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Monday, 18 April 2022
Careers and Jobs Today - new message
Sunday, 17 April 2022
Jobs in Nigeria Today: “Branding, Events & Sponsorship Senior Analyst II at Oando Plc” plus 3 more
Jobs in Nigeria Today: “Branding, Events & Sponsorship Senior Analyst II at Oando Plc” plus 3 more |
- Branding, Events & Sponsorship Senior Analyst II at Oando Plc
- Public Health Specialist at The US Embassy
- Africa End User Business Analyst at Hewlett-Packard Company (HP)
- Business Development Manager, NMC at Microsoft Corporation
| Branding, Events & Sponsorship Senior Analyst II at Oando Plc Posted: 17 Apr 2022 10:20 PM PDT Oando Plc is one of Africa's largest integrated energy solutions provider with a proud heritage. It has a primary listing on the Nigeria Stock Exchange [...] The post Branding, Events &... Visit our website for more jobs and details  |
| Public Health Specialist at The US Embassy Posted: 17 Apr 2022 10:12 PM PDT The U.S. Mission to Nigeria comprises of the Embassy in Abuja, FCT, and the Consulate General in Lagos. U.S. Consulate General Lagos is the Mission's [...] The post Public Health Specialist at The... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Africa End User Business Analyst at Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) Posted: 17 Apr 2022 11:09 AM PDT Hewlett-Packard Company or HP (styled as hp) is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. Africa End User [...] The... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Business Development Manager, NMC at Microsoft Corporation Posted: 17 Apr 2022 10:14 AM PDT Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
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| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Jobs in Nigeria Today: “Huggies LCM Facility Lead at Kimberly-Clark” plus 1 more
Jobs in Nigeria Today: “Huggies LCM Facility Lead at Kimberly-Clark” plus 1 more |
| Huggies LCM Facility Lead at Kimberly-Clark Posted: 17 Apr 2022 06:31 AM PDT Kimberly-Clark has responded to a variety of disasters around the world with corporate contributions, employee contributions, product donations and volunteer efforts. Take a look at [...] The post... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Strategic Partner Manager, Communities at Meta formerly Facebook Posted: 17 Apr 2022 04:58 AM PDT Facebook is a corporation and online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, [...] The post Strategic Partner... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
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| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Life Reimagined: Builders vs. Improvers, Where to Live, & Sticky Ideas
Hey uguba ndubuisi, happy Sunday.
Before we dive in, a few updates in case you missed them:
- Steph and I published a new episode on the podcast about how to decide where to live? It's one of the three most important decisions you will make, so it's worth checking out.
- Speaking of the podcast, we're doing an episode to answer questions from listeners. If you want help figuring out a tricky life situation or our thoughts on something, ask us anything here.
- I recently finished reading Made to Stick, a wonderful book about how to get more people interested in your ideas. You can see my notes and key takeaways here.
- I also published my notes for On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and Not Fade Away by Peter Barton in Foundations, a paid product with all of my book summaries.
This week, I'd like to talk about the difference between builders and improvers, a distinction that has been critical in my career.
Builders vs. Improvers
When my boss asked me to run paid ads on LinkedIn in 2016, I was sure I would be fired within a few weeks.
I was thirty minutes into my first marketing job, and I didn't know the first lick about marketing. I had just spent a year as a professional order taker at a big investment bank in New York. I mastered the art of formatting spreadsheets without touching my mouse, but that wasn't going to help me here. Neither was my degree in public policy.
I wondered why the hell they hired me.
My boss noticed me sweating. He told me to relax and began a masterclass in growth marketing. Standing in his ocean-view apartment in Colombia, he began to draw a marketing funnel with a red marker on his sliding glass window.
He taught me about leads, customer personas, sales cycles, and the unit economics of a profitable marketing campaign. We would have kept going, but sunset was coming and he wanted to play paddle tennis on the beach. He asked me to come with ideas the next day for the LinkedIn campaigns.
With that, my first day as a marketer ended. I still felt like I was going to get fired, but I wanted to learn as much as possible before that happened.
Over the next few weeks, I created a strategy to test paid ads on LinkedIn. I came up with a few dozen personas to target, designed ads, and wrote copy. I modeled out the opportunity and built dashboards to measure every aspect of the experiment.
My creative and analytical brain were firing on all cylinders. With how easy ad copy and design came to me, I realized for the first time that I might be creative.
Since everything I was doing was new to me, I had no idea what would work or not work. Neither did my boss. He had a sense that the channel might be good for the company, but he wanted me to figure that out. It was a uniquely terrifying and exhilarating moment in my career.
Just a few weeks earlier, my entire job was to take commands from people above me in the hierarchy at the bank. There was no room for creativity. You basically did what you were told for as long as they needed you.
Now I was living on the coast of Colombia with the full freedom to operate a budget and attempt to unlock a new channel for a growing company. I enjoyed the rush of no knowing whether my ideas would work.
Even if I got fired, at least I wasn't a dull cubicle zombie anymore.
Within a few weeks, we were ready to launch. I prepared the campaigns and turned them on. The discomfort of spending real money on my own ideas kicked in. This was my sink or swim moment.
Only 20% of my ideas worked, but they worked really well. In my first month, I was bringing in low-cost, high-quality leads to the company. Over the next month, I grew the channel, running new experiments and optimizing the areas that were working.
Six weeks into my first marketing gig, I had unlocked many thousands of dollars in value to the company. It felt exhilarating. I wasn't getting fired; I was being asked to launch new channels and to manage members of the team that had joined at the same time as me.
That first task taught me a lesson I'm lucky to have learned early on – I enjoyed building things from the ground up.
There was something satisfying about starting with a blank slate, designing experiments, and seeing if you had the chops to make an initiative work. I later launched a new marketing channel, and with success there, I took over the growth efforts for a full business unit.
As I expanded into new domains, the high from those initial marketing channels began to wear off. While I enjoyed getting them off the ground, I didn't enjoy optimizing a channel that was already working. The potential incremental gains from further optimization were less interesting than exploring and charting new territory.
Once I figured out how to make the system work, I wasn't interested in squeezing out the last gains. I wanted a new challenge. And so I worked hard to offload these marketing machines I had built onto someone who had the energy to keep them working. My time with them had ended.
What's interesting is that this process of building, getting bored, and moving on has played out through the rest of my career.
I became the guy who could solve new problems across any domain. Even if I had no experience doing what I was asked to do, I would simply think about how we can tackle the issue at hand, design experiments to test my theses, and execute on the plan. The learnings I extracted from the execution phase informed me where to go next.
Little by little, I gained confidence in how you can solve any unfamiliar problem by following this same process. Even if the solutions or systems you built weren't perfect, they were often good enough to generate real value for a company.
I've since used this same playbook to scale a warehouse for an e-commerce company, grow the revenue of a highly-trafficked website, and build out a sales team for a nonprofit.
At least for me, the domain I worked in didn't matter as much as the conditions under which I was working. I just needed a problem to figure out and the freedom to build a system. But once I did that, I was ready to hand-off the project to someone who could optimize what I had built.
These experiences taught me an important lesson – there's a big difference between people who enjoy building a new system and people who enjoy improving an existing one.
Basically, there are two types of workers: builders and improvers. Builders get a system off the ground. Improvers optimize an existing system.
I fell into the builder camp. I enjoyed the sink or swim moment of seeing if I had what it took to make something work. That's the fun part, even if its riddled with uncertainty and doubt.
For other people, the builder phase is a terrifying and unwelcome burden. They'd rather improve something that's already working.
You need both people in a company.
It turns out that the builders are particularly valuable at startups that don't have well-defined processes. Improvers offer more value at companies that have more of the nuts and bolts already in place.
Being more of a builder led me to thrive as a generalist at early-stage startups and in my half-baked career as a writer and podcaster. In all of those contexts, I confronted new problems with unknown solutions and had the flexibility to build an initial system that worked.
The downside of this proclivity for building is that I lose interest in projects rather quickly, and that can mean that these projects don't reach their full potential if I don't find an improver to take over.
The same tradeoffs exist if you're an improver.
Improvers often specialize in certain niches and help companies transform fragile systems into more robust ones. But when they're asked to figure something out from a blank slate, they often falter.
The point here is that both "builders" and "improvers" are necessary.
And if you haven't figured out whether you're a builder or an improver, it's worthwhile to take the time to do so. That way, you can identify where you can thrive and best help a company.
If you've spent your career optimizing processes that you didn't build, for example, you may find that you're much happier being the person who gets something off the ground. The reverse is also true.
The only way to find out is to try both and see what works for you.
Thanks for tuning in, and see you in two weeks.
Cheers,
Cal
Jobs in Nigeria Today: “Market Specialist, Nigeria, WhatsApp at Meta formerly Facebook” plus 9 more
Jobs in Nigeria Today: “Market Specialist, Nigeria, WhatsApp at Meta formerly Facebook” plus 9 more |
- Market Specialist, Nigeria, WhatsApp at Meta formerly Facebook
- Marketing IT Intern at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
- Administrative Assistant at KRADOT Limited
- Growth and Operations Manager at Binance
- Head, Retail & Franchise at 9mobile
- Sustainability Communications Associate at Olam International
- Senior Human Resource Development Officer I (Training) at The West African Examinations Council
- Administrative Officer II at The West African Examinations Council
- Store Clerk at PZ Cussons
- Packaging Trainee at International Breweries Plc – Anheuser-Busch InBev
| Market Specialist, Nigeria, WhatsApp at Meta formerly Facebook Posted: 17 Apr 2022 04:19 AM PDT Facebook is a corporation and online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, [...] The post Market... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Marketing IT Intern at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Posted: 16 Apr 2022 09:21 AM PDT GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is a science-led global healthcare company with a special purpose to improve the quality of human life by helping people do more, feel [...] The post Marketing IT Intern at... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Administrative Assistant at KRADOT Limited Posted: 16 Apr 2022 09:11 AM PDT KRADOT Limited is in proud partnership with different multi-national company that has existed for over 6 decades making global impact in the area of Agro [...] The post Administrative Assistant at... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Growth and Operations Manager at Binance Posted: 16 Apr 2022 09:00 AM PDT Binance is the global blockchain company behind the world's largest digital asset exchange by trading volume and users, serving a greater mission to accelerate cryptocurrency [...] The post Growth... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Head, Retail & Franchise at 9mobile Posted: 15 Apr 2022 05:49 PM PDT 9mobile is a Nigerian private limited liability company. EMTS acquired a Unified Access Service License from the Nigerian Communications Commission in 2007. The License enables [...] The post Head,... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Sustainability Communications Associate at Olam International Posted: 15 Apr 2022 05:37 PM PDT Olam International is a leading food and agri-business supplying food, ingredients, feed and fibre to over 19,800 customers worldwide. Our value chain spans over 60 [...] The post Sustainability... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Senior Human Resource Development Officer I (Training) at The West African Examinations Council Posted: 15 Apr 2022 05:21 PM PDT The West African Examinations Council is West Africa’s foremost examining board established by law to determine the examinations required in the public interest in the English-speaking... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Administrative Officer II at The West African Examinations Council Posted: 15 Apr 2022 05:15 PM PDT The West African Examinations Council is West Africa’s foremost examining board established by law to determine the examinations required in the public interest in the English-speaking... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 12:49 PM PDT PZ Cussons is a dynamic consumer products group and innovator of some of the world’s best known and loved brands. Calling on over 130 years [...] The post Store Clerk at PZ Cussons appeared... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
| Packaging Trainee at International Breweries Plc – Anheuser-Busch InBev Posted: 15 Apr 2022 12:03 PM PDT AB InBev is the world’s leading brewer. We produce over 500 beers, including world-famous brands such as Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona. Local Africa brands [...] The post Packaging... Visit our website for more jobs and details |
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| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
🎉 Season's greetings. We invite you to share your Christmas wishes. 🎯 Santa Claus is delighted to offer numerous gifts for you. 🎁 For expedited attention to your Christmas wishes, please email santaclausuk@teleworm.us.
🎉 Season's greetings. We invite you to share your Christmas wishes. 🎯 Santa Claus is delighted to offer numerous gifts for you. 🎁 For...
