Hikma Collective Podcast: Season One

The Art of Alternatives

Season 1 Trailer

Sneak preview of our first-ever season, the Art of Alternatives. Throughout this season, you’ll hear conversations with higher ed administrators, startup founders, and social sector leaders about the creative power of ‘in-betweenness’ and the many different pathways through which ideas take shape, travel and thrive.

"The odds are really good that it's going to be OK"

Season 1, Episode 1

A conversation with Stacy Hartman about curiosity, mentorship, and how to ace your LinkedIn profile. Listen in for some great stories, actionable tips, and insightful words of encouragement.

Show Notes

Transcript

00;00;01;07 - 00;00;45;22
Erica Machulak
Welcome to the Hikma Collective podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. So Hikma means wisdom in Arabic and Bayt-al Hikma means House of Wisdom. And the House of Wisdom is this idea in the cultural imagination that in the Islamic golden age of the Abbasid dynasty, there was this one roof under which all of this creativity and innovation happened, where theology and calligraphy and alchemy and toothbrushes all get invented, and all of these other innovations happen in this hermetically sealed environment.

00;00;46;25 - 00;01;21;01
Erica Machulak
But the reality is that that's not how change happens. Change happens through relationships and communication and understanding how the contributions that you make can respond to needs, challenges and opportunities in the world. Our first season is called The Art of Alternatives because all of the speakers have in some way translated knowledge and values across contexts. And we're interested in understanding how those values and skills have translated from place to place.

00;01;22;01 - 00;01;52;13
Erica Machulak
All of these speakers were guests in our Entrepreneurship for PhDs course, which was a pilot course that we ran in summer of 2021 with humanists who are interested in starting their own businesses, and through that process, thinking about the value that their academic work could bring to all kinds of clients and customers and new environments. Our first episode is an interview with Dr. Stacy Hartman, who is the director of the PublicsLab at City University, New York.

00;01;52;21 - 00;02;16;01
Erica Machulak
Stacy has been a wonderful mentor to me, as well as generations of humanists, and in this episode she talks about mentorship, luck and the importance of relationships in determining who you want to be and what you want to contribute to the world. We hope you enjoy this conversation.

00;02;19;03 - 00;02;40;00
Erica Machulak
Well, hello and welcome to The Hikma Collective podcast. My name is Erica Machulak and the founder of Hikma and I'm very pleased to be here today with Stacy Hartman. Stacy is the director of the Publicslab at the Graduate Center City University of New York. At the Publicslab, she supports doctoral students who are interested in public facing scholarship and a range of career pathways.

00;02;40;13 - 00;02;56;07
Erica Machulak
Prior to coming to the Graduate Center, she was the project manager of Connected Academics, which focused on broadening career horizons for language and literature PhDs at the Modern Language Association. She holds a Ph.D. in German studies from Stanford University. Hi, Stacy. Thank you for joining us.

00;02;57;03 - 00;02;58;24
Stacy Hartman
Oh, thank you so much for having me today.

00;02;59;08 - 00;03;13;07
Erica Machulak
Oh, it's my it's my absolute pleasure. As you know, I've been a fan of your work for a very long time, and it's yeah, it's it's wonderful to have you. So I wonder if we could start with the story of your career. Will you tell us how you got to where you are?

00;03;14;11 - 00;03;44;22
Stacy Hartman
Sure. So I went into my Ph.D. program in 2010, and I was pretty sure at that point I wanted to be a faculty member. And a couple of years in, I started to have these little sort of whispers of doubts that had to do with not wanting to live far away from my family. That had to do with also feeling like some of the research aspects of what I was doing.

00;03;44;22 - 00;04;11;13
Stacy Hartman
Like while I really enjoyed them, they were a little bit too isolated for me and also sort of some doubts about whether this was sort of the most good that I could be doing in the world. So those were sort of the three major sort of like doubts that I started to have as my degree progressed, even though I really enjoyed what I was doing and I felt well-supported in most of the ways that that I needed at Stanford.

00;04;12;00 - 00;04;41;12
Stacy Hartman
And so in my third year, I'm in my third year of the PhD, I started working with the Vice Provost for graduate education's office and with a woman named Chris Golde. And Chris has been studying graduate education for many, many years. She was on the Carnegie Initiative on the doctorate in the nineties, which was a major study that was done of doctoral education across disciplines.

00;04;42;03 - 00;05;08;10
Stacy Hartman
And then she had come back to Stanford, which is where she did her PhD to be associate vice provost for graduate education. And so I got connected with Chris through the chair of my department, which changed my life. And I started working with Chris to do a speaker series of folks at Stanford who had PhDs but were in non-teaching roles.

00;05;08;10 - 00;05;28;28
Stacy Hartman
So they ran research centers or they worked in the development office, or they worked in student advising. And so I put together the Speaker series with the support of VP GE and and that was sort of the first thing that I did in this area. And in doing that, I got paid to do about 35 informational interviews with folks around campus.

00;05;29;22 - 00;05;53;03
Stacy Hartman
And I really can't emphasize enough what, what a boon that was for me to get to talk to people who had all sorts of super interesting jobs and who had had many of the same doubts that I had had. And so that, the end of that experience, I sort of said, okay, I think I'm I think I'm probably not going to be a faculty member.

00;05;53;03 - 00;06;10;14
Stacy Hartman
I think I'm going to do one of these other things. I want to stay at the university. I really believe in the mission of the university. I want to stay, I want to work with students. I don't necessarily need to teach in a classroom every day. I'm sort of iffy on this research thing. And so at least research as it is in a literature department.

00;06;10;26 - 00;06;33;13
Stacy Hartman
And so I sort of made that decision. And then I did something that is a little unusual and was perhaps a little naive, which is that I announced this to any number of people, including my entire committee. And when I had my proposal defense, we ended by talking extensively about what career path I might be interested in, and I was very fortunate.

00;06;33;13 - 00;06;56;20
Stacy Hartman
The chair of my department was pretty supportive. I think my advisor was sad that I wasn't going to be a faculty member, but he was also supportive and I had a number of people, I had a number of people around me who, you know, even if there were occasionally, even if there was occasionally pushback, none of that pushback had actual consequences for me.

00;06;56;20 - 00;07;18;03
Stacy Hartman
No one was going to yank my funding. No one was going to prevent me from doing things that I wanted to do. And so so I felt I felt like I was secure enough to be open about it, which then allowed other people to be open about it. I mean, it was it was 2013, 2014. At this point, the job market in literature had not recovered from the recession.

00;07;18;13 - 00;07;39;11
Stacy Hartman
It was not recovering from the recession. And so, you know, anyone, anyone who really was, I think, looking out for themselves had to be thinking about other other careers. And so, so then because I knew I didn't want to be a professor, I figured there was no point in sitting around and kind of wax on wax off in my dissertation.

00;07;39;11 - 00;07;57;01
Stacy Hartman
So I was like, I want to get out. I want to get done. I'm tired of being a student. You know, it wasn't just it was, I was tired of making a living on a graduate student stipend. That was certainly part of it because I had worked before I'd come back to grad school, but it was also like I was tired of being treated like a student.

00;07;57;28 - 00;08;16;22
Stacy Hartman
And so I was like, All right, I'm in my fifth year of funding. I'm not applying for six year funding. I'm going to get a job and I'm going to get out. And so I finished my dissertation that year. I was very determined. I did not apply for six year funding and I was applying for advising positions and all sorts of things.

00;08;16;22 - 00;08;30;01
Stacy Hartman
But then this, then Connected Academics. The MLA got the Connected Academics grant in 2014 and advertised this position, which was project coordinator at the time.

00;08;30;01 - 00;08;34;26
Erica Machulak
Can you tell us a little bit more about what connected academics was or is?

00;08;34;29 - 00;09;07;28
Stacy Hartman
Oh, sure, sure, sure. So this was a Mellon Foundation funded project. I've been on Mellon Money my entire post PhD career. This was a Mellon Foundation funded project to support expanded career horizons for language and literature PhDs. It was a three year grant. It was about 1.9 million, I want to say. And they hired in the M.A., the Modern Language Association, which is the major scholarly and professional organization for folks in the language and literature field.

00;09;07;28 - 00;09;30;21
Stacy Hartman
Fields was looking for someone to sort of run it. And so I applied for that. It was in New York. I am from California originally. One of my main reasons for not wanting to go on a tenure track job hunt was that I wanted to stay where my where my family was. But I applied for this job anyway, figuring they were going to have hundreds of applications and I was never going to get it.

00;09;31;14 - 00;09;48;19
Stacy Hartman
Spoiler alert they did not actually have hundreds of applications and I did get it. which, and then I promptly had a panic attack because I've been sort of relying on them not choosing me. But but then I was sort of faced with this decision of do I turn down this great job and stay in the Bay Area for something very uncertain?

00;09;49;00 - 00;10;10;03
Stacy Hartman
Or do I go to New York, which had a different type of uncertainty to it? So I decided to take the job and I moved to New York, which was not an easy decision and it was also not an easy transition. I really enjoyed the job, but it was, you know, moving. I say this to people now, like moving is traumatic, right?

00;10;10;06 - 00;10;26;25
Stacy Hartman
Like you give up your whole life somewhere and unless you, you know, as if you liked that life that you're giving up and you end up, you know, in your now you have to build a whole new life somewhere. It's really, really, really hard. And I cried a lot the first three or four months that I was in New York.

00;10;28;04 - 00;10;45;23
Stacy Hartman
And so so this is one of the things like in academia, people are expected to bounce around a lot. And I think it's really, really harmful in a bunch of different ways. I think it's harmful financially, but I also think it's harmful psychologically and emotionally to just being expected to like pull up, pull up roots and like move someplace else.

00;10;45;23 - 00;10;49;19
Stacy Hartman
Like we're not really built to do that on a regular basis.

00;10;49;27 - 00;10;53;21
Erica Machulak
So how long, how long did it take you to feel like New York was home?

00;10;54;04 - 00;11;20;25
Stacy Hartman
It took me nine months to a year. I had to. So I had a really terrible living situation when I first got to New York, that was bad for me and bad for my cats. And I got out of that in about three months, and once I moved to the second apartment, I felt a lot better. It just it was, it was it was a much better situation for me, even though it was a totally illegal basement apartment in Brooklyn.

00;11;22;03 - 00;11;47;24
Stacy Hartman
But it was a much better situation for me and for my cat, which sounds like a small thing, but anyone who has pets will know that that's not a small thing. If you know they're not happy, then like it's really hard for you to be happy too. And so. And then I said so, yes. And then I moved to Jersey City and actually was able to, and I'm in to the apartment that I've been in ever since.

00;11;48;22 - 00;12;09;12
Stacy Hartman
So I was able to sort of like stabilize my life in New York sort of within a year of arriving. And that made a big difference to me. And I had a sense at that point that I was going to stay longer and that I would probably stay beyond the the end of the grant at the MLA. And so I did Connect Academics for three years, which was a great experience.

00;12;10;07 - 00;12;31;05
Stacy Hartman
You know, the MLA really has a national platform and so I really, I had the chance to talk to sort of be become sort of, I don't want to say become an expert, which it sounds like it's tooting my own own horn a little bit, but like to become an expert at the national level on issues of PhD, career preparation.

00;12;31;05 - 00;12;50;19
Stacy Hartman
And I got to travel a lot and I got to talk to lots of different people and I got like this amazing platform and I really enjoyed the people I worked with at the MLA as well. But then, you know, it was great funded, it was a three year grant and it sort of became time to figure out what was going to happen going forward.

00;12;50;19 - 00;13;15;13
Stacy Hartman
It became clear that there probably wasn't going to be another round of funding from Mellon. They were moving in a different direction and focusing on particular campuses rather than the National professional organizations for the next round of funding. And so the MLA was going to have to sort of do this in-house and during the course of sort of trying to work out with them what that was going to look like.

00;13;15;27 - 00;13;34;08
Stacy Hartman
I this job at CUNY came up the director of the Publicslab and somebody I knew at the Graduate Center let me know about it and said, you know, I've been involved in writing this grant. You should apply when the job comes up. And so the job came up at exactly the right moment for me, which is also true of the MLA job.

00;13;34;08 - 00;13;52;05
Stacy Hartman
The MLA job came up at exactly the right moment for me and I do believe there is an element of what I like to think of as serendipity in job hunts. You know, you have to be ready to go at the exact moment that the job is available. And sometimes, you know, sometimes it takes a while for that to happen.

00;13;53;02 - 00;14;07;14
Stacy Hartman
There are ways that you can position yourself. So I feel like luck. Luck is a combination of serendipity and awareness and I'm happy to talk more about that. But yeah, you know, this job at the Graduate Center came up at exactly the right moment.

00;14;08;07 - 00;14;37;26
Erica Machulak
So let's pause heree for a second and ask you a little bit more about that before we go on, because you're hitting on an interesting point that came up at our first take my office hours the other day. We were meeting with the director of UX Research at Verizon, and many of the participants who were there had in mind a very specific role that they were thinking about applying for or maybe not a specific role, but they were wondering, how do I do the things that I'm doing during my Ph.D. now to position myself for this one specific job later?

00;14;37;26 - 00;14;48;08
Erica Machulak
So how do I redesign my course or the program that I'm running to be exactly ready for this this position that I have in mind that I will apply for when I graduate. But I mean, I'll go.

00;14;48;09 - 00;14;53;27
Stacy Hartman
What are we talking about, are we talking about a specific job at a specific organization?

00;14;55;04 - 00;15;21;01
Erica Machulak
I you know, it was a mix of folks. I think some people were thinking of a particular kind of role, like I want to be a UX researcher, or some people were thinking at a particular organization. But I mean, anecdotally, my experience has been that a lot of us end up finding ourselves in jobs that for various reasons call it serendipity or, you know, other trade offs that we make that aren't the jobs that we expected to have.

00;15;21;01 - 00;15;33;09
Erica Machulak
So before we keep talking about your career, like what? What are the things from your Ph.D. that translated? What do you think prepared you to be ready for those opportunities?

00;15;33;09 - 00;15;56;14
Stacy Hartman
That's a really good question. So for where my job at the MLA, it was clearly the work that I had done with the Vice Provost for Graduate Education's office, running a speaker series of folks at Stanford who had PhDs but were not in teaching roles. That, that is probably what got me in the in my got my foot in the door.

00;15;56;29 - 00;16;15;20
Stacy Hartman
If I had not done that work, I'm not sure that they would have really looked at me, although I also had, I had I always had a side gig going right. And so they were like, Oh, this is someone who always has a side gig going. Seems like she has been really interested in different things. This isn't, it...

00;16;16;03 - 00;16;36;03
Stacy Hartman
I think part of it was that my my profile made it clear that I was not applying to this job as a backup. Right. And so that is part of it is, you know, and I think this is a question that hiring managers always have about PhDs. Are you doing this as a backup to the thing that you actually want to be doing?

00;16;36;11 - 00;16;58;26
Stacy Hartman
No one wants to be your plan B. This may be the reality, right? Like it may be the reality that what you really want is a tenure track job, but you are applying to other things. But I would say, you know, whatever you can do, not just in your application but in, in sort of your preparation to make it clear that like it's not a plan B, right?

00;16;58;26 - 00;17;20;24
Stacy Hartman
Is is is good for you. Right. And so I had done a bunch of this stuff at Stanford that was directly applicable to my, to my role at MLA. And then when, you know, and then by the time it's a little bit different, once you it's a little bit different once you get beyond the first job, you know.

00;17;20;24 - 00;17;41;21
Stacy Hartman
So I was I was a good candidate for the job at CUNY because of what I had done at MLA, not because of what I had done for in my Ph.D.. So although I think like research, I mean research skills, teaching skills, you know, I've translated, you know, one thing that you can do is like think about your teaching as facilitation, right?

00;17;41;21 - 00;18;08;16
Stacy Hartman
And I taught language at Stanford and actually language teaching is a great experience for facilitation because the idea behind at least the type of language teaching that we did at Stanford was, you know, you get other people to talk, know, you know, in a 15 minute class. The idea is that the students talk for 40 minutes and you talk for maybe ten at most right over the course of the hour.

00;18;08;29 - 00;18;09;25
Erica Machulak
Totally.

00;18;09;25 - 00;18;44;04
Stacy Hartman
So if you can if you can translate, you know, sorts those sorts of things into like skills that employers are looking for. And if you can get experience that, you know, even if it's sort of not directly in what you're doing, right, even if like these were side gigs that I had. Right. If you being told to get cultivate side gigs that are, that show that you have a genuine interest in the job that you want to do and you're not doing it as a plan B, I think that's really helpful for, helpful when you go to apply for jobs.

00;18;45;02 - 00;19;04;08
Erica Machulak
And when you say, oh, when you talk about that idea of not, no one wants to be the plan B, does that mean that you really need to have a fixed idea of what your Plan A is? Or can you be more exploratory? How do you how do you frame something as a Plan A that is an opportunity that you hadn't thought of before, but that actually sounds pretty cool.

00;19;05;09 - 00;19;32;20
Stacy Hartman
Yeah. I mean, I think I think that's fine. I think I think what what what serves PhDs really, really, really well is curiosity and an openness. And I, and this goes against our training a little bit because I think we're taught to be quite focused, especially once we, once we finish coursework and move on to the dissertation and it's sort of like, oh, you need to focus.

00;19;32;20 - 00;19;52;09
Stacy Hartman
You need to focus. Actually, you know, one of the things that I had going for me was that I've always had a little bit of intellectual A.D.D. and I've always sort of like followed my nose to whatever I found particularly interesting. And I never worried that much about, Oh, does this fit a coherent like, does this make my research look coherent?

00;19;52;09 - 00;20;15;00
Stacy Hartman
It's like, well, I'm interested in I'm interested in, you know, cognitive science and literature or I'm interested in, you know, post, you know, postmodernism as an emotional response to fascism. And then I like found a way to blend the two together in my dissertation, you know. And so I think there were people in my program who are much more focused than I was, right?

00;20;15;01 - 00;20;43;06
Stacy Hartman
They came in with an idea of what they wanted to study. And then that was what they studied. That was what they wrote the dissertation on. And in some ways I'm like, Well, that would be a lot easier if I never changed my mind. And on the other hand, I was like, Well, that also seems really boring. And so I think I think, you know, letting yourself follow your nose to the things that really interest you and not let people tell you, oh, you're you're getting distracted.

00;20;43;06 - 00;21;07;26
Stacy Hartman
Right. Just I, I personally think that distraction is a good thing. Like, if you're like, go look at the shiny object and see what it is, the shiny object might lead you in a direction that you never expected. So I think all of this, like, idea that we have to focus and not get distracted, like I understand that, like people want to, people want people to move through and not, you know, not take ten years to finish.

00;21;07;26 - 00;21;33;08
Stacy Hartman
I also recommend not taking ten years to finish it, but intellectual curiosity, you know, keeping an eye out about what's what's going on in the periphery. You can totally cut this out. But I, there's a great study about luck by this guy named Richard Wiseman. It's from like 2003. I love this study. So Wiseman gave, so he had a whole bunch of tests.

00;21;33;09 - 00;21;59;08
Stacy Hartman
You know, he asked his test subjects to identify as either lucky or unlucky, to self-identify as either lucky or unlucky people. And then he gave them all a newspaper and he said, All right, your task is to find out how many photographs are in this newspaper. And so they all start going through and counting photographs. And what he found was that these self-identified lucky people got to the answer much faster.

00;21;59;17 - 00;22;22;21
Stacy Hartman
And it wasn't because they were counting faster, it was because on the second page, in very, very large type, like like an inch or two inch large type, it said there are 43 photographs in this newspaper. You can stop counting. And the lucky people were scanning the whole time, right? They weren't just counting photographs. They were actually scanning the whole time.

00;22;23;09 - 00;22;46;20
Stacy Hartman
And the self-identified unlucky people got tunnel vision focused on counting the photographs, because that's what they thought the task was. And so I think there is a danger of graduate school giving a tunnel vision and saying, you know, this is the very narrow task that you are here to do. Right. When, in fact, I think the key to, you know, there is serendipity.

00;22;46;20 - 00;23;07;29
Stacy Hartman
The right job at the right time has to be open, you know, but you also have to be aware of what is happening in the periphery. Right. I mean, even if even if it's something like actually reading your email, I had a lot of colleagues who like didn't read their email and were therefore not aware of opportunities that were happening on campus.

00;23;08;13 - 00;23;28;21
Stacy Hartman
And I kept up with my email and I read my email. And so I knew when there were workshops happening that I was interested in, I knew like this job, the job at MLA landed in my email box. I was like, Oh, that's interesting, right? So just being aware of and curious about what is happening around you is a way in which you can actually generate more serendipity for yourself.

00;23;28;21 - 00;23;51;12
Erica Machulak
It's really funny that you say that. I did exactly what you said. I ignored any email that wasn't directly relevant to my dissertation for the last few years in my degree. And then it was only when I got my first office job that I started really paying attention to. You know, they had great professional development programs. We had this quasi union that did workshops on meeting facilitation and data visualization and all this stuff.

00;23;51;12 - 00;24;13;04
Erica Machulak
And once I had that other job, then I started paying attention. But I was working in the admin side in higher ed. If I had paid more attention to what was happening in my university on the admin side while I was there as a student, I would have been able to hit the ground running so much faster. Just understand adding that context and learning how to understand how organizations work too, I think is part of it.

00;24;14;07 - 00;24;32;13
Stacy Hartman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Now the person I'm thinking of who I had this, I actually had like a little mini argue, not a not a serious argument, but I remember telling a friend I was like, you have to read your email. And this other friend goes, No, you don't. She is now a tenured track professor somewhere.

00;24;32;13 - 00;24;41;14
Stacy Hartman
So you know, I think it served her okay that she that that she had but but she also she got lucky in a different way.

00;24;41;14 - 00;24;58;15
Erica Machulak
Yeah. Yeah. So but that tenure track quirkiness. Right is, as we know, has always been a little hard to come by and it's getting harder now. So what advice would you give to someone who wants to have that open conversation with their advisor about their career development?

00;25;00;10 - 00;25;24;28
Stacy Hartman
That's a good question. So part of it is knowing who you're dealing with and I have a rule which I have borrowed from Professor Bianca Williams, who is the faculty lead on my project at the Graduate Center. And this rule is can I swear?

00;25;25;18 - 00;25;25;29
Erica Machulak
Yeah.

00;25;26;14 - 00;26;00;06
Stacy Hartman
This the real is no divas, no assholes. And so and I highly recommend that people follow this rule to the best of their ability when putting their committee together. Now, sometimes you can't do this, but so the adapted rule for committee formation is you get one diva or all the rest have to be nice people. I really I cannot stress this enough, otherwise it becomes like the Westminster Dog Show.

00;26;00;06 - 00;26;22;20
Stacy Hartman
But with cats like it is just this like crazy experience trying to like get your committee, everyone's out of the country. Nobody like, you know, you just you get one superstar who's kind of a jerk and then everyone else on your committee has to be nice people. And so I and I realized this committee, this could be a tough needle to thread depending on your department.

00;26;22;20 - 00;26;52;29
Stacy Hartman
I understand that. But I really do highly recommend this. And I had on my committee, you know, nice people and and so I felt pretty comfortable going to pretty much all of them about what I about my career ambitions. And so, you know, and it might not be if you're if the superstar jerk is your advisor, you might end up going to other people about about career stuff.

00;26;53;28 - 00;27;17;10
Stacy Hartman
Or there might be, you know, or you might cultivate mentorship in other places on campus. So that's another piece of advice is, you know, through other, you know, through the by work in VPGE like Chris Golde became a mentor for me. She's still a mentor for me. Like we still talk regularly. She hooded me at my graduation when my entire committee forgot I was graduating.

00;27;18;09 - 00;27;49;01
Stacy Hartman
And so it was, you know, and so that, that relationship is, is in many ways more important to me now than the relationships with my advisors and my committee. Like, even though I like, I still see them when I go to like the MLA convention and I still email with them on occasion. But, but the, the relationship that is professionally important and personally important as well, but professionally important to me now is the one that I cultivated with somebody who was, you know, an administrator who was not in my department at all.

00;27;49;07 - 00;28;20;29
Stacy Hartman
And you could give me a very different type of mentorship. So that's the other thing I would say is don't don't think of your committee as the be all and end all of mentorship. You know, really cultivate a network of mentors who all bring a little bit of something different to the table and that will serve you a lot better than trying to rely on your committee, but also like try to put together a committee of like nice, decent people that think of you as a person and not just like another degree to confer or, you know, a potential like feather in their cap.

00;28;21;11 - 00;28;21;18
Stacy Hartman
Right?

00;28;23;00 - 00;28;36;24
Erica Machulak
And so how have you. I love I love that thread of mentorship. How have you found mentors outside of the academy since you graduated?

00;28;36;24 - 00;29;07;17
Stacy Hartman
So I had mentors when I was at you know, I had, people I worked with when I was at but at the MLA who definitely served as mentors. So I had a direct supervisor who was in charge of the project and we worked really well together and he was, you know, and he was a friend and he was a mentor, but he had been at the MLA for 30 years and he couldn't tell me how to manage a career where I was probably not going to be at the MLA for 30 years.

00;29;08;21 - 00;29;36;18
Stacy Hartman
And so I made connections in the graduate career world which is full of extremely nice people, like people who do career development are just very, they're just like nice people. They tend to be very outgoing and positive and they are just like they're just they're really supportive, nice people who obviously also tend to have an expertize in how to develop your career.

00;29;37;05 - 00;30;05;25
Stacy Hartman
So I got some great mentorship through them and I also, you know, continued to cultivate mentorship with, you know, the relationship that I had with Chris Golde. I will also say at a certain point, I think it becomes less about cultivating relationships with people who are senior to you and more about cultivating relationships to the with the folks that are sort of at your level.

00;30;05;25 - 00;30;06;07
Stacy Hartman
And I was.

00;30;06;07 - 00;30;07;09
Erica Machulak
I wass hoping you'd say that.

00;30;07;17 - 00;30;29;17
Stacy Hartman
Yeah. You know, and somebody said on Twitter recently and I thought this was so, so, so. Right. And I can't remember who said it, but I could go I could go look that up after after this. But somebody said networking is not about connecting with people senior to you. It's about connecting with people. It's about connecting with your peers and then helping each other rise.

00;30;30;06 - 00;30;59;15
Stacy Hartman
And that I think is just is critical. And I have through Connect Academics which had a pro seminar and which was, you know, folks in the New York City area who were either in PhD programs or complete or had recently completed Ph.D. programs who were interested in careers outside the academy. I made great friends with the folks in the pro seminar and I was just out of my Ph.D. I didn't have any actual seniority to those folks like I was.

00;30;59;15 - 00;31;25;07
Stacy Hartman
It was it was a totally random chance that I happened to be in charge of that person in some ways. And so now many of them are in great positions doing all kinds of things. And so that has become a network of peer mentors. And, you know, and when I you know, what I'm interested in, in thinking about something new, I often reach out to folks in that network and say, Hey, will you sit down with me?

00;31;26;01 - 00;31;51;01
Stacy Hartman
And we're very generous with each other in that network. And it's a little bit different with my with the fellows that I work with at CUNY, we have a fellowship program as well. It's different because I'm in a different type of role with them, and I'm further from my Ph.D. than I was. You know, it's I'm not like friends with my fellows in the same way that I was friends with the folks in the seminar.

00;31;51;14 - 00;32;26;17
Stacy Hartman
But, you know, in 10 or 15 years when those folks have moved on to, I'm sure, incredible careers, like like those sorts of relationships change over time, right? Like even like my relationship with mentors that I had when I was at Stanford have now changed a lot. And sometimes it runs in the other direction. Right. Those those relationships, once, those relationships can become very bi directional, even if it starts out as, you know, somebody senior to you mentoring you in ten years, those relationship, that mentorship can run in both directions.

00;32;27;11 - 00;32;56;08
Stacy Hartman
And that's one thing that I tell folks who are often very concerned about infringing on people's time or or being a burden is, you know, those relationships change over time. You might feel like you don't have anything to offer that person right now, but you don't know what's going to happen in 10 or 15 years. And so, you know, in some ways, like, if you you know, because people feel like, oh, well, I can't give back to them right in this moment, like, yeah, but you don't know where you're going to be in 10 or 15 years and that's okay.

00;32;56;16 - 00;33;15;27
Stacy Hartman
You know, the relationship, the a good mentorship relationship is sort of longitudinal. And so even if you might not be in a position to do anything for that person right now, I bet you will be someday. You know, and even if it doesn't like, there's no expectation of that in a mentorship relationship.

00;33;16;29 - 00;33;23;23
Erica Machulak
Yeah, I agree with you. I would say the caveat there is still make sure that you're expressing your gratitude.

00;33;24;07 - 00;33;32;17
Stacy Hartman
Yes. Yeah, totally, totally, totally. Gratitude, enthusiasm and curiosity are the three tools that people really need in their tool belt.

00;33;33;13 - 00;33;55;10
Erica Machulak
Yeah, I love that. I, I want to pivot for we sort of reconnected this year at a conference at CUNY virtually a couple of months ago. And we were in this breakout room where a bunch of us had gotten sort of our careers, just catalyze by interactions with you. And someone made a joke in that room that it was six degrees of Stacy Hartman.

00;33;55;10 - 00;34;21;13
Erica Machulak
Because you've been so you've been so active in this space that you've just paved so much of a foundation for many of us. And for me, it was the first time we met. I was in a giant crowd. And I don't think you probably would remember, but I've shared this with you before that it was Philly MLA, the Modern Language Association Conference in 2017 in Philadelphia, and you gave a LinkedIn workshop through Connected Academics.

00;34;21;20 - 00;34;45;04
Erica Machulak
That was awesome. And it was awesome not just because it had never occurred to me that I probably needed a LinkedIn profile and that indeed the mechanism that led me to a lot of the jobs that I applied for and got either got offered or got for in the process, but also because of the way that you framed skilled translation, it wasn't just about this social media tool and how to use it.

00;34;45;04 - 00;35;06;15
Erica Machula
It was about thinking through how to position your skills for other audiences. I had never put that rhetorical lens on it until that moment, and this was me few months before graduation, and it was just a total game changer that made me able to have informational interviews and think about how I was presenting my work. So I wonder if you could tell us.

00;35;07;12 - 00;35;22;13
Erica Machulak
I know that you've continued to help people figure out how to navigate, how they present themselves, and particularly on social media. What advice do you typically give to graduate students who are trying to break break outside the academy?

00;35;22;13 - 00;35;42;06
Stacy Hartman
Let's see here. And by the way, I just want to say that it means a lot for you to say that like that workshop, you know, really helped you because it is sort of when you do those sorts of workshops, it's sort of unusual to get anything back in terms of feedback or anything. And sometimes you think, Oh, did that help anyone?

00;35;42;06 - 00;36;13;10
Stacy Hartman
So I'm really grateful to you for saying that. So I often said one of the things that I often tell people who are current PhD students is to sort of focus on the very top of the LinkedIn profile. And the top of the LinkedIn profile tends to be headshot headline and then the summary.And people make a couple of different mistakes.

00;36;13;10 - 00;36;32;14
Stacy Hartman
So headshots, I generally say like you want people to be able to see your eyes, right? You want so you don't want to have sunglasses, you want to be. I think it's helpful to be smiling. Either a nice headshot where you can see your eyes and you're smiling or a shot of you in action doing something, right.

00;36;32;14 - 00;36;47;28
Stacy Hartman
So I know folks who have great photos on LinkedIn of like them, like giving a lecture or facilitating or whatever, and those are good too. So either an action shot or a nice headshot. I think a selfie is fine, but you kind of don't want to be able to see that it's a selfie.

00;36;49;05 - 00;36;50;21
Erica Machulak
Yeah, like get a selfie stick. Come on.

00;36;51;03 - 00;37;11;27
Stacy Hartman
Yeah. Or just, I mean, I'm pretty good with my arm out, right? But you don't want to be like see the arm but anyway, so. And then the headline tends to be people often. I often see PhD students who have the word, have the words the word "student" in their headline. And I would say definitely like get rid of the word student altogether.

00;37;11;27 - 00;37;39;16
Stacy Hartman
It makes you sound less experienced and a lot younger than you probably are. And so, you know, I think Ph.D. candidate is fine, doctoral researcher is also fine. But what I actually would recommend doing with the doing with your headline is playing around with some combination of labels for yourself, right? Like, are you a teacher? Are you a facilitator?

00;37;39;16 - 00;38;04;27
Stacy Hartman
Are you a researcher? Are you a writer? Are you whatever you might be, right. And what you know and use that combination of use it maybe three of those sorts of labels to to put yourself out there in the way that you want to be perceived, right. Doctoral researcher is fine. It doesn't actually tell people outside of academia that much about what you do.

00;38;05;07 - 00;38;30;06
Stacy Hartman
So if you say instead that you're a writer, a researcher and a facilitator, right. That gives a much better idea of of it gets much concrete idea of what you do and who you are then doctoral researcher, even though those things might be contained by that label. So that's one thing. That's the thing I would say about the headline and then,

00;38;30;06 - 00;38;34;12
Erica Machulak
Before you go on, let me ask you, do you have three words, Stacy? Do you know what they are?

00;38;34;25 - 00;38;45;06
Stacy Hartman
Oh, God. I have to go to my leading profile now. What is my current LinkedIn? What is my current LinkedIn? Mine is project manager, facilitator and strategic thinker.

00;38;45;17 - 00;38;46;12
Erica Machulak
Yeah, I like that.

00;38;47;23 - 00;39;17;01
Stacy Hartman
It's what it currently is. So there's lots of ways to, to, to tweak that, you know, and you can play around with different iterations of it. So then the summary, I think this is the most underutilized part of the LinkedIn profile and people will sometimes just use it like it's a summary of their resume.

00;39;17;03 - 00;39;41;14
Stacy Hartman
Right. And I think this is a real, I think that's a missed opportunity. I think the best way to use the summary is to say this is a chance for me to narrativise my experience and who I am,and use it to talk about how I use it to connect in particular, what you do as a PhD with what you want to be doing afterwards and use it as a way of making sense of that for it.

00;39;41;15 - 00;40;07;01
Stacy Hartman
For people who might be visiting your profile, but also for yourself like this is a great way to sort of agree, a great place to kind of practice your self narrative. Who are you? What do you want to be doing? How do you connect that to the work that you have been doing? And I think that that exercise, that the writing exercise of the LinkedIn summary, which is pretty short, I can't remember what their current character limit is, but it's a pretty short character limit.

00;40;07;01 - 00;40;29;11
Stacy Hartman
But using it as a place to talk about what I think of as superpowers, right? Talk about talk about your superpowers and connect them to what you are doing and what you want to be doing. I think those are I think that's, the LinkedIn somewhere is a great place to start doing that. And LinkedIn profiles are works in progress you're going to tweak them going forward.

00;40;29;11 - 00;40;59;22
Stacy Hartman
It's it's not really done but I think it's a really useful tool for getting yourself out there and making yourself visible to people who might want to hire you, even in a passive kind of way, like just by being visible and having their little open to work label on your on your profile, but then also starting to do, you know, doing the work for yourself of, making sense of who you are and what you've been doing and who you want to be and what you want to do.

00;41;00;16 - 00;41;02;23
Stacy Hartman
I think LinkedIn profiles are useful for that.

00;41;04;02 - 00;41;26;08
Erica Machulak
So one question I've received from a number of postdocs and other recent graduates is whether or not to mention their PhD. You often see PhDs who put their name, comma, Ph.D. in their LinkedIn profile. What do you have advice for folks on when you're moving beyond academia and how much to emphasize your degree?

00;41;26;08 - 00;41;55;01
Stacy Hartman
I don't I personally do not recommend to people that they hide their PhD. There are people who give that advice. I do not. I understand why people give that advice, but I just I don't think that it is super, I don't think it's helpful in many ways because that it's like, well, what did you do for those seven years?

00;41;56;06 - 00;42;24;14
Stacy Hartman
Yeah, you know, and it's like it. I mean, I, you know, it's like, well, I was I was a teacher in a researcher. Okay. But what you actually were was doing your Ph.D. And so I don't recommend that people hide the Ph.D.. I have my Ph.D. on my LinkedIn profile. If I started applying to jobs in like, well, yeah, even if I started applying to jobs in tech companies, I think it is likely that I would apply to jobs where my Ph.D. was going to be useful, right?

00;42;24;14 - 00;42;51;15
Stacy Hartman
Like I might apply for like learning and development roles, or I might apply for like University liaison roles. And in those situations, my Ph.D. is going to be really helpful. And so I don't, I would encourage people not to assume that the Ph.D. is a problem, because I don't it is in many situations. I don't think it is.

00;42;51;15 - 00;43;10;01
Stacy Hartman
The exception might be in situations where they're using an algorithm for deciding who moves forward and PhDs, especially in the humanities, are getting weeded out. And so that can be a little bit difficult, but I'm not sure that it would be helped by taking the PhD off.

00;43;11;09 - 00;43;29;22
Erica Machulak
Yeah and I think some of the piece there. Right. It's, it's not so much about hiding your degree is about translating your skills and your experiences so that they are intelligible to whoever the employer is. So those algorithms often focus on word association and are you able to use the language in the job description to describe what you've done?

00;43;30;04 - 00;43;54;18
Erucan Machulak
You know, like government jobs do this to where they're looking for. I don't I don't know whether they're always using computers or just 1 to 1 matching, but you have to be so careful about the process that you're looking for exact alignment. And if you're a Ph.D. in English, you can decode a job description and determine which of those points on the job description can be sort of reverse engineered and explained through the skills that you've had.

00;43;54;23 - 00;43;56;18
Erica Machulak
Yeah, it's interesting.

00;43;56;24 - 00;44;09;03
Stacy Hartman
Yeah, that's a really good point. The other thing I would say is you can't outside the academy, you can't lean on your Ph.D. You have to like you're going to need to bring other things to the table, but you also are going to have to do I think this is sort of what you were talking about.

00;44;09;03 - 00;44;40;03
Stacy Hartman
You have to do interpretive work, right? So I remember the first time that the MLA ran a job fair at its annual convention and one of the some of the feedback that we got from employers afterwards was people kept coming up and saying to me, "Where would a PhD fit in at your organization?" And this is not a great question to ask an employer because first of all it makes them do all of that interpretive work, right?

00;44;40;08 - 00;45;05;12
Stacy Hartman
They have to all of the interpretive work of figuring out where you might fit in their organization, when actually that work should be on that. A lot of that work needs to be on the job applicant and also like what is contained in the phrase "a PhD"? What does that mean? It varies quite a bit from person to person, and there's no way for the hiring manager or whoever you're talking to to know what you mean by that.

00;45;05;21 - 00;45;32;29
Stacy Hartman
Right? And some PhDs, PhDs are not a monolith. Some people love research, some people love teaching. Some people really like committee work, you know, some you know, it really depends. And so you need to do some of that interpretive work of what is what is the PhD, but also who are you as a Ph.D.? And so that interpretive work is really, really, really important.

00;45;32;29 - 00;45;46;22
Stacy Hartman
And you can't lean on the PhD the way that you would in an academic context to do that work for you and to convey all that we, we understand is conveyed by a Ph.D.

00;45;47;18 - 00;46;04;21
Erica Machulak
Yeah, I totally agree. And it's funny because once you've done that work and you're sort of hired on the merits of the way that you're able to make the case that you are the right person for that job, no one then says, "Oh, but you have a Ph.D" or maybe not No. One, but probably jobs that you actually want and are not going to say.

00;46;05;00 - 00;46;22;03
Erica Machulak
Oh, but because you also have a Ph.D., you know, we don't actually want you if you demonstrated that you built those skills through your degree. Well, fantastic. And you have a Ph.D., too? Cool. As long as you're not a jerk on the job and you don't do all of the things that we think of as stereotypes of Ph.D. behavior.

00;46;22;21 - 00;46;51;17
Erica Machulak
It's not going to get in your way. I'm a medievalist and I haven't worked actively in anything remotely related to, you know, the Middle Ages since I graduated. But it's funny, I really credit the things that I learned during my Ph.D., especially the facilitation piece that you're talking about, but also just the interdisciplinarity and then the need to find patterns and different ways of thinking and kind of mesh them all into one one context like that.

00;46;51;17 - 00;47;12;12
Erica Machulak
That ability to navigate contexts is something that I definitely learned during my degree and just having to figure out how people think and how translation works and how ideas travel. But when I, when I talk to people who I'm working with who are way outside my discipline and it comes up that I'm a medievalist, they're always it's it's like I'm some, you know, shiny unicorn.

00;47;12;12 - 00;47;15;00
Erica Machulak
They're like, oh, really? And they, they assume it has nothing to do....

00;47;15;00 - 00;47;16;06
Stacy Hartman
I have never met one of those.

00;47;17;10 - 00;47;37;05
Eric Machulak
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, you meet these people who are working in computer science or nuclear physics or whatever, and you say, Oh, and I'm a medievalist. And at this point in my career, it typically comes out three quarters of the way through the conversation, if it comes up at all. And it's but it's not that. It's not the fact that I studied Chaucer, that is my selling point.

00;47;37;05 - 00;47;55;19
Ericsa Machulak
It's fact that I learned all of these skills and can do all of these things. And then since then have developed a track record of applying those skills in other ways. And, the medievalist thing is just like, Oh, really cool. And I just become this, you know, you know, interesting creature in addition to the professional that they know.

00;47;55;19 - 00;48;06;28
Erica Machulak
So I think it comes in handy later as something that other people may think of as a curiosity that you yourself know is integral to your work as a professional.

00;48;06;28 - 00;48;32;27
Stacy Hartman
Right. And the fact that other people don't get it, that's okay. Like it doesn't matter that other people don't fully understand what your degree, like meant for what you're doing now. It's okay. I mean, because you're going to make all sorts of connections that they that other people aren't going to make. You know, I know lots of other medievalist doing all sorts of different things and they can absolutely tell you what their degree meant, has meant for them and what it has helped them do.

00;48;33;21 - 00;48;37;05
Stacy Hartman
But those things are definitely not obvious to other people and that's okay.

00;48;37;14 - 00;48;58;05
Erica Machulak
Yeah, exactly. So I wonder if I could ask you, as we close a few more questions about social media, not so much from the perspective of presenting yourself, but of how you engage with communities online. So what advice do you give to job seekers who are engaging with others on the Internet?

00;48;59;29 - 00;49;29;16
Stacy Hartman
Oh, that's a good question. So I treat Twitter. So my Twitter is currently locked down, actually, and it's not for it's not for any particular. This is it's mostly for me because I have a hard time not arguing with people on the Internet. And so I have removed my ability to argue with people on the Internet both for the sake of my time and my sanity.

00;49;30;10 - 00;49;54;08
Stacy Hartman
And I would say, you know, this is something to think about. If you are someone like me who enjoys arguing with someone who is wrong on the Internet because people are wrong on the Internet every day, just all over the place, just so deeply wrong every day. You know, you might think about if you're having a job search, you might want to think about whether there are ways that you want to temper some of that.

00;49;55;03 - 00;50;25;14
Stacy Hartman
If you are someone who is very been very critical of your university on social media, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I would think how is how is potential employer going to perceive that criticism? Right. If they look at my Twitter and I have been very critical of my university and universities deserve this. Right. Like even the best universities who treat their people as well as we can possibly expect under our current system like they deserve serious criticism.

00;50;25;14 - 00;50;59;15
Stacy Hartman
You know, they are universities have they are, you know, their institutions with all of the accompanying, you know, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist problems that accompany any institutions in our current environment. So nothing wrong with criticizing your university. But if I am an employer and I'm looking at you as a potential employee and I look at your Twitter and I see a lot of criticism, I might wonder, are you also going to talk about our organization that way?

00;51;00;11 - 00;51;30;20
Stacy Hartman
And I will say that most organizations are less tolerant of that from their employees than universities tend to be, especially from faculty and students. So that is something I would think about is, you know, treat Twitter, I treat Twitter, especially now, as like, assuming that my colleagues can over can, quote, overhear anything that I'm saying on Twitter because they can.

00;51;31;17 - 00;52;06;25
Stacy Hartman
And so, you know, that would be one thing I would say is I don't think you can never I don't think you can you know, like I wouldn't say like never argue with somebody on the Internet or and I would I wouldn't say like never criticize your university. Like, definitely not. But but if you are in the middle of an active job hunt, sometimes locking down your Twitter is a good idea or just going through and doing a little bit of clean up just so that if somebody glances at your Twitter that they, you know, they see what they see, looks of what they see as like fairly innocuous is what I would say, you know,

00;52;06;25 - 00;52;35;21
Stacy Hartman
But I think there's a lot of latitude within that, right? Like I think there's a lot of latitude. I mean, certainly I think, you know, most organizations would be totally fine with like social justice work. Right. And, you know, and, you know, I mean, organizations vary depending on their own missions. But I think, you know, most of them are most of them would be fine with like some, you know, some political stuff on on a Twitter, like most of them would be depending on.

00;52;36;14 - 00;52;48;16
Stacy Hartman
I mean, there is a little bit from organization to organization. I just, you know, conflict and criticism are the two things that I would sort of be careful of if you are doing, if you're actively job searching.

00;52;49;28 - 00;53;03;09
Erica Machulak
And being mindful of how things can be taken out of context. If you're writing one tweet in an 18 tweet thread and it gets retweeted on its own, make sure you know how it's going to look on its own, or how any one of those 18 would look by itself.

00;53;03;09 - 00;53;04;21
Stacy Hartman
Exactly. Yeah, that's very true too.

00;53;04;28 - 00;53;14;23
Erica Machulak
Yeah. What about things that work well for people on social media? Have you seen any jobseekers or recent graduates who really knocked it out of the park with the way that they engage?

00;53;16;19 - 00;53;46;04
Stacy Hartman
Yeah, so I think so. I mean, a lot of people post jobs to Twitter now, so it's actually a great place to find out, to follow organizations that you're interested in and keep an eye out for jobs and opportunities that they might be posting. This is one thing that I would say and then also, you know, connect with people who are it's a really easy way to connect with people who are doing really interesting work that you want to know more about that might be similar to work that you want to do.

00;53;47;01 - 00;54;16;17
Stacy Hartman
And and certainly there are lots of people who have, had who have gotten informational interviews through through Twitter and who have even gotten jobs through Twitter. It's a fairly low threshold, low barrier to entry way to start listening in on other types of conversations. And that's what I think Twitter is really good for, is like you can listen in on almost anything on Twitter and get an idea of what they're going on, and what's going on there.

00;54;16;17 - 00;54;33;25
Stacy Hartman
And you can start to get an idea of how they talk, how like folks in you talk about UX, right, and start to adapt some of that language to how you, you know, to your cover letter and to your resume and and all of that in addition to making connections with those folks.

00;54;34;21 - 00;54;54;03
Erica Machulak
Yeah, I think that's a great point. You really learn how to translate the context and also the kinds of people that you would want to engage with. And and often people are tweeting resources that become really useful as well. Hmm. Thanks, Stacy. All right. Any any last advice for with listeners, parting words, things you wish I'd asked you?

00;54;54;11 - 00;55;25;05
Stacy Hartman
Hmm. I would say, so when I have asked people in the past, what do you wish you had known when you were job hunting or when you finished your Ph.D and sort of started out? And the answer that sticks out to me is, I wish I'd known it was going to be okay. And so what I want to convey to listeners is that the odds are very good that it's going to be okay.

00;55;26;20 - 00;55;51;24
Stacy Hartman
I won't say that it's good that it works out perfectly for everyone. And I won't say that it's going to work out exactly the way that you think that it will. But your odds are very good, especially since you have you have already made the really tough decision, which is to take seriously jobs beyond the academy. And so your odds, the odds are really good that it's going to be okay for you.

00;55;51;29 - 00;55;52;24
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm.

00;55;54;03 - 00;56;07;09
Erica Machulak
Thank you. I love that. And while it's been wonderful to have you, I'm really grateful for your time. And, yeah, just as always, really great, inspiring, energizing conversation. So thanks so much, Stacy.

00;56;08;00 - 00;56;12;17
Stacy Hartman
Well, thank you so much. This was great. I really enjoyed it.

00;56;12;17 - 00;56;39;06
Erica Machulak
We hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective podcast. I'm your host, Eric Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. The production of this episode was led by our fearless creative director, Sophia van Hees in collaboration with Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre and Matthew Tomkinson. Matthew composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence.

00;56;40;06 - 00;57;04;04
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate B.C., Tech Nation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;57;05;04 - 00;57;17;06
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

Finding the Story

Season 1, Episode 2

A conversation with Crystal Moten about storytelling, authenticity, and the realities of pursuing a career that sustains you intellectually, emotionally, and financially.

Show Notes

Transcript

00;00;04;15 - 00;00;40;18
Erica Machulak
Welcome to the Hikma Collective podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak: writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. We're calling this season The Art of Alternatives because we're looking at how people bring their values and skills across contexts in really interesting ways that are inspiring both personally and intellectually. In this episode, we're talking with Dr. Crystal Marie Moten. Crystal is a historian who specializes in 20th century United States and women's gender history with a specialization in African-American women's history.

00;00;41;14 - 00;01;03;17
Erica Machulak
Her research examines black women's struggles for economic justice in the 20th century urban north. She currently works as curator of African-American history in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She's also public historian in residence at American University. And both of those roles are in Washington, D.C.

00;01;05;19 - 00;01;38;21
Erica Machulak
Crystal and I have had many very generative coffee conversations about social enterprise and the ways that people across contexts to do good work and what that means in both the way that you find purpose and the way that you thrive in your personal life. And she's really been an inspiration well before and throughout the development of Hikma, so I'm really pleased to be able to share this conversation between Crystal and our course participants with you.

00;01;38;29 - 00;01;41;15
Erica Machulak
Hope you enjoy.

00;01;45;18 - 00;01;55;01
Erica Machulak
Well, thank you, everyone. All right. Crystal, would you please tell us sort of what you're doing now and how you got to where you are?

00;01;55;16 - 00;02;23;00
Crystal Moten
Yeah, awesome. I would love to. So right now, professionally, I am working as a curator of African-American history at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.. And so curator there I've been at the museum. I just made my two year anniversary last week. I've spent more time working from home than in the actual museum because of our current global health crises.

00;02;23;29 - 00;02;55;18
Crystal Moten
But I got to the museum after really having a reckoning about how I wanted to be a historian and how I wanted to use the skills that I had both learned in graduate school and post graduate school. And so I ended up coming to the museum. I was a professor, assistant professor of history for six years. I've worked at two institutions, both small liberal arts colleges, one on the East Coast, one in the Upper Midwest.

00;02;55;26 - 00;03;20;29
Crystal Moten
And what I realized about working, doing history in those environments was that the audience that I wanted to reach was different from the audience I wanted to reach. And the audience I wanted to reach was a kind of a small, privileged group of folks, diverse in some ways and undiverse in other ways.

00;03;21;16 - 00;03;53;25
Crystal Moten
But I wanted more people to have access to the stories that I know and love, that I studied, that I experienced personally, and that I thought that other people knowing would help to transform our world and bring us closer to liberation and justice, specifically for African-Americans or black folks. And so at the museum, some positions came up for scholars who had research, writing and communication skills in African-American history.

00;03;54;02 - 00;04;22;22
Crystal Moten
And although I had never worked at a museum, I love museums, but I didn't particularly have any specific museum training. I just threw my hat in the bag. And I really learned about the job, as I went through the interview process and through that interview process, I figured out that, Oh, this is something I can use my skills toward, as well as put the topic that I love more on a national platform.

00;04;22;27 - 00;04;51;23
Crystal Moten
And so that's what brought me to the the American History Museum. Now, because I came from the professoriate, I still had a number of projects I was working on, including writing a book, which I'm in the process of almost finishing, as well as really still being interested in an education that is my calling, I believe, even though my professional work revolves around history.

00;04;51;29 - 00;05;18;00
Crystal Moten
I do believe my calling in life is to be an educator. And so that's in my heart. And so I'm always looking for ways to to teach. And so at the museum, you can do public programs. You can talk to small audiences. But, there really is not the you can adjunct, which I also do, but there really is not a dedicated pathway, a toward education as a curator.

00;05;18;24 - 00;05;45;26
Crystal Moten
And so this led me to think about, okay, the intersection of education, of digital studies and black history. And that's what led me to start the podcast, which you all have many of you have listen to the pilot episode. And so that kind of feeds my love of education, my love of sharing stories, and my love of introducing black history to a very broad audiences.

00;05;45;26 - 00;05;49;23
Crystal Moten
So that's a little bit about where I am right now and how I got to be where I am.

00;05;50;24 - 00;06;06;10
Erica Machulak
Things I love how you've talked about being educators, of calling and also education, taking all these different forms. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it means to be a scholar and how much you see yourself as a scholar and all these different facets of your life.

00;06;07;01 - 00;06;34;20
Crystal Moten
Yeah, you know, that's a very interesting question because there are some who would say that because I you know, I left the professoriate. I'm no longer in the academy, that I'm either not a scholar or I'm not an academic. Right? And I see myself as both, because for me, a scholar forces knowledge, a scholar pursues is in pursuit of answering various types of questions.

00;06;35;03 - 00;07;00;04
Crystal Moten
And what I think now is that I have more tools in my toolkit to answer questions about the topics that matter most to me. And so I see myself as a scholar because I'm interested in the pursuit and the dissemination of knowledge. Right. And that can happen. I mean, that can happen anywhere, actually. You know, I think of scholar broadly, broadly defined as well as knowledge and as well as intellectualism.

00;07;00;04 - 00;07;16;26
Crystal Moten
And that's kind of part of what my research project is about as well. And so I definitely see myself as a scholar, but with more tools at my disposal because I am in, I'm able to cross many different kind of mediums as well as different types of industries now.

00;07;18;07 - 00;07;38;12
Erica Machulak
I love that. Thank you. I love that explanation. I've been thinking a lot about a term that's come up in our in our conversations, a lot with different people in this course about what it means to be an independent scholar. And I keep playing with this idea of the networked scholar. Right? None of us really operate totally on an island on our own.

00;07;38;12 - 00;07;51;28
Erica Machulak
And so one of the things that being an scholar outside of those traditional academic structures opens up for you is that you can do your scholarship in collaboration with all kinds of folks and however you want. I mean, this event being a case in point. Yeah.

00;07;51;29 - 00;08;15;09
Crystal Moten
Yes, I totally I totally agree. I mean, the thing about being a scholar for me and you might be able to make it to generalize, but I'm not really a theory person, so I hate generalizing and I'm a historian. So it's context, time and space, right? And so thinking about being a scholar, you always have to be embedded within a community, right?

00;08;15;16 - 00;08;36;29
Crystal Moten
Because while many times, especially for the humanities, you know, we are mostly single authored, independent. Working on your own project. Right? And it can it can seem like, okay, you're just, you know, your your one little self off in your office doing your own independent project. But actually, in order for you to get your project done, you need to be a community.

00;08;36;29 - 00;09;05;00
Crystal Moten
And that community can be you know, you're creating that community with your research, with the revision process, disseminating your research. And so for thinking about independent scholar, I have to think about independent of what? Because you're not independent of a community of support. You're not independent of a community of research. You're not independent of a community of care.

00;09;05;01 - 00;09;32;03
Crystal Moten
So what are you what are you no longer depending on? Perhaps the academy? Right. And so you have to I qualify that independent because I don't think I can do the scholarship alone. I mean, there's no way there's no way that I can do. I can pursue my scholarly agendas, from my home office by myself.

00;09;33;03 - 00;09;39;25
Erica Machulak
And so can you tell us a little bit more about what the community in which you do your scholarship looks like? How does that work for you?

00;09;40;11 - 00;10;12;29
Crystal Moten
Yeah, I find that I thrive with multiple types of communities. And sometimes these communities or networks, as you just refer to them as they can overlap, you know, they can or they can be distinct. And so, for example, I for my work at the museum in terms of being a curator, which really focuses on acquiring objects for the museum in the national collection, creating exhibits, doing programs around the research.

00;10;13;00 - 00;10;34;08
Crystal Moten
Right that I'm involved in. Each of those museum specific tasks requires a different community of folks. And of course, sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they don't. They don't. Let's say take one task by acquiring an object. You know, for me to be able to acquire an object, I have to have relationship with people.

00;10;34;14 - 00;10;54;12
Crystal Moten
To understand, okay, what's my topic? My specific topic is black business and labor history, right? What am I trying to learn about black business and labor history? Me I'm trying to learn about the working conditions of black women over the course of the 20th century. All right. Where am I trying to go to get this information? Who do I know in these places?

00;10;54;17 - 00;11;22;28
Crystal Moten
What organizations might have the answers? What people might have the answers to? The questions that I have and thinking about kind of acquiring objects, you just don't swoop in, swoop down, get the object, fly back out. You are constantly in conversation, in collaboration, developing relationships with folks from whom you want to, understand their story and then also acquire the object.

00;11;22;28 - 00;11;48;04
Crystal Moten
And so that's just one set of communities that can be overlapping that can have multiple kind of entry points that I engage in. And that's just for the museum side of my work. Now, when I think about kind of my book project, I think about other types of communities. But yeah, so, yeah, I'll stop there.

00;11;48;04 - 00;12;01;19
Erica Machulak
Thank you. That's awesome. Any questions from the group? I certainly have more, but I don't want to hog all the time. Kendra, go ahead.

00;12;03;09 - 00;12;37;09
Kendra
Crystal I was interested in what you were saying in your podcast about coming at things from inside the circle. That's very much how I do things as well, both in terms of my fiction and my creative business. I was wondering, as someone who kind of is in a lot of different circles, academic and museum and etc., what kind of pushback if any, you get from insisting on that personal angle when you tell your stories?

00;12;38;19 - 00;13;02;11
Crystal Moten
Yeah, I think one of the so being a historian, we are really pushed toward what is your evidentiary foundation? Right. What what kind of primary sources are you using to back up what you are saying? And then, have other historians already said what you've said or have explored various ranges of the topic that you've explored?

00;13;02;22 - 00;13;39;25
Crystal Moten
And so for me, it's butting up against sometimes when the the the experience that I am trying to talk about, which may be a personal experience, but it may come from my specific positionality as a black working class woman. That's not well represented. That experience is not well represented either in primary or secondary sources. And so in bringing myself into the analysis, I might not be able to point to the evidentiary requirements or requisites that the field value.

00;13;40;26 - 00;14;10;00
Crystal Moten
And so that's where the pushback comes, right? That my experience as a black working woman, which of course, is not just my experience. But based on the black working women I have encountered where I've grown up. That I have encountered as a result of the communities that I've been involved in, that kind of inform who I am as a person when it's not represented in the traditional archival and historiographical sources, then people say, well, that's not, that can't be part of the narrative.

00;14;10;12 - 00;14;45;15
Crystal Moten
Right. Or gets it gets read as, Oh, that's just your personal experience. And while, that's valid in some disciplines as in history, if there is not an archival record that is not valued, it's not counted as you know, as history. Right? Is not is not able to be analyzed. And I remember specifically when I was starting graduate school, one of the things that my advisor told me at the very beginning of the program is that, oh, well, if it doesn't exist, you can't write about it.

00;14;45;15 - 00;15;10;25
Crystal Moten
If it doesn't exist in historical record, which is fraught, which is created by fallible human beings with prejudice. Right, with, you know, racism, with with power dynamics that would exclude certain less position, less power position, people rights. If it's not in those spaces, then you can't write about it because you have to have that with it.

00;15;11;09 - 00;15;41;29
Crystal Moten
Right. And so there's this insistence on specific kinds of evidence which are weighted, some evidence matters more, some evidence count more than others. And of the specific evidence of my existence. Doesn't count as much. And that is what I have to fight for when I'm writing black women's histories, right? When I am trying to write through the fragments of black women's histories, when I'm saying, wait a minute.

00;15;42;06 - 00;16;06;11
Crystal Moten
Okay. I grew up in Chicago. You know, in Chicago, there's this rich tradition of Black Club women, of black women's activism. I see it in my family. I see it in the church women who I see every Wednesday through Sunday. Right. As they're bolstering this church and contribute to their communities. But then I get to a seminar.

00;16;06;21 - 00;16;30;23
Crystal Moten
Right. And we read a book. And none of these women appear. And I know I'm not going crazy because I'm like, I just saw them. I just encountered them. I touch them. They are real people. But because the evidence, the fragments of their lives have not been collected in value, they don't count for the narrative. Right?

00;16;30;27 - 00;16;56;11
Crystal Moten
And so that's what I have to to work both with and against and when I think about kind of this idea of being inside the circle, it's both having a connection to and a relationship with the subject and the topics under study. Not that I'm trying to say that every black working class woman's experience is the same and therefore I can speak mine and it just is the same.

00;16;56;20 - 00;17;25;26
Crystal Moten
But that I am connected right to these stories and to these histories and this that connectedness, which, number one, informs my understanding that there is a there there. And that also makes me approach the archive with even more kind of dedication and more kind of determination to get at these stories. Because I know it's there.

00;17;26;03 - 00;17;36;06
Crystal Moten
I know it's there. I mean, I know that I'm there too, right? And so that's that's a little bit of what's been on.

00;17;36;06 - 00;17;48;10
Kendra
When you say, you know, it's there, do you mean that it's there and you just need to find it? Or do you mean it's there? It's there in the absences that you see it in the well.

00;17;48;10 - 00;18;16;22
Crystal Moten
So here's the thing. Like, I know I may not find it in the archives right? Because what I also know is that many times black women, their actions, their ideas, their their activism, their own, they're over there doing it. But there is no there's no record of it. Right. And so, for example, two scholars come to mind who do really great work with kind of speculation.

00;18;16;28 - 00;18;40;04
Crystal Moten
Right. And and speculation for historians is a little bit meh, but for as a fiction writer, you speculate all the time, right? But historians we don't speculate. Right. But there is a scholar, Tiya Miles, and another scholar. She's not a historian, but she uses the historical methods, Saidiya Hartman. And they kind of speculate in this arena called critical fabulations.

00;18;40;09 - 00;19;04;04
Crystal Moten
And that's kind of the idea of critical fabulation, where it's like she's speculating but critically. And so what that means is that you're looking at all of the possibilities of the historical moment. So, for example, if we're in 1960s urban America, Chicago, we know that there are tons of people who have migrated from South to north.

00;19;04;07 - 00;19;32;21
Crystal Moten
We know they're experiencing urban underdevelopment. We know they're experiencing many in poverty. We know what the urban environment kind of looks like. Because we've done that research. We also know that there is a tradition of black women saying, hey, I'm displeased with what I'm experiencing. We know that because we have we do have some records of that.

00;19;33;05 - 00;20;13;11
Crystal Moten
We may not have the record of that in, say, Hyde Park, South Side, Chicago. That's a lie, because I know we do because that's a rich neighborhood. But anyway, just for the purposes of this kind of this talk. For this point? And so what Hartman and what Miles would do is they would critically gesture right at what might that look like, even though we have no we may only have a new one newspaper article that said Black Beauty Asians scheduled a dance that raised money to send somebody or to purchase a flat arm.

00;20;13;12 - 00;20;42;01
Crystal Moten
I mean, that's a modern tool. But right like that, that may be all we have, but from that Black Beauticians program to dance to raise money for a black beauticians tool, like there's so much we can do with that. Number one, black beauticians were organized. Number two, they cared about kind of their sister of beauticians. Number three, they also were philanthropic.

00;20;42;01 - 00;21;05;24
Crystal Moten
They're raising money to give to someone else in pursuit of some other dream or goal. They existed in this urban environment. And were and were doing something about their conditions. But none of that was in that that little thing or that little piece. And so it's kind of it's imagining, you know, from a standpoint of what do I know about this historical context or about this context?

00;21;06;00 - 00;21;29;20
Crystal Moten
And then supposing what could happen in your supposition? It can come from, again, the archival record. It could come from what's already been written. And for me, work could come from is my understanding in my positionalityy and my personal experiences. I understand black beauticians because I grew up going to the back, the black beauty shop my entire life.

00;21;30;00 - 00;21;54;09
Crystal Moten
Right. So I have something to critically fabulous about what that experience of organizing tradition may look like. Now, when I go to the State Archives and go to the Division of Cosmetology and look up the the records of the black beauty salons. It's not going to say that the black beauty salon, they were full of organizers and activists.

00;21;54;16 - 00;22;22;04
Crystal Moten
Right. What it's going to say is that this black beauty salon existed in Hyde Park from 1954 to 1962, and it failed to submit. It's you know, it's documents to be recognized by the state. That's what it goes. Right? But then you put that together with the little the little fragment of a newspaper article, and you have a story that you can kind of critically think about all of the possibilities.

00;22;22;05 - 00;22;52;03
Crystal Moten
Right. Based on lots of different ways to look at that with the sources that you do have. So, yeah, like speculation, which again, is not something that historians are comfortable doing, becomes a way to uncover and recover stories that we have just said. "Okay, well, we just got the evidence. We justm we they're not gonna be there." But that leaves me out.

00;22;52;14 - 00;22;54;23
Crystal Moten
That leaves me out, you know? So.

00;22;56;04 - 00;23;03;23
Erica Machulak
Yeah. Thank you, Crystal. So what's the connection between speculate and objectivity, do you think?

00;23;04;05 - 00;23;30;04
Crystal Moten
Right. I mean, so so first I'll say, I don't think any scholar or researcher is objective or can be objective, because even if you, you know, you are engaged in some type of pursuit of a knowledge or question, the fact that you are engaged in that is a function of your desire and your interest in your mind saying, Oh, this is what I want to do.

00;23;30;15 - 00;23;50;12
Crystal Moten
And so already the decision to do it makes you it puts you in a particular position where you chose to do that because of your desires. And so you just can't even be objective because you care about it, right? Because you chose to do it. So I don't think number one, I don't think anybody can be objective.

00;23;50;12 - 00;24;12;07
Crystal Moten
And I think what we can do is really be clear about what draws us to do what we do and why. And it could be as simple as I want to study bicycles, because when I was a kid, I had a bicycle. Okay, fine. But let folks know that's why you're doing that, right? So that's kind of the basis that that I begin from.

00;24;12;13 - 00;24;39;19
Crystal Moten
But then thinking about objectivity and speculation. Speculation is not just willy nilly saying, "oh, I just think that this could be the case". And that's why it's really important to think about speculation in conversation with critical fabulation, because that critical part is really important. And for me, using those in tandem is what makes it work so well.

00;24;39;19 - 00;25;06;06
Crystal Moten
Because I am not just speculate, I'm speculating out of out of a context that I have researched and studied. And so in order for me to come up with this with this speculation, I have to have immersed myself in tons of different documents in life and narrowed them down and said, "oh, okay, if I go down this road, write X, Y and Z, you know, that means I can't go down that road".

00;25;06;07 - 00;25;36;15
Crystal Moten
And so, a good example is again, Tiya miles, you just wrote this book called Ashley's Sack, which is basically a material cultural analysis of a sack that an enslaved woman gave to her daughter as the daughter was being sold from her. Right. And the sack was found in modern day in like a flea market. And the person who bought it for like $20 felt that it was something important.

00;25;36;15 - 00;25;56;20
Crystal Moten
And so she took it to a historical society and they kind of did some analysis and realized that, okay, this is really important. So Tiya Miles has written about the sack, right? And all she has is this the sack but what she's done in thinking about the sack and the names of the women who are engraved on the sack.

00;25;56;25 - 00;26;27;05
Crystal Moten
So, for example, there's a woman named Rose on the sack. All we know is that Rose is enslaved, that she had a daughter. And that the daughter was sold from her. Tiya Miles kind of figured out that maybe they're from Charleston. So what she does is she goes to the archives, looks up the plantation records, and looks for every Rose in Charleston in the plantations during a particular time.

00;26;27;24 - 00;26;59;12
Crystal Moten
And then once she has that list of Roses, she looks to see which Rose had a daughter by the name of the daughter on the saack. Then she narrows that down. And so, like, speculation is not like it's based on, like, really tough, hard research. And it requires going down so many dead ends, but also documenting those dead ends so that you can then say, okay, I went down that that didn't work.

00;26;59;12 - 00;27;26;01
Crystal Moten
Right? So that means I can't go down, you know. And so it's really based on kind of deep, deep, deep research. And I think many times people that people hear, objectivity or subjectivity or closeness to your topic and think, oh, you're sloppy. And I kind of talk about this a little bit. "You're sloppy or you're not really doing due diligence", but it's the exact opposite.

00;27;26;17 - 00;27;50;20
Crystal Moten
That because you're so close and now I'm speaking personally because I'm so close to the story, I want to make sure I have done all of my due diligence. So make sure I follow every thread right so that I can really come up with a speculation that makes sense. That could have actually happened, even though I know that I am not 100% sure.

00;27;51;03 - 00;27;51;16
Crystal Moten
Right.

00;27;52;20 - 00;28;02;14
Erica Machulak
Yeah, totally. Thanks, Crystal. So. So we have a question here. Can you talk more about what things you are doing to be a successful academic outside of academia?

00;28;03;10 - 00;28;40;12
Crystal Moten
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. Okay. So another kind of disclaimer or clarification, and it's something that I go back and forth on a lot. I don't see myself as fully outside. I see myself as I'm not teaching well, I am teaching a little bit. But I'm not a tenured track tenured professor.

00;28;40;12 - 00;29;08;01
Crystal Moten
But I still see myself as desiring and wanting to influence knowledge and knowledge making in tons of spaces, including the academy. Because as I think about particularly the book that I'm writing on black women's activism, I want that to both be accessible to broader publics while also contributing to conversations that are happening in colleges and universities.

00;29;08;22 - 00;29;44;10
Crystal Moten
And so I don't I don't totally see myself as outside of the academy, but I love the heart of the question in terms of how am I defining success for myself outside of a system that has very specific understandings of what success looks like? Right. So how am I doing it for myself? And so for me, it really is thinking about what types of activities and relationships and my engaging in that make black history more accessible to everyone.

00;29;44;15 - 00;30;08;11
Crystal Moten
It also means thinking about what kind of institutional and structural barriers do I need to lend my voice and expertize to you to break down these barriers that would inhibit people from getting access to these types of histories and stories. And so successful for me really hinges on who am I talking to, right?

00;30;08;12 - 00;30;45;11
Speaker 2
Who am I being exposed to? Who are being exposed to the types of stories that I'm trying to tell? And so for me, that comes with the stuff I'm doing in the museum, it comes with community organizations I may be interested in and involved with, and it comes with continuing to research and write and interact with communities across the country so that I can make sure that the stories that are in the American History Museum are representative of the diversity of the experiences spoken specifically in the United States.

00;30;45;11 - 00;31;18;11
Crystal Moten
So that's what you know, that's how geographic I'm focused. But also what I want to also say in terms of being successful and what I have really decided to prioritize is my own kind of personal life and personal desires for both kind of advancement as the person Crystal wants to be in terms of being, you know, a sister, a partner, a daughter, a cousin, an organizer.

00;31;18;15 - 00;31;46;20
Speaker 2
And what what would allow me to be successful, you know, not only professionally, but personally, too? Because if I'm not thinking about who I am personally, then I can't really be successful professionally. And so, especially within the last few years, I've really been trying to focus on, okay, how can I take care of myself, intellectually, mentally, physically, emotionally, right?

00;31;46;26 - 00;32;16;23
Crystal Moten
So that I can be the best professional that I can be. And so that question just really for me, it hits on not just me professionally, but who I am as a person and how all of this intersects. Because I think for so long, you know, when I was a professor, you know, I just thought success missed being that good teacher, you know, making sure I published my scholarship making sure I was contributing to the life of the institution.

00;32;16;23 - 00;32;34;10
Crystal Moten
I was involved in it. If I could do that, then I'm successful. But it just there's there's so much more to what success is. And I learned that I have to define it for myself. Otherwise I'll be chasing someone else's definition that I might not ever catch up to.

00;32;35;09 - 00;32;35;27
Erica Machulak
Thank you.

00;32;36;05 - 00;32;36;20
Crystal Moten
Yeah.

00;32;37;09 - 00;32;44;01
Erica Machulak
Yeah. So what surface? What questions is this servicing for everyone? Any. Jill.

00;32;45;18 - 00;33;10;07
Jill
So I guess my question, well kind of two big questions really might take us back to your opening comments about if I understood the trajectory. You were an assistant professor at Macalester when you saw the opening at Smithsonian NMAAH. So you said that you kind of just saw the role and went after it, right? And learned about the day to day during the hiring process.

00;33;11;17 - 00;33;43;05
Jill
So I'm just wondering if you could reflect for us, and so many of us are sort of on the cusp of transitioning fully or partially out of academia. What kind of steps you took to reframe your skills? Because there is a pretty distinct stratification, right, between the historian and academia and the curator. Or what kind of avenues you pursued or conversations you had to make yourself a viable candidate for that position when much of your work history was housed within academia?

00;33;43;08 - 00;34;11;08
Jill
And then the second big question is, I'm just wondering if you have any tips or strategies for the networked scholar or the independent scholar for maintaining access to resources? Because that's the one thing that we often involuntarily give up, right, when we lose an institutional affiliation. I myself have been adjuncting for the last few years just to retain like library access and that's becoming unsustainable for a number of reasons.

00;34;11;24 - 00;34;19;08
Jill
So if you have any thoughts about how to kind of keep your one self hooked into that element of university life, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

00;34;19;23 - 00;34;43;21
Crystal Moten
Yeah, great. So as to your first question, in terms of thinking about again, I think what's at the heart of it is being able to transfer or articulate how the skill set I had as a professor could map on to the role of curator. Right. And what was the process by which I did that transformation and what kinds of conversations I needed to have and to make that happen?

00;34;44;09 - 00;35;39;19
Crystal Moten
And so, you know, when I saw the position description for curator of African-American History, a few things stood out to me. One was that at the top of the list was that you had to have experience researching African-American history. The next part was that you had to have experience writing and communicating what you researched. The next part was that you had to have some exposure to thinking kind of broadly about audience, broadly about education, etc.At the very least, kind of bottom or I would say minute to bottom was like this requirement that you got to collect objects.

00;35;40;13 - 00;36;05;05
Crystal Moten
And so what I did was like, okay, well, I've got three of the four, I've got 3 of the 4. You know, I've been doing 3 of the 4 for a long time. And then it just so happened that when I was in graduate school, my advisor taught a gender studies class that was on themes and theme theory, which is basically about material culture and objects.

00;36;05;11 - 00;36;30;00
Crystal Moten
And so I was like, I also have some coursework, but what I had to do was kind of craft that in a way to say, okay, I have most of what you're looking for and I'm open to being taught the rest. And that was enough to give me a conversation with the hiring committee.

00;36;30;01 - 00;36;56;14
Crystal Moten
You know, once my application made it through the the black hole of the Smithsonian H.R. process, I was able to have a conversation, like an initial conversation with the hiring committee, where when we're in I was very honest, I said, well, you know, I'm you all know I'm a professor. You know that most of my experience is with the research and the communicating part of the job description.

00;36;56;18 - 00;37;43;21
Crystal Moten
I have never worked. I love museums, but I have never worked in a museum. And what I asked them was, how are you going to train me? And the answer to that question, let me know that they were open to a person with my skill set and they were like, you know, there are they are training opportunities that the museum can both provide and support you in pursuing to help you get the round out the skill set of a curator and what I would say, what kind of reflecting on this, it makes me think that especially as you were, as you are all in a position where you're transitioning from something you

00;37;43;21 - 00;38;19;02
Crystal Moten
know how to do, you have practice to something you may no. Really throw your hat in and and, and when you get the opportunity to talk to the folks in the position in letting them know that you can learn, you want to learn, right? And that because you already have a process for knowing how to research and find answers, you can do it.

00;38;19;02 - 00;38;49;24
Crystal Moten
So many stories. But a small story is that in graduate school, I did not I was not exposed to black feminist theory at all. But what do I call myself? A black feminist historian. I taught myself there. But if you could teach yourself an entire field and then you know how to apply it to your research area, there are many things you can learn how to do, but you have to you have to figure out if the position you are interested in, right?

00;38;49;29 - 00;39;12;18
Crystal Moten
If they are open and flexible in being partners in your learning and your teaching, your learning and your pursuit of a new skillset. And when I found out that the museum was because I had the majority of what they were looking for, they were willing to take the risks and understand that, okay, she learned to do that, she can learn how to do this.

00;39;12;22 - 00;39;38;28
Crystal Moten
You know, she may not know how to be a curator coming in. But we are willing to help her learn. And so that's kind of how I kind of approach that. And and each step of the interviewing process, I just ask tons of questions with the understanding that I am making a professional transition. No one was, that was not a surprise to anyone.

00;39;39;01 - 00;39;59;13
Crystal Moten
I am making a professional transition. How are you going to help me be successful? And just be open to those conversations and the answers to those questions Let me know that, okay, I can come into this position because I will feel supported and I will be able to learn in it.

00;40;00;10 - 00;40;03;08
JIll
Right. Thank you. I mean, that's a really encouraging and helpful answer.

00;40;03;17 - 00;40;26;13
Crystal Moten
Yeah. And then your second question, access to resources. And what I'll just echo the difficulty. That it is continuing to get those act get that access. And what I've just done is similar to what you've done, just try to align myself with the institutions that have the resources that I need.

00;40;26;13 - 00;40;54;24
Crystal Moten
And so although I'm at the Smithsonian, we don't have all the resources, which is why I also adjunct and I adjunct at a major research university so I can have more resources. But that that is a problem of a problem of, you know, the word just jumped out of my mind. But it's a serious difficulty for folks who are trying to be knowledge makers and knowledge creators outside of, the professoriate.

00;40;54;26 - 00;41;27;04
Crystal Moten
And so what I have found is, is that it's not uniform all around, but more and more repositories, more and more digital databases have particular levels of access for people who are not tied to institution that allow access, that kind of like more affordable rates, understanding that you are not a library, you don't have access to a library, so you may need to pay a little bit less to get access to some of these resources.

00;41;27;12 - 00;41;54;17
Crystal Moten
But then me being a person who's interested in the digital, I'm also interested in kind of open access and making sure that as I think about how what I am producing gets out there, that it gets out there free, right? And it really is going to take more, more people involved in knowledge making to do that. So that we can we can begin to remove some of these barriers.

00;41;54;25 - 00;42;09;24
Crystal Moten
But also, again, thinking about how to think about change on an institutional and structural level. And I think we're moving, we're creeping toward that but we're just not there yet. And so it does require some hacking.

00;42;09;24 - 00;42;22;05
Erica Machulak
I think here I have one more question, but I wanted to it looks like we have time for about one more. So so I wanted to give the option to everyone on the floor. Anyone have anything they want to ask? Tania.

00;42;23;23 - 00;43;01;02
Tania
Thank you, Crystal, for such a great conversation. You're really an inspiring person and I don't know if I have a question, it's just more maybe like a comment, but I can see from your podcast and also from this conversation how important imagination has been in your professional development. You talk about historical imagination and now I see that you use the same strategy to imagine yourself in a position that you maybe couldn't if you follow like a traditional path, being what we consider academia, whatever that means.

00;43;01;11 - 00;43;18;01
Tania
So I don't know, I'm just really curious about your experience embracing that imagination as a so important aspect in your in your development as a professional and scholar. And yeah, thank you.

00;43;18;01 - 00;43;27;01
Crystal Moten
Oh, Tania, I love I love that. And you are so perceptive for kind of calling that out in the sense. And I would..

00;43;30;03 - 00;43;54;12
Crystal Moten
Growing up, I was an avid kind of reader of of all types of literature. And so I would just constantly be in other worlds. And part of it was because, you know, sometimes my own world was very difficult, you know? And so I would read these books, you know, be in other worlds and just kind of also and being in those other worlds, see myself in other places.

00;43;55;12 - 00;44;18;28
Crystal Moten
I'm also the type of person where I have to visualize, you know, in my mind, whatever I'm doing, right. And so right now, the visual visualization that I have is that I'm on a book tour next year, you know, because if I don't imagine myself on it, I'm not going to get to it. And so that imagination for me is also tied to spiritual belief.

00;44;18;28 - 00;44;44;09
Crystal Moten
I'm a very spiritual person, and so it's imagination, it's belief. Because, you know, there are tremendous odds against people like us. Right. And so if I don't have the sense of I'm going to see myself doing the thing I want and then believe enough to do it and then also work my ass off, you know, it just won't happen.

00;44;44;16 - 00;45;08;05
Crystal Moten
But like this, this it becomes really important because like, as you mentioned, there's some things that, you know, even with my even my imagination is limited, right. But what imagination does is it sometimes it lifts you from your present circumstance to get you propelled toward where you might want to be. Right. And, you know, you have to be mindful, right?

00;45;08;05 - 00;45;27;15
Crystal Moten
You just can't totally live in your imagination. But sometimes living in your imagination can take you to places you never thought you wanted to be. And that's the truth about this job at the Smithsonian. I didn't go out looking for this job. One of my friends sent me the link to these jobs and I was like, What is a curator?

00;45;28;09 - 00;45;46;00
Crystal Moten
And then I began to read and research, right? And then I imagined myself doing black history before a national audience and what that could look like and what that can mean and all of that, you know. And so. Yeah, Tania. So imagination. Yes. And creativity and belief.

00;45;46;25 - 00;45;47;25
Tania
Yeah. Thank you.

00;45;48;09 - 00;45;55;02
Erica Machulak
Thanks, Crystal This was amazing. Really glad to have you. And I know you have so much going on, so we appreciate your time.

00;45;55;05 - 00;46;13;24
Crystal Moten
Love being here. So nice to see you all and meet you all and hear from you. And I just wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavors as you decide what direction you want to take your life in. May, you feel inspired and confident in who you are and what you bring to the table.

00;46;13;24 - 00;46;44;20
Erica Machulak
Thank you. That's that's wonderful. We hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective podcast. I'm your host, Eric Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. The production of this episode was led by our fearless creative director, Sophia van Hees in collaboration with Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre and Matthew Tomkinson. Matthew composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence.

00;46;45;19 - 00;47;09;18
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate B.C., Tech Nation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;47;10;17 - 00;47;30;14
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you're listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

The Languages of Innovation

Season 1, Episode 3

A conversation with Aaron Mitchell Finegold about entrepreneurship, social media culture, and taking the long view in your career path.

Show Notes

Transcript

00;00;04;24 - 00;00;28;24
Erica Machulak
Welcome to The Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm Erika Machulak. In this season we're exploring the creative power of in betweeness and the roles that people play in transforming ideas into action. We'll hear from leaders in the startup world, the social sector and higher ed about roads that diverge and the pathways through which ideas take shape and travel and thrive.

00;00;31;02 - 00;01;01;28
Erica Machulak
In this episode, I'm chatting with Aaron Mitchell Finegold about the language of entrepreneurship, social media culture, and how to take the long view in your career path. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. All right, everyone. Today we're speaking with Aaron Mitchell Finegold, who is a growth and customer strategy leader with a breadth of experience across sectors, functions and geographies.

00;01;02;17 - 00;01;26;19
Erica Machulak
Aaron holds a B.A. with high honors in English and American literature and psychology from Brandeis University and an MBA from INSEAD, where he was one of the two student commencement speakers and selected to present INSEAD at the WEF annual meeting in Davos. Aaron happens to serve as a current leader in LinkedIn's business operations function. Previously an associate partner in McKinsey Company and a worldwide marketing strategy consultant at Ogilvy.

00;01;27;04 - 00;01;50;05
Erica Machulak
As a queer leader of color, Aaron has contributed to advancing diversity and inclusion agendas at several companies across his career. He has been involved with a wide variety of nonprofits, including Pine Street and previously opened in Boston, Europe, in New York, Chicago and L.A., and Congregation Emanuel in San Francisco. He's also a published author with guidelines in Thrive Global, The Forward and McKinsey Insights.

00;01;50;10 - 00;01;52;09
Erica Machulak
Aaron, thank you for joining us. How are you?

00;01;52;21 - 00;01;55;27
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. How are you?

00;01;56;15 - 00;02;09;06
Erica Machulak
I'm wonderful, thanks. It's really great to be here with you. So that was quite a bio. Let's start with talking about how much of that was planned and how much of that was by accident. Tell us about the story of your career path.

00;02;10;26 - 00;02;40;04
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I think that at every moment, probably of my life, up until age, maybe 25 or 26, I had every future moment of my life planned, meaning I could tell you to a pretty exacting level of granularity exactly what choices I was going to make, where I was going to be, what position I was going to be in at work, where I was going to live, geographically.

00;02;41;12 - 00;03;12;02
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And then, of course, that none of that happened. But the point is, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted for a very long time. And despite none of that actually materializing, it served me because at the very least, it was a useful framework for decision making. I was trying to make both micro and macro decisions that were going to help lead me to that path that, as I said, I had charted out in great detail. At around age 25, 26.

00;03;12;02 - 00;03;50;28
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Let's say I then suddenly felt much less of a need to have such a TV guide like program established for my future and felt more comfortable, I think, going with the flow. But honestly, it required a few years of gaining work experience, getting some degree of positive feedback or reinforcement that I was on the right track. And it took also the first big events, the first big episode of unforeseen change for me to get the confidence.

00;03;50;28 - 00;04;15;29
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
That said, actually, you can make these big pivots and sometimes unexpected things will happen to you that aren't part of that plan, that end up being way better than the plan ever was. And so as a result, you can then hold yourself with a degree of comfort that even without the plan, chances are not only will the choices you make, but the outcomes that they engender will end up being pretty great.

00;04;17;03 - 00;04;20;28
Erica Machulak
So I wonder if you can tell us what that unforseen piece was.

00;04;22;17 - 00;04;41;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Well, I will tell you this. My entire time from from the point when I was a senior in high school up until I was 2 to 3 years into the working world, I thought that I was going to live my entire career at an advertising agency. So when I was a senior in high school, I decided this was what I wanted to do.

00;04;41;25 - 00;05;09;01
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I learned that this was a job which we can talk more about that. But there's a whole path, I think, for people who are in high school to learn about careers other than the careers they see their parents and their peers parents fulfilling. But anyways, I learned that being on the on the business side, so to speak, in the non-creative side of ad agency work was a possibility when I was a senior in high school and I said, okay, I want to do that.

00;05;09;01 - 00;05;28;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I want to graduate college and go to New York and work at a top level agency. In this capacity. And so, as I said, all the choices that I made when I was a senior in high school and throughout all four years of college, were 100% focused on making that happen. And they really did unlock that opportunity for me.

00;05;28;25 - 00;05;55;21
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I went to join Ogilvy and Mather, which is a top, top agency in and its global headquarters in New York, working on its flagship business, IBM, starting in 2009. And I had done that for a number of years. And then in 2012, McKinsey called me and said, We're hiring junior talent for our marketing and sales functional practice, which is growing in size, going into impact.

00;05;56;03 - 00;06;29;14
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And we'd love to consider you. And I never thought that I was going to go work in management consulting. It felt very foreign to me. It felt very formal and conservative and overly quantitative. It felt very far outside my comfort zone, but I was willing to take the leap because I had reached learning and stimulation and challenge plateau, so to speak, and I made the leap and it ended up being a really, really great decision.

00;06;29;15 - 00;06;42;09
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Life changing in more ways than I can really comprehend. To be honest, I think everything about my life from that point on was shaped in some way by the fact that I had made that change.

00;06;43;18 - 00;06;52;24
Erica Machulak
Well, now that we have a little bit more of the context, it sounds like a great time to walk into our vocabulary lesson. Are you ready for the rapid fire?

00;06;53;25 - 00;06;54;07
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Sure.

00;06;55;01 - 00;07;03;02
Erica Machulak
Okay. All right, listeners, I have told Aaron in advance that I was going to give him a few very businessy terms and ask him to translate.

00;07;03;03 - 00;07;13;20
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
A lot of me, just to caveat, doesn't mean that I actually prepared the definitions or remember what they are. So bear with me. I have to pause.

00;07;13;28 - 00;07;16;29
Erica Machulak
All right. Aaron, are you ready for our rapid fire vocab lesson?

00;07;17;23 - 00;07;18;11
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I am.

00;07;19;15 - 00;07;20;00
Erica Machulak
Okay. Innovation.

00;07;20;15 - 00;08;10;06
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Innovation is redefining a category or breaking outside of the mold of what exists in the status quo. There are many, many, many different kinds of innovation. And to be honest, I think a lot of companies conflate the idea of incremental improvements to their existing offering with innovation or true breakthrough innovation, but ultimately, in my mind, innovation is introducing something new to the world that hasn't been understood or hasn't been fully grappled with before.

00;08;10;28 - 00;08;22;15
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
That yields productive results, whether that's it meets a need or it fulfills a pocket of demand or it makes something more efficient. That's my definition of innovation.

00;08;23;29 - 00;08;27;14
Erica Machulak
Okay. Consulting.

00;08;28;07 - 00;09;01;28
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Well, I think that historically, when I used to tell people that I was a consultant, they would often look at me quizzically and ask What kind of consultant? Because I could be anything from a landscaping consultant to a culinary consultant to what I was doing, management consulting. So, you know, by kind of definition and the word consultant just refers to anybody who is advising someone else.

00;09;02;21 - 00;09;54;07
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And in theory, that person is also not a central decision maker, if that makes sense? So as I advise you, you then have the responsibility to interpret my advice and decide for yourself whether or not you want to pursue that path or you want to action what I'm recommending. In terms of my personal experience as a management consultant and consulting very much as about understanding your client, their business, the category they operate in, their competitive landscape extremely well, but also bringing to them insights that they wouldn't otherwise see or have within their own four walls.

00;09;54;24 - 00;10;17;05
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And so it's this balance between being an insider enough that you speak their language, you understand the nuance, but outsider enough that you're able to bring a new way of looking at things that is really valuable and would be really hard to achieve or take a really long time to achieve without going externally.

00;10;17;05 - 00;10;19;05
Erica Machulak
Great. Entrepreneurship.

00;10;21;02 - 00;10;55;21
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So I think classically a lot of people would say entrepreneurship means founding a startup, but to me I think that's pretty narrow. And I would say that just like leadership, which again historically or classically might mean having hundreds and hundreds of reports and being a leader in that way. I think that similarly, entrepreneurship can actually manifest in so many different ways outside of that limited definition.

00;10;55;21 - 00;11;19;16
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I think entrepreneurship is in a way, it's kind of linked to innovation. It's any time you say, "Hey, I have observed something, I think there's a better way to do this. Or if you say, Hey, I realize that there is a gap, there is not an offering in this space where which is adjacent to other spaces, maybe where there are offerings, but this doesn't exist".

00;11;20;19 - 00;11;35;07
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So entrepreneurship is really, in my mind, very much tied to innovation. And that it is any time you, in observing the world around you, have essentially decided that something new is needed or would be beneficial.

00;11;36;06 - 00;11;42;03
Erica Machulak
Okay. How about thought leader?

00;11;42;28 - 00;12;19;28
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
A thought leader is somebody who is respected and has a degree of authority or expertize on a topic, is visible and present in places where these conversations are happening and is sought out for her or his or their opinion. And I think that often I think for a lot of individuals thought leadership is closely tied to publishing or speaking engagements.

00;12;20;01 - 00;13;01;15
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I think that those are really powerful, useful outlets for thought leadership. There are many, many outlets, as we know, of course, media and media consumption flash the general idea of where these ideas are getting germinated and then shared is fragmenting. And I think that there are lots of outlets and lots of ways to be a thought leader. But I do think that having some degree of meaningful experience and therefore expertize in a given topic is a prerequisite.

00;13;02;28 - 00;13;08;25
Erica Machula
Great. Okay. I have a few more for you. What is market research?

00;13;09;21 - 00;13;49;26
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
To me, market research is an umbrella term that comprises several different methodologies, uses to gain a new level of understanding of something that exists in the market outside of what you currently know. And so that can be market research that's launched to understand a whole broad set of competitors, that can be market research that's launched to understand a broad set of consumers, that can be market research that's launched to understand where an industry is going.

00;13;50;19 - 00;14;24;03
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
But either way, it's always designed to deliver some kind of counterintuitive, surprising and ultimate outlay actionable, but not necessarily immediately actionable. We can talk about that in a bit, but ultimately actionable insight again about the world at large and how either a product or a brand positioning or something that you internally are generating is going to interact with, and hopefully elevate.

00;14;24;04 - 00;15;02;21
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And so, essentially, what I mean by that is if I'm, let's say, creating a new product and I say, I think that people need a new tool that helps them. Let's say this was back in, you know, like days of pre iPhone. I say, okay, I think people I think people need some kind of tool that allows them to talk on the phone, maintain a calendar, have that calendar, get updated automatically when changes are made on the computer, do email, text message, take notes, take photos, etc..

00;15;04;12 - 00;15;32;15
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
One of the things that I would want to validate through market research is questions such as "How large is this need? So what's the what's the market? So to speak? Are these needs thought about individually or together? Do consumers already show certain behaviors?" That would lead me to say, "If we put this listen in front of them, they're likely to adopt it or not?"

00;15;34;06 - 00;15;37;19
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
That's an example of market research.

00;15;37;29 - 00;16;10;00
Erica Machulak
Great. Thank you. I do want to pick up on that ultimately actionable piece. And maybe before we go there, I'll just give you the context for why I asked you to do this Blitz vocabulary lesson. And so, as you know, I'm interviewing you as part of our Entrepreneurship for PhDs course, which is, a Haikma collective program that we're developing to help students these identify alternative career pathways, either through starting your own business or finding or creating some other kind of meaningful work and a big part of that process.

00;16;10;11 - 00;16;46;16
Erica Machulak
So our rationale goes for the program is about translation is about taking existing competencies around how you understand systems, how you communicate, and translating that framework into other professional contexts. And so many of the things that you've described strike me as components of systems thinking that are also part of the academic track. So before we dove into the idea of testing that we're talking about today, I want to talk a little bit more about how your background and humanity and psychology has informed the way that you approach these topics.

00;16;48;02 - 00;17;23;19
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Oh, absolutely. I'm more than happy to talk about that. In fact, it was actually the topic of conversation at a dinner just a little over a week ago. We were engaged in a debate about, so what degree was my academic training in English and American literature useful to my success today in the private sector? Vis a vis an unknowable training that could potentially have happened either to me or anyone else in computer science.

00;17;23;19 - 00;17;52;10
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And the debate was was quite lively in the sense that I think that there were differing opinions. I'll tell you my and my, it is essentially threefold. A) I use the training that I got as an English major in college, in my work life every day, but b) even more, an even stronger statement than that is that I think some of those skills have been the most influential in my success or the closest tied.

00;17;52;20 - 00;18;15;20
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Now, of course, I can't go back and run the actual, just the progression to tell you how correlated these variables are but from my perception, it can be biased but I really do think that not only have they been useful every day, they've been the most useful. And then I think C) is that you don't have to be exceptional.

00;18;15;20 - 00;18;49;01
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So there was this belief that was expressed at this dinner conversation that you have to be exceptional in order to major in a humanities discipline and then later have a successful career in the private sector. And I actually would really, really challenge that. I think that the logic there is essentially that if you learn computer science and you become a software engineer, even if you're mediocre, there's so much demand in the market for that skill set that you'll always have job security, you'll always have some kind of income.

00;18;49;01 - 00;19;13;07
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And because of the way the dynamics of the industry, you're going to be paid pretty well. If you're a humanities major, essentially the thinking goes, it'll be really hard for you. You'll have to really stand out in order to have an equal level of success. And if you're mediocre, you're basically much at a facing a much lower probability of success than the mediocre software engineer.

00;19;14;02 - 00;19;43;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And I fundamentally disagree with that because I think that with a humanities background, as long as you have a deep understanding of what it is you want to do, that you can use that background absolutely to your advantage. I think what often happens and what was potentially being confided in in this conversation I'm referencing is that there are some humanities majors in college who don't have a clear sense of what they want to pursue.

00;19;44;05 - 00;20;13;00
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And so, of course, naturally, somebody who doesn't know what she/he/they want to pursue is always going to have a harder time landing, that really amazing post-college opportunity vis a vis somebody who is very focused and very certain exactly what he's sure they want to do. And also layer on top of that the right experiences, the right sets of internships, the right exposure to topics, leaders, companies, etc..

00;20;13;11 - 00;20;41;01
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So I really think that for me, the training I got as an English major and less so as a psychology major, I can talk a little bit about my view of the psychology major in a bit, but I think to me the training I got as an English major in terms of structuring an argument, providing evidentiary support for a thesis, understanding themes and doing the work of literary analysis on a daily basis.

00;20;41;17 - 00;21;08;11
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
All of that has been so, so crucial in my ability to wake up and put together a meaningful CEO presentation and polish it to the point where it's concise and it's high impact in a matter of minutes. Now, I think the reason I'm so efficient at it is because I spent so much time writing essays about Mansfield Park and Emma and Northanger Abbey when I was in college.

00;21;09;12 - 00;21;44;07
Erica Machulak
Interesting. I love that description, but I wonder, I'm trying to balance that with the description of the history you gave earlier, where you came in with a very clear plan and then somewhere around your mid-twenties you described getting this feedback and having these experiences that started shifting you in a different direction. So I wonder what kind of advice you would give to, say, an English pasty who has always anticipated that they would be a professor and is now getting to the point where they're realizing that either they don't want to do that, or because of the constraints of the academic job market, it's simply not an option.

00;21;44;07 - 00;21;56;18
Erican Machulak
So they may not have a clear goal in the private sector. Can you talk a little bit about what you would advise for a person like that in terms of how to apply their skills to their job search?

00;21;57;13 - 00;22;33;27
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Yeah, it's a it's a fantastic question. And by the way, I am aware of how contradictory these messages could potentially come across. Just to clarify, I personally think it was really important for me, frankly, throughout all of college to have my sights set on a specific goal. I then achieved that goal, and by virtue of achieving it, or in the process of achieving it, realized then that that very act of achievement was actually a pretty meaningful foundation to then go off and do other things.

00;22;34;14 - 00;23;13;27
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
But I do think that achieving that first success is a really important milestone. I think without that it would have been a lot harder for me to adopt this mindset of I'm very open to a number of future possibilities and I don't need to plan as meticulously anymore. It just gave me personally the self-confidence and I think honestly it also was really valuable signaling to the outside because ultimately when people are being hired, of course you know, we'd love to move to a world where this isn't the case anymore, but I think a lot of employers will really want to understand what's your past experience, i.e., what's your pedigree?

00;23;13;27 - 00;23;37;05
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Again, knowing full well that many, many of us wish to move away from pedigree based hiring. But I do think that is largely the norm today. So anyway, to answer your question about what would I tell a Ph.D. student who, by the way, I have in my life, I have interacted with many, many academics at various stages of their journey.

00;23;37;29 - 00;24;04;22
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And I've seen probably as many permutations, at least as I can think of in terms of what does one do from the minute you start a Ph.D. course to whatever the final outcome is, you know, some of whom finish and then go on and become scholars and get a tenure track position and everything else. That's a possibility.

00;24;04;22 - 00;24;44;06
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So anyway, what would I advise? I would say essentially that by virtue of having the level of self-discipline, I'd say to enter into a Ph.D. program and do the coursework, do the orals, and then work on the dissertation. And you've probably demonstrated a really high degree of competence in a number of areas that are relevant outside of the pure, quote unquote, pure academic track.

00;24;44;06 - 00;25;03;18
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And I think that that is a really important first message to convey, because I think a lot of academics, or PhD students, in particular would probably think about the training that they're getting as relatively specialized. Do you agree?

00;25;03;18 - 00;25;04;00
Erica Machulak
Yes.

00;25;05;13 - 00;25;28;27
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And I think that there's a lot of messaging that happens, which is your study in this niche topic. Right. Like the whole point of the Ph.D. is to add to human knowledge. So by very definition, the only way you can do that is by going specific. Like if you were to go abroad and try to add to human knowledge, essentially that was not possible that nobody really has the bandwidth to do that.

00;25;28;27 - 00;25;54;14
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
You have to go specific and say, okay, I am going to say something new about the conversion of Southern Midwestern churches from Catholic to Protestant in the late 1890s. Like you have to go that specific and then you can actually say we've discovered something new that nobody else has ever published on. And so I think from a content standpoint, it really feels specific.

00;25;54;22 - 00;26;19;18
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
But what I would urge is to re-lens this and start thinking about it in terms of the content expertize and think about in terms of the skills expertize. And to be honest, that's a lot of how I view my training as an English major. Did I use the content that I know Samuel Taylor Coleridge and I know Bram Stoker and I know Jane Austen super well in my professional life.

00;26;19;18 - 00;26;46;22
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
No, I mean, it was maybe useful at a few cocktail parties, but the point is, on a day to day basis, I don't refer back to what I know about Herman Melville when I'm talking to CEOs about what they should do with their business. However, it doesn't matter that the content is irrelevant, what matters is that the skills I talked about argumentation, I talked about writing, I talked about structuring, evidentiary support that ladders up to a thesis.

00;26;47;01 - 00;27;06;15
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Those skills are paramount to me being able to do my job and have been for the last several years. And so I think for a Ph.D. as well, you say, "Oh, but I'm studying this very niche intersection between philosophy and neuroscience, and I'm trying to understand how what happens on a chemical level and the potassium channel, what that tells us about free will." Fine.

00;27;06;18 - 00;27;17;06
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
That may be a very niche topic, but the actual content should be divorceable from the skills and capabilities that you're mastering by virtue of being in the PhD in first place.

00;27;18;22 - 00;27;37;06
Erica Machulak
Right. And I would add to that, it's it's the skills of being able to scaffold that argument, but it's also the skills of being able to work across frameworks like all of the examples you've just described involve taking components of different disciplines and integrating them together in order to kind of form a very, as you say, niche understanding of a particular area.

00;27;37;20 - 00;27;48;04
Eric Machulak
And if I can paraphrase what you're saying a little bit, it's that ability to focus on something that's specific and find the new within it. That is a skill in itself as well or a constellation of skills.

00;27;49;01 - 00;28;16;28
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that it's really valuable to be able to say, 'Hey, I brought a new understanding to this topic and the way that I did that was synthesizing across existing work and the existing disciplines, specific paradigms". So the example I just gave about neuroscience and philosophy, while obviously there is a neuroscience way to look at a problem, there is a philosophy way to look at a problem.

00;28;17;04 - 00;28;51;14
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
The fact that someone has identified that there's an intersection there is, first of all, groundbreaking in and of itself. And then the ability to do that translation, which I think is the theme, as you said, for your course or at least for this episode to do that translation is really important. And I think that it's not dissimilar from, as I think about my experience in the private sector, I think that a lot of what needs to happen at any given organization is a lot of translation across functions.

00;28;51;20 - 00;29;23;01
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So we don't have disciplines the way an academic institution does, but companies will have a finance organization, possibly a risk management organization, a marketing and sales organization. They'll have technology. And by understanding how different functions approach similar problems that are really important and sometimes even existential for the company to solve e.g. something like growth or profitability. That's really hard to do.

00;29;23;01 - 00;29;39;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And the reason it's hard to do is because each function is so trained in their ability to look at a problem with their specific lens. It can be really hard, especially after years and years of that specific paradigm being reinforced, can be really hard to move outside that.

00;29;40;21 - 00;30;07;29
Erican Machulak
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right. On that note, I want to I want to change slightly to a related topic that also goes back to some of the things you said that really sparked for me in the beginning of the episode. This concept of feedback. So as we've been talking about, these are very complex thinkers who can work across those different disciplines or worlds or frameworks.

00;30;08;26 - 00;30;31;06
Erica Machulak
They might manifest differently in different contexts. But I think one of the things that I myself had struggle with as a business owner, moving from, you know, a Ph.D. that took me seven years and involved a lot of deep, sustained thinking about one thing is how to test. And so we've sort of come full circle to the last term that I had given you for that translation quiz on that term was minimum viable product.

00;30;31;10 - 00;30;34;15
Erica Machulak
Can you tell us what that means?

00;30;34;15 - 00;31;15;26
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So in a lot of thinking around agile methodologies or agile ceremonies and then later up to a methodology, a lot of the thinking for a long time has been rather than build something and keep it under wraps until it's perfect, at which point then it gets released to the world. Build the thing that solves the need that it's meant to address in the lightest weight possible way, and get user feedback early and often, to inform rapid iteration.

00;31;16;13 - 00;32;00;22
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So let's imagine a world where I was trying to essentially give you, let's say like an email software, like a piece of software that you download on your computer and it allows you to read emails. It's kind of like the mail client on an Apple computers pre-installed. Let's say I did that and let's say that there was some really fundamental design choice in the beginning, which was about replying to or viewing emails grouped chronologically or grouped by thread.

00;32;01;02 - 00;32;28;02
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
What I mean by this is, let's say you and I have an exchange and we have 20 back and forths. And one of the dissenters I have to make in my software is whether or not I want to display all those back and forth script together, or I want to show you all your emails as they've come in in order, even if that means that these back and forth are then broken up by all the emails that came in in-between in the meantime.

00;32;28;14 - 00;32;57;15
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And let's say, you know, obviously, maybe in an ideal state now today we know that users like to have the choice. But let's say at a certain point in time, we felt like we could only do one or the other or we didn't even know that providing the choice was going to be meaningful. If we put out there a product that had made one of those design choices and then gotten to the nth degree of Polish, and we found out that our users really, really had an allergic reaction to that design choice.

00;32;57;15 - 00;33;21;19
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
We would have wasted all the time that we spent from that design choice onward, creating all the all the polish versus if we had gotten them a more quote unquote barebones version of this and heard users say, 'I really don't like this central aspect of this program. I really am turned off from using it because of this". That's really, really important.

00;33;21;19 - 00;33;46;09
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And useful. And it allows us as the developers of this product or the designers of this product to go back and say, okay, we need to make a pretty fundamental shift here. And then once we can once we put that back on the market, get user saying, "Oh, we like the structure much better, then we can add the next layer of polish and do that in a way that allows us not to waste time getting everything perfect.

00;33;47;05 - 00;34;05;11
Erica Machulak
And are there analogies there for, say, a freelancer working alone who's just starting to work? And let's say we've got a grant development freelancer who's working one on one with clients. Do you see any examples of a minimum viable product and that kind of industry?

00;34;05;11 - 00;34;30;24
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I think that there are a few things that you can do as a freelancer where this thinking maybe relevant. The first is you're going to want to productize your offering to the greatest possible extent. So you're going to want to be able to talk about, say, on your website or in any materials that you have to share your value proposition.

00;34;30;24 - 00;35;07;19
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Essentially, with prospective clients. You're going to want to be able to describe the different things that you do. And I think that that's where a minimum viable product can be useful because you paint for these prospective clients a high level picture of what it is you can offer and allow them to give you feedback on where they'd want to see you take it. Versus you kind of pre imagining, let's say, what exactly the market as defined by again your your set of prospective clients or customers for need.

00;35;08;02 - 00;35;47;23
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So that's one. And then the second is through the process of doing freelance work, I always find it useful, whenever there is any kind of client service construct involved, it's always useful to align early on something that's much less polished but much more fundamental in terms of the way it answers questions or the direction that's going. I think that's the idea too if I had a freelancer working with me on anything, brand development or otherwise, and that freelancer and I spoke about essentially the brief for a project and then the freelancer away for eight weeks and then came back with something that was totally finished.

00;35;48;09 - 00;36;13;27
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
The chances of that freelancer getting exactly right, whatever the brief was, the chances are pretty low. And it's frustrating to me because I think those eight weeks could have been so much better spent if we had done a check in even just a brief 15 minute check in or it doesn't even have to be live. Maybe it's over email, just something on a much more regular cadence so that I as a client can help you course.

00;36;13;27 - 00;36;59;00
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Correct. I think that's crucial. It allows me to not only one, get that emotional assurance that your time is being well spent and therefore my money, which is buying your time is well-spent. But to also to be honest, even if the end of the eight weeks the freelancer who went away and hold him/her/themself up in a you know, in a study and then came back with a product, even if that product were perfect, I still think that it's a much better outcome for me as a client to feel like I have helped to co-create this and there's just going to be a much lower risk of organ rejection

00;36;59;00 - 00;37;24;08
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
If that's the case. If I have played a role in shaping this and I feel bought in and as a really good freelancer, you not only brought your own ideas to the table, but you also made me feel like some of your ideas were my ideas. That's a great relationship for a freelancer in a client to have, and to me that only happens through iteration.

00;37;25;21 - 00;37;38;16
Erica Machulak
I would agree. And there's a trust piece there too, right? If people enjoy working with you and feel like your time together is co-creative and productive and their opinions are being internalized and accounted for, it's more likely that you'll get to work together in the future.

00;37;39;18 - 00;38;09;12
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Yes, absolutely. I think that's one of the things that I learned very early on, is that the experience that people have of working with you has to be stellar. And that is the key to a great reputation. And the reputation is the key to essentially doing what you want and being fulfilled in life. And I'm not trying to oversimplify. There are other things, of course, that lead to life fulfillment besides just having a great reputation.

00;38;09;23 - 00;38;40;08
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
But when you have a reputation, it creates market demand for what you do and. When there's market demand, that enables choice. And the best place you could possibly be in is a place where you're turning down projects all the time because there's so much demand and you're saying, "No, I'm being really selective right now. I really want to work on the stuff that gets me excited versus the other stuff that, yeah I can do I'm qualified to do, but is a little bit further away from my passion".

00;38;41;20 - 00;39;05;22
Erica Machulak
That's an interesting segway into a theory I have, and I wonder if we can start to wind down by you giving me your thoughts about this. So many PhDs don't necessarily have robust social media networks, or they do, but they may not be the networks where their clients are. And so in some cases, they're starting from scratch or building new networks along the way.

00;39;06;08 - 00;39;23;10
Erica Machulak
And so I imagine that many people who are listening right now are probably in that phase of trying to figure out where to build out relationships, how to build out relationships, how to present themselves in new markets. And that, too, is an act of translation, right? Where you're trying to figure out what language to use, what skills to highlight.

00;39;24;07 - 00;39;39;03
Erica Machulak
And I think here there's also a sense that you need to have the perfect profile. You need to have everything figured out to have the base that you would leave us with for how to start building that new kind of reputation for yourself.

00;39;40;25 - 00;40;14;05
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Yeah, it's definitely hard. I can tell you from a personal experience standpoint, when I started to get into writing that number one piece of advice for me, I found this very odd that this was so important. But I realized in hindsight that actually it was was being active on Twitter, which isn't a social network that I had previously ever used or taken seriously or spent the time to understand.

00;40;15;01 - 00;40;46;08
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And I feel very adept at a few other social platforms and I still have to admit I'm not very fluent at Twitter. I haven't yet invested the time, but I do know how it feels. It can be very intimidating, this idea that you have to learn a whole new social network with, not only its own rules from a UI and functionality standpoint, although that can certainly be hard, especially if you're trying to learn Snapchat.

00;40;46;23 - 00;41;31;10
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
But from an unspoken norms standpoint and what is actually done on the platform, because to be honest, every social media platform has slightly different unspoken rules or norms about what is accepted or what gets promoted, what gets a lot of attention. And that's tough. There's no question. It's really hard to learn that. And so I would say for anybody who is trying to break into a new social media platform is to learn through both observation and experimentation.

00;41;31;10 - 00;42;04;18
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And so I think, Erica, this is the whole central premise here of minimum viable products and testing is that by putting out a little bit of information about you or starting to experiment with posts, you can start to see in a very real time and very quantitative way what the response is. And that can be useful feedback. I would say it's not the only thing that matters.

00;42;04;18 - 00;42;34;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
So as feedback goes, it's one input. If you post something that you really love and it doesn't get a lot of engagement that doesn't mean you should never put something like that in the future, but it will help you understand where there's kind of some gravitational pull. And you might even be so lucky as to get private messages back from people who say, "Hey, I noticed you wrote this thing in your profile just so you know, that's not really what people do here".

00;42;35;01 - 00;42;57;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
"It's kind of countercultural. It may come across as X, Y and Z adjective that you weren't anticipating". I've certainly gotten that feedback before and it can be really helpful. So I think the best thing you can hope for, so to speak, is to put something out there and have people come back and say, Hey, you might want to adjust this.

00;42;58;06 - 00;43;35;05
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Now, the one caveat that I'll mention, Erica, you and I were talking about this before was like weeks ago before we did this recording is that in today's heightened environment, where we have a new level of, I would call it social consciousness about racial injustice and inequity in general across different marginalized or underrepresented groups. I think the stakes are higher in the sense that you can put out their mistakes, quote unquote, or content, your information, your profile.

00;43;35;12 - 00;43;54;10
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
That is slightly off from what that social media platform expects. But I would be really diligent about making sure that the content you put out there doesn't create an accidental harm. If that makes sense.

00;43;56;01 - 00;44;13;10
Erica Machulak
It does make sense. But I also want to point out that you can also get positive feedback on the posts that you present. So for instance, the whole course that we're designing right now, the genesis of that was in part that I published an article in Inside Higher Ed in September of 2020 and got a lot of positive results.

00;44;13;10 - 00;44;35;05
Erica Machulak
People coming out of the woodwork saying, "Wow, I'm a Ph.D. in felt like I've been totally knocked out of the academic community. And I read your article and suddenly I feel like maybe there is a place for me in this context". And that's that's what started to build this community. So I take your point, and I think you're absolutely right that we need to be careful and mindful and ethical and I think I think that's true.

00;44;35;05 - 00;44;42;20
Erica Machulak
But I wonder if you could leave us with an example of something we shared that you were rewarded for in a positive way?

00;44;43;29 - 00;45;14;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Sure. Absolutely I am. There are tons of things that I have shared recently. I have the two are two articles. One was about networking strategy, specifically a virtual networking strategy that I published, I posted in a few places and then the other, which I mean, that got like a kind of lukewarm response, if you will. It was like, fine, but I posted something that was really different for me.

00;45;14;25 - 00;45;53;02
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Frankly, it was about my experience as a Jew of color and my relationship to the presidential election that was taking place in November of last year. And I wrote this article for the forum and then I posted it in a number of places. I was really hesitant to be honest about posting it on LinkedIn because I have all these questions running through my mind about "What is the content people really want to read on LinkedIn and is this appropriate, etc., etc." But I ended up posting it and I got a really positive response from a number of readers, from a number of colleagues.

00;45;53;24 - 00;46;13;24
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And you know, since I work at LinkedIn, I think that they are probably, you know, in theory the most up to date. So to speak, on what is isn't appropriate for the platforms. And a lot of them wrote back and they said "This was so eye opening. Thank you for sharing this. It broadened my perspective it help me understand you in a way that I didn't before".

00;46;13;24 - 00;46;44;27
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
"Help me understand these issues". And that was a really great feeling. So it made me feel confident then going forward, to your point about what that positive reinforcement can then lead to, it made me feel confident. Whenever I have a piece that is similar in tone or subject matter, etc., to post it and to help let it as it was intended, inform the dialog that's taking place in a wide variety of forums.

00;46;44;27 - 00;46;59;17
Erica Machulak
I'm really glad to hear that you had that experience and that you created that space for yourself, Aaron and that's great. Well, I know we're about out of time. Is there anything else you'd like to leave us with before we sign off?

00;46;59;17 - 00;47;28;00
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I would just say that I think the most important important thing that someone can do over time, and this sounds a little bit out of left field, but I think that one of the things that is very much in the zeitgeist we talk about a lot is gratitude. And we talk about gratitude as it relates to mindfulness and gratitude as it relates to happiness.

00;47;28;13 - 00;47;45;2
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
This idea that the reason that a lot of us are unhappy is because we're on this hedonic treadmill and we're not grateful for the things we have. One thing that I would just offer, and I think this is so true of PhD students who are trying to make a pivot, is remember to be grateful not just for the things you have, but for the things you've accomplished.

00;47;46;23 - 00;48;10;02
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
And I know that there's going to be people who hear that and they immediately reject it, and they say, "That sounds like resting on your laurels. That's not what we're here to do. We're not supposed to be grateful to we accomplished. We're supposed to look at the horizon and say, what's the next mountain to climb?" And I get that a genuinely like there is a very deeply rooted, insecure over to me who understands that mindset.

00;48;10;24 - 00;48;36;02
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
But I think gratitude for our accomplishments is honestly the only way that we can ever live life. Not fixated on that next mountain to climb. If we have gratitude for our previous accomplishments, we can be aware of the next mountain to climb in a way that's healthy and in a way that tells us our identity and self-worth isn't tied to whether or not we climb that mountain and whether we climb it faster than anyone else.

00;48;36;26 - 00;49;06;25
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I think that being grateful for the things that you've accomplished is very uncomfortable because it feels like resting on your laurels, but very important and has been for me a really important breakthrough, quote unquote, in reaching a new level of happiness and also equanimity, so to speak, about kind of my, quote, career prospects. Like if something goes wrong, I no longer freak out and say, oh, now I am completely like the unhirable, which is the way I would have reacted in the past.

00;49;06;25 - 00;49;40;29
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
I now say this is one event that happened among thousands, if not millions. And yeah, I think that in the grand perspective of things, I've accomplished a lot. And so for all of you PhD students, just by virtue of applying to and getting into a program which is already extremely selective, much less doing the work, passing orals, writing a dissertation, adding to the body of human knowledge, all of those are accomplishments that should 100% be acknowledged and thought of in your own mental frame.

00;49;41;08 - 00;49;44;20
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Very, very highly.

00;49;44;20 - 00;49;54;06
Erica Machulak
Thank you, Aaron. It is a great words to end on. I'm so glad that our listeners will get to hear that. Really appreciate your time. This has been wonderful. Thanks. Thanks for coming along.

00;49;55;08 - 00;50;00;00
Aaron Mitchell Finegold
Thank you very much for having me.

00;50;00;00 - 00;50;26;19
Erica Machulak
We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Hikma Collective podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. The production of this episode was led by our fearless creative director, Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre and Matthew Tomkinson. Matthew composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence.

00;50;27;19 - 00;50;55;18
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate B.C.,Tech Nation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people. We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you.

00;50;56;13 - 00;51;06;13
Erica Machulak
Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you are listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

You Can Check More Than One Box

Season 1, Episode 4

A conversation with Nadia Sasso about being an unconventional scholar, what it means to have an entrepreneurial spirit, and how to ask for what you deserve

Show Notes

Transcript

00;00;08;14 - 00;00;40;07
Erica Machulak
Welcome back to the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm Erica Machulak and today we're speaking with Dr. Nadia Sasso. Dr. Nadia Marie Sasso is a high powered creative cultural producer and unconventional scholar based in Los Angeles. Her expertize is developing, engaging, creative content and driving strategy across various platforms and media. Nadia has ten years of relevant, professional experience with documented success in the areas of social innovation, strategic partnerships and new media.

00;00;41;24 - 00;01;20;08
Erica Machulak
Her portfolio proves that she is deeply invested and interested in media as a storytelling tool, to not only engage and inspire audiences, but also to connect people around the world with stories they will love. She advocates for changing the way relationships are built, fostered and established across various industries, both in the diaspora and on the African continent. Nadia was the equity consultant for our Summer 2021 Pilot Course Entrepreneurship for PhDs, which also means that she was one of the very first consultants that I had ever worked with in my professional life.

00;01;21;04 - 00;01;44;17
Erica Machulak
And actually I learned a lot from her, not only about reframe in the way that I thought about access and inclusion in the course, but also the way that I thought about myself and how I comported myself as a business owner. And I'm really glad that we had the opportunity to chat with her about the path that she took to becoming a business owner.

00;01;44;17 - 00;02;17;11
Erica Machulak
Because I think that her approach to entrepreneurship comes from such a place of strength and such a celebration of the value that we bring to the world and the importance of prioritizing your mental health and your personal life and your passion in the way that you approach your work. Nadia also talks about, as you'll hear, the ways that we can defy categorization by other people and self-determine who we want to be and what we want to bring to the world.

00;02;18;04 - 00;02;22;10
Erica Machulak
So we hope you enjoy this conversation with Nadia.

00;02;24;16 - 00;02;51;18
Erica Machulak
Welcome back, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Erica Machulak with Hikma and I'm here with Nadia Sasso, who is the equity consultant for this program and also an entrepreneur in her own right who has a Ph.D. in Africana studies and an entrepreneur. Nadia creates content to engage millennials in the African diaspora. She has also leveraged her background in diversity, marketing, communications and new media across notable stages and thank you Nadia for being here.

00;02;52;11 - 00;02;53;17
Nadia Sasso
Thank you for having me.

00;02;53;24 - 00;03;17;00
Erica Machulak
Oh, it's absolutely my pleasure. Nadia, it's been wonderful to work with you throughout the development of this program. You've really been here from the early stages, and I have appreciated so many different facets of your experience. But today I really want to dig into your work and your experience and better understand how you came to be a business owners that you are today.

00;03;17;01 - 00;03;23;13
Erica Machulak
So could you tell us a little bit about your educational history first, what did you study as an undergrad?

00;03;24;25 - 00;03;52;16
Nadia Sasso
So my educational history started with Bucknell University, where I studied English and Sociology with the concentration in media and culture. And for me, when I first got to Bucknell, I really thought that I was going to be a international politics major and just really work for the U.N. and really just change the world in that way. But then after I started getting my grades, the first couple of semesters, I was like, "Oh, that's not working out too well".

00;03;53;18 - 00;04;21;22
Nadia Sasso
So so I had to pivot. I actually met a great mentor who told me to major in English, and I was looking at him a little crazy because I do come from the Washington, D.C. area and I spoke with a really, really deep D.C. twang. I mean, some people might call it Ebonics or African American vernacular English, but I say that meant nonetheless to say that I, you know, I really didn't feel like I had what it take to be an English major.

00;04;22;09 - 00;04;43;18
Nadia Sasso
But I ended up graduating with, you know, with great grades. I actually ended up loving it. And I think it was because they had just implemented a variety of courses under the English department that really spoke to who I was as a black woman or the culture that I come from with a lot of things focusing on, like media, African-American history and Africana.

00;04;44;15 - 00;05;09;20
Nadia Sasso
The African diaspora in general. And then with sociology, it was just a great combination and I just got to have fun with it. And so that made my experience academically worthwhile at Bucknell. And then I went on to I took a year off, a year or two off. I moved to L.A., I worked for Disney Consumer Products and Nielsen and Media Marketing Analytics.

00;05;10;00 - 00;05;33;18
Nadia Sasso
After that time, I actually moved back to the East Coast and went to grad school because my mom started getting sick. I needed to be closer to home, so I went to Lehigh University. Where did a Master's in American Studies with a focus again on the African Diaspora experience within the American context. And I also did a certification in documentary film.

00;05;33;26 - 00;05;56;14
Nadia Sasso
And within those two programs I was able to develop my thesis, which was a documentary on "Am I to African to be American, too American to be African?" and it featured Issa Rae. And that was a really, really fun time. And that's where my entrepreneurial part well, I always had the entrepreneurial spirit given my dynamic and growing up with my grandmother, my godmother.

00;05;56;21 - 00;06;12;09
Nadia Sasso
However, that's when it really intersected with academia because I ended up right after that went to Cornell University, I printed out DVDs, I sold DVD that went on to do a college tour with the film. And I really, you know, it was a business.

00;06;12;14 - 00;06;19;17
Erica Machulak
So. So when you say entrepreneurial spirit, what does that mean? What are the what are the skills or competencies you're thinking of there?

00;06;19;22 - 00;06;47;03
Nadia Sasso
So entrepreneurial spirit, it's literally taking, you know, really, really just, I guess, hustling. But also turning something into a business, right, that people don't really think you would need business skills for or you would, you know, going on this business venture, that's not necessarily a big massive company, in my opinion. So when I say I always have is entrepreneur spirit.

00;06;47;13 - 00;07;16;22
Nadia Sasso
You know, from elementary school I was sell candy. Then in middle school, I upgraded to selling earrings and jewelry and accessories for my locker, which I don't even know if that was I was supposed to be doing that. That's really here nor there, doing hair and being booked all weekend because, I just wanted to really get out of my parents hair and not really feel like they had to be so, you know, take some responsibility off of them.

00;07;16;27 - 00;07;44;04
Nadia Sasso
So I was always doing something and then again, hair in college and doing tutoring, whatever the case may be. But then I felt like in grad school it was always those things definitely made money and I was able to survive, but when I was able to do the thesis and the film and different things, that was on a whole nother level because that's when I started and 2014 registered my first business or the 2012 around.

00;07;44;04 - 00;07;50;19
Nadia Sasso
Then between 2012, 2014, graduating my first business. What does the EIA number look like? How do you file business taxes? All those different things?

00;07;51;04 - 00;08;03;09
Erica Machulak
So you start selling these DVDs, you start turning your actual scholarship from your Master's into a hustle. How does that lead you to your Ph.D.?

00;08;04;25 - 00;08;31;10
Nadia Sasso
So it led to my Ph.D. because I actually continued. I actually turned in the rough cut of my documentary at Lehigh, so stop there. So I was like, Whoa, I still have to finish a final version of it. So I finish that in my first year at Cornell University and then my dissertation actually I was going on tour and I was really, I thought my dissertation was going to be making a part two of this film and doing another film, but it didn't really work out that way.

00;08;31;10 - 00;09;01;00
Nadia Sasso
So I was taking a lot of Anthro classes and Anthropology department, and I was finding when I released the film at Cornell and it was on I went on tour while I was at Cornell, I started in this anthro course being in the field in a different I started looking at tours, the field. And so I started analyzing the reactions to the film, film reception, what people were saying on social media, and then also what it was like when I went to do my field research in Sierra Leone.

00;09;01;07 - 00;09;09;11
Nadia Sasso
And then this film just became a an impetus or kind of segway into my this as well.

00;09;09;11 - 00;09;16;04
Erica Machulak
Person So your research was actually kind of a critical look at the reception of your own Master's thesis?

00;09;16;24 - 00;09;44;20
Nadia Sasso
Yeah, that was about a chapter or two. And then I had another chapter on, so my dissertation was very nontraditional. It was very mixed as well in the format it was written. So at the first chapter, there was a chapter on family as a unit or structure, and what did that mean when you talk about identity for first and second gen. Then there was a chapter on audience reception, including the social media and actually what was happening in the audience.

00;09;45;06 - 00;10;10;02
Nadia Sasso
Then I had a chapter on doing field research in Sierra Leone, and what did that look like in the struggles that I had with trying to fit, make my work seem more seemingly academic, but it just wasn't working out that way. The struggle of doing that and imposter, and all the different identities that impact that and unpacking that whole situation.

00;10;10;02 - 00;10;31;17
Nadia Sasso
And then I had a chapter on fashion. And what does that say about your identity? And how that all came together was just how the thread was, how identity and how people see you or you see yourself and the community really impacts the work that you're doing and how you're perceived, if that makes sense.

00;10;32;02 - 00;10;39;25
Erica Machulak
That's amazing. Did you face any challenges sort of selling that as a dissertation to your committee, to the administrators at your school?

00;10;41;05 - 00;11;06;10
Nadia Sasso
I did, but I ended up finding a chair who was just really supportive. And she actually and I found someone and then I found two others outside of my department who spoke to the Anthracite and another one who spoke to the fashion side, another one who spoke to the larger African diaspora. And once I had the great that great team, it got a lot easier.

00;11;06;24 - 00;11;14;13
Nadia Sasso
But before it was hard to even figure out who was going to be on my committee and if what I was doing made sense.

00;11;16;04 - 00;11;29;01
Erica Machulak
And how what was the process like of finding those people? What would you recommend to other people who are trying to think a little bit more outside the box or do something a little bit different with their research? How did you find the people that you wanted to work with?

00;11;30;21 - 00;11;53;23
Nadia Sasso
In the beginning I was struggling because was sounded, like the individuals. That would be a great fit for me personality wise and in other nuances, it just didn't work out. So I had to go back to the drawing board and I realized that I am my worst critic. So and I'm already hard on myself.

00;11;53;23 - 00;12;22;21
Nadia Sasso
So I realized that I wanted people who knew how to encourage me and motivate me without beating me up, if that makes sense, or making me feel crazy or like I should know things already are stupid. So I really. First I went for how people brought the best out of me. So the classes, the teachers that I kind of work well with or that I felt like it was effortlessly from me to get their work done because they, and I was excelling with them.

00;12;23;07 - 00;12;39;21
Nadia Sasso
Those are the five people that probably need to be on my committee. And then I looked at what I was working on and how I could relate to them, and then I went from there, but I put my mental health first in choosing my committee because I wasn't really mentally in the best place while completing my dissertation.

00;12;41;12 - 00;12;43;14
Erica Machulak
Do you want to talk about that more?

00;12;45;07 - 00;13;29;18
Nadia Sasso
I was saying that I wasn't mentally in my best place because that was my first really deep, deep dove with depression and anxiety. And I think that was a combination of a few things personal with my mom being sick, also being in Ithaca and not really understanding that seasonal affective disorder is really real or being in dark places and not having much access to the sun, to just feeling like I was also being academically hazed or feeling like I had to prove myself to everyone and everyone having anxiety about performing well at this predominantly white and Ivy League institution.

00;13;29;27 - 00;13;42;29
Nadia Sasso
And so I had to kind of just let all of that go and redesign what that space would be like for me and who I wanted to build in that space with, to protect myself.

00;13;43;12 - 00;13;44;07
Nadia Sasso
And my sanity.

00;13;45;04 - 00;14;09;06
Erica Machulak
Yeah, that resonates with me. That makes a lot of sense. It's sometimes you see people on paper who you think scholarship wise, if you're looking at our CVs, We should be the ones who are in the room together. We should be the ones..but sometimes it's the people who are thinking on the same creative wavelength or have the same kind of humanity wavelength that are the ones that really enable you to be your best self and your best scholar.

00;14;09;28 - 00;14;20;23
Erica Machulak
Yeah. So can I ask you as a woman of color, what was it like to create space for yourself in a kind of unique?

00;14;21;13 - 00;14;43;16
Nadia Sasso
It was hard and it almost was tiring, to be very honest, especially coming from other predominately white institutions where you constantly have to do that. So I think at this point I'm not going to lie, at Cornell. I was pretty much over it. I don't think I was as engaging as I was in my previous two institutions, to be very honest.

00;14;44;05 - 00;14;49;02
Nadia Sasso
I kind of got my work done.

00;14;49;02 - 00;15;19;11
Nadia Sasso
And I also was a parent, so I didn't really have that extracurricular time that I used to to create those spaces. But I did create I did work on creating genuine friendships where we could support each other in whatever way we could. So I have two very close friends that developed at Cornell, and to this day we still support each other and cheer each other on and I would say a handful actually, and just kind of building a very close knit community, I would say would end up saving me a little bit.

00;15;19;17 - 00;15;57;04
Nadia Sasso
I did. I was a graduate R.A. And while the students weren't the same age as me or we weren't necessarily friends, I did try to create a space for the students to kind of explore things, you know, the general population, to explore things that they wouldn't normally get to see or that's foreign to them, but also for the students of color, making sure that they always felt like they could confide in me or they can come and get support, or they could come get a home cooked meal, or they could just feel good about themselves while they were there because they were somebody, within that living environment that look like them.

00;15;57;04 - 00;16;14;02
Erica Machulak
It's amazing. I mean, you had so much going on, on your own, and the day for anyone is already just hard not to mention. Also having a family, taking ownership of that other piece for other people. Do you find that energizing or exhausting or both?

00;16;15;09 - 00;16;37;22
Nadia Sasso
I think it's a little bit of both. I wouldn't say it wasn't, I'm learning now at this age that it's a part of who I am because of the community that I come from. I come from a culture where it's less about you as an individual and more about the community. And so it becomes exhausting when you don't take care of yourself and when you're not finding balance within that.

00;16;38;01 - 00;16;58;11
Nadia Sasso
So there's a fine line and that has always been a struggle for me. But I was socialized to think about my community first at all times. So it was also a little bit energizing in a way. But also I think what kept me energized with the fact that I was once in their place and I'm just doing what I wish somebody would have done for me.

00;16;58;28 - 00;17;07;27
Nadia Sasso
And I also believe that you bless others, you your life becomes easier and you get more blessings in return. Like, everything isn't about, like, money and, you know.

00;17;08;09 - 00;17;23;12
Erica Machulak
All right. So that's a really interesting note to pivot on. Tell me about how this community first mindset and the acknowledgment that everything isn't about money, but also the management that, you know, people got to make a living either translate to your business now?

00;17;24;04 - 00;17;48;04
Nadia Sasso
So the community first mindset translates into my business now because I have a team of about six or seven people. It's more about how we work well as a team and how there is some type of mentorship and growth for everyone and that everyone's voice is being heard. So really, making everyone feel like they belong and they deserve to be in the room.

00;17;48;25 - 00;18;09;12
Nadia Sasso
And I think that works because it builds more confidence, whether you're an undergrad graduate or graduate student or you're already set in your career, you kind of feel like there's a place for you, for you to perform and do your best work, which in turn, I think if everyone feels good about themselves and they come to work as their whole selves, then there is good.

00;18;09;14 - 00;18;14;01
Nadia Sasso
They're going to do great work and the revenue will be easy.

00;18;14;01 - 00;18;20;26
Erica Machulak
And so are there takeaways from your experience working within other people's systems that have enabled you to build your system better?

00;18;22;14 - 00;18;48;15
Nadia Sasso
Yeah, there are take aways, I would say, you know, seeing your employees celebrating them, you know, showing them that you appreciate them, that's something that I really try to take in and also really understanding who they are and how they're doing. So I try to implement that for sure. I try to bring the human humanist perspective to my work environment and my company for sure.

00;18;49;25 - 00;18;53;20
Eria Machulak
In the sense of seeing people who are in other senses as well.

00;18;53;20 - 00;19;31;16
Nadia Sasso
In the sense of seeing people and also, you know, just giving them that room to give grace. But also not... if you're sick or you're not feeling well. Yeah, we may need to get certain things done, but it's better you take the time off and come back when you feel good. Or if you're having a bad day, then let's figure out another solution or doing something else, not saying that we're going to be over accommodating every day, but really just making sure that that's at the forefront.

00;19;32;01 - 00;19;35;26
Nadia Sasso
So that way we can we can get the most things done.

00;19;37;17 - 00;19;52;18
Erica Machulak
It sounds like you really try to create an environment where every single person on your team can be their whole self at work. That's what I'm hearing. So let's talk about the work itself. Nadia, what services do you offer?

00;19;52;18 - 00;20;17;21
Nadia Sasso
So I offer production services. So whether that's from producing to directing curated creative projects and that can range from film to a photo shoot to a commercial. And in a lot of the content that I like to work on is content that, A, has a storytelling element, but B, I love it even more of has a cultural element to it as well.

00;20;18;03 - 00;20;34;19
Nadia Sasso
I also do like writing as well as research for different entities and writing, consulting and research, consulting as well. And I feel like I'm missing a couple of things, but I essentially do a lot.

00;20;35;03 - 00;20;43;22
Erica Machulak
Okay, cool. So without breaking any privacy, can you give us examples of the kinds of projects that you work on?

00;20;43;22 - 00;21;04;19
Nadia Sasso
Well, I guess I can talk about projects that I'm working on and that I'm developing that'll come out this year. I'll do that instead just because I don't know what I'll be breaking. So for me, I'll be coming out with a podcast with a colleague of mine that should be dropping next month, and it's unboxing layers of blackness.

00;21;04;19 - 00;21;37;06
Nadia Sasso
I'm also coming out with an app with another partner of mine, Blaytor Box, which is Black Create, stands for Black Creator. And it's an app where you can discover black creatives all over. So in the process of developing that and that should be released, a soft launch will come Juneteenth, I believe, if all goes well. And so those are the type of things that I have just been working on and is producing a lot of personal creative content, but again, working with different brands on that as well.

00;21;39;00 - 00;21;45;05
Erica Machulak
And how does your experience from your scholarly work translate into the services that you offer? How much overlap is there?

00;21;46;06 - 00;22;12;09
Nadia Sasso
And there's actually a ton of overlap because again, I like to do a lot of creative stuff, but also culturally relevant topics. And so for example, working with PBS, I provide them a lot of content consulting and research advice there for their web series Say It Loud, which is about black history and a way to make it more fun and interesting for a younger generation.

00;22;12;09 - 00;22;19;14
Nadia Sasso
And so that is me bringing in the creative as well as the academic side, making sure facts and content is all accurate.

00;22;11;22 - 00;22;25;23
Erica Machulak
So what would you recommend to you on the first day of your piece, or even when you started thinking about applying for a Ph.D.? What advice would you give yourself? Looking back?

00;22;25;23 - 00;22;28;23
Nadia Sasso
Well, funny enough, I realized I actually didn't even want to do a PhD.

00;22;30;17 - 00;22;51;09
Nadia Sasso
I was actually I had a plan of moving to Sierra Leone. I was actually already there. But then Ebola hit and my parents were freaking out and then they were like, If I don't come home, they're going to send the U.S. Embassy to take me back. So my backup plan was okay, if that didn't work. My backup plan was the Ph.D.

00;22;51;09 - 00;23;17;10
Nadia Sasso
So that's how I ended up doing the Ph.D. because it was a backup plan. And what would I say first to myself is that I wish I said was, "put your mental health first at all times". And in reminding myself that everybody's journey is different because you get into a space where you start collecting everyone's anxiety and what they think you should be doing and how you should be doing it.

00;23;17;10 - 00;23;22;05
Nadia Sasso
And the reality is, you only know what works for you.

00;23;22;05 - 00;23;28;15
Erica Machulak
And so building your own business. Has it been easier to put your mental health first?

00;23;28;15 - 00;23;54;29
Nadia Sasso
It's been easier in that I'm doing what I'm passionate about. So that stimulating in a way, you know, it's been a little bit harder in a way because it is your business. So you're kind of now responsible for others and you don't want to, you know, let them down. So it's about finding balance, but it isn't as draining because you're doing what you're passionate about.

00;23;54;29 - 00;24;04;29
Erica Machulak
One final piece of advice I would love to know is your take on how do you ask for what you deserve too?

00;24;04;29 - 00;24;25;07
Nadia Sasso
I think you ask for what you do as well. How I ask for what I deserve. I can speak for myself. I'm always constantly reevaluating. I mentioned before, what do I bring to the table? What do I have to offer? And then I also, when it comes to the more business and practical side, that's more theoretical. I'm looking at what do I need to survive?

00;24;25;07 - 00;24;51;22
Nadia Sasso
How much do I need to make from a yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily basis in order to live a lifestyle that takes care of myself and those that I'm responsible for? And so one time merge all of that together. That really is what kind of your worth, now you know what to ask for and now you know how to kind of settle your, your ask when working with others.

00;24;51;28 - 00;24;52;08
Erica Machulak
Mm.

00;24;52;20 - 00;24;58;26
Nadia Sasso
And of course there's more details and more nuances to that. But I will say the oversimplified answer is that.

00;24;59;26 - 00;25;09;21
Erica Machulak
Okay. Any final advice for, for our listeners and anything you think we haven't covered here that you really want to make sure get said?

00;25;11;11 - 00;25;40;15
Nadia Sasso
I would say that don't be afraid to take risks because success comes from risks and from failure, don't fear that either and to always, go after what it is that you want. And lastly, I know that a lot of times we're socialized to think that we can only do one thing or we should only check one box.

00;25;41;02 - 00;25;46;06
Nadia Sasoso
But you can be all that you can be and it can still work out in your favor, you know.

00;25;46;07 - 00;26;06;13
Erica Machulak
So yeah, I love that. I think that that riskiness is often hard for us to think through, but at the same time, like as a scholar, there are lots of risks that you're taking all the time. So thank you. And I thank you for your time and for all your insights and really, really grateful that you could be here with us.

00;26;06;13 - 00;26;09;09
Erica Machulak
This is this is wonderful and appreciate your time.

00;26;10;06 - 00;26;11;13
Nadia Sasso
Thank you so much.

00;26;11;25 - 00;26;14;08
Erica Machulak
My pleasure.

00;26;20;08 - 00;26;46;26
Erica Machulak
We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Hikma Collective podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. The production of this episode was led by our fearless creative director, Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre and Matthew Tomkinson. Matthew composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence.

00;26;47;28 - 00;27;15;29
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate B.C., Tech Nation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people. We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you.

00;27;16;23 - 00;27;26;26
Erica Machulak
Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you are listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

The Questions You Ask Determine the Results You Get

Season 1, Episode 5

A conversation with JP Baker about asking the right questions, organizational structures, and scarcity vs. abundance thinking.

Show Notes

Transcript

00;00;06;19 - 00;00;45;19
Erica Machulak
Welcome back to the Hikma Collective podcast. I'm Erica Machulak. One of the interesting things about starting a purpose driven business has been trying to figure out what social entrepreneurship really means and what it means to want to do good in the world while still needing and wanting to make money. So in this episode, we're talking with JP Baker, who's a consultant in the not for profit sector with the Social sector, which means that he works with all kinds of organizations wanting to do good work, thinking about both the meaning and the logistics behind what they want to do.

00;00;46;11 - 00;01;19;21
Erica Machulak
He talks a lot about empathy, asking good questions and cultivating abundance, thinking and a spirit of collaboration. We hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for the humor podcast. I'm Erica Machulak and I'm very pleased to be here with JP Baker. JP is a planning consultant, ready to support organizations, strategize the most effective ways to reach their goals.

00;01;20;02 - 00;01;41;21
Erica Machulak
JP has extensive experience as a facilitator, consultant, researcher and writer. As a consultant, he is sought out for his expertize in governance, organizational culture, strategy, process design and change management. Over the past ten years, he has done strategic planning with a variety of not for profit organizations and university departments and led the development of several community wide plans.

00;01;42;16 - 00;02;05;08
Erica Machulak
Outside these accomplishments, he also has experience in international language education. Specifically, JP taught English in South Korea, which he loved for both the people and the food. Vancouver and Victoria, where he ran Mingus Language Services. JP likes to bring his communication skills to his work. Active listening and articulating ideas. He also enjoys making broad connections between people, ideas and organizations.

00;02;05;27 - 00;02;12;28
Erica Machulak
He's currently a planning consultant at Vantage Point, which transforms not for profit leadership. JP, Thanks so much for joining us.

00;02;13;14 - 00;02;15;04
JP Baker
Thank you so much for having me, Erica.

00;02;15;09 - 00;02;26;26
Erica Machulak
It's absolutely my pleasure. I wonder if we could start by talking a little bit about your career journey and starting way back in your university days with with what you focused on at that point?

00;02;28;06 - 00;02;54;13
JP Baker
Sure, yeah. I studied English and Russian literature in university, which my father liked to call dishwashing and dish drying. But I had big plans in some ways for for what I would do with my education, which, in some senses means no plans. I just wanted to study what I was interested in, and I thought that sort of career wise things would fall into place afterwards.

00;02;55;04 - 00;03;00;09
Erica Machulak
And what were the kinds of topics that interested you at that point when you were studying literature?

00;03;01;08 - 00;03;22;05
JP Baker
I was interested in how humanity and groups functioned. And literature in my was was my avenue to explore that. I had friends who studied sociology, and we used to argue about who had a better understanding of humanity. I like to maintain my point that I think literature gives you a better understanding.

00;03;22;05 - 00;03;27;03
Erica Machulak
I love that. And so you graduated that and then what came next?

00;03;28;27 - 00;03;58;14
JP Baker
Well, I went overseas, actually. I was invited to go and teach English in South Korea by an old friend. And I had never considered teaching before that time, but I decided to go for it and I absolutely loved it. I learned a lot in those first couple of years after university. As a teacher, I was able to apply what I'd learned from studying language, because besides literature, I studied a lot of languages, so I was able to apply that understanding as a teacher.

00;03;59;22 - 00;04;10;09
JP Baker
But I also had certain skills that helped me move into management positions fairly quickly in the schools that I worked in.

00;04;10;20 - 00;04;12;22
Erica Machulak
What kinds of skills? What do you think served you best?

00;04;13;28 - 00;04;37;15
JP Baker
Well, I think that that understanding of people is important for leadership. And I think this is something that you see when you look at people in leadership positions in all areas of our society. Many of them have a liberal arts background. They didn't necessarily study leadership, but I think they learned about people. And I think that makes people well positioned for leadership.

00;04;38;10 - 00;04;43;04
Erica Machulak
Interesting. So tell us what came next in your career? What led you to where you are now?

00;04;44;11 - 00;05;03;24
JP Baker
Yeah, I had a few stops along the way. So after working in South Korea, I returned to Canada and I worked as an English teacher at a private college in Vancouver. And at a certain point I realized that the ceiling felt fairly low for me as a teacher, and so I decided to strike out on my own and start my own school.

00;05;03;24 - 00;05;21;02
JP Baker
So I started a private language school in Victoria with a partner, a fellow teacher. And we learned about business, basically on our own and how to start one. We leased a space in Victoria. We did our own renovations. It was a real DIY sort of project.

00;05;21;22 - 00;05;25;10
Erica Machulak
And so how did that lead you to your role consulting with not-for-profits?

00;05;27;01 - 00;05;46;27
JP Baker
Well, I on the side because I think that as a self-employed person, you've always got your finger in a few different sort of pots of activity. I worked as a freelance writer, and this goes back to my time in South Korea, actually, I did corporate communications on the side. And I was working as a freelance writer when I left that business in Victoria.

00;05;46;28 - 00;06;12;25
JP Baker
I did freelance writing full time and I ended up having a lot of clients in the not-for-profit world. And eventually they asked me if I could do facilitation as well. And because I had worked as a teacher, I felt that I had some of the skills necessary. And so I started doing facilitation work. And that just led me to, to learn more about the nonprofit world and to expand my skills there.

00;06;13;20 - 00;06;18;14
JP Baker
And so that led naturally to serving as a as a nonprofit consultant.

00;06;19;03 - 00;06;28;17
Erica Machulak
So tell us a little bit more about that for people who don't quite know what facilitation is. What is facilitation and what's the connection between facilitation and teaching?

00;06;29;10 - 00;07;00;12
JP Baker
So facilitation is basically running a good meeting and producing good outcomes from a meeting on a very simple level. That's all it is. But on a more sort of complex level, it's good meeting design. We've all had experience with meetings both good and bad. And some of that is a design issue. It's also, asking the right questions within a meeting to get people to generate the ideas, helping them towards decisions.

00;07;00;24 - 00;07;23;10
JP Baker
And that's sometimes difficult for groups to do on their own. So for certain processes like strategic planning, which is something I do a lot, it's very helpful for them to have an outside facilitator to lead that process and to guide them through. I think it relates to teaching because I think a fundamental skill in facilitation is understanding group dynamics.

00;07;23;19 - 00;07;36;20
JP Baker
So if you have a room full of people and you need them to go in generally the same direction, how do you get them to do that? And so the ways of doing that are similar in teaching and facilitation.

00;07;37;02 - 00;07;41;22
Erica Machulak
And so from your perspective, what's the benefit of coming to that process from the outside?

00;07;43;07 - 00;08;08;29
JP Baker
The benefits are that you actually are more free of bias than the people in the room. For one thing, I'm never going to say that anybody is completely free of bias, but certainly you don't have a stake at the table, so you can sort of play a more objective role as facilitator than someone in that process. And that's important when there are high stakes decisions to be made or sometimes to in high conflict situations.

00;08;08;29 - 00;08;32;09
JP Baker
And although I'm not a mediator, I'm not trained as a mediator, that's not really what I do. There's a lot of facilitation that involves some of the same things that mediation involves. And so to have an outsider do those things is really helpful to groups. There's also, I work a lot with nonprofit boards of directors. I those are those are groups of volunteers.

00;08;32;23 - 00;09;01;02
JP Baker
It's very challenging for volunteers to hold each other accountable in the same way that maybe you would hold someone accountable in a work setting because people are volunteering their time. And there's this idea that we need to be thankful for whatever they give, regardless of the quality or sometimes how it's done. So that can be challenging. So facilitators benefit groups there.

00;09;01;02 - 00;09;17;25
JP Baker
But I also work with university departments and it's not the same as a nonprofit board of directors, but in the in collegial governance, you have a group of faculty members. It's very difficult for them to hold each other accountable, too. And so they benefit a lot from outside facilitation as well.

00;09;18;25 - 00;09;39;06
Erica Machulak
Interesting. Really interesting. So given that you've worked a lot with not for profit boards, I wonder if you could step back for a second. You've worked with so many different kinds of not-for-profit organizations. Could you give us sort of anatomy of what a not-for-profit organization is and how it works at a high level?

00;09;40;19 - 00;10;07;04
JP Baker
Yeah, I will do my best. So basically a not-for-profit organization is set up to achieve some kind of social purpose. Whereas a for profit organization is set up to achieve profits. And those that's been complicated in positive ways in, in past years. There's a lot more social purpose business. There's a lot more social enterprise.

00;10;07;12 - 00;10;30;29
JP Baker
But basically a not-for-profit is built on the idea that they will generate some kind of social, good social or environmental benefit. So the way that they do that is they incorporate and the rules are different state by state, province by province in different countries. But generally the non-profits are governed by a board of directors, and those are volunteers.

00;10;31;24 - 00;11;04;02
JP Baker
In some cases they are paid. It's a myth that boards of directors can never be paid. In some cases they are. But there's strict rules around that. So they're responsible for governing the organization. And that's sort of high level oversight, direction setting and sharing, effective senior leadership risk management, the very high level governance aspects. Then below that, if we see it as a hierarchy, though it's not always is, is the management of the organization, and then there's the delivery of programs and services.

00;11;04;27 - 00;11;36;23
JP Baker
But nonprofit organizations are kind of all over the place on how they organize these different functions. So in the province where I live, 70% of nonprofit organizations have what we call working boards, where the work of the organization is done by the volunteer board of directors. They have no paid staff. On the other hand, there are many large nonprofits and charities that have a lot of paid staff, in which case the board of directors generally limits itself to governance work and doesn't get involved in management and operations.

00;11;36;28 - 00;12;03;15
Erica Machulak
Interesting part of the reason that I'm asking this is that many graduates, particularly graduates who have done something like a Ph.D., where they're really passionate about the work that they're doing and they've really invested a lot in thinking through ideas, are excited about the concept of working in the not-for-profit sector, but they don't necessarily have a lot of experience in that sector or a lot of knowledge of the nuances within it.

00;12;03;15 - 00;12;15;15
Erica Machulak
So if I'm a recent graduate looking to get into the not-for-profit space, what kind of advice would you give me in terms of trying to figure out where to enter?

00;12;17;05 - 00;12;44;14
JP Baker
That's a great question. And what I would say is that one of the best ways and I don't know if people always want to hear this, but is volunteering and volunteering with the board of directors is a great way to learn how those organizations work? And that's a great entry point, actually. And that's, in many ways, the way I learned about nonprofit organizations was I served on boards of directors, and I saw some of these things from that level.

00;12;44;24 - 00;13;06;10
JP Baker
I've never been a staff person at a not-for-profit. I've only worked on boards of directors and I continue to serve on boards of directors, and that's part of my ongoing education, I believe. So I think that's a really good entry point. And to volunteer with organizations in other ways, actually, some boards of directors is only one place, one volunteer opportunity.

00;13;06;10 - 00;13;10;00
JP Baker
There are other ways as well. And that's a great place to start.

00;13;10;26 - 00;13;23;26
Erica Machulak
Great, thank you. And having worked with so many different not-for-profit organizations, could you give us a sense of the spectrum of organizational cultures that you've seen in these different mission driven groups?

00;13;25;15 - 00;14;02;22
JP Baker
Yeah, that is there's a great variety of different cultures. You know, and I mentioned sometimes we talk about hierarchy in organizations, but many organizations are a much flatter organization. And you see this in business as well. But it's challenging for organizations given their governance structures to flatten sometimes. Some organizations are actually governed by not just the board of directors, but they invite governance, participation by their entire membership.

00;14;03;06 - 00;14;28;02
JP Baker
So we do see some highly democratic organizations that involve members broadly in major organizational decisions that gets like all democracy, it gets a little bit messier, it looks a little bit more chaotic or it's more time consuming. But in many ways, some of our our governance structures and the way we've designed these things and not-for-profit is borrowed from the corporate sector, for better or for worse.

00;14;29;04 - 00;15;04;23
JP Baker
And I think we're trying to overcome some of those. So I participate in a peer network called Re-imagining Governance, where we're really trying to explore ways to expand our ideas of governance, and particularly around distributed governance, so involving more people in decision making. But organizations are all over the place on this very issue. There's a lot of the not-for-profit sector is made up of very small community based organizations, led by a small group of dedicated volunteers that are actually very, very in touch with the community issues they're trying to solve.

00;15;05;28 - 00;15;15;26
JP Baker
But then it runs up to very large, multimillion dollar charities that have massive budgets and massive staffs and massive operations.

00;15;17;17 - 00;15;41;29
Erica Machulak
Interesting. So one of the reasons that I've been so excited to talk to you in this interview, and one of the things that I think will really benefit our listeners is that you've worked this crossover between not-for-profit and industry. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what the interaction between private and not-for-profit organizations is like.

00;15;41;29 - 00;15;55;06
Erica Macchulak
And maybe we could start with when you as a member of a private organization come into a not-for-profit and help them with their strategic planning, what does that look like? What is what is typical meeting have the shape of?

00;15;56;27 - 00;16;21;08
JP Baker
Well, that's a great question. And I think that I work a lot with my clients on meeting design. So before I go into a group situation where we're going to talk about some high level strategy, I put a lot of effort into dealing with the client on designing an agenda and basically figuring out what are the questions I'm going to be asking.

00;16;22;11 - 00;16;54;12
JP Baker
There's an important approach that that guides a lot of our work called Appreciative Inquiry. And part of the important concepts there are that the questions we ask determine the results we get. So I put a lot of energy into figuring out what those questions are. And then so I work with groups. I ask them questions. I facilitate a process where, you know, it's you might have images of getting down into breakout groups, groups, and you're using sticky notes and all of that kind of stuff.

00;16;54;12 - 00;17;25;24
JP Baker
And it's really an exercise in generating ideas. And then part two of planning or decision making is then selecting options. Sometimes we talk about this divergent thinking process where we're generating ideas and options, and then the convergent thinking process where we're choosing options. And those are two different kinds of facilitation. The first is about brainstorming, and it's a very creative process, and the second one is really about evaluating ideas.

00;17;26;04 - 00;17;30;15
JP Baker
So they require two different kinds of thinking, and I think they require two different kinds of facilitation as well.

00;17;31;20 - 00;17;54;25
Erica Machulak
That makes a lot of sense. That's that's really helpful. So building on some of the work that you've done and some of the things that we've talked about in the past, I wonder if we could explore other kinds of thinking, specifically this idea of scarcity versus abundance thinking. As a person who's worked with many, many kinds of organizations in many different capacities, you have a unique perspective on this.

00;17;54;25 - 00;17;58;18
Erica Machulak
So could you first tell us what scarcity and abundance thinking are?

00;17;59;26 - 00;18;31;21
JP Baker
Yeah, the basics of this are that scarcity thinking is really looking at. It's coming from a place of thinking. "There is not enough". And that could be time, money, people, a focus on deficits and gaps, and that generates a sort of competitive spirit. Any time you're inspired by scarcity, then you become competitive. But it also, in some cases, creates risk aversion, fear of change.

00;18;32;25 - 00;19;13;20
JP Baker
And then on the other hand, the abundance thinking is about thinking. There is enough to go around and maybe there's even infinite potential. And it's a focus on strengths and assets. It inspires more collaboration rather than competition. And it's about embracing and leading change. This is an important concept, I think, for me, because in my work as a self-employed person, both in business and serving nonprofits, I've taken an abundant thinking approach, which means that I will talk widely about my ideas, I will share my knowledge with others.

00;19;13;20 - 00;19;20;14
JP Baker
I'm not afraid of them stealing them, and I will collaborate widely. And I think that that approach has helped me.

00;19;21;00 - 00;19;25;17
Erica Machulak
Could you give us an example of an idea that you've shared and how that's worked for you?

00;19;26;06 - 00;19;54;21
JP Baker
So I generate in my strategic planning work, I generate certain kind of frameworks for exploring certain ideas, especially sort of graphic representations that, that help inspire certain kinds of thinking. I will share those with other consultants that I know and encourage them to use them. And I don't ask for credit, and I'm happy to do that because I think that that kind of approach comes back to help you.

00;19;55;17 - 00;20;20;17
JP Baker
It inspires a sort of spirit of collaboration. I do the work that I do, in part because it has social benefit. I'm not interested in sort of hoarding my ideas or hoarding my tools and making sure only I benefit from them. I really sort of have this idea that they're for the benefit of all. So it's important for me to share those things.

00;20;20;17 - 00;20;39;24
JP Baker
And I engage in communities of practice and communities of practice for consultants can be a little bit hit and miss because there is competition among consultants in some ways. And so some of them hesitate to to be too open about what's in their bag of tricks. But I'm happy to share.

00;20;41;01 - 00;20;53;29
Erica Machulak
And so how does that work if you are coming to a community, a practice of consultants, let's say. And actually maybe let's pause there. Could you define community of practice for us? What do you see? A community practice being?

00;20;54;28 - 00;21;13;21
JP Baker
The way I see a community practice is a group of peers or colleagues, professional colleagues who get together to share good practices and ideas for doing the work well and support. And and invariably, there's some some measure of emotional support there.

00;21;14;21 - 00;21;41;24
Erica Machulak
That's interesting. I think for some of the best ones, there certainly is. So one of my questions about your point about scarcity versus abundance thinking, one of the things that we talk a lot about in the development of the programs that we're doing here at Hikma and also in the way that we're thinking about helping PhD's translate their research and communication skills to new contexts.

00;21;41;24 - 00;22;04;26
Erica Machulak
Is this idea of testing and particularly testing ideas in small incremental ways so that you're getting that early feedback. And for me, abundance thinking is a big part of that. You know, you and I never would have had the conversations that we've had in the past that have so informed a lot of my thinking around my work. If I had said, I'm not going to share my idea with anyone until it's absolutely ready, right?

00;22;04;26 - 00;22;27;05
Erica Machulak
I'm not going to share my idea with anyone until it's totally polished and ready to launch because I don't want anyone to see it. But when you're coming to one of these communities of practice and you're coming to it with this approach of I'm going to share, what's the dynamic like when there are people who are holding their cards a little closer to the vest or being a little bit more competitive about it?

00;22;27;17 - 00;22;30;23
Erica Machulak
That disadvantages you or does it matter at all?

00;22;31;17 - 00;22;58;23
JP Baker
I don't think it disadvantages me. I don't get too worked up when someone takes a different approach. And if they take what I do and they use it for their own benefit, I'm fine with that because I think that fundamentally in a lot of the work that I do, it's very relationship based. So people are not necessarily hiring me because of that one little useful tool that I use in the sessions.

00;22;59;09 - 00;23;30;18
JP Baker
It's because I've built trust with them and they have faith in me and trust in me as a consultant. And so that can't be freely shared and traded and passed on. That's something that's cultivated. So in that sense, I'm not afraid of the competition because it's all relational. And there's also the important idea about fit. I might not be the right consultant for every organization, and I'm happy to refer people on to a consultant who I think would be a better fit.

00;23;30;18 - 00;23;39;03
JP Baker
And that idea of fit could be there could be a lot of different things wrapped up in that, but it's an important one.

00;23;39;13 - 00;24;02;10
Erica Machulak
Yeah, that makes sense to me. And that's something I think that applies to all kinds of private businesses. If you're a freelance writer and someone asks you to do a project that really isn't in your wheelhouse, it's of more benefit for you to refer that to a colleague who might throw you some business that's not in their wheelhouse later than to try to do a job that isn't something you're going to be able to deliver on well.

00;24;02;10 - 00;24;18;22
Erica Machulak
Or to use that as an opportunity to build a partnership with another business owner. Are there differences, do you think, in the way that scarcity versus abundance thinking applies in the private sector versus the not for profit sector and potentially versus government?

00;24;20;14 - 00;24;46;25
JP Baker
I'm sure I want to say yes. I'm sure there are differences, though I haven't thought about it enough to articulate it clearly. But I think that I mean, a lot of the for profit world is is built around the idea of scarcity that, in a particular market, there is finite demand for a product. And if there are three companies trying to sell the same type of product, they're competing in a finite market.

00;24;47;10 - 00;25;09;01
JP Baker
One of the things I like about not-for-profit is that to me it's a very creative. It's creating social benefit in the world is limitless in many ways. So, you know, I serve on the board of a small organization called Kamloops Society for the Written Arts. We host author talks and we do workshops for writers and we host a writers festival.

00;25;09;22 - 00;25;29;09
JP Baker
The sky's the limit as far as what we want to dream up and try doing. And so that's one of the things I like about the not for profit is that we're creating social benefit and I don't think there's any natural limits to social benefit, but there perhaps are on the other side of the economic house in the for profit world in terms of market demand.

00;25;30;00 - 00;25;32;07
Erica Machulak
Hmm.

00;25;32;15 - 00;25;48;13
Erica Machulak
Here's an interesting question that I think is an undercurrent to many conversations about where people want to go with their careers when they graduate. What do you see as the role of money in driving social change?

00;25;49;19 - 00;26;23;25
JP Baker
That's a really hard question. I think...I mean... I have a lot of thoughts about that, especially given the the experience of the past two years and in our society, I have this feeling that we might at some point give up on the myth of perpetual growth. That things are either growing or dying.And I'm hopeful about that.

00;26;25;10 - 00;27;05;06
JP Baker
But that that relates to the role of money, because I think that generating money is not necessarily the goal of a lot of activities. I think the money is a tool to create other benefits. And one of the things that kind of a hobbyhorse of mine and my colleagues are tired of hearing me talk about it, but I don't even like talking about the nonprofit sector because that's defining our sector in two ways one, in economic terms and two, in negative terms.

00;27;05;17 - 00;27;11;23
JP Baker
So when we call our sector the nonprofit sector, we're defining it by the fact that it doesn't generate a profit.

00;27;12;28 - 00;27;13;16
Erica Machulak
Interesting.

00;27;13;16 - 00;27;34;19
JP Baker
And I think that's very limiting in our entire sort of narrative about our sector and the advocacy work we do. I wish we could reframe it and talk about social benefit. And so there are sometimes I'll talk about it as the social sector in the U.K. Sometimes they'll say civil society. There's a movement to call it the third sector.

00;27;35;25 - 00;28;06;11
JP Baker
I like all of them. As long as we're not kind of reinforcing what I see as a false economic binary binary that there's for profit and nonprofit. And naturally and intuitively, people will think that for profit is somehow more productive than nonprofit, because it seems to imply no profit. So the role of money in that, and we see this sometimes, too, when we talk about government support for nonprofits.

00;28;08;02 - 00;28;40;13
JP Baker
Sometimes people will talk about handouts on an individual level or an organizational level. When they come to the corporate world, they talk about bailouts. It's a subtle sort of difference in language, but there's a lot of judgment there. And I think that, you know, the nonprofit sector is contracted by the government to deliver essential services. We don't often use the same economic metrics to measure the nonprofit sector.

00;28;41;27 - 00;29;14;13
JP Baker
Many people aren't aware of exactly how many jobs it creates or the purely economic benefit. Not to mention the social benefit, which is hard to quantify. There are attempts, there is an approach called social return on investment that uses proxy measures to try and put a dollar figure on the social benefit. But those are pretty fuzzy, not necessarily widely accepted, but I think the role of money is to enable social benefit.

00;29;14;29 - 00;29;18;10
JP Baker
And I think that's the ultimate purpose.

00;29;19;00 - 00;29;24;11
Erica Machulak
Hmm...And how do you see the role of private organizations in this ecosystem?

00;29;26;07 - 00;29;42;16
JP Baker
Private organizations can produce social benefit as well. And this is where we see a lot of crossover initiatives. We see social enterprise, for example. There's a big push for things that generate revenue and produce social benefit.

00;29;43;01 - 00;29;44;09
Erica Machulak
Can you give us some examples?

00;29;45;15 - 00;30;11;26
JP Baker
Yeah. I mean, your local thrift store that's run by maybe the hospital foundation or the Salvation Army is a social enterprise. It's producing it's selling goods to funnel those those monies into social benefit. And some of them do that by just funneling money towards a social purpose organization. Some of them do it by providing employment to people that the organization serves.

00;30;13;11 - 00;30;41;19
JP Baker
But there's even more complex social enterprises that are, in many of them, for example, in agriculture that are, say, employing people who may be difficult to employ and at the same time working the land and selling produce. These things have many benefits social, economic. And it may be easier to see them because they look like businesses.

00;30;43;01 - 00;31;14;28
JP Baker
But that said, many nonprofit organizations, more than people realize, they rely on earned revenue. They have program fees. They run events and they charge for tickets. This is very businesslike in the sense that it's their earning revenue. So not all nonprofits, you know, there's just a few myths. Sometimes we people who haven't seen the inside of nonprofits much assume that they're run on either government contracts or government grants or private foundation grants.

00;31;15;24 - 00;31;21;06
JP Baker
It's much more common for them to have earned revenue and to be functioning a little bit more like businesses.

00;31;22;28 - 00;31;38;24
Erica Machulak
Hmm...And so then what do you think is the I'm trying to think of? So you're calling it the social sector. What would you call an organization within the social sector? Would you call it a social organization instead of a nonprofit or not-for-profit?

00;31;39;07 - 00;32;10;15
JP Baker
That's a good question. I think the social sector or civil society or the third sector, I mean, there's lots of different kinds of organizations we might put into that category. You know, you'll hear the difference between nonprofit and not for profit sometimes. Not all nonprofits are charities. Charity is a status with federal regulators in both the U.S. and Canada that gives them the ability to issue tax receipts for donations.

00;32;11;17 - 00;32;49;02
JP Baker
Nonprofit societies that are not charities cannot issue tax receipts. So that broad category of social sector includes nonprofits as well as charities, but it also includes cooperatives. Which are member run organizations. It also includes social enterprise, which we mentioned, but also some community organizations that maybe don't have any legal status at all. And there are some neighborhood associations that are not incorporated, but they produce social benefit, but they don't have a legal sort of status.

00;32;49;25 - 00;32;50;07
Erica Machulak
Mm hmm.

00;32;51;08 - 00;32;53;19
Erica Machulak
And where would you put foundations in the system?

00;32;54;28 - 00;33;14;22
JP Baker
Yeah, foundations would be in there as well. And some of the foundations function as charities. So they collect monies, they issue tax receipts, and then they disburse those monies to other organizations. So there are private foundations, and then there are public foundations. So there's fuzzy lines in there.

00;33;16;00 - 00;33;48;10
Erica Machulak
One of the things that I'm interested in trying to peel back in this conversation, is this idea that people are coming out trying to drive social change. They want to find work that is, possibly lucrative, but I would say for a lot of people who have dedicated their lives to learning, finding something meaningful that is really making a difference is important as long as you're able to, live a healthy life and sustain your family and do all the things that you want to do without having to worry about your finances.

00;33;48;11 - 00;34;19;19
Erica Machulak
So for many people, the goal is to drive change in a way that is, personally and for your family and financially sustainable, but also doing good. And I suppose my question is, I think many people assume that doing good means going into the not-for-profit or social sector. How would you advise someone who's driver in their career searches to find work where they can really make a difference?

00;34;19;26 - 00;34;46;18
JP Baker
I would say that the not for profit world is a wonderful place to find meaningful work, but I wouldn't say it's the only place. And I think that the business world is a lot more open. There's a lot of young businesses and older more mature organizations too, that talk quite authentically about social impact. And this has changed a lot in the past several years.

00;34;47;08 - 00;35;19;06
JP Baker
So I don't think you need to go into not-for-profit. In the tech world, there are social startups, startup companies that have an explicitly social purpose. I mean, yes, they're designed to achieve profits as well but a part of their DNA as an organization is producing some benefit to society. So I think there are options there, and I don't think that people need to commit to a life of penury if they want to have meaning.

00;35;19;07 - 00;35;46;10
JP Baker
I don't think that's always a tradeoff. My hope is that that improves in the future as as the nonprofit world becomes more more understood and more appealing to to a lot of different people. But I think you can find meaning in in the private sector. You can find it in the nonprofit sector. You can probably find it in the government sector as well, though I have no firsthand experience there.

00;35;46;21 - 00;35;47;01
Erica Machulak
Hmm.

00;35;48;05 - 00;36;02;05
Erica Machulak
And so while we're on this topic, are there any myths that you would want to debunk about the not for profit sector or the nonprofit sector or the social sector, whatever we choose to call it?

00;36;03;16 - 00;36;41;18
JP Baker
Yeah. Where do I start? There are lots of myths, I think. One of them is there are some myths around financial mismanagement. And in my experience, the not-for-profit world is really, really good at stretching. And actually they know how to do it better than anybody. Because one of the things about not for profit funding models is there are diverse sources of revenue, but a lot of them rely on foundation or government grants or government contracts that are sometimes that are not necessarily multi-year agreements.

00;36;42;02 - 00;37;11;18
JP Baker
So a lot of nonprofits significant, they have staff or programs that depend on contracts being renewed year after year. There's a lot of uncertainty in that, and there's lots of situations where an organization doesn't get a contract renewed and suddenly entire program and some staff disappear. So there's a lot of uncertainty there. So I think there's a lot of resilience and ingenuity in nonprofit because of that uncertainty.

00;37;11;18 - 00;37;45;10
JP Baker
Still, I wouldn't want to keep that uncertainty, just inspire ingenuity. But the myths around financial mismanagement, you know, one of the things I hear, for example, is that if you donate to a charity, you're going to line the pockets of one of the charity's executives. There are examples where an organization's administrative costs or overhead or executive pay consume an unreasonable amount in the budget.

00;37;45;27 - 00;38;11;28
JP Baker
Those are not common examples. Those are anomalies. And in most cases, the people I know who work in finance and work deeply with nonprofits say that we actually need to invest more in administrative systems and overhead for nonprofits so that they can increase their impact. So, I see things about, oh, sure, 80% of what you give to United Way will go to the CEO and all those things.

00;38;12;07 - 00;38;36;09
JP Baker
A lot of those are and that's not simply not true. Accredited organizations and accredited charities are required to keep their administrative costs to certain, certain maximums. And those are not very high at all. So that's a huge myth about on the financial side of nonprofit, which I would like to see overturned.

00;38;37;11 - 00;39;01;12
Erica Machulak
And so speaking to that ingenuity and resilience piece that you mentioned that is so critical to the societal or not for profit or nonprofit sector. What do you think are some of the roles that are most valuable in this space right now? What are the skills that serve this sector best?

00;39;01;26 - 00;39;33;02
JP Baker
That's a big question, but I think that there's a lot of need for leadership skills and management skills. And I don't necessarily mean the kinds of leadership and management skills you get from an MBA program. As I mentioned, there are a lot of organizations with people in leadership positions, with arts backgrounds or academic backgrounds. They need generalist skills. In many cases creative thinking, communication and skills are an enormous one.

00;39;33;25 - 00;40;05;16
JP Baker
A lot of nonprofits are understaffed or under capacity in the communications department. For them to have people who are skilled at communication is really valuable. So those are some of the some of the skills that are important, but then also some of the strategic thinking skills. And this is where I've found a place in my work connecting ideas across domains, connecting organizations with each other.

00;40;06;07 - 00;40;11;18
JP Baker
Some of these things and these are the skills I think, that will never be automated or outsourced.

00;40;12;21 - 00;40;31;15
Erica Machulak
I think that's really helpful. So you're a consultant Working Advantage, which is a nonprofit. Maybe one question then is how would you define a consultant? Consultants can look so different. What do you see that title meaning?

00;40;33;01 - 00;41;03;18
JP Baker
That's a really good question. And I think for many years I was not completely comfortable with the word consultant because I felt that it could mean anything or nothing. I mean, also, some of my discomfort was the fact that in the business world, sometimes management consultants are not...they get a little bit of a bad rap sometimes.

00;41;04;02 - 00;41;32;11
JP Baker
And there are plenty of jokes about management consultants. And people question their usefulness. So I was a little uncomfortable with the term consultant for a long time. I'm better with it now because, I think that there are many problems that organizations face that they don't necessarily have the perspect of within their organization. They need to break through on that problem.

00;41;33;11 - 00;41;59;20
JP Baker
Sometimes they need expert opinion, and it's taken me a while to be comfortable with the idea of being and giving expert opinion. But there's different levels of consulting, so sometimes I get an engagement where all someone wants is facilitation. They're not looking for my ideas or my advice on anything. They just need me to steer a process and get them get them to a certain place.

00;42;00;22 - 00;42;37;14
JP Baker
In other cases, people want me to advise them on ways to do things. So there's really different relationships within that consulting relationship, depending on how much advice people want and how how light of a touch you're required to take. But it takes a while, to get there and to get comfortable with that. But I think that, so in the past, I often wanted to refer to myself as a facilitator because I didn't want to pretend that I could give advice on things that I wasn't intimately knowledgeable about.

00;42;39;05 - 00;42;59;25
JP Baker
But so a consultant is everything but nothing. It's basically a third party that can come in and offer you perspective or facilitation or steer you toward resources. So a lot of what I do is, I go to an organization, I talk with them about the things that they're facing, and I go out and I find the people and the resources that will help them.

00;43;00;15 - 00;43;27;19
JP Baker
So in some cases, it's not me. It's not me who's helping them. It's just connecting them with things. My work is all over the place, so in some cases, I have a client that I talk with this morning that I'm helping them on Policy development. So I meet with a group, their policy committee. I find out what the guiding principles are, that they need their their policy to sort of abide by.

00;43;28;23 - 00;43;53;16
JP Baker
I look at examples. I look at what they have already. And I draft new policy for them. And I go back to them and say, does this look like it's going to serve your purposes? How can I revise it? So that's part of consulting, too. And you can see from doing work like that, how those skills of writing, understanding ideas and connecting ideas and research are perfectly applicable.

00;43;54;28 - 00;44;22;01
Erica Machulak
That sounds like really interesting work and that makes a lot of sense. It strikes me that one of the undercurrents of consulting that you have a high level of very nuanced experience with is giving and receiving feedback. So I wonder if you might leave us with a few pointers about how to offer feedback in a constructive way, and also how to hear things that might be critical of your approach.

00;44;23;04 - 00;44;55;14
JP Baker
You know, that's it's something I've thought a lot about. I was a teacher, too. So feedback is something that we need to learn how to give and take well. And I think there's this idea of radical candor. And someone wrote a book about it, and you can Google it and find out. But basically, if you do things with a high level of directness, but also a high level of caring, you are in a space of radical candor and it produces the best outcomes.

00;44;56;17 - 00;45;19;29
JP Baker
If you deliver feedback or ideas very directly, but with a low level of caring, the outcomes are not as good. So I think that the role of empathy is really important in feedback. I'm very fortunate because I'm working with organizations that are trying to make social good in the world, and I care about them deeply.

00;45;19;29 - 00;45;50;07
JP Baker
And so I find that for me, if I give them input or feedback and it's done with a high level of caring, it's taken generally very well in some cases too. I find that my duty is not just to the egos in the room, but, and I've had conversations with consultants about who we serve. If we have, for example, someone in an organization has hired me and they really want me to advance their particular position in organization.

00;45;51;12 - 00;46;26;18
JP Baker
And there's some factionalism. The question becomes, who does the consultant serve? And what I've resolved on is that I actually serve their constitutional purpose, and it's my duty to actually help them achieve their mission, regardless of what the particular individual rules feel. There's a higher purpose there for me, and that's important. And that means that sometimes I do have to deliver kind of tough feedback, but I try and keep my eye on the fact that I'm increasing the effectiveness of the organization.

00;46;26;18 - 00;46;51;02
JP Baker
I'm increasing social good, and that's how I have to do it. But I have to do it with caring or it doesn't work and relationship is so important in those things. So I spend a lot of time in my consulting just listening before I give too much advice to anybody. In terms of accepting feedback. Again, it's not about me.

00;46;52;00 - 00;47;03;12
JP Baker
I'm there to serve and in many ways I take a very service based approach to my work. So if it helps me do that better, I'm happy to receive it.

00;47;04;01 - 00;47;10;20
Erica Machulak
So it sounds like there's a lot of resilience involved in that part of the job, too.

00;47;10;27 - 00;47;17;10
JP Baker
There is. Yeah, I work I work hard at it, so I'm keen to do a good job.

00;47;17;27 - 00;47;29;23
Erica Machulak
Good. Well, and I'm sure that you do. We're we're just about wrapping up the end of our time. Is there anything else that you would want to address? Anything I haven't asked that you would want to answer.

00;47;31;04 - 00;48;09;13
JP Baker
One of the things I think I came out of school, out of university. I think I really believed that it was all about my intellect. I felt it was about how smart I was. That's what would get me to where I wanted to go. I think I learned very quickly that that's not the case. Intellect is definitely important, but there's kinds of emotional intelligence and social intelligence that I discovered are fundamental and that I can't put my intellectual tools or parts of my brain to work unless I've built a relationship.

00;48;10;29 - 00;48;19;13
JP Baker
So that was a big eye opening thing for me. When I came into the world out of university, I didn't really realize that. So that was an important piece of learning.

00;48;20;08 - 00;48;35;18
Erica Machulak
Thank you. I think that's really insightful advice to end on. We really appreciate your time. I thank you for joining us. This was excellent. And I'm sure our listeners will get a lot of value out of hearing this conversation. So thanks. Really appreciate it.

00;48;36;09 - 00;48;39;05
JP Baker
Thank you so much, Erica.

00;48;39;09 - 00;49;05;29
Erica Machulak
We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. The production of this episode was led by our fearless creative director, Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre and Matthew Tomkinson. Matthew composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence.

00;49;07;00 - 00;49;30;26
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate B.C.,Tech Nation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;49;31;25 - 00;49;45;23
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you are listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

"There's Not Really a Ton of Secrets"

Season 1, Episode 6

A conversation with Bill Neill about building relationships, keeping your work in perspective, opportunities in the tech sector, and what we mean when we say "coding."

Show Notes

Transcript

00;00;05;01 - 00;00;39;29
Erica Machulak
Welcome back to the Hikma Collective podcast. I'm Erica Machulak. And today we're chatting with serial entrepreneur Bill Neill. In this episode, Bill talks about building relationships, keeping your work in perspective, opportunities in the tech sector, and what we really mean when we say coding. One of the things that I love about Bill's perspective, and that I hope you pick up on in this episode, is that he's a big believer in our capacity to figure stuff out and that process of learning is a core part of self-determination.

00;00;40;26 - 00;00;49;16
Erica Machulak
I find his approach to entrepreneurship to be really inspiring, and certainly it has informed the way that I approach my business. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation.

00;00;54;14 - 00;01;14;18
Erica Machulak
Thank you for joining us today. Today, we are going to interview Bill Neill, who is the co-founder and chief operating officer at Carex Consulting Group. He's also the co-founder and chief executive officer at Talent Bandit. Bill is a Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. And we're thrilled to have him here today. Bill, thank you for joining us.

00;01;15;16 - 00;01;16;25
Bill Neill
Yeah, thanks for having me, Erica.

00;01;16;29 - 00;01;36;12
Erica Machulak
Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. Today we're going to talk about a number of things. But first, I want to get a sense of your career journey to being a double founder. So let's start talking about your origin story. So you grew up in the Bay Area during the tech boom. What was that like?

00;01;37;08 - 00;01;54;13
Bill Neill
It was pretty incredible just to see the amount of wealth that was being created in such a short amount of time. And I would pair that with the amount of innovation that companies were undergoing. I mean, it was a constant exchange of free ideas and new companies being started. There was tons of funding floating around, so good and bad ideas got funded.

00;01;54;22 - 00;02;03;15
Bill Neill
And at the time, both my parents were computer science engineers. And so I really had an inside look at to several different startups in the Silicon Valley area.

00;02;03;25 - 00;02;13;28
Erica Machulak
Wow. And so just to back up for a second for our audience, for a range of specializations, when you say innovation, what do you mean?

00;02;14;25 - 00;02;40;20
Bill Neill
I mean, hopefully this isn't totally new, but just the idea of that like early 2000, sort of a figuring out that suddenly we had this ubiquitous Internet tool and how many different areas can we apply that to create value for customers or users? And I mean all over the place, right? Like you see companies like like Salesforce, like Google, like I mean, at the time, Google was a was still a privately held company.

00;02;41;07 - 00;02;54;00
Bill Neill
And just to see what they have been able to do, I mean, they're one of the most dominant corporate entities on earth now at this point through through applying a lot of those innovative techniques to create customer value. So, yeah, great.

00;02;54;00 - 00;02;58;16
Erica Machulak
Interesting. And so tell us about your journey. How did you end up in Madison, Wisconsin?

00;03;00;10 - 00;03;22;23
Bill Neill
Yeah, for sure. I came here for the weather. Just kidding. So I grew up in the Bay Area. I was really interested in finance when I was in high school. You know, I was in finance club, all that good stuff. And so when you're talking about studying finance at the university level, I mean, Wharton's one of the, certainly got to be on your short list.

00;03;22;23 - 00;03;41;10
Bill Neill
And so I was offered a pretty good scholarship to attend there. And through my time at Wharton and one thing I discovered was that I don't like finance at all. And I'm not very good at it. And so I graduated the Wharton School in 2009 with a degree in finance and management. And I was kind of a lost soul.

00;03;41;10 - 00;03;59;11
Bill Neill
I was I was looking for a job that was going to really interest me, that was going to use my skills. I thought I had a lot to offer, but at the same time, I had a couple of different Wall Street roles and none of them really clicked for me. And so I was sitting on my couch, basically homeless or jobless, at least.

00;03;59;28 - 00;04;23;11
Bill Neill
And my cousin called me out of the blue and said, "Hey, I just took a job doing technology consulting at a company here in Madison, Wisconsin". I had to look up where Wisconsin was on the map. I thought it was Minnesota. But after I went through the interview process, I realized that technology had a lot of the things that I enjoyed about finance, like being quantitative, being analytical.

00;04;23;21 - 00;04;50;01
Bill Neill
But the application was quite different. There's a lot of systems thinking, and so I took the job and it brought me into the Madison, Wisconsin area to work at a large software vendor called Epic that makes electronic medical records for hospitals. And I spent some time there and and after I left, I continued to stay in the space and consult with various health systems for 8 to 10 years, somewhere in there.

00;04;50;02 - 00;05;14;27
Bill Neill
And lost track, which I still do to this day. I enjoy that kind of work. And it's fun, it keeps me grounded. But through my time there, I joined a startup consulting firm called Nordic Consulting, and we just had phenomenal success. I wish I could point to myself and say it was all me, but the leadership team there was really good and they grew to about 900 employees.

00;05;14;27 - 00;05;37;12
Bill Neill
By the time I had left, a really large entity had gone through several rounds of private equity funding. Lots of people made lots of money, and shortly after that, was it second or third round of private equity funding? I realized that, I'd love to have my own my own company and that I understood how the business worked and that it would be kind of fun to work for myself.

00;05;37;26 - 00;06;10;09
Bill Neill
So I started Carex Consulting Group with Rachel and with Casey Liakos. And we've been in business now for about four years. We have about 60 employees. So we certainly haven't made it made it rich or anything like that. But I think we've done all right. And then through a lot of my work in the air and talent acquisition space, I kind of became aware of a need in the space for a technology platform that staffing firms can use to connect with their clients.

00;06;10;23 - 00;06;12;14
Speaker 2
And that was the genesis of Talent Bandit.

00;06;13;19 - 00;06;18;14
Erica Machulak
At what point did you decide that you were going to start your own business?

00;06;18;27 - 00;06;49;21
Bill Neill
So when we had gone through several rounds of private equity funding at Nordic, it became apparent to me that the business was changing and that's not all bad. But I mean, the business was growing, it was maturing. The opportunities for just wild growth were diminishing because we were maturing and we were leveling off. And several of the folks that had large equity stakes in Nordic, we're kind of interested in taking some of their earnings and finding other businesses to invest in.

00;06;50;17 - 00;07;03;27
Bill Neill
So since I had those connections and I understood how staffing worked, I had the time of a really good talent acquisition person. We we're able to put together a package to fund a new entity and start Carex Consulting Group.

00;07;04;21 - 00;07;15;05
Erica Machulak
And so, given your formal business background and all of the things that you've told us so far, what surprised you the most about starting your own business?

00;07;16;03 - 00;07;48;03
Bill Neill
For me, it was just the sheer task diversity that was required from me. So, you know, I was accustomed to working in it departments and I work on a very large system in a very narrow sliver of that system is my responsibility. And I knew that area of front to back. And suddenly when I am the chief operating officer of a small company, I'm responsible for everything now, everything from understanding what our legal and compliance strategy and concerns are to building out our tech stack.

00;07;48;19 - 00;08;08;19
Bill Neill
Getting on the phone and calling a candidate or a prospective client to understand what their needs are. And so switching from a highly trained specialist to a jack of all trades, master of none was a challenge. But also one of the things that I enjoy the most about being an entrepreneur, you get to get your hands dirty and you're the expert.

00;08;09;16 - 00;08;18;15
Erica Machulak
So tell us about that idea of being an expert. Do you experience imposter syndrome when you started your business?

00;08;20;04 - 00;08;43;13
Bill Neill
Oh, yeah, for sure. I did. And I still do on a daily basis. I'm still waiting for my staff to figure out that, I have a very limited value and I think that's a challenge. And one thing that we spend a lot of time on in our business is thinking about and very clearly defining in writing what we are good at.

00;08;44;02 - 00;09;00;22
Bill Neill
And that's what I use a lot of times in my sales conversations is say like, look, it's a competitive environment. There are a lot of people out there that are good. And I'm not I'm not the best, but I know that me and my team can deliver on X, Y or Z, and that I can look you straight in the eye and tell you.

00;09;00;22 - 00;09;19;27
Bill Neill
Yeah, absolutely. And so when you have that comfort of knowing what you're good at, it made a lot of things easier for me. It made it clear what types of opportunities or deals I should turn down because we can't deliver customer value. And what things I should really fight for and try to demonstrate my value because I genuinely believe it's there.

00;09;20;06 - 00;09;22;20
Erica Machulak
And has your sense of what you're good at changed over time?

00;09;24;04 - 00;09;52;00
Bill Neill
Oh yeah, totally. So that like, you know, highly specialized IT resource to I can probably figure out, this sounds conceited and it's not meant that way. But sure,but throw me into a compliance discussion about H.R. law and the new, you know, PPP funding, how that impacts a business. Like I have that confidence that I can I can jump in and probably figure out at least what it means for my business pretty quickly.

00;09;52;16 - 00;10;17;05
Bill Neill
And there are new systems, new challenges that get lobbed over the fence all my time, especially in the operations space. And so, like, I'm just I just feel like I personally am a lot better at adapting to those situations. Having been through the small stage startup. And I would pull in my experience working at Talent Bandit kind of as a shining example of that.

00;10;17;17 - 00;10;31;18
Bill Neill
So we have I mean, the path to start Carex was arduous. We had to look up everything. How do you form a company? How do you get a bank account with talent? It I mean, it took like three days. We were like, okay, I'm going to call the same banker that I use. I'm going to call my accountant.

00;10;32;11 - 00;10;46;14
Bill Neill
I'm going to call my law firm. Boom, boom, boom. We were up and we were a corporate entity. And so it just having done it before, it was a thousand times easier. Like what seemed daunting and just full of uncertainty was no big deal.

00;10;47;00 - 00;11;00;10
Erica Machulak
That's really interesting. So with all of this benefit of hindsight that you have, what are the things about your formal business training that have carried over the most part?

00;11;00;27 - 00;11;25;06
Bill Neill
I think probably the most useful thing for me is just general management techniques about how to organize as a group, how to get sort of the most productivity out of a small team. That is been highly useful. And then the other things would just be like the hard technical skills, like how to use a spreadsheet, how to put together a professional looking presentation, send to a client.

00;11;25;26 - 00;11;45;26
Bill Neill
We don't have a finance department, so I am the finance department and I'm sure I don't do it full justice. But if we need to understand the profitability of a line of business, I'm the guy. And so I still use a lot of those techniques, not nearly as sophisticated as they taught us, as a much smaller business, but still, those parts are very applicable.

00;11;46;25 - 00;11;53;06
Erica Machulak
Great. So tell us about some of your first big wins as a business owner.

00;11;54;03 - 00;12;20;05
Bill Neill
Oh, yeah. And it's tough when you look back because I'm not entirely sure. I would love to pat myself on the back, but a lot of the early stuff feels like it, like we were a bit lucky. So one of the earliest wins that we had, we were like literally a three person company and there's a Fortune 1000 organization here that that hires a lot of people.

00;12;20;05 - 00;12;47;02
Bill Neill
They're a big consumer of contingent labor, which is what my business provides. And through just a series of personal relationships, they were rationalizing their vendors, determining who to cut and who to bring on board. And we were selected as one of the three firms that they chose to provide services to. And this is a three person company being a primary vendor for a Fortune 1000 company, which doesn't it doesn't sound that impressive.

00;12;47;02 - 00;13;06;16
Bill Neill
But when you sort of think about, whatever, 4000 employees versus three, it it definitely felt like we were playing with the big boys. So that was a pretty fun one. I think some of the other big wins that I would point to would be like just bringing on some staff members that were really highly sought after.

00;13;06;26 - 00;13;20;25
Bill Neill
And they're always challenges challenging to acquire because good people are, in short demand so convincing that person that they should take a shot on a three person company and work for less money. And those were definitely wins that I felt like were a feather in my cap.

00;13;22;14 - 00;13;40;24
Erica Machulak
One of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you in this interview is that you strike me as a person who's not what we think of as a born salesman. You're not a person who jumps into the limelight, and yet you've been effective at relationship building. You've been very effective serial business starter and owner.

00;13;41;21 - 00;13;48;13
Erica Machulak
What do you think? What are the qualities that make you successful at that, sir?

00;13;49;01 - 00;14;15;27
Bill Neill
Yeah, good question. It's been said so much that it's cliche, but I'll say it again. It's for me, it's knowing your strengths. So I'm not a phenomenal salesperson. I'm not the person you'd normally put on the face of your TV campaign. But I know enough to get in front of a client and be able to articulate our value proposition and marry that up to what their needs are.

00;14;17;09 - 00;14;39;03
Bill Neill
But it's more than that. It's understanding what you're good at and what you're not good at, and then bringing in people to fill the skill sets that you're not good at. And so our CEO at Carex, Rachael, is a phenom and a salesperson. She is on commercials all the time. She is. I think she's going to do Shark Tank and that's great.

00;14;39;03 - 00;14;48;22
Bill Neill
She loves it. She gravitates towards it. So having her as part of the team is extremely valuable. You need that front man, but it doesn't necessarily have to be you.

00;14;50;13 - 00;15;16;20
Erica Machulak
That makes sense. So on that note, let's shift the conversation a little bit to focusing on many of the people listening to this podcast are likely to be freelancers or people who are thinking about starting as freelancers who have mostly worked independently in the past. What advice would you have for someone who's just starting out and not necessarily at the point of being able to bring on a team?

00;15;18;21 - 00;15;48;29
Bill Neill
Well, there's a lot of directions I could take that question. My first instinct is to fall back on one of my most important principles, which is to understand what your goals are for the business before you start acting. So if your goal is to grow in scale and enormous enterprise, the list of activities that are going to be top of mind for you are going to be completely different than if you want to run a lifestyle business that lets you leave work every day at 3:00 and, pays you a good income.

00;15;49;18 - 00;16;11;20
Bill Neill
So I as as abstract as that sounds, I think that's probably the most important thing I would ask a budding entrepreneur to spend some time thinking about. And then beyond that, I think one of the most useful things that I did at the start of Carex was to reach out to other entrepreneurs and buy them a cup of coffee and ask them for their advice.

00;16;13;00 - 00;16;38;11
Bill Neill
It's because a small business operationally isn't that sophisticated. You're encountering tons of the same issues that other small businesses are. So it's everything of like what? What software should I use to pay my bills? And, should I do my own bookkeeping or should I hire a CPA? Those questions are things that fellow entrepreneurs have been through time and time again.

00;16;38;12 - 00;16;57;09
Bill Neill
And sometimes people don't have insight for you, but a lot of times you'll walk away from that conversation knowing exactly what you need to do next. And so that was my suggestion. I never paid for consulting help, but I feel like I got tens of thousands worth of free advice for the cost of a buck 85 or whatever a latte is going for.

00;16;58;18 - 00;17;09;05
Erica Machulak
All right. So take that down on a very elemental level. How do you ask someone for a meeting like that? How do you make the request?

00;17;09;27 - 00;17;31;27
Bill Neill
It's a good question. I mean, it kind of depends on the existing relationship. So if it's someone that I knew as like a colleague from, a previous employer, that's going to be quite a bit different than someone that I found on LinkedIn and has a cool background and just somebody I think you could, drop some knowledge on me.

00;17;33;02 - 00;17;54;24
Bill Neill
I think the one thing I learned from our CEO, Rachel, who I mentioned is a great people meeter, is, you know, use a little flattery and tell them specifically why you're interested in chatting with it. "Oh, my goodness. I've seen that you sold three companies and you took one public. That is so impressive. I would love to hear your story and learn how you did it".

00;17;55;07 - 00;18;17;15
Bill Neill
And everybody loves talking about the things they're good at and talking about their successes. So it's a really easy, low bar for someone to accept. Oftentimes that person will give you a referral and they'll say, "Hey, talk to my guy Jay. He's he's a phenomenal accountant". And so you can you can kind of just leapfrog from one contact to another through a lot of those conversations.

00;18;19;16 - 00;18;40;13
Bill Neill
Generally speaking, and this is my philosophy with entrepreneurship, and I know a lot of folks that I've interacted with share it. There's not really a ton of secrets, right? Like the hard part about creating a new business is executing well. It's not it's rarely do I find is it my strategy. So there's telling..giving someone advice doesn't mean you're truly giving them a leg up.

00;18;40;18 - 00;19;00;17
Bill Neill
You're really just telling them the things they should be thinking about. But creating a company that can do those things well is is hard. So, again, like, I don't think you should be bashful about asking questions about financials or try to try to keep anything close to the vest. Unless you've got some crazy proprietary technology that no one's ever heard of.

00;19;00;27 - 00;19;13;09
Bill Neill
Like I would be an open book. Just candidly, share what your problems are and like, ask them how they handled it. Well, you're talking to me right now and like this is exactly the same kind of thing. I love talking about myself.

00;19;15;02 - 00;19;32;14
Erica Machulak
Okay. Real talk, straightforward question. Say you're a consultant so you're not relying on any proprietary information or patents. You're relying on your brain as the service. How do you figure out what you are worth?

00;19;35;06 - 00;20;00;20
Bill Neill
I mean, the easiest way to do that is to look around in the market and find other people that have similar services and find out what they charge. And good advice is when you're first starting out, try to charge less and maybe you can charge more, but you're an unknown entity. You don't have much of a brand behind yourself, so you look to discount yourself 20%.

00;20;00;20 - 00;20;22;25
Bill Neill
Just, I don't know, as a rule of thumb. And then as you start to build from there, of course, you can increase your pricing, you have more cachet. Maybe you've got people on staff, maybe you've done some high profile engagements. That's the easiest way to think about it. Each business is different. Sometimes you can price it in terms of the pain or the problem you're solving for them.

00;20;22;26 - 00;20;41;13
Bill Neill
So if you did this and you outsource it to a PR firm, it would cost you, you know, $16,000 a year. I'll do it for 12. Right? So there's just a couple of ways. But but if you're truly just knowledge consulting, somebody else almost certainly does it. And so just copy their prices.

00;20;42;15 - 00;20;49;23
Erica Machulak
Do you charge by the hour or do you charge by the project?

Bill Neill
Me personally?

00;20;49;24 - 00;20;53;02
Bill Neill
Yeah, usually by the hour.

00;20;53;17 - 00;20;57;18
Erica Machulak
Okay. And why?

00;20;57;18 - 00;21;28;17
Bill Neill
And it insulates me from changes that the customer has. So when you do it, project work or statement of workbase work, where it takes a lot more to assess the project upfront and to price it properly. So you have to really understand what they're trying to do. You need to have safeguards in place that say, "Well, if suddenly we decide instead of building a car, we're trying to build the next hoverboard that that like, okay, well, then we're going to renegotiate the price".

00;21;29;01 - 00;21;45;13
Bill Neill
Whereas when you charge hourly, I'm working on a car, suddenly you want me to work. Suddenly it's a hoverboard. Okay? It's going to take a lot longer, but there you go. And so that right there is like it's just much more simple to do hourly based work. And you know that you're not going to end up upside down.

00;21;46;28 - 00;21;55;10
Bill Neill
Typically, you I mean, SOW based work can have a higher margin, but you really have to know what you're doing. Otherwise you can price it incorrectly.

00;21;56;22 - 00;22;20;01
Erica Machulak
Okay, that's helpful. So to give you some context from a very different perspective of a typical business that a humanist might have, you know, many humanists will go into grant development and editing kinds of work. And if you look, for instance, at Editors Canada, here in Canada, they have a breakdown of different kinds of rates that you would charge for different kinds of services.

00;22;20;01 - 00;22;40;09
Erica Machulak
So an hour of light, line by line copyediting, you would charge a lower rate than really structural, conceptual developmental editing. Is is there an analogy in your field for that? And how do you how do you have those conversations when you're working with clients on new project?

00;22;40;26 - 00;23;07;27
Bill Neill
Yeah, I mean, that's completely accurate. Like, I kind of fall back on like typical H.R. language. So we talk about the complexity of the task, the expert, the expertize required. We talk about years of experience required to deliver that, and that's going to help you articulate your value proposition, and especially if you have something like what you just said, like the listing from Canadian publishing of like what these rates are.

00;23;08;04 - 00;23;31;26
Bill Neill
There's kind of, you have ammunition, there's there's an established precedent for this being tougher and this requiring a higher rate. And you see that all over the place. I mean, in IT department, there might be a senior analyst role which is probably closest to what I did when I was consulting. And that role is going to pay, whether it's consulting or full time, that's going to pay quite a bit more than a helpdesk tier one type role.

00;23;32;00 - 00;23;33;10
Bill Neill
So that's pretty common.

00;23;34;16 - 00;23;39;12
Erica Machulak
How do you position yourself for having those conversations with a first client?

00;23;42;13 - 00;24;07;22
Bill Neill
Yeah, I mean, for me, the a big part of it is the fact that I've done this before for another consulting firm. So for me, it was really easy because I said, Hey, when I worked at X, Y, Z Consulting Company, they charged $150 for my time and $50 an hour for my time. How about you and I agree on $120 an hour because I don't have to worry about the overhead.

00;24;07;22 - 00;24;28;06
Bill Neill
And I want you to give me a shot. That's that's a pretty easy conversation to to have. And you sort of anchor them to 150 and then explain that you're giving them a discount from it. So I think it really just depends a lot on the scenario. But one thing that I would use heavily is if you have a list of established prices that you can work based off that.

00;24;28;06 - 00;24;41;05
Bill Neill
You can say, you know, the average price for a copywriter is $60 an hour. But I've been doing this for 15 years for X, Y, Z University. So it's 65. And I think that's a steal, you know?

00;24;41;13 - 00;25;13;15
Erica Machulak
Yeah, that's really helpful. And all right. So we're going to change gears in a minute, but I want to ask you a couple of things based specifically on your expertize, expertize, working in the recruitment and staffing space. So, Bill, both at Carex and at Talent Bendit, you are working in the recruitment and the staffing space. Can you tell us a little bit more about the qualitative skills that are in demand right now?

00;25;13;15 - 00;25;41;21
Bill Neill
Qualitative skills that are in demand. What I've noticed in the recruitment and staffing space is that there is a lot of consumers of technology labor are still very much interested in someone that can come in and do the job that understands the specific IT tools that they're using. So a bad example, would be like we use Microsoft Excel to do all these things.

00;25;41;21 - 00;26;11;22
Bill Neill
I need someone that knows Microsoft Excel, but a new shift that we're seeing because technology talent is so tight. Looking for, a lot of companies have started to shift towards people that understand the space and understand the function, but don't necessarily know that exact tool. So I've worked on enterprise resource planning systems many times in the past, but I've never worked on Oracle's product, and that's complicated.

00;26;12;00 - 00;26;31;00
Bill Neill
A lot of companies are now switching to will train you. You understand what the business is trying to do with this system. And so we just need to teach you this specific tool, which I think is a great is a great opportunity for folks that don't have a traditional background to get into some pretty lucrative opportunities.

00;26;32;13 - 00;26;54;23
Bill Neill
The other thing I would tack on there would be just communication skills. If you are in a consulting role, if you're an individual or even with the larger firm communicating with the client, being able to convey issues and challenges and what you're doing to overcome it is going to be of central importance to you. And so those a lot of those business fundamentals, are always in demand, right?

00;26;54;23 - 00;26;57;12
Bill Neill
You need those regardless of what industry in space.

00;26;58;02 - 00;27;19;13
Erica Machulak
Interesting. So Hikma works with a lot of PhDs, particularly for some of the career development work that we're doing now. And so many of the people listening to this podcast are likely to be early or mid-career PhDs. They may be students, they may be academics, they may be people who've taken their PhDs to other sectors or are trying to make that transition.

00;27;19;13 - 00;27;29;13
Erica Machulak
Now, how do you position yourself as a good learner for a job application?

00;27;29;13 - 00;28;09;18
Bill Neill
That's a really good that's a really good question. I think first you have to find the right company if if that's your if that's the route you're going to go. So I'll use an example. Like I worked at a large software vendor, Epic Systems, and they hired tons of PhDs, but not necessarily specifically for their discipline. The idea was that they were a talent acquisition strategy that relied on finding, high IQ people, highly motivated people, folks that can't sleep if the job isn't done and train them on specific tools.

00;28;09;18 - 00;28;28;12
Bill Neill
And so I've seen that strategy work really well. And I've worked with companies that are like, we need somebody that has 8 to 10 years of experience doing this specific thing. And and if that's the case, then you're just barking up the wrong tree. You're wasting your time trying to trying to convince them that you could be a good fit here.

00;28;28;21 - 00;28;50;11
Bill Neill
So finding those companies that are more open to to somebody who's smart and motivated and a quick learner is just is just going to be easy and you'll get that from doing company research and things like that. I think the other thing is there are lots of opportunities to learn a new skill set outside of like a traditional four year degree.

00;28;50;21 - 00;29;06;27
Bill Neill
So if you're interested in computer science, you can go to a coding bootcamp, invest 1 to 2 weeks of your time and at least show that you may not be an experienced software developer, but you know enough to be dangerous and you're interested in it personally.

00;29;08;18 - 00;29;32;29
Erica Machulak
That's great. I one thing I really like about that approach, so there's a common sort of aside to call it a joke. But for instance, when I was a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature, there was this narrative when I started looking for other career paths. This was, 2016, 2017. The career development landscape has changed a lot, but at the time it was, you're a PhD in English.

00;29;32;29 - 00;30;05;05
Erica Machulak
You can go into publishing. You can go into teaching or you can learn to code, right? Because your skills, the inherent skills that you have are not market ready. And I think that narrative is changing. And so I wonder and when we talk about these career transitions, having worked in contexts where people are looking for those professional learners who may not know this particular industry backwards and forwards, but are coming into it with a unique perspective.

00;30;05;28 - 00;30;16;20
Erica Machulak
Have you observed any particular growing pains that you would want to prepare someone for who's looking to make that leap?

00;30;16;20 - 00;30;48;12
Bill Neill
And yet there there tends are growing pains. I think you're right that the market has shifted towards towards being more open. And that's, people don't stay in their job for 30 years anymore. So the expectation is that you're going to move around, you're going to be retrained. And many companies now have a pretty well built out sophisticated learning and development department for just that reason that they know even within the company, people are going to change roles and they're going to have different needs.

00;30;48;12 - 00;31;19;10
Bill Neill
And I think, this is not the question you answered. So let me you can stop me at any time. But one of the challenges that I've seen is if you go into consulting and you're you're new and hungry, that can be very challenging because typically companies hire a consultant because they have pain now. So they're not interested in a development project in somebody that will be really good a year from now when they've gotten their sea legs.

00;31;19;11 - 00;31;45;10
Bill Neill
They want somebody who is an expert now. And so if I were looking to make that move, one of the things that I would look for is a company that had a pretty involved training program and probably not a company that's looking to slap their logo on me and then immediately rebuild me to customers. And then the challenge with that is like, I'm going to have a very difficult time because it'll be apparent that I'm inexperienced in that engagement.

00;31;45;21 - 00;32;02;27
ERica Machulak
All right. So going to start to transition toward the end here and wind down, but I want to leave this a little bit open ended and ask you, is there any other advice you would give to someone who's just starting out as a freelancer trying to get their sea legs, as a business owner?

00;32;03;28 - 00;32;31;11
Bill Neill
I'm yeah. So it's cliche, but it's true. Networking is king, especially if you are looking to freelance and sort of be in a very specific space that maybe you got a lot of training in school. Do not underestimate the value of your network. You might think of yourself as someone who isn't that prototypical salesperson archetype, but you would be surprised if you really sit down and think through it.

00;32;31;19 - 00;32;56;02
Bill Neill
How many good contacts you would have to leverage. And so starting that like sales effort is as simple as reconnecting with many folks in your Rolodex. Having a cup of coffee and talking about what's going on in their professional life. Because through that discussion, you'll encounter problems they're having. And then the source of any good business is solving problems for your customer.

00;32;56;17 - 00;33;20;19
Bill Neill
It really is that simple, I think, being flexible. And the other thing would be don't get too daunted by the operations portion. I've known some really, really good consultants that would easily, create their own business and be very successful. But when I talk to them over a beer, it's "I don't know how to do those taxes".

00;33;20;19 - 00;33;38;14
Bill Neill
"I wouldn't want to screw that up". And and in reality, that's, that's an hour and a half worth of learning. You got to talk to an accountant. But then, and it's no big deal and they're effectively leaving a lot of money on the table by working for someone else just so they don't have to figure out a couple of those nitty gritty things.

00;33;40;02 - 00;34;00;06
Bill Neill
You know, just through networking, lots of folks that are interested in starting businesses will talk to me. And that is a recurring theme of like, Oh my God, I don't know, do I need insurance? Oh, my God. You know, again, find somebody that's done it before. Ask them. Ask them for, you know, an hour of their time. And I bet you anything you'll walk away with an insurance broker, you'll know exactly what coverages you'll need.

00;34;00;06 - 00;34;03;16
Bill Neill
You know how much it needs to cost, and it's not that bad.

00;34;04;28 - 00;34;16;16
Erica Machulak
And so you've talked a lot about the value of mentorship and the importance of those early conversations. Can you tell us a little bit about how to treat your mentors down the line? How do you maintain those relationships?

00;34;16;16 - 00;34;44;00
Bill Neill
Yeah, so definitely something I should be better at. But one thing I always try to do is to share my business successes with my mentor and tie it back to them too. So Carex Consulting Group was named to the INC 5000 list for, fastest growing entrepreneurial companies or something like that. When that came out, I reached out to my network and share it with a lot of my mentors and said, "Thank you, I wouldn't have been here without you".

00;34;44;26 - 00;35;04;01
Bill Neill
And what that does is that let's just be a part of your success. Everybody wants to be the person that backed a winner. That was, you know, that was whispering in the ear of someone who became very successful. And so I think that's that's a source of value that oftentimes people don't think of. And think of it more like a friendship than it is a transactional thing.

00;35;04;01 - 00;35;25;06
Bill Neill
Like if your friend had a question about how to get to the drugstore, you would explain it, right? It's not like you're looking to get something out of it. And so it's just a genuine friendship doesn't have to feel like, Oh my goodness, I'm asking this very impressive entrepreneur for her advice for an hour of her time. But I'm not giving anything of value back.

00;35;25;06 - 00;35;47;24
Bill Neill
Like, I think that's the that's the thing that we have to overcome is that, like, you will always have insights to contribute. You have great questions. You can pad their ego bite by sitting and listening and saying, "Wow, you're an incredible entrepreneur". And so all those things are things that you bring to the conversation and you've got to remember that, it's a two way street.

00;35;47;24 - 00;35;53;10
Bill Neill
So it's not just being a taker because you ask someone to be a mentor.

00;35;53;10 - 00;36;15;15
Erica Machulak
I like that a lot. I wonder if you would agree with the point that I'll end on, which is what I have observed about talking to entrepreneurs throughout this process. Different business owners or people who are working in other kinds of sectors, not running their own businesses, but have insights into the field. Is that when you're starting something new, people love to be a part of the process.

00;36;15;15 - 00;36;26;24
Erica Machulak
And so it's not just about the flattery, it's also about including them in your thinking and helping them share in that excitement about creating something new. How does that resonate with you? Is that been your experience?

00;36;28;03 - 00;36;53;02
Bill Neill
Oh, absolute. That is how I got some really phenomenal staff members on early is by selling them and it sounds underhanded but it's not like really articulate how they could be part of something new and how that provides them with a lot of agency to make decisions, to do things better than they've seen done in the past, that that resonates a lot and we hire people for start ups quite a bit.

00;36;53;02 - 00;37;25;13
Speaker 2
It Carex And that's one thing. I mean startups typically don't pay as well, but that's one thing that that typically makes up a pretty large pay gap. It's like, I'll take $15,000 a year less, but I'm going to be this department and I run the entire sales department. That's really cool. Satisfying feature of any job. And like here, I'll give you a for instance, I had a contact of mine who is just incredibly experienced in supply.

00;37;25;13 - 00;37;46;07
Bill Neill
He's worked with Fortune 100 organizations. He gets paid tons of money to do this. And I had some what I thought were pretty simple, like questions about how we can improve our processing efficiency at Carex, and he's really good at systems thinking. So I asked him if he would have coffee with me. We had coffee, we were chatting.

00;37;46;07 - 00;38;15;21
Bill Neill
He came back to the office and he gave me a two hour review, an in-depth analysis of what we were doing, how we could make it better. He gave me principles. He gave me materials to read. He shared some old stuff that he was allowed to from his company, and that was just tremendously valuable. I got ten times more efficient and then when my wife is looking to start a a product company and she has great sales skills, but maybe doesn't understand the supply chain around product very well.

00;38;15;29 - 00;38;33;24
Bill Neill
He was the first name I thought of. And so now he's in business with my wife and he's a 50% owner and a pretty promising venture. So again, like there was nothing in it for him at this at the start. But but down the line, it hopefully it paid back in spades.

00;38;33;24 - 00;38;49;07
Erica Machulak
Great. That's a that's a really great example. So, Bill, you're a family man. Tell us a little bit about the people around and how your relationships with them have shaped your career.

00;38;49;07 - 00;39;08;25
Bill Neill
Yeah, so I think there's probably a little joke in there. I have five children, soon to be six, so definitely a pretty busy household over at the Neill residence. And for me, it definitely contributes to the to the workload, no doubt about it. Like I come home from a busy day and I can't put my feet up.

00;39;08;25 - 00;39;27;19
Bill Neill
I've got to be dad. But it also keeps me grounded and it really helps me find perspective. So when I'm an entrepreneur, so much of the weight can be on your shoulders and usually you feel that way when things aren't going well. There are going to be times when things are low and you don't feel great about it.

00;39;27;28 - 00;39;47;26
Bill Neill
And when you're the boss, right? There's no business hours. Like things don't just end at 5:00. So you at least for me, I have a habit of like letting my mind just run over these problems. That's not always productive. And so for me my family really helps get me out of that headspace and just focus on other things because it's staring you right in the face.

00;39;48;21 - 00;40;15;13
Bill Neill
So rather than sitting and being frustrated about a client engagement that isn't going the way I'd hoped, I'm sitting there reading to my daughter and I think that humanizes me a lot. The other thing is there's a great network around being a parent. And you certainly meet contacts through that. So a lot of the professional contacts that I have, great contacts, are simply because our kids go to school together, they play soccer together or whatever.

00;40;16;10 - 00;40;37;07
Bill Neill
And oftentimes meeting people through their kids is a great strategy because their defenses aren't up. They're not like, "Oh, this guy's trying to sell me something". It's just a friend from school. And oftentimes kids with or people with kids are a bit later in their career maybe have reached a higher corporate title, and now they're in a position to buy.

00;40;37;07 - 00;40;44;24
Bill Neill
So there's there's a lot of benefits there. And yeah, I just think it's what makes life worth living, I guess.

00;40;45;17 - 00;40;56;26
Erica Machulak
That's great. Any any parting thoughts or advice about preserving your own well-being while making a new path for yourself and a career?

00;40;56;26 - 00;41;18;27
Bill Neill
Yeah, I mean, a couple of things that I would suggest was, would be to, to be honest with yourself about throwing in the towel. Like I have had businesses that have not been successful. And probably one of the best things that I did was to see the writing on the wall and realizing that it was time to shut it down and do something else.

00;41;19;18 - 00;41;47;13
Bill Neill
And I think once you do that, it also makes entrepreneurship a lot less scary. So people are like, "Oh, aren't you worried your company will go under?" Sure I am. But if it does, I'll just go get a real job or I'll start another company. So it does take a little bit of the pressure off you when you kind of can look at it as like a temporary asset rather than this like holy grail that you've taught your soul to and you will pull it for your soul in.

00;41;47;16 - 00;42;01;17
Bill Neill
But hopefully it gives you a little bit of perspective, right? Even the same thing. If time comes to sell your company, it helps a lot. If you sort of think about it as like, let me try to get the most value for this asset I have rather than I'm selling my baby.

00;42;03;03 - 00;42;14;21
Bill Neill
So if I'm hearing you right it's keeping that critical distance from your work and maybe also just remembering the things that you learned along the way that prepare you for your next steps.

00;42;14;21 - 00;42;39;29
Bill Neill
Well said. Yes. The other thing that our CEO does extremely well is when things aren't going well, she reaches out to everybody all the time for advice, just, "Hey, things aren't going well. I just want to tell you about it". And you would not believe the incredible solution she comes up with because she's so communicative about it. It's it's the exact opposite of my instinct, which is things aren't going well.

00;42;39;29 - 00;42;58;13
Bill Neill
I kind of want to hide in a corner and work really hard and fix it. And she's like, Let me tell everybody in shouting distance what's going on and ask for help. And sometimes it's not even a specific ask, but you'd be surprised at the amount of help that comes out of the woodwork. So give it a try and see what happens.

00;42;59;06 - 00;43;06;12
Erica Machulak
Great. Well, thank you so much for your time, Bill. This has been a wonderful conversation and I think it's going to bring a lot of value to our listeners. Really appreciate your time.

00;43;07;24 - 00;43;14;23
Bill Neill
Oh, thank you. And thanks for listening to me ramble.

00;43;14;23 - 00;43;57;29
Erica Machulak
This is the Post script. We hung up the phone and kept talking. And now I have another question for you. And so all right. Well, we've just gone on a tangent about is this idea of learning to code. And as I told you, it was a little infuriating to me after doing a PhD in Medieval Literature, learning several languages, writing a dissertation, teaching for courses to have the most prominent career development advice at the end of my PhD be "Learn to code and then maybe you can get a job" that a lot of humanists have had incredible success going that route, doing these data accelerator programs and things like that.

00;43;57;29 - 00;44;27;16
Erica Machulak
So there's a stereotype that if you just learn to code, you'll be employable. And I resist that narrative personally alone up to it because as someone who spent so much time trying to do something else, I resist the idea that I need to do this other thing in order for my skills to be valuable. But based on your experience in the tech sector, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what it means to learn to code and what jobs where you learn to code actually look like.

00;44;27;19 - 00;44;35;07
Erica Machulak
So if you become a coder, what does that mean? What does that career look like for you?

00;44;35;07 - 00;45;10;10
Bill Neill
Well, first, it's painting with the broad brush. So being a coder, or is, one specific area within the technology sector. But I think the application for humanities PhDs is wider than that. I mean, at its base level, it's someone that writes software code. And that goes back to the answer that I gave earlier, where companies are starting to care less about whether, you know, that specific software language, that code and really just like whether you can think properly about the problem and solve it in an efficient way.

00;45;11;03 - 00;45;41;23
Bill Neill
And so I think a lot of the times the resistance that I'm hearing really comes from the way you frame it. Like, I don't want to be sitting in a corner, you know, just just writing this lame syntax, all day because I understand syntax because I'm a Ph.D. There's so much more that comes into the equation when you're applying it in a real business setting where you're thinking about business requirements and how people are going to use it, how we're going to solve the problem, how systems are going to talk to each other.

00;45;42;01 - 00;45;59;18
Bill Neill
Like you can really pop your head up a level. And that's where I think someone who's incredibly intelligent and accustomed to systems thinking and how things are going to interact, like that's when you can really provide a lot of value. Like learning the syntax is literally something you can do at a coding bootcamp. Like that's why it only takes a couple of weeks.

00;45;59;27 - 00;46;24;23
Bill Neill
It's really just, it's the other stuff that takes a long time and people get paid a lot of money for it. But just for context, like I routinely work with software developers or folks with Python skills, stuff like that. And those people could will demand 160,000 a year with five years of experience. Not always. It depends on the role.

00;46;25;01 - 00;46;53;22
Bill Neill
But like, when I'm pushing it, when I'm pushing towards the technology sector, like that's where the money is. That's those companies make a ton of money. And it's not surprising that their staff is well paid, too. And those companies also have the pockets to invest, deep pockets to invest in employees. So again, like if you're coming from a humanities background and you work at Google, they're the kind of company that can invest in you for six months and teach you how the systems work and teach you to code and play the long game with your skill set.

00;46;54;09 - 00;47;14;04
Erica Machulak
And so when you say the long game, if you picture someone who say they graduate with a Ph.D. now they do one of these bootcamps, they get one of these jobs that has a training component. What is their career look like ten years from now? What are the actual opportunities that are available to them?

00;47;15;02 - 00;47;38;29
Bill Neill
So there's a myriad of applications for coding. It can be everything from, working for a municipal wastewater department to working at a Silicon Valley tech startup that's making the newest, greatest app like just like anything else. Just like saying you are a manager or you're an accountant. There are so many applications to what that means?

00;47;39;07 - 00;48;00;12
Bill Neill
But ten years down the line, to even the entry level roles tend to pay pretty well. And if your goal is to to interact with people and make more strategic decisions, maybe you see yourself as a VP of IT Or maybe you've started your own technology company that understands customer's problems and writes custom software to solve them.

00;48;00;25 - 00;48;12;04
Bill Neill
You know, there's so many opportunities, but it's just a big growing sector that generates incredible returns. And so I would encourage anyone to think about about being a part of that pie.

00;48;13;06 - 00;48;22;28
Erica Machulak
So, Bill, based on your understanding of the tech sector, what efforts do you see to work toward inclusion in the tech space?

00;48;24;21 - 00;48;53;11
Bill Neill
Okay. Every company that I work with at the moment is falling over themselves to bring in nontraditional candidates. Nontraditional, meaning female, minority veteran, disabled... technology has a labor shortage. So the the economics are already with you. If you're a nontraditional candidate, there's just incredible demand. And they're trying to figure out how to fill it. But 2020 is the year of BLM.

00;48;53;11 - 00;49;24;05
Bill Neill
And there's there was me, too, before that. I think there's a recognition within large corporate America that they need more diversity, and it is a push for every single talent acquisition department. And so I think, if you play your angles right, you can say, "Hey, I am a woman who is interested in technology and I have this incredible mind and background that makes me a potentially great fit, but I don't have those immediate skills", and companies are looking for ways to invest in that.

00;49;24;05 - 00;49;39;01
Bill Neill
I mean, there's you can you can go on any Fortune 500 website and and find their diversity and inclusion initiatives. And and they commit to it to varying degrees. But many are quite serious about about incorporating more nontraditional folks into their workforce.

00;49;40;01 - 00;50;12;29
Erica Machulak
Great. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Hikma Collective Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Machulak, writer, medievalist and founder of Hikma. The production of this episode was led by our fearless creative director, Sophia van Hees, in collaboration with Nicole Markland, Dasharah Green, Eufemia Baldassarre and Matthew Tomkinson. Matthew composed the original music you hear now in his capacity as the 2022 Hikma Artist in Residence.

00;50;12;29 - 00;50;36;25
Erica Machulak
This podcast has been made possible with generous support from Innovate B.C.,Tech Nation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find show notes, links and transcripts at www.hikma.studio/podcast. Hikma is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the ən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

00;50;37;24 - 00;50;51;21
Erica Machulak
We are grateful to be here and to share this space with you. Our speakers, team members and listeners are based all over the world and wherever you are listening, we encourage you to learn more about whose lands you're on.

At Hikma, we are committed to supporting emerging scholars and practitioners through our internships, made possible with the generous support of our partners and funders. The following organizations have supported this podcast by funding past and present members of the Hikma team. We thank them for their investment in creative, outstanding people who have enriched and amplified our work.

Hikma Collective Podcast: Season One

The Art of Alternatives

Season 1 Trailer

"The odds are really good that it's going to be OK"

Season 1, Episode 1

Show Notes

Transcript

Finding the Story

Season 1, Episode 2

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The Languages of Innovation

Season 1, Episode 3

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You Can Check More Than One Box

Season 1, Episode 4

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The Questions You Ask Determine the Results You Get

Season 1, Episode 5

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"There's Not Really a Ton of Secrets"

Season 1, Episode 6

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