“Practical Steps for Completing Your Master’s Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation”

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (PROMISE Dissertation Coach, The Dissertation House)

Saturday, February 23, 2013

10AM -12 Noon

UMBC Campus, Public Policy Building, Room 206

Directions: http://promisesuccessseminars.wordpress.com/directions-to-campuses/

RSVP: UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here:http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16380

Students from other campuses are asked to RSVP as a comment for this post.

Join the blog for The Dissertation House today! http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/blog-online-challenge/winter-2013-challenge/.  Any student from any school may join.

————————————————–

Learn more about activities for the PROMISE AGEP!

Related articles

• Feb. 23, 2013 Special Saturday Success Seminars: Thesis/Dissertation Completion & “Radio Research” (promiseagep.wordpress.com)
• The January 2013 Online Writing Challenges Begin NOW! (Dissertation, Thesis, Publications!) (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com) We invite you to join in February!

“Practical Steps for Completing Your Master’s Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation”

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (PROMISE Dissertation Coach, The Dissertation House)

Saturday, February 23, 2013

10AM -12 Noon

UMBC Campus, Public Policy Building, Room 206

Directions: http://promisesuccessseminars.wordpress.com/directions-to-campuses/

RSVP: UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here:http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16380

Students from other campuses are asked to RSVP as a comment for this post.

Join the blog for The Dissertation House today! http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/blog-online-challenge/winter-2013-challenge/.  Any student from any school may join.

————————————————–

Learn more about activities for the PROMISE AGEP!

Related articles

• Feb. 23, 2013 Special Saturday Success Seminars: Thesis/Dissertation Completion & “Radio Research” (promiseagep.wordpress.com)
• The January 2013 Online Writing Challenges Begin NOW! (Dissertation, Thesis, Publications!) (dissertationhouse.wordpress.com) We invite you to join in February!

Want to gain confidence, wisdom, and leadership skills in record time? Go to work for a floundering company.

If you've never worked for a floundering company, you don't know what you're missing.

I'm serious. Nothing will prepare you better to lead. And nothing will prepare you better for life.

I've worked for a number of companies that, at one time or another, found themselves on the ropes and, you know what? I learned more about business, management, and leadership trying to help those companies fight it out with giants like Microsoft and Intel than all the rest of my experience combined.

The truth is that working for troubled companies brings out the best in people. It creates strong, resilient, adaptive leaders. Here's what you'll learn by working for companies that have to slug it out with market leaders while on a shoestring budget:

How to drink from the fire hose without drowning. When you're understaffed, underfunded, and losing money every quarter, nobody's going to wait around for you to figure things out. Your customers have better things to do. So do your competitors. These days, markets are constantly changing. Everything moves at lightening speed. There's always too much information and never enough time to breathe. Better get used to it.

You can find your home. If there's a test for knowing if you're in the right place, it's when the company you work for is in deep trouble and everyone's got to sacrifice, pitch in, and fight. If you still love getting up in the morning and going to work under those conditions, then you've found your home.

You know what great leadership really is. Chief executives don't usually get fired when things are going well. They get canned when times are hard and the board figures out what they're really made of--and it falls short of their expectations. When business is floundering, that's when the rubber meets the road. That's when you can really tell if the company's leadership has what it takes: the guts, the smarts, and most of all, the resilience.

The miracle of market segmentation. One of the most powerful techniques in marketing is called market segmentation. We can't all be market leaders, but we can all find unique market segments and focus on leading those. It's all about positioning your product in a niche you can dominate, and then growing from there.

How to win no-win situations. When you're outmanned and outgunned, you always end up having to troubleshoot seemingly impossible problems. When you're pushed so hard that your back is up against a wall, that's exactly when you'll rise to the occasion and do your best work. That's right: necessity really is the mother of invention.

Guerilla warfare. Let's face it: You don't learn how to be scrappy, how to be crafty, how to do more with less, while working for the industry leader. You learn all that by working for an upstart that has to scrape and claw for every point of market share and every product feature with a fraction of the resources that the big guys have.

How tough and adaptive you really are. More than anything else, working for a company in trouble teaches you about yourself. You learn what you're really made of. What you're capable of doing when everything's on the line and everyone's counting on you. That's why troubled companies really are gold mines. They're opportunities for you to step up to the plate and take risks.

You'll gain confidence from your successes and wisdom from your failures. Most of all, you'll grow into whatever it is you're capable of becoming.

A fascinating article on "emotional labor" argues against companies coercing staff into feigning cheerfulness. Is it OK to pay workers to pretend to be happy?

You go into a fast food shop or a shoe store. What are you expectations for the staff member who serves you? Politeness, sure. Knowledge of the products on offer and efficiency in getting you want you want? Fair enough. But how about a big smile and a sunny disposition?

As a consumer your initial response to this last requirement is probably, yes please. Of course it's nice to have service staff behave like they're thrilled to be at work and our mere presence in their establishment has genuinely brightened their day. But as a business owner, is it a good idea to actively require your employees to express joy at work, even if it's feigned?

That's the question posed by a fascinating recent article in the New Republic. Looking at the sandwich chain Pret a Manger, Timothy Noah argues that there's a dark side to forced cheer at work. Pret, Noah reports,

Keeps its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi. A "mystery shopper" visits every Pret outlet once a week. If the employee who rings up the sale is appropriately ebullient, then everyone in the shop gets a bonus. If not, nobody does. This system turns peers into enthusiasm cops, further constricting any space for a reserved and private self.

So what's wrong with paying employees for "emotional labor" as well as simply slinging sandwiches? While empathy for pay may be a legitimate part of some professions, Noah feels introducing it to gigs where its not strictly necessary is a little sinister:

Emotional labor is not itself new. Prostitutes have faked orgasms for millennia. With greater sincerity (one hopes), undertakers calm the grieving, nurses comfort the sick, and migrant nannies lavish on other people's children the love they aren't present to furnish back home…

In all these instances, emotional labor served (legitimately or not) identifiable emotional needs. That's not true at Pret. Fast-food service is not one of the caring professions. The only imperatives typically addressed in a Pret shop are hunger and thirst. Why must the person who sells me a cheddar and tomato sandwich have "presence" and "create a sense of fun"? Why can't he or she be doing it "just for the money"?

Or, as Noah puts it elsewhere in the article, "Pret doesn't merely want its employees to lend their minds and bodies; it wants their souls, too." His concern, evidently, is that demanding cheer is demeaning, exploitative and dehumanizing, but psychology blog Mind Hacks, which commented thoughtfully on Noah's piece, notes that forcing people to fake emotions also has negative practical consequences.

Acting happy when you don't genuinely feel happy, creates "emotional dissonance" that "leads to burnout, low mood and poor job satisfaction," notes the blog. And monetizing emotion can cut into an employee's sense of the intrinsic value of their job. "It has the capacity to denigrate genuine compassion as ‘required labor,’" concludes the post. (For a deeper dive into the question of what areas of life shouldn't be invaded with the market logic of buying and selling, check out this fascinating essay from Michael J. Sandel.)

Meanwhile, researchers have also cast doubt on the long-term efficacy of "forced fun" at work, finding that required levity can lead to an array of bad outcomes such as burnout among employees, and that these cheerful work cultures often serve to distract workers from excessive control or poor conditions elsewhere in the business.

Do you think its right to require employees to be happy at work?

Users will hand over a lot of data to an application, sometimes without even noticing that’s what they’re doing. Unless you’re working with a particularly savvy group of users, the only time your users will pay attention to what information they’ve provided is when something goes wrong. You have to make the decisions to protect them and minimize those problems ahead of time — a smooth experience means that you can land and keep more users.

As Little as Possible

When you’re considering what information to ask your users for in the first place, and what you need to save, there is a simple rule to stick to: ask for as little as possible. It’s tempting to ask for a lot of data; after all, you can do all sorts of analysis and use it to help you land even more customers. But the reality is that you usually don’t need all that much information for an app to actually work. Since you can’t really predict when you’ll get around to that big analysis project, why ask for data you don’t need yet? You can always get some of it with a customer survey later on, plus perhaps some more useful information.

Go through what fields you’re considering asking your users to fill out when they sign up. Eliminate everything you can — it’s not a bad option if you’re only asking for an email address and a password. Heck, you might not even need that. The same goes for what information you’re collecting that your users might generate. It’s much harder for a security vulnerability to expose information that wasn’t actually saved.

Dealing with Financial Information

Financial details, like credit card numbers, are in a class of their own when it comes to keeping them secure — there’s so much more incentive for someone to try to get ahold of such information. If you’re selling something, you’re going to have to accept payments in some fashion. In general, it’s a good idea to make credit card numbers and other financial data someone else’s problem.

Handing the issue over to a payment processor that has already invested their resources into safeguarding payment information will make your life easier, but it can also make you appear more trustworthy to your users, especially if they recognize the payment processor you’ve chosen.

Your Legal Obligations

Just what your legal situation is when it comes to storing data about your users depends greatly both on where you’re based and where your users are based. In the U.S, for instance, there are laws specifically governing what information you can store about minors, particularly those under the age of 13, as well as about financial and medical data. Do your research so that you don’t have to deal with a legal problem right off the bat.

Security and privacy issues are only going to get more press in the future, so invest whatever you need to make sure that you’re saving user information correctly and safely.

Image by Flickr user Daniil Vasiliev

The business titan behind KB Home and Sun America--also an author, philanthropist and art collector--on the trait that brought him success. Hint: It's not complacency.

Slightly built, bespectacled, mild mannered, and dressed as if he were attending a CPA seminar, Eli Broad comes off as anything but the legendary entrepreneur who started homebuilding giant Kaufman and Broad (later renamed KB Home) and the pioneering financial services company SunAmerica. The Los Angeles billionaire is also one of the nation's leading philanthropists and art collectors. In his recent book, The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, Broad, who turns 80 in June, says much of his success, in business and elsewhere, stems from a dogged (some would say obstinate) unwillingness to go along with the crowd. --As told to Mark Lacter

Growing up in Detroit in the 1940s, I was always inquisitive. In high school, I would drive my teachers batty. They would make a statement, and I would say, "Why is that?" They didn't want to be questioned. But I've never accepted the status quo. After I was married a few years, my wife, Edye, found a quote from George Bernard Shaw that essentially said reasonable men adapt themselves to the world; unreasonable ones don't--therefore all progress comes from unreasonable men. She gave me a little plaque with the quote.

The first thing I did after I graduated from Michigan State was accounting. My initial salary was $67.40 a week, after taxes. I was married with a child on the way, and I wanted to make some money. I had some clients who were homebuilders--I didn't think they were all that smart, and they were making a lot of money. I decided that I could do that, and I found a partner in Donald Kaufman, a carpenter who did remodeling. I didn't know how to build a house, but I had a pretty good sense of finance and marketing. We started in Detroit at the end of 1956.

I looked at what was going on in homebuilding outside Detroit, where people were building different kinds of homes--say, without basements. I thought this was an opportunity for us. We would sell them for 20 percent less--and the payments would be less than the rent on a two-bedroom garden apartment.

We were more efficient than other builders. We never took out construction loans, which were very expensive. I would pay subcontractors and suppliers at the end of the following month from when the work was done. So if they finished on the 15th, I would pay 45 days later. By then, we would have a house closing, so we'd have enough money. We didn't have any financing costs.

In 1961, we went public on the American Stock Exchange. In 1969, we became the first homebuilder to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We had a pretty fancy P/E ratio in the 1960s, about 40 times earnings, and a market cap of over $1 billion when $1 billion was an awful lot of money.

We convinced Wall Street that we were countercyclical, that we weren't like a lot of those small homebuilders that would go broke after every cycle. But I knew that wasn't necessarily true. I looked back at the Great Depression. The one industry that did well was life insurance. I said, Maybe we ought to acquire a life insurance company.

In 1971, we acquired the Sun Life Insurance Company of America in Baltimore, founded in 1890, for about $52 million in cash and stock. We were competing with companies like Metropolitan and Prudential, so we needed to find a market niche. It became clear that there was a great need for retirement savings. So we started selling variable annuities, mutual funds, and some other products.

We also had to develop a brand. We changed the name to SunAmerica, hired an ad agency, and became the biggest advertiser on NBC Sports. People thought I was crazy. Well, our name became known, and people started seeing us as a lot larger than we really were.

No one on Wall Street understood the combination of the two companies. So we split them up: I stayed at SunAmerica, and Bruce Karatz stayed at Kaufman and Broad. [Donald Kaufman had retired shortly after the company went public.] I had been in the homebuilding business for more than 25 years, and I found this new industry--retirement savings--to be a great challenge.

By the late '90s, I was in my 60s, and I thought it was time to find a merger partner for SunAmerica. One of the companies that could afford us was AIG. I knew the CEO, Hank Greenberg, and I had high regard for him. I approached him about a merger, and he was excited at the idea. We got a nice premium--not huge, 27 percent, but in dealmaking, it's got to be something that makes sense for both parties.

I stayed on the AIG board for a number of years. And then I got lucky. One day, I said to Hank that 90-some-odd percent of my net worth was in AIG. I wanted to diversify. Hank said, "You're a director; you can't sell stock." So I got off the board and put the stock in The Broad Foundations, a pair of nonprofit organizations that focus on education, science, and the arts. That's why our foundations' assets are $2.5 billion.

I work harder now than I've ever worked. We've spent $600 million over the past 10 years on biomedical research. The biggest time-suck has been education reform. In science, no one wants to maintain the status quo, but people in education have been resistant to change.

We didn't know anything about curriculum, so we started looking at governance and management. With rare exceptions, people become school superintendents without any training in management, finance, systems. So I said, Why don't we create an academy to train superintendents? We've seen a lot of change in the past 10 years.

I didn't get involved in art until the early 1970s. Our first major acquisition was a Van Gogh drawing. Eventually, we moved into contemporary art, because I found it more interesting to be involved in art of our own time. I enjoy meeting the artists. Every artist is unreasonable, because he or she is doing something that hasn't been done before. All of the art in our collection will ultimately be shown at The Broad, our new contemporary art museum that will open in 2014 in downtown Los Angeles.

Philanthropy is not charity. Charity is just writing checks. Philanthropy is an investment where you want to see a return, whether it's breakthroughs in scientific research or performance in education or broadening the audience for the arts. You want to see results.