1. All of us have been there at some point. Out of necessity, you are stuck in a job that is
unbearable – and as a result, you hate life. This is all-too-common in the U.S., where
workers are often treated as commodities and liabilities, and get almost no real respect.
Unfortunately, under current conditions few have the luxury of simply quitting, so here
are several strategies for coping in a job you just can't stomach.
Set Goals and Objectives: If there is a bright side to your situation, it's easier to get a
job if you already have one. This means that if you are in a job you hate, you're in a
better position to get something better. Set a goal every week for sending out x number
of resumes and attending a networking event or job fair. Such actions will help you to
see a light at the end of the tunnel (which won't be New Jersey).
Time for One's Self: If you are overscheduled and harassed, you'll be making a bad
thing worse. It is vital to set some time aside each day, particularly before heading into
work. It's also helpful to engage in some activity that brings a smile to your face,
whether it's reading the latest Facebook posts, treating yourself to a favorite snack, or
playing your favorite music on the stereo.
Create Diversions: If possible, fill your workspace and/or your day with small
diversions. For example, a inside salesrepresentative who sometimes dislikes making
"cold calls" to prospective clients might bring a joke book to work and make it a point to
read something funny before picking up the phone. It made a great deal of difference
when it came to talk to people.
Learn New Tricks: If you don't have the job you want, it may be due to a lack of skills
and/or knowledge. Fortunately, this is highly curable. It's never too late to learn
something new that may make you more marketable when a new and better opportunity
comes along. Are $$$'s in short supply? Is free better? The Internet has a treasure-
trove of free seminars and webinars to help you build your education. Also, make use of
your local library. Many carry new how-to DVD's relative to improving your personal and
professional skills (i.e. coaching yourself to success, dealing with management issues,
and time management).
Decompression: Failing to "blow off steam" and letting frustrations build up can be
dangerous not only to yourself but to others as well. Continuous physical exercise is a
great tension reliever, obviously, but also don't overlook fun activities such as softball,
bowling, and dancing. Or, a leisure walk at a local park can go a long way towards
depressurizing and maintaining a positive outlook.
Keep on Keepin' On: Anything worth doing at all is worth doing well – even if it's
something you hate. Not only will this give you a sense of accomplishment and pride in
yourself, it can also help you down the road should you need a reference.
Te

2. This interview with John Donovan, chief technology officer at AT&T, was conducted
and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?
A. There are certain characteristics that give people a start — and for me, I remember
starting to use them when I was named captain of my hockey team. I think after that it
becomes practice. I think those characteristics are the ability to set a framework that
makes sense to people, and being articulate. You can look at the landscape,
characterize it and set a framework for action, then be able to articulate it clearly. You
have to have antennas for picking out what's really important.
So you have to have those basic skills and be a good pattern recognizer. I was always
good at those problems where you go "two, four, six, eight, what's next?" And you start
to put those skills together and then, like anything else, you get better with practice.
That said, if there's a situation where someone else needs to lead, and it's working, that
is A-O.K. I don't feel a burning need to be in charge, and I don't feel that it's a bad thing
to follow when the right things are getting done. So in some respects, I don't have the
innate drive that certain people have about control and ownership and leadership. When
I left Silicon Valley, a lot of people bet me that I wouldn't last at AT&T. They figured that
because I'd been a C.E.O. before, I couldn't go work at a big company where you have
bosses, and you don't control everything.
It really isn't even a consideration for me. I just derive great satisfaction from a well-
played plan. As a matter of fact, I have an aversion to situations where credit is
showered upon leaders. Those don't sit easily with me. Maybe that's because I was one
of 11 kids in our family. I love engaging, but I don't like the compliments, with somebody
saying, "Hey, great job."
Q. Other lessons?
A. The first thing I noticed very quickly early on was that hard work is central to what
you do, and that's not any magic orscience. I said, "Well, if I start today, and I outwork
everybody, then the only question is the starting point." So I figured that if I work really
hard I can be in the top 5 percent in any field. It just gave me some comfort to say, O.K.,
I'm going to do fine financially, so I shouldn't make decisions based on money. My
objective should be to gain the broadest set of experiences I can, and just try to drill
deep everywhere I can. And so I played the game for breadth. Early in my career, I
bought businesses, fixed them and sold them. Some went well; some didn't. I did some
home development. I was in sales. I went back to business school.
A lot of people work hard to get ahead, and I recognized early on that it's a
differentiator. I just figured that there was a certain amount of this that's just raw
tonnage.

3. Q. What else?
A. I worked at Deloitte, and became a partner there. That's probably where a lot of my
development occurred as a leader. There were simple things around teams. I developed
team skills because I started to engage in deliberate deflection of credit in an
environment where it was all about credits. What I started realizing is that people
appreciated when you played for the result, and not for your role on the team. So I
learned there that giving credit away, deflecting credit, was an effective thing to do. I
think I learned a lot of subtleties about teams and how you assemble teams.
Q. Can you share some more insights on that?
A. If you figure there's a karma pool out there floating around for credits, you have to
stop playing for credits. I remember the day I realized that, and that I probably never
again needed to involve scorekeeping in anything that I did.
Q. What are some questions you ask when you're interviewing job candidates?
A. I always ask questions about what words people would want on their tombstone. So
I'll ask, "If your professional colleagues were going to put three words on your
tombstone — I mean literally three — what would those three words be?" And then the
follow-up question is always the one that surprises people. I will then ask, "Instead of
three, what's the one word?"
I've tried to assemble teams with people who were grounded enough, and comfortable
enough, to be able to have these kinds of conversations. When you find people who
have that sort of grounding, then it can be about the problem you're working to solve
together, and not about the person.
The leadership part for me now is so much more about game planning than about the
role that I play in the game plan. I love the opportunity to take a role that I had and give
it away to another team member, and the team result is as good or better. I sort of see
myself over time as needing to play the game less, but I'm becoming better at getting
even better results by that combination of the right framework and the right people in the
right positions.
Q. Back to your tombstone question. What's the one word for you?
A. When I was young, the one word for me was "smart." I wanted it to be "leadership." I
wanted it to be "inspirational." But it was smart, and smart is an individual, lonely thing.
When you get it on a tombstone, it feels like an island. I'd like to say that it's "wise"
today, but I don't feel that I've accomplished that yet.
Q. The other two words?

4. A. I do think they would be "inspirational," and "leader." I'm proud that I can inspire
people. I think there are a lot of people I've worked with who have burned extra oil, but I
don't think at the end of the day that inspiration is measured in terms of me getting more
from them. I think it's about a better result that we can all share in.
Q. How did you make the transition to a big company like AT&T?
A. So when I came to AT&T, I was standing on the shoulders of giants in the industry. I
was going in to lead a group that, frankly, I wouldn't have been qualified enough to join
as a junior person.
But let me start with the process I went through. I went to my direct reports and I said I
want the 16 smartest people in the technology organization. It's not about titles. I don't
want any diplomats. I don't want any process people. And I called them the Tech
Council. I still have it today, almost four years later. I rotate people in and out. I gave
them several hours a month. Rules of the road are that you're not allowed to report back
to anybody you work for — what is said in this room stays in this room.
We then started with a list of all the things that were broken, stupid, idiotic, what's killing
innovation, from 16 really bright people who were willing and able to tell you the truth.
And if you look at some of the things that we've done in our innovation program, a lot of
the seeds were born in that room. And so we built a profile that started with the ugly
truth, and that's kind of where we had to start from.
When I came in, I was led to believe that we would have an innovation problem. And I
learned very quickly that we did have an innovation problem, but we didn't have an
invention problem — and that's important.
Q. Can you elaborate?
A. If you're going to build a car and you have no blueprint, and you have no factory,
that's a different place to start than if you go in your garage and you turn the lights on
and there's everything that you need to build a Ferrari. It just isn't assembled. That's a
very different world. So I very quickly started to tell people that we're close. We have
inventions. Most companies don't have that.
So I realized that this was going to be much simpler than I originally thought walking in.
You have all these brilliant people inventing. So I started just by telling folks that's an
important distinction. We have invention.
Q. Parse the distinction for me a bit more.
A. I would describe innovation as invention with a customer at the other end. When it
becomes a relationship that's consummated with a commercial transaction, then that's
an innovation. That adoption part of it was where we were not good. But the invention
was there.

5. So I did a diagnosis. The 16 folks who were with me gave me a million reasons to
explain why we couldn't innovate, it's just simply impossible. So then we spent hours
and hours just breaking the problem down. Then we said, let's start an innovation
program in this room. And we started our "crowdsourcing" plan in that room.
Q. Tell me more about that.
A. It starts with the fact that we're too kind of an organization, so no one stands up and
says, "Your ideas are lousy." So we have this culture of really nice people, and it's
nurturing. And there's a convenient place to blame if I don't want to tell you your idea
isn't any good — I just blame it on the people upstairs, and I say that they don't like it.
So I said, let's start with some tabletop exercises. Each of us brought six ideas into the
room. So we had 96 ideas. Everybody presents their ideas, and then we voted on them,
and chose the top two that were going to get funded. And then we knocked down every
hurdle to get those two ideas into their final form and into a funding process.
Today, that idea has been expanded to an online site, with 104,000 people who are on
the innovation pipeline, as we call it. It generates thousands of ideas. Then people vote
on them, like in social media — thumbs-up, thumbs-down — and it's invisible who
voted. Why? Because, culturally, people don't want to call other people out. So then you
move to the collaboration phase, where you need comments, and comments are not
without attribution. We thought about it, and decided that you have to be accountable
when you use words.
And so it doesn't feel like a big company anymore. Somebody might say that an idea is
impractical because it would be really expensive, but then someone says, wait a minute,
what about trying this? So the group comes together and they solve the problem.
What happens in that second phase is that you earn a certain amount of currency, fake
currency, for playing the game. If you vote up and vote down, and you're pretty good —
meaning that your down votes are on stuff that went down, and your up votes are on
stuff that went up — you can earn more. Then you earn points for being a good
collaborator.
Then, at the end of every quarter, people "invest" in these ideas, and there's a stock
value that's placed on them. They're placed on the potential leader board. And then on
the leader board, people invest in them and the ideas get voted up to the top. The top
10 move on to the next phase for potential funding. People then pitch the ideas to an
angel committee — we only give them 20 minutes — and then on the spot we decide to
fund it or not. But this time it's real money.
So we've had more than 15,000 ideas generated. We have 45 of them we funded, with
tens of millions of dollars that have been invested. Products are now hitting the
marketplace. It's become so popular that executives are throwing problems out to the

6. crowd, like instead of spending $1 million with a professional branding firm, they'll offer
a trip for two to Hawaii to the person who comes up with the best idea.
If you look at this process, it's designed around the idea of venture capital, because I
had the experience coming out of that world on how things get funded. It also uses
social media to solve this perceived problem that there's some corporate machinery that
kills ideas. Now it's your peers, and good ideas ultimately get funded with real money.
At the end of every quarter there are prizes — real money — for the people who have
made the most contributions. You get a bonus for this, and you get a bonus for that. We
already have about 50 patents that have come out of it. It's an amazing environment,
and it was built by those 16 people in that room. It started as a paper exercise, and all
we did is we digitally removed real cultural barriers by thinking through how we can use
technology to solve that problem.