Aaron Eden

We had our landscaper over yesterday and he was doing an awesome job of getting the yard all cleaned up.  While he was working hard, I was trying to get through my homework.  After an hour or so I decided I needed to take quick a break and play DJ Hero with my step-daughter.  I went upstairs and started jamming.

We were playing for a bit and I noticed that the dog was not in his cage and I couldn’t remember seeing him for the last few hours which was unusual.  We began searching the house with absolutely no luck.  It was about to be dark so we decided to drive around the neighborhood and see if we could find little Charlie.  He usually doesn’t go very far so we thought driving with the windows down and calling for him would do the trick.

I didn’t and we spent the next hour and a half driving through all of the neighborhoods near our house.  We had no luck with that either.  We went home to gather our thoughts and try to come up with a plan to get him back.

The next morning we got up early and started again.  Lots of our very helpful friends expressed their sympathy and gave suggestions while we had been sleeping.  We took all of it, we called the humane society and animal control, but they hand’t seen him.  Next we posted an advertisement on CraigsList and created some printed flyers.

We went through the entire neighborhood and put flyers at every entrance or exit for our subdivision!  We literally must have put up at least 40 flyers.  We were excited to see people out with their dogs coming up and taking really close looks at the flyers!  We were very hopeful that the beautiful sunny day would bring about a rescue.

By late afternoon we still had not heard anything!  We were all starting to lose hope again and went back to being very sad and missing Charlie.  On top of this the clouds started to roll in…  A massive storm hit our part of town and obliterated all of the signs that we had put up.  We decided that we’d head to the pound the following day and try to remain hopeful.

During dinner my Fiancée was feeling hungry and sad and decided to check her iPhone for email.  It was there that she found a message from someone that claimed to have found Charlie!  She immediately called and talked to a very nice girl that said she had seen him with one of the neighbors.

She had seen the advertisement on CraigsList and thought to let us know that she had seen Charlie with some of the neighbors.  How amazing is that?!?

To say that the last 24 hours have been a pretty crazy emotional roller-coaster is an understatement, but we’re happy to have the crazy little lion home!

Tonight I had a huge flashback to high school after trying to help my step-daughter finish her math homework.  She had a problem where she was supposed to figure out which combination of operations could be used to solve the problem.

15 _ 3 _ 17 _ 11 = 205 You would replace the _ spaces with either addition, subtraction, multiplication or division.

After a few minutes of discussion we decided that she should try a few combinations and see if she could figure it out on her own.  She tried about 20 combinations and then started to get a little frustrated.  In an effort to help I decided that I would try to put together a quick Excel sheet that would compute the answer.  I quickly found out that it’s difficult to get Excel to evaluate formulas dynamically.  It works great if the numbers change, but terrible if the operators change.

This is where my flash-back kicked in.  I remember many times in high school where I was having problems math homework and would go write myself a pascal program to solve the problem.  I never was great at math, but I could break it down into small steps and brute force my way through!

Tonight, I did that again.  I put together a quick console application in C# which generates a permutation and then utilizes XPath to create a dynamic equation and evaluate the result.  If the result matches 205 it can stop.  Otherwise it must try another permutation.

Is there a more elegant solution to this problem in C#?



Managers often try to motivate employees as a group rather than individually. It is extremely important for you to take the time to really understand each employee on an individual basis.  This will ensure that you are aligning any extrinsic motivations like pay increases, bonuses and recognition with the intrinsic motivations of each employee.  When it comes to employee motivation there is no “one size fits all” solution that can be designed.

Your first task is to take the time to clearly understand what motivates each of your employees.  I would recommend first looking at the sixteen basic desires theory.  This theory was created by Steven Reiss after he studied over 6,000 people and helps show why people do what they do.  Once you’ve taken the time to understand which of these qualities motivates each of your employees you can align your extrinsic motivation plan with their needs.

I will use myself as an example in this scenario.  I am motivated by curiosity (the need to learn), order (the need for organized, stable, predictable environments) and a little by power (the need for influence of will).  Based on these key areas we can put together an annual goals document that outlines key projects I can work on that best utilize my intrinsic motivational needs.

After the goals are documented you should utilized your one-on-one sessions with your employee to not only discuss status on their projects, but how they “feel” about their work and how well these intrinsic needs are being satisfied by the work.  The key here is to make sure your employee’s intrinsic needs are ALWAYS being met. They will not be happy with their work if these needs are not met.

Throughout the year I would suggest that you look for extrinsic ways to reward the employees for accomplishing their goals.  Some will be motivated by public recognition while others will prefer private.  Going back to me as an example, you could reward me by sending me off to training (curiosity) or maybe by giving me the opportunity to lead a sub-team for a specific project (power).  Again, this goes back to knowing your employee!  If you haven’t taken the time to do this you will probably default to giving the person a pat on the back during a team meeting, but this might not matter a bit to them.

When year-end comes and you’re working to determine pay increases and bonuses you can continue down the same path as you did previously by looking for ways to frame the rewards in a way that directly relates to their intrinsic motivations.  If your employee is motivated by saving then remind them about how much this bonus will contribute to their retirement fund.

Have you been in your position for a while and are ready to move? Maybe you feel stalled out in your current role and want to move up or are just looking for a change. My goal with this post is to give some tips for those of you looking to move around and have a stable position currently.

Research

Your first step in this process is to figure out what your next job is.  I personally would take a blue sky approach to this task and really think about your dream job.  Don’t hold back!  Come up with a handful of jobs that you might be interested in doing.

Conduct Interviews

Once you’ve nailed down a handful of dream jobs you need to start conducting informational interviews with potential employers.  The point of these interviews are for you to learn about how different jobs are treated at a potential employer.

I would recommend using your friends & family as well as social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to quickly identify people that are working in your dream jobs.  When you are connecting to them you’ll want to make it very clear that you aspire to work in that role and would like to learn from them about it

There are many good resources on the internet for how to conduct an “Informational Interview” which I would recommend reading through before starting.  You don’t have to make this into a big deal.  You’re simply trying to learn from them and see if the “dream job” is all it’s cracked up to be.

Choose a Position

Now that you’ve learned all about your dream job inside different organizations your next step is to choose one.  Think long and hard about what you’ve learned and which one will be the best fit for you.  You’ve already made some in-roads with people at these organizations so you’re one step closer!

You should now start assessing gaps in your skills.  You need to identify key areas where you are lacking so you can either address them using your current position or be sure to re-work your resume to cover these gaps effectively.

Monitor

In many cases your dream job will not be available and you’ll need to monitor job boards like HotJobs and Monster to see when your dream job pops up.  Luckily you’ve already refined the search so it should be pretty easy to allow these sites to do the work for you.  This will ensure that you don’t end up with a slew of garbage jobs in your email box every morning.

Apply

Now that your dream job is available you should again tap into your social networks and gather some initial information about the job.  I would recommend using everything you’re able to find out about the job to ensure that you’re able to customize your resume to the position as well as nail the interview.
As you can see it just takes a little connection building, research and friendly talking to be able to nail your dream job!

Have you had success with processes like this in your career already?

Wow, this year has been incredible for sunsets in Tucson!  I can’t remember a year where there were so many incredible photo opportunities.  I’m thinking that next year I should just put all of my shots into a single blog post as it will probably be more visually powerful.

Here are a couple more that I took with my iPhone 4 and Panorama.

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Taken right behind my house

Taken from the Rillito bridge (Alvernon & River)

Taken from my driveway facing due East!

I had the awesome idea a few weeks ago that I should build an online crowd-sourced family tree web site.  Like with all business ideas your first task is to see what’s going on with your competition.  I began by doing a few searches and found to my dismay that there is already someone doing it, and doing it quite well.  That site is http://www.geni.com/.

Eden Family Tree

To continue my research I thought I should give the site a spin. They allow you to quickly add TONS of details about any family members.  After you add a few you can quickly build your entire tree by connecting to Facebook and inviting your family members to participate.

In my case I had already utilized Family.Show to build out a tree a few months ago.  So I quickly imported my data into Geni and began to fill in the additional info that Family.Show did not support storing.

After only about 30 minutes I have a HUGE family tree built out, and Geni is already matching family members in my tree to potential overlaps in other member’s trees!

My family so far

It seems that I have quite a varied background like most Americans.  I have ancestors from Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, Germany and much of the north-eastern United States.  All this and I’ve only been able to trace my roots back to the late 1700′s.

I’m very excited to see what I’m able to find with the help of the rest of my family!

Wow, I’m really excited about all of the cool stuff I’ve been learning in school this week. I thought, rather than posting all of my homework assignments I would just pick one that was the most interesting. I don’t want to annoy people with floods of writing!

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The seemingly insignificant act of hearing and seeing a baseball hit by a bat, moving to catch the ball and then catching it in a glove actually requires the use of almost every part of our brain!

First we see and hear the ball being hit by the bat. The sight of the bat about to strike the ball is first registered in the Occipital Lobe inside the Cerebral Cortex. It’s possible that these images are also processed by the temporal lobe. Next the sound from the bat would arrive and would be processed by the Temporal Lobe. At this point another function of the Temporal Lobe would also kick in which is motivation so that the rest of the body and brain will be motivated to expend the energy necessary to catch the ball. This in turn would cause the Medulla to start preparing the body for some potential stress of moving by altering the respiration, heart rate and blood pressure. A goal in the Frontal Lobe has now been set to catch the ball.

During this preparation process our subject is monitoring the ball’s direction, speed and velocity as well as also utilizing the Parietal Lobe’s spatial and mapping functionality to try to predict where the ball will come back down. This way the body can move to the proper location and not need to dive or slide to catch the ball. Efficiency is of key importance is most of the brain’s operations.

Next, the Cerebellum will utilize its ability to control movement to get the subject walking or running over to where it believes the ball will be landing. After getting into the right position the Cerebellum will use another function to adjust reflexes and balance for the entire body to ensure that the subject does not fall over or drop the ball. After the ball is caught the Medulla will begin sending signals to the body to let it know that it can now begin relaxing.

As you can see from this short description almost every portion of the brain is utilized during this process. Hopefully this gives you a view into how diverse, flexible and powerful the human brain really is.

I don’t tend to whine a lot, but when I do it’s usually about being hot. I have a lot of energy and it usually manifests itself as sweat! Luckily Tucson has the most amazing sunsets during the hottest and most humid time of year. These help me ignore that I can’t stop sweating unless I’m hiding inside with the air conditioning set to 75.

Here are a few panoramic photos I took from my house that show of one of the things that makes Arizona an amazing place to live! These were shot with my iPhone and stitched together using AutoStitch.

Be sure to click to see these larger!

Taken 7/16/2010

Taken 7/19/2010

As some of you may or may not know I decided to return to school and try to finish off my degree in Business Administration.  It’s pretty crazy to look back and see that it’s been almost 7 years since I last attended classes.  In an effort to try to get the best grades possible I thought it might be an interesting experiment to post the output from my classes here on the blog.  It actually forces me into a different mental state where I am not only writing for the teacher, but to ensure that what I’ve learned is clear for my readers as well.  Please let me know what you think so I can get even better.

Week 1 learning summary:

BEH 225 – Introduction to Behavioural Science

Psychology was not considered to be a formal discipline until 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt from Germany setup the first laboratory of psychology.  Prior to this time, it was considered to be a discipline of philosophy.  Because of these differing perspectives psychology has taken many paths over its young life, and is an extremely large umbrella under which hundreds of disciplines are covered.

In believe that the rise of cognitive psychology in the 1960s has had a larger impact on psychology than any other sub-field.  The primary reason for this belief is that cognitive psychologists were actually able to expand the definition of psychology which firmly supports my belief.  Additionally, I feel that neuroscientists in the future will be able to answer many of the “black box” questions that have been eluding psychologists for many years.

I also see the power of cognitive psychology in my every day work for Intuit’s customer care department of Turbotax.  As a team we continue to try to better understand our customer needs during extremely busy tax seasons by utilizing voice of the customer (survey), “follow me home” (naturalistic observation), case and mock-case studies to help us try to understand which key levers we can pull to effectively impact our key business outcomes (correlational research).

I look forward to learning more about the field of psychology and how I can use the scientific tools to better understand my current and future customers.  Additionally, I would like to understand more about neuroscience as I believe that it holds the keys to many currently locked and other yet unidentified doors in science.

ETH 125 – Cultural Diversity

Before reading this first chapter of the book I thought I had a clear understanding that race was effectively just skin color or the continent that someone was from, but now I realize that I was very incorrect.  I have often interpreted the terms almost interchangeably, which I believe is what many people do every day.  

Due to the rapid growth of the world population, it is imperative that everyone has a clear understanding of the differences between these terms.  By the year 2020 it is estimated that the population of China will outnumber that of the United States, Canada and Mexico.  If we do not come to terms with the underlying issues we run the risk of finding ourselves assimilated by another group just due to them viewing us as ignorant.

For me personally it is hard to turn off my analytical side which wants to constantly categorize and bucket people.  Between my daily work, school and social activities I do consistently interact with people of various races and ethnicities. It is human nature to assume that you know how someone will behave, but once you get to know them you typically find out that you were nowhere close.  I’ve had many situations in my past where I’ve been pleasantly surprised, but it’s important to be sure that you’re adopting a very open mindset and approaching these situations as a chance to learn from the other person.

As the title of this post says, I would reccomend that every small business owner read this book.  Not only does it clearly outline the process for making the business successful, but it is full of TONS of practical ideas that any small business can implement immediately!

John Jantsch shows you how to lay the foundation for your marketing platform by identifying who your target market is so that you don’t waste any time or money chasing bad relationships!  Next, he helps you through the process of boiling your core message down to a single sentence (“Talking Logo”) that will ensure that potential clients, vendors and partners know exactly what benefits you will provide them right off the bat.  Next, we’re off to logo and branding land where we apply all of those initial foundational elements to now create imagery.

I have seen many companies setup that skip completely past these first steps.  Most of them jump straight to selecting a name and creating a logo before laying this crucial groundwork.  Personally, I think it’s probably the hardest part about starting a company and a process that most people don’t feel is practical.  Obviously, once you know it’s there you realize that it’s absolutely necessary.

After John has walked you through the foundational elements of marketing he takes you through the process of developing products for every stage of your customer lifecycle.  This is a very key piece of The Duct Tape Marketing system and another piece that most small businesses overlook.  Typically they have 1 or 2 packages that are fee based and don’t think about giving something away for free to help pull customers into their marketing funnel early on.  This is something that larger companies tend to do, but most small businesses go straight at the hard sell.

The rest of the book really focuses on applying multiple other channels to your marketing system to round the entire thing out.  Rather than going into details or specifics about these I would like to reccomend again that you pick up the book.  It’s worth millions to you if you follow it step by step.  It should be required reading for anyone that doesn’t want to work for someone else their entire life.

How have you used this system for your business?