whether this is still the right position for your work.
Too often we just go with the flow. The discipline of doing this weekly ensures that you are working in the right position for the right reasons.
Click here to learn more from Scot and Cube Rules.
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