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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
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Today we will learn how to turn jobs into careers, even if you're the company founder
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or your leader trying to get more from your business in life. Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois.
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Are Kurtzberg is a published author lecturer for MIT's career success accelerator and is a fractional CTO and CTO. Visionary Mark has contributed to the development of multiple startups and fortune 500 companies as a CTO. He currently serves on the board of the nonprofit plants a million corals March Book, the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one taught you is a mystery to get an engineer career, and is a great resource for leaders to build strong teams. Mark, welcome to unbound. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. It is my pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm gonna open by saying I wish I had read your book or even knew it existed years ago, when I left the military and started an actual career, it would have been extremely helpful. So
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let's just open with that. For anyone who wants Career Knowledge, advice, thoughts, just go pick up a copy of the book right now. And if that's all you remember, from this episode, you're good, but we're gonna go deeper. That is the number one piece of feedback I get. That's the number one type of comment we get in the Amazon reviews, which is I wish I had this years ago. But fortunately, no matter where you are in your career, it will help you in the years to come.
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Perfect. So I think the best place to start is with your origin story. So let's dive in there. A my origin story. I grew up a classic 80s nerd I think any stereotype that comes up with that, with that description that was probably me, Math Club, chess campus Star Trek, all the above. And I really love doing that. I went to MIT as an undergrad and later grad school because math, science, all the cool stuff was at MIT. And when I graduated during the.com era, I said, Okay, here I am, I'm ready. I'm going to start as a software developer, and began my career. And I was, I think, pretty good at doing the math that solving these technical problems. But very quickly, I was bumping up against these things I didn't quite understand why. Because in real life, it's not just solving the problem. It is making sure you're solving the right problem, and delivering the answer in the right way to the right people at the right time. We don't teach you any of that in school. So I was stumbling. And I began to ask why I began to do some personal development. Now, we didn't have great podcasts like yours back then. So I had to do it a little more on my own. And as I was training myself up, I said, you know, these skills aren't just for me, leadership, communication, team building networking negotiations. It's not just for the executives. It's for everyone. So at this point, I was leading teams, I began to upskill my teams, as I was doing so MIT was getting similar feedback companies were saying, your students are great. But these are the skills we're not seeing. And by the way, not just in your students, not just our students, not just engineers universally, we can't find these skills. So we put together that program you mentioned referred to as MIT's career success accelerator. And in parallel to my career, building tech startups or helping fortune 500. For these days, I worked as a fractional CTO CPO. But in addition to that, in parallel, I've been teaching at MIT teaching elsewhere. And then, of course, put together the book, the career toolkit, the app and related work trying to help people with their professional efficacy. Right. So soft skills, obviously, are required, right. But in a, in today's market, something super necessary. How do you actually go about training days for people who have spent their entire careers like really excelling in hard skills?
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Great question. In fact, if you think about what we do with people, we say, go to high school, you'll get a general education, well then go to college, and you'll narrow your education to a specific discipline. And you'll learn the technical knowledge of that field. I say technical, this could be history or accounting, not technology. Maybe you go to grad school where it gets even deeper and narrower, narrower. Maybe you go into the workplace where again, they say, well, here's what matters. And so we continue to get more narrow in our technical knowledge and we are rewarded for that. But as you point out, these are these broad skills. Our education system wasn't designed at
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is not conceptually about broadening those skills. It's about as you advance getting more narrow. Now, the other key learning these skills, it's more akin to learning sports or music. Our education system, even at the college level is typically knowledge transfer. I'm going to write down these dates in history, these formulas, equations, memorize it, practice applying on these problems. Now you get,
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there is no formula for leadership. There's no three steps and you magically communicate. It is like sports, I can teach you the rules to basketball in probably 30 minutes. But it's going to take you years to get good at. So the key is we have to learn these skills just like we learn sports. It involves drills, scrimmage, reflection, feedback, coaching, it's not just listening to a podcast or reading a book, he says on a podcast talking about his book. So here,
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I recommend creating. And this by the way, what I'm about to explain this is how we teach at MIT, this is how top business schools teach. The key is to create peer learning groups, I recommend groups about six to eight people in size. But there are ways to do it bigger, engage with some content, you can read a book, if you want to use my book, we have tools show how you can use a different book, pick your favorite business or leadership book, use a great podcast like this one, listen to the episode, however you start read the article here in episode, and then come together to discuss it. Because it's in that discussion that we start to understand you view it differently than I do, oh, I never thought about your perspective, that's helpful. Maybe I'll incorporate it, maybe I won't, but just understanding their different perspectives is helpful. We might during the discussion, talk about an experience you had, and how you applied this concept and what worked and what didn't. That's similar two ways we can reflect and watch the tape, we might even practice and say, here's the situation, I have a challenge as you sit there and try to help me solve it, that scrimmage, that's practice. Or you can even bring in case studies from business schools if you want to do something more more formal. And so this is how we're going to learn and develop. And equally important, we would never say, Chris, welcome to the basketball team, I'm gonna give you two days of training. And then you're good for the season, you're done, you're ready to play, of course not to have to keep practicing. And yet so often in our workplace, we say I'm gonna send you to a two day leadership webinars seminar. Okay, you're good, you're ready to leave for the rest of the year. So we have to treat it like sports or music. And so with the soft skills really being, like experiential, right, and so you can do deliberate training, in order to get more experience as new these are, they're kind of like more subtle ways. You can just be going about your day, go on about whatever your your educational process, right, and just slip in modes of of getting more experience in the soft skills. I would say it's very much about reflection. It's hard in the moment, as you're in a meeting, as someone comes to you with a problem to get meta, some very advanced people can do it. But for most of us, do it, but at the end of the day, or the end of the week, sit back and reflect and say, how did that go? What worked? What did work? What could I have done better, you can do this by yourself. Again, you can do it with the group, or you can do it with a coach or mentor. But it's that reflection, just like when we play a sport, or we put on a concert, we can go back and say, you know, I struggled with that little piece or I struggled with this type of shot. Okay, that's helpful to know, now I'm going to address it and reflect on that. Right? So
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say I'm a company founder, I need to start developing my training plan curriculum to get my entire team has spun up, how can I incorporate some of these things in order to ensure that I'm giving them the most value I can as their leader? You know, getting them trained up in their careers? Great question, what I described this program, it is completely free. And on my website that will give you the end of the show, there is a free download for how to do it. I don't sell this, I don't even ask for your email to sell you something else. Just take it use it. I want you to be successful, so you can download and follow the steps. Now one catch at a bigger company. This is fantastic because you have people from all different departments. You want that diversity. You don't want all your engineers in one group and all salespeople and other different perspectives. And it's great because you get to engage with people you might not otherwise interact with. And you got these broad perspectives at a smaller company. It can be harder if your company is only six people
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Oh, well, I don't want to talk about these challenges and tell you where I think I'm struggling because I work with you every day. And, in fact, my boss might be sitting right next to me, it's very awkward. When you're doing this with people, different levels. Very importantly, you want people at the same level. But what you can do is create such a group with others outside the company, if you're a small business owner, you hopefully know other small business owners, and if not, go find some group of other business owners, your local chamber of commerce wherever, because you should not be doing this alone. Find those other folks because they also have these teams of 410 people that are small, and say, we're going to set up these groups that go across company, and will be one for my company, one from yours, and one from hers, one from his, and they're going to get together once or twice a month to have these discussions. So there's really no cost other than the time you're giving them, I would recommend giving some structure and saying, Here's each of the weeks or each of the cycles, here's what to read or what to listen to, or the topic, just to give a little structure. That's it very easy to set up very low cost and overhead. And what are some of the benefits that you've seen from a company who actually puts us to play and follows through, you get four fantastic benefits? First, you're upskilling, your team, fantastic. Your team is more effective. When you think about how important your network is to starting your business, for finding customers, suppliers for getting new ideas in there. Imagine if it's not just you with a great network, but everyone in your organization, bringing in these ideas and customers and other things. So you're upskilling your team. Second, you are really creating a better work culture and you're increasing retention. We know employees today, they're not just saying, Okay, give me a paycheck, make sure it's good. Yes, they care about being paid, but they want more, they want that support, they want that development engagement, you're giving to them at effectively little or no cost to you. Third, you're increasing internal networks. Now, this is probably more true for those bigger companies, as we talked about, may not be as important in smaller companies, either. You'd be surprised how many companies I've seen of even 30 people? Will they go? Well, I know that's Chris over there. I think Chris is in finance. But I don't really know Chris, or talk to Him or know what he does. You're sitting 15 feet from him. Yeah, but we don't interact. So you do increase those internal networks, even smaller companies. And finally, you're creating a common language. So imagine if the book you chose was Good to Great, classic book, if everyone reads it, I can say to you, it, let's apply the hedgehog way of thinking about this. And you go, Oh, I know exactly what you're saying. Because I get that framework, I get that concept. So you're creating a common language that fosters communication. So you are upskilling your team, you are creating better retention engagement with your employees, you're creating internal networks, and you are creating a common framework. And so all of these seem to play very well for a startup that is trying to grow. And so one of the things we had talked about
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before in pre interview was
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something that I've seen with companies hiring someone, someone like sea level, too early in the brought like they're, you know, they're making maybe a million annual revenue, and like, we got to bring in a CTO, and now that CTO might be great for doing the daily work at a million in revenue. But what happens when you're at 10 million? Are they actually the right person to keep up and you don't really have a choice but to either let them go or throw them. And so I love the idea of having this, being able to incorporate this kind of training plan that where you can grow people from within and and just see them kind of taking the reins and working up. Is this. Is that something you normally recommend for startups, right, like being able to kind of take charge of just growing their own leaders
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to fill some of those more senior positions? Or should they be looking to hire I do very much recommend that it is great if you can grow your own because then your employees see there's growth opportunities. I always say to my employees, if you do a good job, I will hire under not over this is your chance to move up. And that's one of the great things about startup. In fact, early in my career, I advanced quickly because I was sitting around I was doing my job. I noticed there were these fires going on. And no one had time to put out the fire. So I stepped up I started putting out the fires and my responsibility grew as long as I was getting my work done. No one cared if I did other things. And then now I'm in charge of them. But let's talk
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for moving, that's one of the challenges I see. When you're hiring the senior people, I see a few mistakes. So one is, as you noted, you're hiring someone for this stage. But they're not ready to grow. I see us a lot with technical folks, is, they might hire very often, oh, this is my buddy from college. Yeah, I know him. He does software development, I got him in. He's our CTO, He's our leader. And he's great when you have four other engineers, and this guy's leading a team of five, and he's coding most of the time. And so he's the lead developer. And I'm giving example in software, but you can imagine this in customer success or sales, wherever you're mostly an individual contributor, just leading a handful of others. It's very casual and informal. But when this team grows to 15 people, 30 people, suddenly, it's a different set of management leadership skills, and this guy may not be ready for that level. And you get into trouble because well, he's the CTO, I can't tell you how many companies tried to hire me saying, Mark come in as our VP of engineering, because we've got this guy who's in over his head, well, he's gonna be the CTO, but you're gonna run the team, and the team reports to you. And he'll kind of report to you because you'll tell him what to work on. But he's over you. And well, he's the guy in the management meeting. So he'll be telling you what to do there. No, this is a disaster. I do recommend to most companies hire
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at the director level, maybe the VP level for two reasons First, because you can always promote you hire the VP. And if they're doing a great job, make them the C level executive. If they're not, then you can hire over them. So this gives you flexibility. Same thing would be true. If it's maybe director to start. Second, that's probably all you need. So again, to use a CTO example, and this is why I do so much fractional CTO work today, when a company says, Hey, we've got eight people. And I feels like they could use some extra leadership or direction. We just don't have it. Okay, fantastic. But you don't need 40 hours of that. You don't need someone full time is there a little work with maybe customers strategic accounts, maybe the board or fundraising? Sure, there's another five hours a week, 10 hours a week, maybe, but not 40 hours a week. And when they try to hire a 40 hour CTO? Good, okay, you're paying me to be a very expensive developer. That's not worth your time. And so fractional CTOs, but also fractional CMOS, fractional CFOs. Or even at the director level or VP level, what you're doing is arbitraging for what you need, let the developers write the code, maybe even do basic project management, oh, this ticket, we're moving it up. And this is complete. But for the higher level work, that's where you have the expert who comes in some number of hours a week at a higher cost. And you're optimizing each dollar for where you get the most return. So I was just thinking about this as, as you were talking, like,
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it's always been obvious to me, and probably for a lot of people listening, right, the the higher you get in a company, especially as the company itself is growing, probably the more soft skills you have to do you have to become more of a generalist as you move up. Actually, this is in your book as well.
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You have to become more of a generalist because you have more people who are specialists underneath you who are watching, you know, who are actually focused on doing very specific tasks. Now, I think one of the challenges might be that it's really hard to quantify soft skills, and which seems to be what's required as you move up being being able to present the solution that your team came up with and actually get buy in from, you know, from a board or from even the rest of your internal company. Is there a way that you can actually kind of prepare for that, right? If you were interviewing someone internally to have them step up? What would you be looking for, as far as soft skills to know that they're actually able to handle that next level of position? This is tricky. And in fact, this I talk a lot about in the interviewing chapter. Because when we interview we often suffer from the street lamp effect. That street lamp effect. This comes from the old joke. There's a drunk guy looking around Street and a cop comes up and says, What are you doing? The drunk says, Oh, I lost my house keys up says All right, I'm going to help you find it. It's been half an hour looking over the street. Cup finally says you're listening. We've looked everywhere. I'm not seeing them. Are you sure this is where you lost them? And drunk says no, no, I lost him two blocks over on Maple Street. Well, if you lost on Maple Street while you're looking here, said Yeah, well, there aren't a street lamps on Maple Street, so I'll never find them there.
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We look where it's easy. And so most of us and I was guilty of this too earlier in my career. When we have a job. We say well to do this job you need
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Ede X years of experience of this knowledge of why we have this laundry list, and it's easy to assess if you're capable, oh, X years of doing marketing. Well, tell me about the marketing you've been doing the last X years. Do you know why? Let me ask you some questions in finance in marketing and engineering. And since I know something about the field, I can judge if you know it or not, that's easy to assess. Harder. As you point out, we need a good leader. Are you a good leader? A full white? Yes, I am. Okay, check. Yep. Tell me about a time you lead. And of course, we can cherry pick the good examples, not the disaster we had two years ago. And so it can be very hard. Now, the first mistake we make is when we say, again, I used to be guilty of this, we often say, Oh, we're looking for a leader.
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What the heck does that mean,
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because of leading a team of five, through a transition, where they're demoralized, because the project's been set back and cancelled and people have quit, is very different than leading a team of 500, who have all worked very well together. And it's a good well oiled machine, both leadership, different types of leadership, and someone who's good in one may not be equally strong in the other. So when it comes to the soft skills, we have to drill down and say, What exactly are we looking for? What would be the characteristics? What would be evidence? And then during the interview process, we have to talk not directly like, well, how are you at leading a team of five demoralized people? I mean, come on a little more indirectly. And ask about how you motivate people? Have you had someone demoralized? And what did you do? And how would you think about that? And let's talk about leading small teams versus big teams? And how do you think about that? And I'm going to, for all these indirect questions put together how I think you will do in that circumstance that I need help with makes sense.
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So I'm going to kind of shift gears now. What What would you say are the biggest mistakes that companies are having in regards to managing the careers of their team?
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They don't. That's the biggest.
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That's the show, especially now, big companies. And we're talking household name companies have 10s of 1000s. People. Yes, they do that most companies are under 100 200. Some people, I don't see anything at all. And to be fair, no, I work a lot of early stage high growth startups. You're too busy doing other things. And the first year or two, I know I have people kind of be saying Mark, what's my career trajectory in three years? My answer is, well just understand, we might not be here in three years. So I can't tell you what's happening at this company, we can talk about your career and where it could go, I can't make any promises. I don't know if I'll have a job here in three years. But what we can do, and then we see the companies are a little more mature, they might have the once a year kind of assessment. But really, it's it's very narrow, narrow sighted. What we want to do is have a real discussion. You and I, the people you manage about your career, and here's the scary part. Your career involves other companies. That's what scares people. Wait, can we talk about the fact that you might not be here in five years? No one wants to say that to their boss, or HR.
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But we don't know what's going to happen. So it begins by honestly saying, Look, Chris, five years from now, you may not be here. And that's okay. In fact, I might not be here in five years. But let's talk about what the career you want looks like in general, where you want to be the challenges and roles you want the skills you need to develop to get there. We'll see how long that can work at this organization. We may be able to create roles to keep you here longer knowing what you want. And I know with my team, I have a very honest conversation when I hire them, or when they join me when Tim for the first time. I say, Look, if you're ever going to leave first, I hope if there's an issue, you talk to me, I'll try to resolve it. But if you feel like Nope, this isn't fit or you need to leave for other reasons. Let me know I'm not going to punish you for it. You're making my job easier because I can prepare and not get caught. So let me know. And I've had people give me heads up. And we've worked on transition. I've helped them find new jobs, because they made my job easier. I think I was I was viewing things from the wrong perspective when I left the military, where you have a very clear career progression, right like you are looking at the next rank. These are the things you need to do in order to achieve the next rank. And everyone knows it and
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You're constantly working there, your leaders know it. And so it's very easy. And when I started hiring when I was working now in corporate America, I would ask, what is what is something that's been on your growth plan before? You know, that seems like a constant for you, no matter where you've been? And I get these like blank stares, or like, what's the growth plan? Like, what do you mean? Like, no one has ever sat down and talk to you about your career. And that is, I think, the concept there.
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And so how, I mean, obviously, we're talking to founders here. But there could be other people missing, what should individuals be doing to kind of step up, talk to their their leaders, you know, if the company is small enough to the founder,
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to be able to get that career point of that growth plan for themselves. Just a side note, before I answer that founders, you need a career plan as well. So often, we think of the career plan, as this is how I progress titles, or ranks military programs. But we might not change titles as founders, but we still need to grow and develop, because to lead a company of 10 people uses a different set of skills and to lead a company of 500 people. And if your skills are not ready for that next step, you need to develop them. And that is part of your career plan, not just how you get another title. But now to your question. So if you are the founder, and you have people, when they join your team, you say welcome. One of the things I want to talk to you about is your career, let's talk about where you want to be down the road, five years, 10 years, and you can tell me anything you want, I understand if that isn't going to be here, we know you're not gonna be here for the rest of your career. Let's always be open and honest. And what I will do given where you want to be in five years and 10 years, I'm going to try and help you develop in that direction. Ideally, we find ways to develop you that also help our company. So if there's two ways I can develop you, you want to do both, I'm gonna pick the one that helps the company here and now and that's fine. But we're going to develop you as long as there's alignment and make sense. And if during one of our discussions we're going to meet, say, every six months, we start to say, you know, it's not working out long term where you want to go next doesn't align to the company.
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Let's have that conversation and say, Okay, we work together, you're not going to storm out one day, I'm not gonna fire you, we will plan to transition. And that gives you time to find something gives me time to find someone we're all better off, actually want to go back. So you said something great about founders actually managing their own career. And not just because I think a lot of them do view it as like, Well, I'm just gonna grow with the company. But these are all the founders that I work with, to teach leadership skills, because you started the company, right? Like you're, you're at the top, because you had that idea doesn't mean you're the best fit to actually run the team. And for a lot of people, it's super hard to stomach, right. And I'm sure that's the same for most positions where you get told you're not a good leader, or like, even though you're not a good leader, you're not the leader that we need right now. Or you're not at that level of potential. Same thing, public speaking skills for, you know, networking, all of these things, it's like, you can take control of that, and go find someone to help you get there with dedicated training and all that. Anyway. So that's my quick pitch for myself. So that's absolutely on, on par, because you do need to develop, it's hard to develop yourself by yourself. And because you are the founder, you don't have a manager. And that's why you need experts like yourself to come in and provide that external view and guidance, right. I mean, I personally have three coaches, and for various things, because I'm not going to be able to see I can bring in a second set of eyes, who can tell me exactly what I need to be looking at, because they've seen it before, or they actually they know the right questions asked in order to get me thinking about it differently. So I can actually grow faster.
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If I may, that's a very sellable, important point. You have three coaches. I have more than one doctor, I have my primary care physician. But then most other people, they might have an eye doctor, they might have an OB GYN, they might have somewhat cancer specialist. One doctor doesn't solve it everything. Now one doctor might be the main one, the primary one, but we recognize one doctor can't give us everything. You probably don't have one grocery store. There's your primary one, but there might be specialty foods elsewhere. And likewise with our coaches. Maybe there's a primary one but to think one person can solve all your problems. Doesn't work that way. That's why you don't have just one employee cloned 50 times in your company
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If you have 50 different people with different skill sets, so don't be afraid, whether it's a formal coach or a mentor to have more than one. But be very clear about what is the scope? What are you looking for from this person and be clear about, Chris, I need your help with this, by the way of someone else helping me with that we can touch upon. But no, I've got another source for that. And that's fantastic. Right? There you go. Everyone hired coaches.
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I want to shift gears because I am fascinated by this app that you run. And I just want to talk about it more. So let's Can you explain to everyone what a brain bump is? Rain bump is a free app on the Android and iPhone stores. Here's a challenge I saw. I've been teaching for years. And my students are class is not lecture based. It's experiential. Our students don't take a lot of notes. And I know they forget most of what they learn once the class is over. I also know from reading books, from listening to podcasts like this, go, Oh, that's such a great idea. But of course, you're probably listening to this while you're in the gym, driving to work doing something else, you're not writing it down. And the chances that you remember the ideas you're hearing in this episode, three days from now are pretty slim. When you read a book like mine, two weeks later, you forgotten 95% of it? Well, that's a problem. As someone who cares about other people, as you and I both do, we want them to retain this information. We want them to remember it. So the app is designed to help you retain and use the information. Here's how it works. We have the key points from books, blogs, podcasts, other sources, they're in it. So it's kind of like a flashcard app, you've got these little tips, typically about one to four sentences in length. And you can access it one of two ways, either just in time, if, for example, you're going to a conference, there are some great networking tips in my book that you've probably forgotten. So right before you walked into the conference, you open the app, everything is tagged by topic. So you hit networking. And you get all the great networking tips from my book, May from your podcast, or whatever sources you added, you go here's what I need this moment here now. So it's instantly relevant. The other way you can use it, it's like a daily affirmation app. Because you can't say in the middle of a management meeting, wait, Chris, pause, hold on, I have to pull up my app to see what I should do here. That's you have to remember, it's foundational. So to bear retain, we know spaced repetition works. fancy name for look at again, it's why we opened the book a few times when we studied before the test, but there's no test now. So it works like a daily affirmation, you don't even need to open the app, you can set up to get a reminder, when you want, say at 9am as you start your day, oh, here's a management tip. Look at two seconds later, you swipe it away, you're done. But by seeing it over and over, it stays top of mind. Now in the 2.0 version coming out, we're recording this in the summer of 2023. At the end of the summer, in August 2023, we're putting out the 2.0 version that will have more functionality, if you want it not daily, but once a week, or just weekdays, you can change will give you more control over that. If we don't yet have the tips you want. We haven't yet added your book or blog or whatever, you can add your own tips, or you can add your Kindle highlights. So we're giving you a way to put in more content. But we continue to add every month, we're always adding new content, so the brain bump app completely free. And it's going to help you access the things you are learning when and where you need them. Okay, so one, I'm already in love with the app. But to the Kindle highlights thing, it's just solves any immediate problem for me.
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Because I use that all the time. I also I mean, for anyone watching the video version I get, these are all just books that I have readily available, because I actually reference them daily. But I have hundreds of other books where I take notes, I use a piece of paper as my bookmark for everything. So I can take notes, I highlight a dog year. But I'm not going back to those notes unless I think of something in relation to that book. And then I go open it and I look back through my notes. And so this app makes it so much easier. It's actually searchable. I can I can remember the stuff that I need without needing to be faced with a problem and then say, oh, that book were on the shelf. So you'll have heard that that was exactly a problem I had, which is I would take notes but never look at them again. And I couldn't remember where something was. So in the case you described I have in one of the chapters I use the parable of the blind men and the elephant. If you're thinking there was something he said involved an elephant by can't remember what, well we've got that search function. So just start typing E L, E and boom it's going to bring up two or three things, but relate to LF
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MC and one of those will be what you need.
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Right? It's awesome.
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Highly recommend everyone. Download the app, I also highly recommend, again that everyone picks up a copy of your book, The career toolkit. I grabbed it off Amazon, is it available anywhere, it's available anywhere your bookstores can order if you want support your local bookstore, fantastic. Obviously, you can get on Amazon, or many other places.
35:28
Awesome. So I strongly encourage everybody to grab a copy. I do wish that actually had this when I was starting my career. So I probably would have just approached different things in my own growth differently. I don't know that I would have changed companies or anything, but I would have definitely just been approaching my personal growth differently. And so for whatever that's worth, I would strongly recommend everybody grab a copy.
35:49
That's separate from that, because we've already recommended it, what book would you recommend everybody grab a copy of? Great question. I mean, I give you a few answers. But on the website that will give you shortly, I actually have in the resources section, a number of free resources, free downloads, like I mentioned before, but also a list of other books, not just ones I referenced in mine. But other books in general, that I think are helpful that helped me in my journey are there for you. But if I had to pick one or two books, the two that come to mind first is people were by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It is not only about software, projects and teams, there's not a line of code in it. You don't have to know anything about building software. That is one of the best management books I've ever read the premise of the book, most software projects fail, but they fail not for technical, logical reasons. But sociological, it's not that, oh, we need a PhD to do this. It's that we miscommunicated and misunderstood and didn't plan and coordinate well. And that's what happens on most of our projects. So people were Tom DeMarco Timothy Lister. The other book that I really enjoyed. This was important for my development, said the 80s Nerd Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Gabon. And she teaches us that charisma is a skill that you can build up. Just like you can learn golf, or networking or negotiating or in the skills of my books. These are all learnable you can learn to be more charismatic, and that certainly helps as a leader, as someone building a network as just someone going through life with other people. Charisma is very helpful. I think we could all use a little more charisma.
37:38
Alright, what is next for you professionally? Professionally, as I mentioned, I am a fractional CTO CPO, so I'm helping a few different companies right now. Lately, again, we're recording this 2023. I've also had love inbound requests for help with AI because lots of companies are saying what do we do with AI. And I have a background in bringing AI machine learning into companies and building up tooling to help companies succeed with it. So lots of that. But also for me, picking up both speaking I do professional speaking at companies and conferences. And brain bump, as you mentioned, 2.0 is coming out. And we're looking to really expand this coming year with more functionality and more content. So those are the big things on my radar.
38:29
That is exciting stuff. Where can everyone find you? I'm going to give you two different websites. The first the career Toolkit book.com. That's my books website, you'll see where to buy it Amazon, as you mentioned, but lots of other places. You could follow me on social media reach and get in touch with me if you have questions or just want to talk. There is a blog, I put out new articles every week. And the Resources page I mentioned completely free resources page. The first download is how to develop this internal free training program. There's other resources for career planning for interviewing, and then a list of other books and links to other resources online, all completely free. I'm not even trying to capture your email. I just want to help you all that is that the career Toolkit book.com The second website, brain bump app.com brain bump, it's like a nudge for your noggin, brain bump app.com and that will take you to the apple and android store. We can download the free app, you'll get the 1.5 version maybe today I'm not sure when the episode comes out. 2.0 is coming out soon. So download the free app, add some content from my book and from others all free and use this to help learn, retain and use all the great wisdom from our content. Alright Mark, thank you for joining me today. It's been great conversation. Thanks again for having me on the show.
39:56
If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review
40:00
on your favorite podcast player, and for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership, is it leading for effect.com As always deserve it
Transcribed by https://otter.ai