Most of us are busy, not productive. Yet, actual productivity is what leads to success. Here is why busyness sucks us in and how to be productive instead. Generally, “busyness” is easier than true productivity. It is easier to check emails and reorganize files than to do meaningful work on hard problems.

Things are rarely valuable, easy, and praiseworthy at the same time. When they are, those things get done very quickly.

Today, I am excited to share a powerful new tool to get a job or promotion. It works by helping make a strong visual and emotional connection with the manager. The Straight Truth is that hiring decisions are as much about *feelings* as they are about *facts*. If you can get the hiring manager to believe that you are the right person for the job early on, they will come up with reasons to justify that you are the best person as the hiring process continues.

A reorg is coming. Are you positioned to move up when it does? You actually have a lot of control over how these situations turn out for you - let me explain. Here are some stories from my coaching clients to help prepare you:

-I have (at least) one client dreaming of when their boss might move on

-I have another client who is in a top level role, planning a massive overhaul of his team. His actions mean that hundreds of people on his team will be impacted.

-A third client just got a big promotion because he was ready when a reorg hit

I made it to Amazon VP because my managers fought for my promotions. They fought for my promotions because I met the 3 criteria that a manager needs to risk their reputation on you: 1) Good work performance

2) They trusted me

3) They "liked" me

The two pieces of “good work performance” are quality and reliability. Basically, your work should make their work easier. This is the groundwork on which the other two parts are built.

Doing your job won’t get you promoted; managing up will. There are 6 key parts of managing up to executives: 1. "Be bright, be quick, be gone."

Executives are busy. Come to your conversations prepared with well-thought-out ideas, and then express them quickly and clearly. Then move on.

Straight Truth: Each promotion in a career gets harder. Your peers get stronger and the number of positions decrease. Here is how to win: For both Individual Contributors (ICs) and managers, there is a pyramid. Many roles at the bottom, few at the top, only one CEO.

This pyramid means that our competition gets stiffer at each level as our less talented, motivated, or driven peers drop behind us.

My first demo at Amazon failed in front of Jeff Bezos at the company all hands meeting. I have had to recover from visible disasters while on stage at several key moments in my career. Your career will stall out if you are not comfortable speaking in front of others. You don’t have to be loud or extroverted, but you do have to express yourself clearly and confidently.

Here is why and how you can do this.

“Executive presence” helped me reach VP at Amazon. The biggest challenge when it comes to improving your executive presence is simply defining it.

Here is how I define it: Executive presence is the ability to command a room, hold attention, and present yourself as someone who should be trusted and followed. It is a composite of many skills.

In order to break executive presence into specific areas for improvement, I will borrow from the author Sylvia Ann Hewlett. She breaks it down into three categories:
→ 60% gravitas
→ 30% communication
→ 10% appearance

I screwed over one of my top engineers when I was a Senior Manager at Amazon. He felt betrayed, found another job, and resigned. This is a dark spot on my career, so learn from my mistake. Here’s the story: I joined Amazon in April 2005. This engineer was a new graduate assigned to my team, which was a new team for a new project.

Everyone on this new team was smart and talented, but this engineer was a top performer. Our project had a tight deadline, and he came to me and offered me a deal: he would do whatever was needed to ship the project if I made sure he was promoted as a result.

One of my biggest regrets is how stressful I allowed my career to be. I worried constantly while on the path to becoming an Amazon VP. Let me save you some stress. Career growth requires: 1) Doing lots of good work; hard work is table stakes
2) Growing your skills to be more valuable
3) Partnering with good bosses
4) Finding growing companies

I became a VP partially because I grew up in a family that argued loudly. I kept right on arguing my points through my career. However, sometimes people like me are the problem. Today, I want to share a different perspective: leading as an introvert. Leadership can be hard for introverts because more attention is often paid to their louder, more assertive counterparts.

Here is my advice for introverted leaders—or introverts who want to become leaders:

When I got my Master's in 1993, the "story" was that all Information Technology jobs were going offshore to India because the labor was cheaper. This story has parallels to what we face with AI today. Going to school in Pittsburgh in the late 1980s, I heard "man on the street" interviews where unemployed steel workers would say, "When the mills reopen, ..." and then give their vision for when things "returned to normal."

Achieving true work/life balance requires escaping the corporate trap.

Here are 5 ways you can escape at any point in your career:

(thread) First, let’s understand how the trap works. It starts with our own goals and ambitions. In my career, I wanted more responsibility and more compensation. This led to more work and more stress. If you follow my writing, you likely have similar ambitions. You want to grow, be the best at what you do, and be compensated for it.

The "bad leader" who is frustrating you does not think they are "bad." You must accept this in order to navigate those relationships. "Bad" leaders have different values and think of you as "naive" and themselves as "practical." Labeling them EVIL in all capital letters and expecting them to change is foolish. My takeaway saying you can remember is:

"We are all heroes of our own story."

“Saving is the gap between your ego and your income. The fastest way to increase your savings is to increase your humility."

I decided to listen to Morgan Housel's book, The Psychology of Money, and he says a number of brilliant things in it. I highly recommend the book. The most important thing he bangs away on is how it is our savings rate that controls our ultimate wealth.

I was born and raised on a farm in a small town in Ohio. I've worked to get H-1B visas and green cards for my team members my entire career. There are three simple economic arguments for increasing legal immigration by highly educated workers: 1) If another country pays to raise and educate a child through college and that young person then moves to the US, we just gained a fully mature tax payer at zero cost. All the news about student loans? In this case, another country paid for that education. They bore all the costs, we get all the benefits.

There are 3 big areas of growth to be an effective "Chief" level executive (CTO, CPO, etc.):

1) Guiding with Strategic Influence

2) Scaling Talent on your team

3) Demonstrating Executive Presence Guiding with Strategic Influence requires you to be a Steward of the whole business.

It isn't just about leading your team, at the CXO level it is about leading the entire company to success.

"In 20 years only your children will remember that you worked late" — This quote SHOULD make you think.

Over my career, I've been a part of many close teams. Teams that worked hard together, ate lunch together every day, and attended social events together. I've also worked long hours for every company I have served. Evening and weekends.

I am sure that most readers who follow me are the same. You heed the call of the project and the deadline, you do not let teammates down.

In 15+ years at Amazon, I influenced 30+ promotions to the Director level. I know why some people get promoted while other "top performers" get overlooked.

Here's what you need to know: There are two reasons why you may not be getting promoted:

1. You are being overlooked.

2. You are being considered but not selected.

I traded my time for money for 33 years, from 18 to 51. Recently I turned 55 and now I often feel "short of time" before old age closes in.

Here are 5 lessons on how to make the best use of your time so that you live the most of the life you want, rather than just "working." was in school or working 60 hours a week from age 18 to 51. During those 33 years, I had limited personal time.

Like most people, focused on my career and money.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos told us to "not compromise for the sake of social cohesion." I saw him tolerate lengthy, exhausting arguments as a result.

When I was a director, my VP constantly argued with Jeff and refused to back down. Their main, recurring argument was about an arcane economic model called the Prime Attribution Model (PAM).

PAM mattered because it determined how the fee paid by Prime members was divided between business units. Prime Gaming (our business) was getting almost nothing, and we disagreed with how the model was designed.