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The loss of David Laws to the British coalition government is a crying shame.  At a time of great economic uncertainty and impending cuts in public services and pay, he radiated competence.  He gave us confidence that the right man was at the helm.

He had no choice but to resign. That his abuse of parliamentary expenses was caused by his desire to maintain privacy around his sexuality, rather than to gain financially, offers no excuse.  It just makes it sadder. And so frustrating to those who supported him. He is a wealthy man, so why did he not just stop claiming any rent allowance?

He possesses so many of the Key Kapabilities (see Backing U!) needed to become a top politician – see my post last year on Sarah Palin.  His mastery of not just the Treasury brief, but that on Education before that, was evident to all.  His communication skills are so adept that my 13 year old son, along with 70% of a youthful audience, had no hesitation in voting for him in a debate on education at a youth centre in South-East London in March this year.

There are some impressive ministers in this coalition government, but none more impressive than Laws.  He will be back.

Gut feel is all that’s needed at this stage. You need to rank your long list by what you feel. You already have a vague notion of market demand and competition for these jobs, because you know something about them. These are jobs to which you aspire, where you believe the hwyl lies. Let your gut provide a preliminary view. 

You need to rank each of the long-listed jobs or businesses by four criteria:

• Number of people engaged in this job or business—Are there many people working in this field, compared to the numbers engaged in other fields?
• Growth in jobs or businesses—Is this a field where there will be growing demand for people over the next few years? Or is demand more likely to stay flat, or decline?
• Competition for jobs or among businesses—How ferocious is the competition to get these jobs? To what extent does the supply of people wanting to do these jobs exceed vacancies available? If this is a business, how intense is the competition between businesses? Is it intensifying?
• Job market risk—How risky is this job or business, compared to others?

 Take care to get the rankings of job market attractiveness the right way round (!):

• The more jobs available, the more attractive the market.
• The faster the growth, the more attractive the market.
• The more competitive, the less attractive the market.
• The more risky, the less attractive the market.

 How attractive are your long-listed jobs overall? One or two on your long list may already be screened out. If market conditions are unfavorable, you’re unlikely to be backable. You’ll be pushing uphill. But others on the list should come through okay.

In the next post on career tools, we’ll take a look at the second part of the process: how well placed you would be to get in and then succeed at this job or business.  Again gut feel is all that’s needed for now…

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The British public has been mesmerised by politics over the last week in a way unprecedented in my lifetime. 

How is this relevant to a career-oriented blog on backing your passion?  Bear with me…!

The general election on May 6th was so tantalisingly inconclusive.  By 4am on the 7th, when I called it a day,there was still little confirmation which way the country was moving.  So many results were quirky or anomalous that no clear pattern was emerging.

The next morning we found out.  The Conservatives had won the most seats, but not the majority they had long expected.  Labour had lost almost a hundred seats, but had proven surprisingly resilient in the cities and regions.  The Liberal Democrat bubble had been blown away and, far from gaining 20+ seats as the polls had suggested, they had lost more seats than gained.

And then the talks started.  Four days of Conservatives stuck in a room with arch-rival Lib Dems.  Gordon Brown announcing he will go to entice Lib Dems into talks with Labour – yet with no realistic prospect of a deal, given the mathematics. 

Then Brown resigned, the Queen asked David Cameron to be PM and we  had the first coalition Government since WWII – complete with an astonishing love-in between Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg in the rose garden at #10.  Two men who had a week earlier been tearing strips off each other, smiling and joking and patting each other on the back.

Extraordinary times.  But can this whirlwind romance last?  Yes and no.

In the corporate world, there are three prime pre-conditions for a strategic alliance to work – that is, to be sustainable.  The organisations need to have shared objectives, a common time horizon and the value brought to the alliance by each party has to be fairly assessed and built into the power sharing in the new entity.

In this case, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat negotiators did a thorough job spelling out their shared objectives.  Their coalition agreement is as good as could reasonably have been expected for a document cobbled together over four days between formerly bitter rivals.

The time horizon has likewise been sorted.  Both parties are firmly fixed on a full term, five year horizon, with safeguards built in to ensure no one party cuts and runs.

It is in the power sharing that the mistake has been made.  The Conservatives no doubt argued for an allocation of seats based on their respective number of MPs (57:306), so four out of 23 seats to the Lib Dems.  The Lib Dems would have countered that the electoral system is biased and the allocation should reflect votes cast (23%:36%), giving nine seats to the Lib Dems. 

For a stable alliance, they should have split the difference, to say six or seven seats.  The Lib Dems got five.  Furthermore, they landed not one of the big three offices of state – the Treasury, Home Office and Foreign Office.

Once the early, pre-agreed legislation has been passed, the Lib Dems will find themselves marginalised.  As events unfold, they will feel that they are sitting in an effectively Conservative cabinet.  Their supporters will regard them as Cameron’s poodles.  Their activists will be less keen to stuff leaflets through letterboxes and knock on doors.

They will be unable to hammer out issues on a four-four negotiating basis as over the last week, but as five to 18. A seven to 16 ratio around the cabinet table, with one of theirs representing a heavyweight office, would have represented a healthier balance of power.

The Lib Dem negotiators did well on policy matters, but less well where it really matters, the power sharing.  Here Cameron’s team was too successful.  Their success is not conducive to coalition stability.

There is a lesson here for all of us.  Be careful in your negotiations.  Be too successful and the ball can bounce back to strike you.

When you join a new organisation, you effectively form a new alliance, a new coalition.  Your little organisation, UCo, merges with the big organisation, BigCo, to form a slightly bigger one.  It is in your interests to make BiggerCo a stable organisation.

So when you apply for a job and sit down with your boss-to-be to discuss pay and conditions, take care not to win outright!  Leave him or her with the impression of a score draw.  If you manage to negotiate too good a deal, there could be lingering resentment, leading to an unstable alliance. When the layoffs come along, guess who’ll be first out of the door.

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Gordon Brown’s indiscrete rubbishing of a pensioner on Wednesday will be the final nail in his coffin. A shabby end to a once glorious career. The lady was no more a “bigot” than you or me – just an old lady finding it difficult to come to terms with the changes around her and asking honest questions of her party  leader.

Back in the early 1990s, when I stood for parliament, Brown was a formidable opposition politician, indeed the most formidable opponent. He was devastating in framing answers in one or two minute or even 10 second soundbites. He went on to become a sound chancellor of the exchequer, achieving the previously unattainable feat of a Labour chancellor being trusted by the financial markets – at least for the first half dozen or so years.

It is said that all political careers end in failure. Maggie was undone by the poll tax, Major by sleaze and tedium, Blair – and Bush – by Iraq. Brown will be undone by vanity. He was never cut out to be a PM, as  most in his party have long known. But he pursued his ambition ruthlessly and heedlessly.

His appearance in the final PM debate last night was excruciating. In control as much of fact as spin, yet so divorced from reality that he could mount no simple, clear, convincing case for his record. Instead his rhetoric was largely negative. One can only imagine how his Labour collegaues must have wished they had had the courage to replace him with Alan Johnson or David Milliband a year ago – just imagine how well either of them would have performed against Cameron and Clegg.

A good man, undone by pride. Any lesson for us there?

Would you back U in your current job or business? Are you hanging on, without passion, motivation and conviction, simply because of pride?

If so, bail out now, before it is too late.  Before you come to be seen as a failure, like Brown.  Before you are ousted in favour of others who have more oomph than you.

Find another job or business where your passion lies and where you’ll be backable.  Back your hwyl!

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Steve Pavlina is a personal development blogger extraordinaire.  He is followed by thousands, so what he says matters.

But he’s a businessman first and foremost. Which means that he writes controversially to generate clicks. Clicks mean ads. Ads mean dough.

So he has every incentive to break some crockery.

Which is why you need to take what he says with a slight pinch of salt. Use his words by all means to make you think, shake off your preconceptions, rustle your complacency.  But realise that his is a cleverly packaged, deliberately extreme point of view.

Take his greatest post of all, which has elicited with more than 1750 responses: 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job. It’s heady stuff – take these snippets:

• Income is for dummies – don’t sell your time, sell products which can work for you 24/7 – like his lucrative blogsite!
• Humans are not meant to be raised in cages – roam free!
• Self-employment risky? – tell that to the employee who’s just been fired!
• Employees are slaves to the baas man, the “evil bovine monster” - they’re just “turds in the herd” – try telling the boss he’s a jerk and see what happens!

Where Pavlina goes wrong is to assume that everyone else is like him. All they have to do is, for instance, start a blog, come up with some controversial but engaging viewpoints and, hey presto, they have an income stream and they can bin the day job.

As if it were that easy.  There are thousands of bloggers out there who barely turn a buck. Likewise in most other highly competitive areas of self-employment. Take web design, music, aromatherapy – some make it, many don’t. The trick is to find and exploit a niche – Pavlina got into his early and is reaping the benefits.  Good for him.

Self employment isn’t that straightforward.  It’s fine for some, not so for many. On balance, it works for me. I run my own business, with diverse income streams, but I recognise that it ain’t for everyone.

Here are six reasons why going it alone may be tough:

It’s not easy to win business. Most newly self-employed people have little experience of winning business. At their former company, they were typically handed work to do on a plate. Business was promoted by the marketing team and clinched by the sales team, with the company possessing a brand that conferred a degree of credibility in the sales process. Your role may have been to help deliver the business after it had been won. You will be new to selling. 

Pavlina suggests that employees, if they want a pay raise, have to sit up and beg their master for more money. While, “if you have a business and one customer says “no” to you, you simply say “next.”” That is an outrageous exaggeration! Many sole traders suffer because they genuinely find it difficult to sell and have to make do with whatever comes their way.

Pavlina may not understand this. He’s a super-salesman. Not everyone is.

You have to do everything yourself. When you’re self-employed, who do you ask to type a letter? Issue an invoice? Then post it? Make the coffee? Keep the books? Wine and dine a key client? Chat up the local journalist? Design the business cards? Write the brochure? Provide content for the website? Choose the laptop? And the ISP? Delete the spam? Fix the abominable pop-ups? And, having done all that, provide the service better than the competition? The answer is scary: U!, U!, U! You’re not just the CEO. You’re also the GIC—gofer-in-chief. 

There ain’t no security. If you’re an employee and you’re feeling dreadful, with the flu or perhaps something nastier, what do you do? You call the boss and suggest, croakily, that you stay home for the day. You’ll still receive your salary. Likewise if your son is unwell, your wife is unavailable, and you need to take him to the doctor, your bank account will still be credited at the end of the month. Just as it is when you’re on holiday. An employee also has some element of job security. Not as much these days as in earlier decades, perhaps, but some. 

There’s none of that when you’re self-employed. When you’re sick, or when you have to care for sick relatives, you don’t get paid. When you’re on holiday, its cost is not offset by a salary check on your return. And there’s no security, none at all, when the market gets tough. For the self-employed, you eat what you catch. No catch, no food. You are as we all once were: a hunter-gatherer. 

Work time blurs into home time. For the self-employed, there becomes a finer distinction between when work stops and play starts. Work can infiltrate leisure time. This is especially true if you work from home. It can be difficult to turn off the laptop or put down your tools and play with the kids when there’s work remaining undone. 

It can be lonely. As CEO of your own business, you may be pretty isolated for much of the time. That comes with the territory. Worse, when things go badly, it can be lonely. Bad news like a lost pitch can be hard to take. It gets more personal. It’s not your company the client is rejecting in favor of another provider. It’s you. It’s your skills, your track record, your storyline, your pricing, your personality, your face, your armpits (?!), your everything. In a word, you. It can be tough. 

Don’t do it for the money. It’s a common fallacy that self-employed people make more than employees. It’s not generally the case. Just because the daily rates may seem high, remember they are multiplied not by 5*52 days/year, but by the days you do paid work per year—a very different concept. Take off days for marketing, pitching, admin, holidays, or sickness, and take more off for downtime/no work—and your annual earnings may not be spectacular. 

Phew! So there are some of the downsides to being self-employed. Now let’s try to redress the balance. Here are some of the main advantages of being self-employed, of being the head honcho of your own business: 

You’re your own boss. This is the most obvious boon. No reporting, no asking for permission, no annual reviews, no internal politics. No need to account to anyone but U! To those of us with little patience for bosses of limited capability other than playing the corporate game of slippery snakes and greasy ladders, this is a big plus. Pavlina is bang on here. With your own business, you’re not just another turd. 

You’ll grow your business. Each time you win a new customer, that’s your precious customer. Each time you receive payment, that’s your bank account you’ll be dropping the check into. Each time you prepare your annual accounts, hopefully you’ll be tracking the growth of your company, your enterprise, your initiative, your energy. Your baby. It feels good. 

You can select your own free time. This is the flipside to the disadvantage above of work slipping into leisure time. Leisure can also slip happily into work time when you’re self-employed. You’re bashing away at the laptop, the lad comes home from school and he wants to kick a ball with you in the park. Why not?! 

You’ll see more of the family. Few self-employed people have long commutes. Many work from home or from nearby offices, maybe on the Main Street down the road. Many visit other people’s homes within a reasonable radius of theirs. Time saved in commuting should mean more time with the family. When you see both parents of a child at an after lunch performance of the school’s jazz band, what’s the betting that the working parent (or parents) is self-employed? 

So there you have it. There’s a balance. Some fantastic advantages, balanced by some rather grim disadvantages. It’s a lifestyle choice.

We all know which side of the argument has most swayed Pavlina. And good luck to him. But for you?

If you have found this helpful, there’s much more detail on the pros and cons of setting up your own business in Chapter 13 of my book, Backing U! A Business-Oriented Guide to Backing Your Passion and Achieving Career Success.

There are also a whole bunch of tips on how to sell and how to run a business in the book – which you can take a look at now or wait for another blog post sometime soon…!

So, to summarise. There’s one reason why you may need a job – you’re not Steve Pavlina! Different strokes for different folks…

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What does it take to become successful in this business, and are there any lessons for the rest of us? 

Let’s take it from the top.  As set out in my book, Backing U!, this needs to be done in two stages.  You first set out what the needs of the customer are, and then you consider what the provider needs to do to meet those needs and run a successful business – the key kapabilities (“K2s”). 

Let’s take a stab at customer needs.  At the top end of the market, he (let’s keep it simple, it’s usually this way round) is probably looking above all for three things: excitement, safety and cleanliness.  He may also be interested in things such as specialties, conversation, comfort.  Only a few, at the top end, will be concerned by price – though this will be very different at the bottom end. 

To satisfy the most important needs of the top end customer, the provider needs to have the appropriate package of looks, attitude and technical skills, convey a sense of security through site location – an apartment or hotel with plenty of CCTV cameras? – and be scrupulously hygienic.  

She may also need to develop skills in certain specialities and develop a line of banter and/or intelligent conversation, as required.  Dr Brooke Magnanti, alias Belle de Jour, in an interview with Billie Piper (pictured), the actress who played her in the TV series, stated that she specialised in a particular technique inappropriate to mention on this blog – though that would hardly have differentiated her from the street provider.  She also acquired a highly diverse wardrobe – making sure that “working knickers and the rest of my knickers never entwined” – and was at the least on an intellectual par with her clients. 

All this, however, just gets you to the level of competent provider.  To excel, you need something else: passion.  Magnanti seems to have had it.  She thoroughly enjoyed her job.  She had no guilt at all.  [“It's OK if someone goes home and has sex with someone they don't know for free. But it's not OK if... there's some money involved, which is something I don't quite understand.”] She needed the money and this was something she was good at, darned good at.  [“You left a client and thought – yes, I nailed it!”]. 

But even passion isn’t enough to run a successful business.  There are the management-related K2s to consider as well, over and above those related to customer service.  In a service such as this, marketing and distribution are critical. 

As for all self-employed professionals, if no-one knows you’re there, you won’t get your share.  Allie, the call girl interviewed at length by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in SuperFreakonomics, relied exclusively on web marketing for her business.  She got into it by accident, through visiting online dating sites and, after one such date, finding $200 left on the dresser: “I’d been giving it away for years and the fact that someone was going to give me even a penny – that was shocking!”  From then on, she focused her investment on online marketing – that was her distribution channel. 

Magnanti chose an alternative channel – an agency.  Less effort, more secure (due to call-to-office security checking pre-appointment), but more expensive – the agency would lop off one third of charges for commission. 

Either way, the distribution channel chosen was highly instrumental in the business success of these two entrepreneurs.  When you look at the channel pursued by those at the bottom end of the profession, that of walking the streets, you can see the advantages.  The street hooker has the benefit of free distribution, but at the cost of maximum discomfort, minimal security and rock bottom prices.  It’s a desperate model. 

At the other extreme, Allie’s web-based marketing and distribution model was extraordinarily successful.  She was able to exploit her bargaining power to hike up prices, work less and earn more.  How many professionals can do that?  Even Magnanti couldn’t have done that, being reliant on a third party distributor and marketer. 

No-one in their right minds would recommend a young woman to embark upon such a career, even where the need for ready cash borders on the desperate.  There must always be an alternative.  Happily, both these call girls came through and moved on successfully.  Magnanti is now a best-selling author and TV personality, on top of her highly respected job as a research scientist.   Allie went on to take a university degree in, of course, economics and even gave guest lectures at Levitt’s University of Chicago.  Levitt records that some students said she gave the best lectures ever – she had them hooked!  It is unlikely that these two are the norm. 

But these top practitioners in the oldest profession can remind us of two vital tips for the self-employed: it’s all about passion… and selling.

It doesn't have to be that bad...!

Are you unhappy at work–with one foot out the door? If so, you’re not alone…

The Conference Board report of 5th January on employee attitudes found that well over half of American workers (55%), and a full two-thirds (66%) of workers under 25, are dissatisfied with their jobs.

“While one in ten Americans is now unemployed, their working compatriots of all ages and incomes continue to grow increasingly unhappy,” says Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board.

Meanwhile, an October 2009 monster.com survey of over 20,000 job seekers in North America and Europe found that almost 90% of employees would be prepared to switch industries. Nearly half of respondents were actively doing just that.

“Changing careers, especially during difficult economic times, can be an empowering decision. Those struggling to find employment in their current industry could use this time to consider pursuing their passions or think about retraining,” said Norma Gaffin, director of content for Monster.com. “The current economic climate may have forced the hand of many jobseekers, and for anyone looking to make a career change.”

If avoiding the unemployment line is the main reason you’re hanging on to your job, you are at risk of losing it at any time–to someone who is enthusiastic and passionate about work. Employees who lack passion are prime targets for layoffs.

The time to look for a job that fills you with passion is NOW.

Read this blog!  Better still, take a good look at Backing U!

Now you need to derive a short list of two or three jobs. These will not only be jobs with passion but also jobs in which you could succeed. 

You need to take a first cut at assessing how attractive the markets are for each of these jobs and how well placed you would be to get in and succeed in them. You’ll effectively be doing a quick and dirty assessment of how backable you’d be in each job.

The screening process has to be as objective as you can make it. The aim is not to provide you with a clearer ranking of which job you’d most like to do. It’s to find out in which job you could be backable. Out of all those jobs in your long list, where would a backer consider you worth a punt? 

This aim has implications for the criteria we’ll use in ranking the jobs. Typically, when people are thinking of a career change, they’ll list criteria such as pay, working conditions, values, culture, location, type of colleague, status, and so forth. They’ll use these criteria to rank possible careers by relative attractiveness. 

This is all highly valid. But it’s not for here. It’s for later on, after we’ve screened the long list for backability. 

There is little point in spending loads of time doing further research on a career where it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be backable. To a real-life investor.

There are two parts to the screening process: how attractive are the markets for these jobs, and how well placed you would be to get in and succeed in them.

We’ll take a look at the first of these in the next post…

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In the book SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner delve into the mysterious economics of prostitution.  They explain how demand for prostitution overall has plummeted over the last fifty years, driven out by the sexual revolution of the Sixties and the advent of serious competition in the form of casual sex, delivered for free by consenting, newly “liberated” women.  Prices for street sex have accordingly crashed over the decades, with street hookers now finding it hard to scrape together a hard, dangerous and sad living. 

The economics is very different at the top end.  Levitt and Dubner showed how a savvy, self-employed, home-based, web-marketing call girl can not only make very good money, but can actually increase her earnings by pushing prices up and working less.  Yes, read it again! – atypical economics indeed. 

Some might say that whether a girl is working the street or from a fancy apartment, the ultimate mechanics are the same and a hooker is a hooker.  Morally perhaps, economically not so.  A high class call girl operates a different business model altogether. 

For over seven years, one of the most widely clicked blogs in Britain has been Belle de Jour, the “intimate adventures of a London call girl”.  The diaries are witty, quirky and, most strikingly, literate.  They were also anonymous, and for years had press pundits vying to guess the identity of the scribe.  Most opined that the adventures were the work of a reputable author with an over-active imagination, possibly a man. 

Then in November last year the author revealed herself.  She is Dr Brooke Magnanti, a research physicist in her mid-thirties, specialising in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.  For 14 months in 2003-04, she worked as a prostitute to support herself during her PhD studies.  She found her situation not without humour, so started blogging under the name Belle de Jour, the nom-de-guerre of a bored housewife turned call girl played by Catherine Deneuve in the brilliant movie by Luis Bunuel in the 1960s. 

Magnanti  earnt very good money in her surprising, enjoyable (says she) but temporary  career, but that was just the start.  The blog turned into a best-selling book, and the book into a TV series, starring Billie Piper, former teen pop singer and later co-lead of the highly rated UK children’s TV series, Dr Who.  Again, the role of hooker was played by a celebrity known more to children than adults. 

Magnanti has been condemned by many in women’s groups, politicians and the media for glamorising prostitution.  But she frankly retorts that she was lucky.  She was at the top end of the trade, she never had to face a troublesome or dangerous client and she wasn’t in it for long. 

She recognises that things are very different at the street end of the trade and she in no way wishes to glamorise that, especially where trafficking is involved.  All are agreed that any element of coercion in the trade, from over-assertive pimping to outright abduction, is abhorrent.  But where there is free will, and that is the case in the vast majority of cases, according to recent research by London Metropolitan University, which challenges the over-inflated numbers on trafficked sex workers in the UK touted by some in the media, the ethics vs economics argument is more open to debate – and is indeed regularly debated in parliament and beyond. 

What then does this have to do with a blog on backing your passion and achieving career success, you may well ask? 

Well, aside from the obvious retort that if the practitioner doesn’t display some element of passion at the delivery end of the trade, quite a lot.  It is an activity that we all come across in an amateur capacity and regard the professional side of things with at least curiosity.  And it has some strange economics, as discussed above. 

But, above all, it produces quite a surprising result to the question we ask of most jobs: what do you need to have, or do, to be good at it, to succeed in the trade? 

Is it the technical skills?  The attitude?  The passion? 

Have a think about what drives success on at the top end of the game.  How come the high class hooker in SuperFreakonomics was able to raise her prices?  How come the real Belle de Jour was so successful?

Any tips for the rest of us?  All will revealed in a later post. Hint: think marketing…