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The Two Most Valuable Classes I’ve Ever Taken

Twenty years post-matriculation from my alma mater Glendora High School, I still strongly believe that the most valuable classes I’ve ever had (in high school or in all collegiate work combined) are typing and speech/debate. Typing class gave me the power to sit down and let thought flow through my fingers - fast with no fear of what was flowing out. That’s what editing is for. Speech taught me how to see both sides of an argument (since we were often asked to take the side of an issue we explicitly disagreed with). During my career I’ve seen deeper into issues and peeled away layers when company leaders had very strong opinions about strategy or execution, and I saw a different path I wanted brought to light.

Peck Peck Peck

What I’m about to say would sound ridiculous and sophomoric if it weren’t true. In my experience working with marketing clients and departments, about 50% of those over 40 years old cannot touch type. Over 50, about 80% cannot. I’m making statements based on my experience - not painting age brackets with summary judgment.

Marketers who can touch type 60 words per minute are far more efficient at creating text-based content and communication than someone who hunts and pecks on a keyboard. We’re not even talking about the quality of the words that come out yet.

I’ve seen VPs of Marketing (and CEOs of companies) take 3 minutes to construct a sentence or two for an e-mail as I sat in amazement. As I said to start this chapter, the most valuable classes I’ve had since high school are typing and speech.

If you’re hiring, you must ask your candidate straight up, “How many words per minute do you type?” Perhaps you formally test them with some kind of free web tool. I don’t care. Your candidate MUST know how to touch type and be pretty quick about it. And if YOU can’t type, please seek help. You don’t need a semester and a classroom anymore either.

Put your candidate in a situation where they need to create something for you. Watch how your candidate interacts with a keyboard and mouse. Does he know any shortcuts to save time? Does he know where certain menu items are in PowerPoint (cringe) or Word if you’re a Microsoft house? I’d rather have my VP of Marketing be focused on creating an amazing visual and interactive chat with a potential partner or client than have them banging away trying to figure out how to make the company logo fly in. You think I’m kidding?

Must Play Well With Others

Get a very clear sense of how your candidate interacts with others and how he has interacted with others in the past. Is he comfortable managing projects and teams? Is he good with delegation yet still able to take ultimate responsibility for a project? Listen for keywords and phrases during your interviews like:

 We

 Us

 My team

 I was responsible for

 Autonomy

 Giving authority

 Leveraged external resources

 I outsourced that because it’s not my strength

 I managed multiple projects simultaneously

Recently, I pitched a company some ideas on driving demand through content creation online, i.e., inbound marketing. Just before the meeting I was told that their Marketing Director had been ”asked to step down because he delegated quite well but didn’t actually do much and took no responsibility for the delegated results”. Not good.

As an agile company you don’t have the budget to simply delegate everything, sit back and take credit for the good work anyway, but continue to probe for ownership and teamwork.

This book isn’t about psychologically profiling candidates, but let your gut be your guide. Your hire must type fast and play well with others.

MultiThreading Foundations

Hunt-and-peck typing was far more commonplace through at least the 80s until word processors began their rise. As availability of home computers and word processing software increased, so did the desire to become more typing efficient.

Entering the 90s, the advent of AOL & Compuserve which included chat rooms and message boards pushed more users to learn touch typing to keep up with their strings of conversations online while more and more every day work tasks were making their way into the desktop PC versus happening on paper.

The legendary Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing program, released first in 1987, is still available today to guide the hunter and pecker to a state of typing zen. In case you were wondering, “Mavis Beacon” is not a real person; the original photo of Mavis Beacon was of a retired Carribbean-born fashion model named Renee L’Esperance.”(1)