#200 - You Don't Need To Be Loud. You Need To Be Resonant. It’s always the same five words.I've been replying with them for years. Somebody writes in to say they dug an issue, or to talk about something they've been working on and saw reflected in these pages. When I sit down to reply, I always type the same response: I'm so glad it resonated. Sometimes I pause and scroll back to see if I've used the phrase before. But even if I have, I sit, and stare -- and hit send. Because nothing else...
12 days ago • 9 min read
#199 - Your Career Has No Comms Team I joined Uber in February, 2013, just before we launched in Singapore. One day during my first month, I parked myself at a cafe and pitched Uber back-to-back, for hours. I wasn't interviewing, I was just getting in front of people we knew were talented, to spread the word: "We're here, we're hiring." The problem was, no one knew what the heck Uber was. None of them had ever taken a ride with an app before. By mid-afternoon, I was four coffees deep. It had...
19 days ago • 10 min read
#198 - Being Good Isn't Good Enough Anymore You've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?! — Clint Eastwood, as Dirty Harry By the time I got to him, Clint Eastwood was in the mature, reflective stage of his career. He'd grown soulful. Perfect World. In the Line of Fire. Million Dollar Baby. Great movies, all of them. But my dad, after moving to the US, fell in love with Clint Eastwood 1.0. That Clint did many things. Ruminate was not one of them. No, dad's Clint...
26 days ago • 7 min read
#197 - Shaq. Not Madonna. Strategy in the 21st century is not about protecting competitive advantages -- it's about continuous reinvention. — Tendayi Viki When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10, I was the organizer. I'd come home from school, or wake up on a Saturday, and -- this being the 1980s -- I'd work the phone. I had it down to a script: Hi, Mrs. Goodman?[Yes.] This is Aki, how's it going?[I'm well. How are you, Aki?]Good. Can I speak to Mike, please? I learned the script the hard way. When...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
#196 - What's your remix? To originate is to carefully, patiently, and understandingly combine. — Edgar Allan Poe When my kids were much younger, I saw these t-shirts online: Instant buy. Take my money. The shirts -- one for me, one for each kid -- came just in time for Christmas, and for the next year, I made the kiddos rock them around Singapore with me. I know, I know, cringe. But we'd wear them on the subway, and get curious looks from strangers; some smiles and laughs; some sly iykyk...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
#195 - The Unexamined Career The unexamined life is not worth living. — Socrates Recently, someone who knows I help people navigate their career put me in touch with a long-time friend of his. It was a well-meaning but brief intro: "Jim, talk to Aki, he's good at this stuff! Aki, Jim needs to talk to you!". But that was all we had to go on. I didn't know why I was meant to connect with Jim, and neither did he. So Jim and I dial into a hastily-arranged Zoom, and it is awkward, folks: we spend...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
#194 - You Can't Take It With You When opportunity comes, it's too late to prepare. — John Wooden I always wonder about people who sign up for newsletters with a work email. Not the standard Gmail, or an old school Hotmail address. Not a hip firstname@yourname.com. But a good, old-fashioned @currentemployer.com. I mean, I get it: we're at work all the time, and we're in our inboxes all day. And these are newsletters we're talking about, not cures for cancer. But as time passes, I think about...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
#193 - Nobody Saw It Happen What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say. — Ralph Waldo Emerson A close friend, I'll call her Molly, built a tremendous career in public service. For over 20 years, she lived and worked around the world doing aid work for the US government. But last year, along with tens of thousands of others, she got caught in the grind of Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. Her job was gone, but so was the entire path she'd followed, and had planned to follow into retirement....
2 months ago • 4 min read
#192 - What Changed In You If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more. — General Eric Shinseki Two days into my first job as a recruiter, I sat on a big, open floor of connected desks, with phones buzzing nonstop. One of the partners at the firm came up to me, unprompted. He’d moved from New York to open the San Francisco office, and is probably the person I learned more about recruiting from than anyone. Without greeting or segue, he launched in: Aki, if you really...
2 months ago • 6 min read