I am excited to be here, to be joining this incredible team as your new editor-in-chief. In fact, I have had a stupidly silly grin across my face for hours as I have been thinking about what to write.

I remember when I first came across your project last year. A friend from my news design world, Justin Ferrell, was on Northwestern campus for a few days and stopped in for a chat. He asked if I had seen this project and, ever since, I have admired you from afar. In fact, my Knight Lab colleagues and I have often spoken about, even written about, your impressive and ambitious beginning, going from an off-the-cuff Twitter exchange to proof-of-concept in about a week. Hot damn!

And now, dear team, [internal squeal] … I am so proud to tell the world that we are going to work together.

I am so looking forward to exploring the potential of this project as we go on an adventure. All new publications take some time to find their editorial voice, to find their stride, and I have enjoyed your fearless approach to the highly competitive journalism startup community. Perhaps we’ll pivot to something more locally focused. Perhaps we’ll shoot for something more dinner-party-esque. Wherever we end up, we are going to have a ton of fun getting there because we want be the ones who always have five great stories to deliver at 5 p.m.

And you, our loyal Evening-Edition readers and podcast listeners, I am looking forward to getting to know you better. We are so grateful that you like us and we would love to know more about how we have been doing so far. So please, don’t be shy. Reach out to me on Twitter, @jmm, or email us and let us know what you think.

Now, let’s get back to work.

Miranda Mulligan
Editor-In-Chief
Evening-Edition

It’s cool. I am here to help you.

I am a job creator. And contrary to what you may have been told in school, you are about to enter a market awash in opportunity. Especially if you’re entering the technology and interactive design market. Which doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna have to go out there and nail an interview—because you will. So if you’ll give me a few minutes of your precious time I have a few tips that may help you land the job of your dreams.

1. Get your house in order

Don’t even think about looking for a job without an online presence. If you’re a designer you better have an online portfolio. If you’re a developer, show me some code samples. And don’t just show me your work is pretty, describe what problems you were solving.

And as much as I hate to say this, get a LinkedIn profile. Otherwise, prospective employers are gonna look at your Facebook page, which should be cleaned up but not to the point where it’s obvious you’ve cleaned it up. Leave a beer bong shot or two.

Buy a decent outfit to interview in. Tights aren’t pants and flip flops aren’t shoes.

2. Where are these jobs at, fool?

Good question. There are a few excellent job boards you should get familiar with. Start with Authentic Jobs and 37 Signals Job Board. Stay away from Craigslist and stuff like that, they’re shit shows for stuff like this.

3. Get names

When you finally find a job you want to apply for do some research. Find out the name of the person who’ll be receiving your email. Hint: They’re not called Hiring Manager. (Also, if you assume the hiring manager is a man, you suck.) If it’s a small shop, just address it to the principal by name. Don’t address your letter to the dog, even if the company is stupid enough to list a dog on their website with the rest of the staff.

4. Even better, network

“Networking” is kind of a gross word. It’s true. But, nepotism is real and making those connections will serve you throughout the duration of your career. Hiring can feeling like an exhausting crapshoot. People hire their friends and their friends’ friends before they start picking random strangers from the jobs@company.com inbox. Tell everyone you know what sort of job you are looking for and ask for introductions to anyone they know who works in your desired field. Then, when one of these people is asked “Hey, do you know anyone looking for a job?” your name will come up.

You can go to a “networking mixer” if you like drinking with sad people in uncomfortable clothes, but it won’t be nearly as effective as working your existing friends and relatives. Even your professors. They had dreams once.

5. No one wants to read your cover letter.

Write a good email. The goal of the email is to get an in-person interview. Explain why you’re qualified. Explain what you’d bring to the job. Sound genuinely excited about this new field you’re entering! Do not apologize for your lack of experience. It’ll be obvious when you tell me you’ve just graduated from college. Don’t be overly familiar, no matter how “wacky” you’ve heard the workplace is. You’re not applying to be anyone’s friend. The fact that you can write a solid, straight-forward email that gets right to the point and maybe shows just a glimmer of personality goes a long way.

Put the message in the body of the email. Plain text formatting. Do not attach your letter to the email. I’m not going to open any of those attachments anyway, and I’m certainly not going to open them when I’ve asked you not to attach anything. I may click the link to your website. If your email was well-written.

Also, I’ve never read a resumé in my life. But if you insist on giving me one, don’t lead with “Photoshop” as a skill. Tell me you know how to combine typefaces and have a solid understanding of color theory. Those are skills.

6. Prepare for the interview

You got an interview? Fantastic. Time to prepare. Find out as much about the company you’re applying at as possible. Google them. Read their site. Get familiar with the type of work they do and who they do it for.

Prepare questions for them. At some point during the interview you’ll be asked “Do you have any questions for us?” You should have some.
“What’s it like to work here?” is a dumb question. “I notice a lot of your work is in editorial, do you worry about the economics of that market?” gets you a second interview.

7. Dress the part, be the part

There is a school of thought that says your brilliance will shine through even if you’re wearing a ratty hoodie and a stained t-shirt. It’s stupid. You’re gonna get some graduation money. Spend it on some decent clothes to wear to your interview. Your Flickr-stalking/research should tell you whether a suit will impress or terrify your prospective employers.

Don’t hug any of your interviewers. Before or after.

8. Not to be a self-serving douchebag, but…

Read my book. I wrote it just for you. It’s got a ton of good lessons that will guide you through your career. Trust me on this. It’s only $18.00.

9. Don’t apply at Facebook

Seriously, do you think so little of the sacrifice your parents made sending you to college that you’re willing to just throw your life away?

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You’ve probably discovered this from working in organizations, with them, or just interacting with them at any level: Organizational decisionmaking can be crazymaking, and often in a very different way from individual decision making. There are similarities, such as the frustration of why?! which can be as powerful when stonewalled by an organization as when someone dumps you cold with no rhyme, reason, or explanation. But groups, by nature of being groups, inherently have different decisionmaking processes than individual actors. Understanding a few of those may not explain the choices organizations make, but it can help us understand how they get to them.

There are many decisionmaking processes we could explore in this series, so today let’s look at one: the garbage can process. This takes us away from the Google example — you’ll see why in a minute — but chances are it will help you understand a frustrating client better, or even see some decision making processes in your own company that are leading to less than ideal outcomes.

The way an organization makes decisions depends on a number of things, such as how the organization is structured and who the members are. For example, more traditional top down hierarchical organizations have a chain of command, and there are  organizations known organized anarchies. Organized anarchies and their decision making processes comes from work by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen.

An organized anarchy is an organization made up of political alliances that have various, often competing goals, interests, and values. These goals may be ambiguous and there may be many of them from each group, so there’s no clear path to issue resolution. You’ll find this in organizations that don’t have a clear “technology” or a defined “product” but are more of a professional service, like a law firm, a non-profit, a consultancy, or perhaps even publishing. Procedures and decisions are based on historical precedence, experience, organizational routine, trial and error. People in these organizations participate in decision making in different ways and to different degrees, depending on the concern at hand and how much it matters to them, rather than as a matter of hierarchy. So, some issues will matter to some of the people some of the time. Not all issues matter to everyone all of the time, and that means getting something to change can be difficult, because it’s easier to rely on the same old, same old.

In these sorts of organizations, decisions get made in Cohen, March, and Olsen call the garbage can process. This is shorthand for “decisions as accidents”. Rather than approach decision making from a more linear, rational approach — as rational as decision making can be, at any rate, with a clearly defined set of issues, a set of invested stakeholders, and a method of determining solutions — the garbage can model has everything all jumbled up. So many problems! So many unrelated questions! So many solutions just waiting to be the answer to a problem!

Ah, see? In the garbage can process, standard operating procedures (SOPs) are often offered up as solutions to problems, reinforcing the existing procedure. Or, someone comes up with a solution first and then roots around in the can to see if they can find a problem to apply it to. There are also a lot of post-hoc narratives to explain the decision making process after the fact. It may make the decision look rational and coherent, but is simply a rationalization of why a solution-in-search-of-a-problem was the right answer.

Any of this sound familiar, fellow designers? Obviously, changing an organizational culture is difficult and sometimes more work than you want to take on. This is especially true as a consultant. But there are ways to work around the garbage can and improve the decision making process, which we’ll examine about in future posts.

As an outsider, there’s no way to ever know how an organization came to a particular decision. It’s sometimes difficult to know as an insider, depending on your access to information or on the ways in which the decision was made. It’s tempting to think we all, whether as individuals or as organizational actors, make rational decisions with a full range of information. But a lot of the time, we’re making decisions based on the situations in which we’re embedded. And while we like to think we’re optimizing — carefully considering each possibility and bit of data until we reach the ideal solution — we’re satisficing — heaving a big huge sigh of relief as soon as we find a solution that will work pretty well as soon as we come across is.

And who knows — perhaps a decision making process we explore in the coming weeks will help explain the Google Reader decision.

We publish three different web editions (with more to come): Paris, London and San Francisco, and we recently introduced a fourth: the Evening Edition podcast. The podcast gives you another way to get your daily dose of news, offering highlights of the most important topics covered across our web editions, alongside a selection of stories exclusive to the show.

Like the web editions, it’s designed to be quickly and easily consumed. You give us five minutes, we’ll give you a big-picture look at what’s going on in the world around you. And when you’re ready for a deep dive into specific stories, you’ll find source links for the news mentioned in each episode on our show pages.

Angela Kilduff and I, your humble co-hosts, are excited to bring the podcast to the Evening Edition family, and we hope it becomes an integral part of your news day. Check it out and let us know what you think.

You can find the show on the Mule Radio Syndicate and Soundcloud, and you can subscribe via RSS and iTunes.

Finally, if you’re interested in sponsoring Evening Edition or another Mule Radio podcast, you can start here.

Last year on Let’s Make Mistakes, we were very lucky to have Karen McGrane on as a guest, talking about her work and her book Content Strategy For Mobile. At one point during our conversation, Karen mentioned working in the publishing industry and the experience of trying to change an industry — trying to drag aspects of the print industry print kicking and screaming over to digital.

Her experience sounded a lot like some of my research. And like a lot of industries, really. We got to chatting, but not as much as we might have liked, about organization theory and stagnation and a steadfast digging-in-of-the-heels by people who have done the same things in the same ways for decades because that’s the way it’s always been done. It’s interesting, I said, to see how entrenched behaviors can be and to understand how they become tied to more than just money. Behaviors that seem stupid to outsiders hoping to shake things up are often tied to things like a very familiar workflow or someone’s routine. Organizational culture can very much affect how people respond to and engage with change — or don’t!  Changing isn’t always as simple as we’d like to think it is, no matter how obvious and head-smackingly clear the solution is. Based on what Karen was saying about the publishing world, based on what a lot of people in the design world said about a lot of the industries they encountered, it sounded like a similar set of problems that might be worth examining.

I considered writing a blog post or two about the intersection of organization theory and design, but I had a realization: This isn’t a blog post or two, this is a series. Every day we as designers engage with organizations and organizational actors who are experiencing change at some level, whether a new website or a business strategy or a growth spurt or a pivot. We encounter organizational behaviors that make us roll our eyes or smack our foreheads.

So I hope you’ll join me here on the Mule Design Studio blog as this biweekly series explores where organization theory and design meet, with an eye for how the former can help us better understand the challenges we face and solutions we create.

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Personally, I’m not terribly concerned about a “monoculture” of rendering engines. WebKit seems to have done a rather good job of innovating at a rapid clip and bringing a variety of ideas, even from fierce competitors. I just don’t subscribe to the “it will become the new IE if you let it” theory but I’m willing to entertain other opinions.

What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end for browser innovation or should we welcome our WebKit overlords with open arms?

Related: John Resig says WebKit is the jQuery of browser engines.

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