Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

Boom Goes The Resume

Seth has a great post up titled Why bother having a resume?

There is something comfortable about the standards of a resume. You know how to fill in the blanks. The format has already been worked out. The only question left is if you are going to send it in a Rich Text Format or Word Document.

If you blow up the resume, the questions are wonderfully endless.

• What I am going to say?
• How I am going to say it?
• Is this really what I want to do?

I was describing my career to someone last week and realized the textbook method doesn't really explain who I am or what I want to do next. Today, I was looking at the description at the top of my tumblr blog and came to the same conclusion.

Every person is a sum of their experiences and certainly my mechanical engineering degree and the time at General Electric is important, but there are a whole set of new things that show better what I can do and want to do with my time.

This image is from a document I turned in for a chance at an internship with Ben and Jackie from Church of the Customer. I always liked this representation, experiences overlaid and fading with time. That collage is three and a half years old and would look quite different today.

As I look at the things that I am interested in now, there are seeds in those past projects and positions, but they would be hard to see through bullet points and required corporate speak of a standard resume.

This post should not be considered by anyone reading that I am looking for a new corporate home. Seth's post just made me think about the stories we tell other about what we do, both in form and content.

Wisconsin Music - in person and name

• Bon Iver - Justin Vernon wrote his album "For Emma, Forever Ago" in a Northwestern Wisconsin cabin.
• Collections of Colonies of Bees - My good friend Jon plays drums in this Milwaukee-based group. They just returned from a SXSW performance, and a little bee told me that we are doing a project with Justin.
• Juniper Tar - They get another piece of link love because I like them and their album a lot.
• What Made Milwaukee Famous - Paste Magazine introduced me this month to this Austin-based band. The name is what first caught my attention, but their pop rock hooks drew me in.
• The BoDeans - this master of the bar band genre is from my town of Waukesha. Find a live version of Still The Night; I have never heard a song where the audience has a part. Kurt and Sammy have a new album called Still, which is solid and familiar.

Time To Pay Attention

I just got done reading When Genius Failed, as one of the selections for the 800-CEO-READ upcoming best of business books project. In the book, writer Roger Lowenstein profiles Long-Term Capital Management. In 1998, it was the largest hedge fund and nearly brought down several Wall Street firms when the trades it made went the wrong way. The bailout required the intervention of the Federal Reserve as they herded fourteen banks to pledge $3.65 billion.

Ten years later, we are seeing the same illiquid markets that crippled LTCM. For them it was interest rate swaps; this time it is mortgage-based securities, but on a scale that is two orders of magnitude larger.

I have long argued that Enron and Long-Term Capital were not crises well-understood by the general public. In part because the drama lay in the personal stories of the affected. And there were certainly victims in the employees that worked at these firms, but the biggest causalities were in the balance sheets of large firms who are in the business of lending money. Risk is a part of that game.

We don't pay much attention to things we don't understand and the average American doesn't have a lot of experience with such large-scale financial terms as debits and credits, derivatives or bond spreads. If we are nation fixated on markets and always talking business, we as a whole don't understand balance sheets or Black-Scholes modeling. This lack of knowledge exacerbates the problem. And it is a problem.

The media reports the stories. The trouble is their viewership has a hard time assessing the magnitude of the story in the 24-hour news cycle. Cable channels report with the same passion the fall of Eliot Spitzer, the disappearance of a young mother, and the Federal Reserve loaning $200 billion to banks.

The final news item in that list is one to concentrate on. This meltdown is mostly being caused by fear and trading will loosen again.

Pay attention though to what our leaders in business and government are doing to deal with the crisis. The Treasury offering new lending guidelines. The Fed offering more and more lenient terms to its customers. Banks lending to other banks. There are broad implications to all of these. Lowenstein uses a Mark Twain quote to that fits with these unfolding events--"“History rhymes; it does not repeat."

Check Out Juniper Tar

Juniper Tar is a Milwaukee based band. Brothers Schleicher are members and they just released their first album "To The Trees."

http://www.myspace.com/junipertar

Give it a chance. I think you will like.

Four Things...

1. If you really are interested in what is going on with me, bookmark my tumblr blog or subscribe to the RSS feed. I pull together my blog posts from here and 800-CEO-READ, my del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos of the family and twitter posts from when I am in a hurry.
2. I have been feverishly writing to finish a book manuscript for a title that will be coming out early next year. It is a part of my gig at 800-CEO-READ. The book is the 100 business everyone in business should read. It has been a great project in a million different ways and I'll be talking about that more over this coming year. So, that explains why there has been close to nothing here at the Astronaut Projects blog.
3. Marc Orchant's More Space essay Work Is Broken was published on ChangeThis last month.
4. Check out Grant McCracken's This Blog Sits at the : Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. I was hestiant to recommend it because I was having problems with the RSS feed. I upgraded to NetNewsWire 3.1.3 and don't see any issues.

My Poor Packers

I and several million others are looking for grief counseling today.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from all of us to all of you!

T, A, E, Z, & A

Apple Owner Must Read: Daring Fireball

If you own an Apple and are remotely interested in following the brand, Daring Fireball is a must read. It is a little bent toward the programmer set, but there is a lot to get out of the prolific John Gruber.

Case in point, this might be the best blog post title of 2007:

Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point, Despite the Fact That No Matter How Egregious the Inaccuracies / Fabrications / Exaggerations, Such Pieces Inevitably Lead to Accusations That I’m Some Sort of Knee-Jerk Shill Who Rails Against Anything ‘Anti-Apple’ Simply for the Sake of Defending Apple, and if I Love Apple So Much Why Don’t I Just Marry Them?

Congratulations to UW-Whitewater Warhawks

On Saturday, the UW-Whitewater Warhawks won the NCAA Division III National Championship in a 31-21 victory over Mount Union Purple Raiders. This was their third meeting for the national championship in consecutive years. The win is best defined by the opponent they beat:

• Mount Union had been unbeaten in 35 games.
• Mount Union had won by 24 or more points over every opponent this season
• Mount Union only allowed 72 total points all season
• Mount Union was favored by 21 points

Congrats to Coach Leipold and the Warhawks!

Things not to say on your first day...

You have just been hired to run the Green Bay Packers, arguably the most storied franchise in the NFL, and this is what you say in the opening press conference:

"Most of you probably know I've been in the Chicago area for four and a half years. I've really loved living in the Chicago area. I've become a Bears fan. I hopped on the Bears bandwagon last year, went to both playoff games at Soldier Field."

After that joke bombed new Packers CEO Mark Murphy went into spin control and assured the media he was no longer a Bears fan.

Not the right foot to be starting on, Mark.

Nod: Rob Reischel's "Murphy picked as next president" in Packers Plus on Dec. 6th, 2007