Career Capital - Useful traits

What are the personality traits that are associated with a good employee?  When hiring, what should you look for?

Conversely, we all work for somebody so what are the traits we should develop in ourselves?

I saw this list some place.  It isn't mine, but I can't remember where I found it.  It's a good list:

1. Action-oriented
2. Intelligent
3. Ambitious
4. Autonomous
5. Leadership
6. Cultural fit (personality)
7. Upbeat
8. Confident
9. Successful
10. Honest
11. Detail oriented
12. Modest
13. Hard-working / results-oriented
14. Marketable / presentable
15. passionate

I think one of the most interesting ones on that list is "marketable/presentable".  I know many people who fail to separate their work persona from their personal life persona.  I sometimes struggle with this, as well.  There is a constant battle between being authentic and being marketable.

If your personal life persona is naturally highly-polished, buttoned-down and carefully worded then that's probably fine -- lucky you!  If your natural persona is not highly diplomatic and you aspire to a role that requires careful diplomacy then there's a conflict -- adopt a different work persona or adopt a different career objective or prepare for a pretty frustrating slog.

"Decision Intelligence"

What are the steps of successful business strategy?

• Market Intelligence (outside facing)
• Market Sizing/forecasting
• customer trends, workloads, size, growth
• drivers, sensitivity, elasticity
• current customer groups, neighbors.  things your products could serve
• what are the customer needs for each group of customers?  what measures of performance and quality are important to them and what is their utility curve?
• Design Win Pipeline
• What RFQ and RFP are in the pipeline?
• What products best fit the customer requirements, both on roadmap and off roadmap?
• What are our chances for each opportunity?
• probability of the win
• size of the win, assuming we do win
• Prospect Estimations (workload / sku mapping)
• how will products play in the market, given the needs of the customers?  how do the performance/quality characteristics of these products match up to the needs of the customers?
• What does the competitive environment look like?  How do our products stack up?
• How much market share can we expect to capture?
• How much can we charge for our product?
• Business Intelligence (inside facing)
• Product Roadmap / communication
• what products do we have in the market now?  what about our competition?
• What products are in the pipeline?  What products are we not currently developing but could be?
• what are the important performance/quality characteristics of those products?
• what is the cost structure for those products?
• Project Planning/execution
• When will our products be ready?
• What resources will we need to develop our product?
• What resources will we need to bring our product to market effectively?  To support our customers?
• What risks are there to our project planning?  How can things go wrong, and if they do, what will the impact be?
• Execution Risk
• Upstream Roadmap risk
• interrelationships between project decisions  - 
• what projects are required for other projects?  
• what projects are required to build a product?  
• what projects help shape the markets? 
• what projects are required to take a product to market?
• Decision Intelligence
• Project strategy (portfolio) / funding
• funding decisions - what projects to do / cancel / keep alive
• Enterprise Risk
• What major pivot factors exist that would radically change the value of our company?
• What decisions would we make differently if we had perfect information?
• How can we hedge our bets most effectively?

Fun shows with asshole philosophies

Two shows have been driving me crazy lately... they are #Game of Thrones and #The Walking Dead.

They drive me crazy because I really want to like both of them.  I like Zombie/post-apocalypse stuff and I like the Medieval/fantasy stuff.  These are two shows that are made for grown-ups, have legs and are about things I like in my entertainment.  But they both frustrate the living hell out of me, and I think I know why.

They're both made by assholes.

For example, let's talk about the philosophy in The Walking Dead.  Or better yet, read this Cracked article that does.

Let's talk about the philosophy in Game of Thrones... I'm not even sure there is one.  It seems more like just a mysognyistic hate-fueled fan-fiction written by a miserable person out to punish everybody except Samuel Tarly.  Which isn't surprising from this guy:

For cripe's sake, just look at the guy.

Which brings me to my point.

Immersing yourself in literature is a sense of immersing yourself in the philosophy of the author.  It is actually very intellectually exposed because --as the reader--you let your guard down.  The lessons and morals of the story slide through unexplored by your rational mind because they come through the activities and repercussions that the characters face.  We rarely think through what the lesson is, and whether or not it is valid.

So why the hell are we watching so many shows that have such terrible philosophies?  Why are people who are clearly assholes making so much of our entertainment?