You Need to Be Relevant to Your Employer

A couple of months ago, I was playing golf with a friend of mine, and he showed up to the golf lesson visibly agitated.  He lives in an area of Los Angeles called Hidden Hills which is not too far from the world headquarters of Countrywide Mortgage.  As you might imagine, there are acres of buildings for Countrywide and other mortgage companies around this area that are sitting practically empty.  Not too long ago, these buildings were filled with thousands of people selling mortgages to mortgage brokers and others.  Now, most of these people are out of jobs. All around this area, businesses are closing and people are pretty desperate. In the early evenings, if you drive by these Countrywide  buildings, you can see into the windows.  Inside there should be hundreds of people visibly moving around; however, in most cases you see no one.

What has happened in the mortgage industry is that many of the jobs that used to exist have simply disappeared. The disappearance of these jobs had thrown tens of thousands of people out of work.  While there are many who manage to hang on in all downturns, for the most part, the people in the mortgage industry have lost their jobs.

People who lose their jobs in the mortgage industry generally have a couple of options. One of the most incredible options they have is to try and find another job in the same industry, because this is what they know.  This is something that an incredible number of these mortgage professionals are doing.  They sit there and do their best to network. and email their resume out to every opening they can find in the mortgage industry.

“The job market is really tight,” they will tell you.

They may get an occassional interview, but they do not get the job because the companies they are interviewing with eventually realize they do not have the business to hire the person.  They may also realize there is someone out there who is more qualified.  The  hiring criteria for these jobs has gone through the roof.  Eventually, after weeks or months of looking for a job, the person may say something like:

“I need to wait for the market to pick up.  I simply cannot find a job.”

I love to chat with people I meet working in stores.  A couple of weeks ago, I was in a store and met a guy who was working in the computer industry.  He told me he had made over $250,000 a year just two years ago writing software for mortgage companies.  Now, he was working in a store selling sweaters and shirts to men for probably no more than $12 and hour.  (There is something hugely wrong with this. and I will address this in a moment.  The man working in the store had no place working in retail.)

“There are no jobs out there doing programming in the mortgage industry,” he told me.  He looked like a movie star and started telling me about some degrees he had in electrical engineering from a very good school.  I wanted so much to sit him down and tell him what to do.

The friend I was playing golf with was upset due to a friend he felt had wronged him the night before.  That night, my friend had been invited to go to a small party one of his friends (who was an unemployed mortgage broker) was having at his multimillion dollar house he had purchased when he was employed and doing very well.  The party was presented to him as a social occassion.  My friend related that he was pretty excited about going to the small party.  When he showed up at the party, he immediately realized something was wrong.  My friend showed up in jeans, and his friend was dressed in a suit.  The party seemed a little “too professional.”  A few minutes into the party, he was handed a brochure about some Donald Trump condominium going up in Florida.  His friend then started showing a movie about the development and then started telling everyone at the party that if they “wanted in,” he could immediately assist them with financing a condominium right away.

The audience for this presentation was understandably astonished.   A group of people who had been invited to a party were suddenly being encouraged to buy and finance condominiums thousands of miles away that they had never seen in their entire lives.  My friend got up and left the party upset that he had been suckered into a sales presentation he had no interest in.

While I have nothing against aggressive sales practices, what this story represents to me is someone who is holding on to a paradigm that no longer exists. While people may have been speculating on condominiums sight unseen years ago, this is was no longer the case.  Here, the mortgage broker was doing everything he could to hold onto a profession and a life that no longer existed for him.  This example is extremely important to understand because it has a lot to do with you, your career, and what will end up happening in your life.

From what I understand, the mortgage broker, in this example, was on his way to losing his house through foreclosure.  His world was literally crumbling around him.  Like the man in the store, he was making a fundamental error that so many people make: He did not understand how to adapt to a new paradigm.  Understanding your paradigm. and what you do for a living, is the most important thing you can possibly do with your career because paradigms are always changing.  The sun does not shine on every specific type of job forever.  We get comfortable with one specific type of job and believe that we should always be doing this.

The man who was trying to sell mortgages and Trump Condominiums in Florida was in the business of sales. If he realized this, he would likely not be having the problems he is having now.  He could apply to every sales job out there and probably easily get a job.  The man I met selling sweaters in the store was also in a business: The business of programming.  Instead of applying to every programming job out there, he was stuck in believing that he was a specialist in programming computers for mortgages and, for this reason, he could not find a job.

In everything you do, you need to understand what your basic business is.  Far too many companies and individuals fail to understand what business they are in.  They end up “going out of business” and having issues due to this.  Some of the largest and most profitable companies in the United States used to be railroad companies.  These were the “Internet moguls” and tycoons during their age.  However, when trucks came along, none of these railroad companies entered the trucking industry.  Instead, they held to the belief that they were in the railroad business.  If they had realized they were actually in the transportation business, they could have started offering trucking services and other transportation services to their clients. Because of their belief they were in the railroad business, and not the transportation business, many great railroad companies ended up going out of business.

In your career, it is essential you realize what business you are in.  You should not be blinded by the specifics of what you do and, instead, should understand the generality of what your specific profession in fact is.  This is the way to stay employed, and it is also the means to continual improvement.

W. Edward Deming gives an excellent example of a time when there were carburetors in all cars.  The people who made carburetors continued to improve their product over and over.  Soon, however, fuel injection was developed, and everyone stopped using carburetors.  With very few exceptions, many very large companies that had formerly made carburetors all went out of business.  They should have realized that they were in the business of finding better ways of putting the correct mixture of fuel and air in the combustion chamber of engines.  This is what the mortgage broker was doing wrong as well: He failed to realize that he was in the business of sales.

Something similar happened to the makers of Swiss watches in Switzerland.  The Swiss invented the quartz movement; however, they failed to realize the gigantic impact this would ultimately have on their business.  The Swiss continued to make mechanical watches and market these even after inventing the quartz movement.  The result of this was that the number of people making watches in Switzerland went from 65,000 to around 10,000 in a decade.  The Swiss failed to realize they were in the business of making watches, and they did not take into account the needs of their market.

What you need to do in your career is the same thing that companies need to do: They need to understand their market.  When you understand your market, you have the ability to provide your customers with products and services that match exactly what they are looking for.  You and your career are a product.  You need to sell yourself to the correct audience and know where and how to market yourself in the best way possible.  You need to know what your audience wants and requires.

In 200, General Motors released the Pontiac Aztec.  The car was voted the ugliest car in the world by the British newspaper, The Telegraph.  The vehicle was criticized many times in Steve McConnell’s book about software design, Code Complete 2: The Pontiac Aztek and the Perils of Design by Committee.  According to another commentator, Dan Norman:

In the mid-1990s, then-General Motors Corp. Chairman John G. Smale decided to bring the world’s biggest automaker a dose of the give-the-people-what-they-want ethic that had animated Smale’s old company, Procter & Gamble Co. And what the people wanted was sexy, edgy and a bit off-key; in short, a head-turner. General Motors’ culture took over from there. Design would be by committee, the focus groups extensive. And production would have to stick to a tight budget, with all that sex appeal packed onto an existing minivan platform. The result rolled off the assembly line in 2000: the Pontiac Aztek, considered by many to be one of the ugliest cars produced in decades and a flop from Day One.

The Aztek represented all that is wrong with GM’s design process, that official said. The concept car actually did something few GM designs do: arrive before a trend — this time, the crossover SUV that combines the attributes of a truck and a passenger car. And GM had high hopes to sell 50,000 to 70,000 Azteks a year, establishing Pontiac on the cutting edge.

Then came production, the executive said. The penny-pinchers demanded that costs be kept low by putting the concept car on an existing minivan platform. That destroyed the original proportions and produced the vehicle’s bizarre, pushed-up back end. But the designers kept telling themselves it was good enough. “By the time it was done, it came out as this horrible, least-common-denominator vehicle where everyone said, ‘How could you put that on the road?’” the official said.

Sales never reached the 30,000 level needed to make money on the Aztek, so it abruptly went out of production last year. The tongue-in-cheek hosts of National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” named it the ugliest car of 2005. “It looks the way Montezuma’s revenge feels,” one listener quipped. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000321.html

In an oval office interview in January of 2006, President George Bush said that he believed that General Motors and Ford needed to produce “a product that’s relevant.”  The idea of producing a relevant product is one of the most important things that any manufacturer can do.  Being a relevant product is also something that is essential for your success, as well.  Far too few people hold onto a way of doing things, or a type of job, that simply is not relevant in the market they are in.  In a bad economic climate, one of the strangest things people do is try and keep being a product that is no longer needed.  This is nonsensical.

You need to be relevant and understand what the skill you are offering is.  The worst thing you can do is not be relevant to the market you are serving.  It is easy to be relevant when you understand what you are doing and what purpose you serve.  Being relevant is about much more than just getting a job, however.  Being relevant also relates to serving your employer with the skills they need.  You need to understand your market and what your customers want.

One of the biggest failures in my career was due to not understanding my market.  When I got out of law school, I worked for a federal judge who had recently been appointed to the bench.  My interest in this job was being brilliant and showing how smart I was, what a good writer I was, and how much detail I could put into opinions and more.  I did a very good job with the hard intellectual aspects of the work.  The judge I worked for liked my intellectual prowess, but his biggest concern was that I needed to produce work that was completely error free and without typos.  Because I was so interested in the intellectual aspects of the work, I did not always give him what he wanted in terms of the error free work.  This was upsetting to him.  Because of my concern with the “meat” of what I was doing, and not the details, I ended up leaving this position after one year, and I had originally been hired to work for two years.  Had I not left, I am pretty confident I would have lost my job.  I was not giving my employer what he wanted and, instead, was making up my own rules.

The next legal job I had, they loved my intellectual insight into legal issues and thought it was great.  I was even sought out for my intellectual abilities. You need to know your audience.

When you think about your career, how often have you made up your own rules?  You need to understand your audience.  You need to know that you are in the business of selling a product to people, and you need to give them what they want.  You are a product, and your job is to give your audience exactly what it wants.  This is the way to get a job and keep a job.