And No Republicans Were Harmed In The Writing Of This Post

"A company that would discriminate on the basis of facial hair would probably also discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views - and I don't want to work for that kind of company."

I said this to a guy who offered me a job on the condition that I shave my beard. He claimed his company had a policy against facial hair. I declined. I had to decline.

I bring up this incident because I'm hearing a lot of discussion about how social media is changing the world of job search and recruitment. In the age of social media, injustice happens more swiftly and anonymously than it did when I had to turn down a job because the company didn't like facial hair. Today, they might just look candidates up on Facebook and rule out those with facial hair or any other characteristic they don't like.

"Is it ethical for me, an HR manager, to look up people on Facebook and LinkedIn before I decide to interview them?" someone asked rhetorically to nobody in particular the other day.

Whether or not it's ethical, we have to assume she and other HR people are doing it.

By now, you probably think you know where this is going. You probably think I'm about to tell you what I told a crowd of University of Kentucky grads about the dangers of posting your radical religious or political views or your drunken Spring Break photos on Facebook. Yeah, I told them they should Google themselves and see what employers are going to see and then clean up what they can.

But in the limited time we had available I didn't tell them what I'm about to tell my blog readers. I didn't tell them that they shouldn't be ashamed of what they haven't done wrong. I didn't tell them that if they have to pretend to be someone they aren't in order to get that dream job, then maybe it's not really a dream job.

That's why I proudly and unapologetically fly my liberal flag knowing full well that doing so may cost me consulting gigs or job offers.

But someone who would discriminate against me because I am a liberal Democrat would probably also discriminate against a lesbian or a black or a Rastafarian.

And I don't want to work for a company that would do that.

And, oh, while I'm flying my liberal flag, let me invite all my liberal, Charleston, WV readers to the second meeting of the re-launched, re-loaded Charleston chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet this Thursday, 19 November, at Tricky Fish, 1611 Washington Street East at about 5:30-ish. We welcome gays, minorities, animal rights activists, vegans, vegetarians, people with facial hair, people without facial hair and people who have the courage of their liberal convictions to turn down job offers from bad guys.

No knuckle-dragging conservatives or sentient beings were harmed in the formation of the Drinking Liberally chapter but we're not above making conservatives squirm.

If This Social Media Thing Ever Catches On

One of the reasons I started a blog was so I wouldn't have to answer the same questions over and over again on LinkedIn discussion groups. Now when someone asks me a question I've already answered in my blog, I can just send them the link. Lately, the LinkedIn discussion groups have been buzzing with variations on the question "How will social media change your life?" What follows is roughly how I've been answering that question. After I post this, I'll simply link people to it.

My good friend, Joe Bird, is right when he says "resistance is futile" but this social media thing hasn't really caught on yet. For example, there are 6 billion people in the world but only 40 million LinkedIn users. Even if we don't count the maybe 3 billion or so people who don't have computer and internet access, 40 million is still a tiny percentage of people using LInkedIn. And inside that 40 million number there are millions of people with few or even no connections - and people who don't join any groups. I know people who accept every invitation to join LinkedIn for the first time and who actually set up a new account each time because they forgot they already belong to LinkedIn or they can't remember their password.

So I'm guessing that of the 40 million LinkedIn accounts, when you factor out the unused or rarely used accounts there may be 10 million people who are actually using LinkedIn to get intentional and organized about professional networking.

And while blogging and tweeting have made it theoretically possible for anybody with an account to publish their thoughts to a great many people, I'm always surprised at how many people I know who don't have a Twitter account or a blog.

For example, I'm thinking of a certain town of 10,000 people with, as far as I and my spies can tell, only one active blogger.

I've said this before but I'll say it again: social media reminds me a lot of CB radio back in the 60s when only a few people knew about it and then in the 70s when it became a fad. No matter how much time and money you invest, the value you get from CB or social media is dependent upon who else is using it. Just as I can't talk to you on a CB radio unless you have one, I can't network with you on LinkedIn and I can't tweet with you or blog to you unless you use these platforms.

I could go on and on like this but you get the point: I'm still waiting for social media to actually catch on.

And when it does catch on, here's how it will change things - and how it won't.

Let me start with how it won't change things: people who don't have the networking gene or aren't willing to learn how to network still won't network effectively just because they have a LinkedIn account or a blog. Some of those people I mentioned earlier who don't join any groups and don't have any connections seemed to think that accepting a LinkedIn invitation would magically and effortlessly bring them a tsunami of new friends, new job offers or new clients. When that didn't happen, they accused social media of breaking a promise it never made.

Fact: despite all the hype about what social media is and what it can do, social media won't make a connector or a networker or a friendmaker or a salesman or a leader out of someone who isn't. Social media facilitates behaviors and skills people already possess but it doesn't impart new behaviors and skills. if you don't like people or you're an asshole, you'll still dislike people and you'll still be an asshole after you have a Twitter account or a blog. The only difference is, you'll be a misanthropic asshole who tweets and blogs. And, God knows, we don't need that.

But for those who have the networking gene or are willing to learn how to network, here are a few ways social media will be a game changer:

1. Headhunters will nearly become extinct. I said this recently on a LinkedIn discussion group and I really made a lot of headhunters mad but I think they know I'm right. As some of my readers know, I have dabbled in the headhunting game myself and you'd be surprised how many fees I've collected for "finding" people my clients already knew. Yes, of course, I know that there are cases where a client already knows exactly who he wishes to recruit but for reasons I'll not try to explain here, the employer is better off letting somebody else do the recruiting. I've been hired to do that and this is one of the rare cases where headhunters will still be a necessity, not a luxury. But the truth is, I've been paid a lot of fees for "finding" people my clients could have found if they : 1. weren't lazy 2. knew how to network 3. had some electronic tools to facilitate their networking.

Way back in the early 90s when I left my first career and started headhunting the first time, we had phones and fax machines. We didn't have email. We didn't have search engines. We didn't have websites. We certainly didn't have Twitter and LinkedIn and blogs. If we did - and if we headhunters were the only people who had them - we could have all made $millions in search fees every year until employers also had those tools.

But now employers do have those tools, and like I recently told a client and friend, "If you'll start using social media you may never need me or any other headhunter ever again."

Headhunters, please, spare me the angry emails and the nasty comments. I've heard it all before on various LinkedIn forums. Yes, I understand that those of us who have honed our search skills and our interview skills and our salary negotiation skills and so on still have something to offer to some employers but, come on, admit it, what headhunters basically do is this: we network. We network until we find the candidate we think can get the job offer. That's basically what we do. Yes, as I said before, there are cases where the employer shouldn't make the approach himself for reasons I may explain in a future blog, but, for the most part, headhunting is 90% networking - something that has never been easier for those who either have the networking gene or are willing to learn and do.

Lazy, non-networking employers will still need headhunters.

2. Membership organizations of all types will no longer be able to sell memberships just by holding a captive audience that can only be accessed by paying members. If this social media thing ever catches on and professionals ever learn how to network, they won't need a Chamber of Commerce event or a Chamber membership directory or a Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programmers event to provide them with a way to meet people. LinkedIn provides categorized access to those folks right now. Later today, after I publish this post, if somebody goes to Google and types "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" or "headhunters" they'll find this post and they can contact me if they want. They don't need to meet me through a membership org.

If this social media thing ever catches on, membership orgs will have to deliver more than access to their members because you and I will already have access to their members.

3. If social media ever catches on, we will all need to either become really, really good at managing our online "brands" or we will have to hire people to manage our online brands. Let's say you apply for a job and the employer looks at your Facebook friends, sees somebody he doesn't like, and decides that if you have friends he doesn't like then you won't be a "fit" in his company. This happens all the time right now and it will happen much more if this social media thing ever catches on.

Or suppose you say something in your blog that your boss doesn't like. Maybe you get fired.

Of course, the reverse is also true. If social media ever catches on, it will be easier than ever for us to all decide who we want to affiliate with. People with similar interests or beliefs or who need each other's skills or expertise will find each other if we effectively manage our online brands.

But only if social media catches on.

If You Don't Believe Jesus, Maybe You'll Believe Seth Godin

Yesterday, while sitting in my driveway waiting for people to come buy my furniture and other contents of my house, I started reading a Seth Godin book called Tribes. I've read other Seth Godin books so I new what I was in for. I knew it would be poorly organized. I knew there would be a lot of short sentences and sentence fragments. I knew there wouldn't be footnotes or a glossary or an index and that if I wanted to go back and find a passage I'd have to mark the page in some way because it would be impossible to find it again. Tribes doesn't even have a table of contents listing chapter titles.

Godin has become famous enough and has sold enough books now that he doesn't have to work hard at the craft of writing. His books at least the last few - are like, say, furniture that you put together yourself. The raw materials are there but the structure isn't. His books read like rough drafts or like beta software that is several iterations from gold. Godin knows that taking the time to re-write and polish his words won't make them sell any better, so he doesn't.

So why do I read Godin? I read Godin for the little factoids he drops into his books, the little illustrations, the little stories - some of them apocryphal, I'm sure. For example, had I not read Tribes I might not know that Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, once said Google was a house of cards, not even a real company. Godin told me this to illustrate how fast the innovators, the heretics, the upstarts like Microsoft can become hidebound keepers of a faith and persecutors of heretics and how quickly the heretics become the orthodoxy that resists change.

In a way, Tribes is another book about leadership but instead of starting where other leadership books start - with the massive, overinflated egos of the people who read books about how to become leaders - Godin focuses on the tribe itself and how leadership grows organically out of the technological and psychographic stew that hasn't really become a tribe yet. The leadership message of Tribes is a variation of the old saying "Find a parade and get in front of it."

Finding a parade and getting in front of it is what he did with this book. Had Godin not written it somebody else would have had to because for several years now people have been talking about the fundamentally tribal nature of human beings and how we all tend to informally arrange ourselves into tribes. Branding books have been telling us for years now that creating powerful brands is fundamentally about facilitating the human urge to belong to a cool tribe like Apple or Starbucks.

But Tribes isn't a book about marketing or branding. Tribes is about - well, let me quote Godin on what it's about - and it isn't easy since the book doesn't have an index or a table of contents: "A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe."

The key words are "communication" and "assemble". Godin recognizes that the kind of organic leader he's writing about doesn't invent a tribe or an idea then try to persuade people to rally to that invention, rather the organic leader sees hints of tribedom in the crowds and then gets them communicating with each other until they start thinking of themselves as a tribe. To illustrate this, Godin shares his rememberance of the simple newsletter that put him on the leadership map when he was 24-years old and with a tiny software company called Spinnaker. After an internship, Spinnaker offered Godin a job launching a new brand. He had no secretary, no staff, no programmers and an impossible ship date.

So he launched a newsletter in which he extolled the virtues of the new brand and how exciting it was and bored programmers and engineers started asking if they could transfer to the new project. Godin doesn't claim the newsletter persuaded people to come to his team. Godin sensed that there were people at Spinnaker who wanted a challenge, a journey, a ride. His newsletter gave them a movement to sign up for and showed them where to sign up.

I've done it again. I've blogged wrong. This post is way too lengthy.

So let me wrap this up by violating another canon of blogging. I'm going to close by limiting my blog's audience, by making a personal reference to a local guy who knows there's a tribe within a crowd we have been calling "New Lexington" but who hasm in my opinion, been going about leading this pre-tribal crowd wrong way. Because we are both armchair theologians and barber shop Bible scholars, we have been communicating leadership principles to each other by swapping biblical references. I've been telling my aspiring tribal leader to notice that when Jesus came up to Jerusalem where he changed the world, he didn't try to persuade other tribal leaders to convert. He knew they wouldn't. Jesus knew that people who get their power and their livelihood from an old system don't help the guy who wants to introduce a new system. They fight it. They resist it. If need be, they crucify somebody.

Jesus took his message of a New Way to people who were mentally "up for grabs", people who weren't getting power or prestige or their livelihood from the Old Way, people who weren't invested in the Old Way. Jesus went to regular people who were just trying to earn a living. And they followed him.

Had nobody followed Jesus, taken him seriously, he wouldn't have been a threat to the established order, the powerful people who had a vested interest in suppressing dissent. Had nobody followed Jesus, the Roman occupiers and the Jewish religious leaders could have ignored him but when people began to listen to him and to follow him, Jesus couldn't be ignored.

I keep telling my friend that he will have no power to influence change until the tribal leaders of Old Lexington see people following him. And I don't mean Twitter followers. Until he has followers, he's just an egomaniac who wants attention or a lunatic with a Messiah complex but as soon as you have followers, you have influence.

People who get their power from the current power structure aren't going to follow a guy who wants to build a new power structure. So don't waste your time on them. Go to the disenfranchised and the disengaged and provide them with information and give them a way to identify and interact with each other.

My friend doesn't believe me. Or Jesus. So maybe he'll believe Seth Godin who said:

"Growth doesn't come from persuading the most loyal members of other tribes to join you. They will be the last to come around. Instead, you'll find more fertile ground among seekers, among people who desire the feeling they get when they're part of a vibrant, growing tribe, but who are still looking for that feeling."

"If you're trying to persuade... don't start with the leader of the opposition. Begin instead with the passionate individuals who haven't been embraced by other tribes yet. As you add more and more people like these, your option becomes safer and more powerful..."

I Don't Blog Right

As my regular readers know and my LinkedIn groups tell me, I don't blog right. My posts are lengthy and infrequent. I'm not selling anything. I'm not running for City Council. I'm not trying to get invited to be the keynote speaker at your professional association's next convention - though two careers ago I got a few of those gigs and it was the easiest money I ever made.

"If I could get a speaking gig or two every week" I used to say, "I'd never do another honest day's work."

By the way, there is and always has been an inverse relationship between how hard I work and how much money I make. This is, of course, the opposite of what your parents, your teachers, your boss and other authority figures say. To hear your CEO tell it, he makes several thousand times more money than you make because he works several thousand times harder than you do. But I know the truth. I've cruised into some convention center where franchise owners or over-regulated business owners have gathered to network and schmooze and complain, I've stayed in a nice hotel and eaten pricey food at somebody else's expense, talked for an hour, and then left town with a check for many times my normal rate of pay.

It's no wonder there are so many people on LinkedIn who want to make a living speaking and presenting. Who wouldn't? I guess the only people who don't want to make a living this way are those people who tell the pollsters they fear public speaking even more than they fear death.

I don't believe them.

In fact, I suspect this is why so many people start bogging right before announcing that they have filed for the mayoral race or for a seat on city council. I think they believe that if they get elected to something they can just go around making speeches and having Q and A sessions with people for a living. First comes the blog, then the speaking.

I'm not saying that all bloggers or speakers are egomaniacs, but I suspect that there would be fewer bloggers and aspiring speakers and politicians and preachers if these poor people could get somebody to pay attention to them any other way.

Same goes for excessive, frivolous tweeting. In some cases, I'm convinced it's a cry for help, part of their search for significance.

I've also noticed that people start blogging and tweeting and Linking In and doing social media of all kinds when they are about to lose their jobs. Or when they want to leave their company and go to a new one.

When I worked at Lexmark I could always tell who was trying to get a promotion because they suddenly started dressing just a little better and carrying books on leadership.

People who don't blog or tweet or LinkIn or carry around leadership books until they want a promotion or a new job should put down the leadership books and read Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone and Tim Sanders' Love Is The Killer App and Harvey Mackay's Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty - all books about how to network. People who don't have the networking gene need to learn because, as I said in a previous post, competence only gets you into a game that relationships win.

As for selling something, the only things I want to sell right now are, in this order, (1) the contents of my house then (2) my house.

Perhaps I'll post again tomorrow and tell you what I was reading and thinking while I sat there in my driveway selling my possessions today.