Ep 60 Why Yahoo's David Pogue Doesn't Worry About His Job Feb 29 16

Why does David Pogue of Yahoo not have to worry about getting fired possibly ever.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Folks, more bad news coming out of Yahoo. Revenues down, profits down and that means more job cuts. In the last week they announced that they are shutting down 15 of their so called magazines. They had digital magazines and hubs for food, autos, technology. This is on top of another thousand employees that have been announced that they were getting laid off in the last month. What's happening there? What can we learn? What struck me as extraordinarily interesting in the stories about this, it talked about the hubs, the food hub, and I didn't even know they had these hubs mentioned the technology hub, but it said, oh, and David Pogue will be staying with the company. Now David Pogue, as you may or may not know, is a wildly popular and high profile technology writer and expert. He was with the New York Times for years and Yahoo lured him away. He's not a friend or client of mine, I've never met him. I have to assume he had a nice contract that did not allow him to be fired and that's why he's there. But it begs the question, why does David Pogue have a contract and the other 30 people who didn't? I happen to believe it's because David Polk is a good all round communicator, A well rounded communicator. Yeah, he's a good writer, but he's also a great presenter if you've ever seen him give a speech. And I've only seen them on YouTube. He's funny, he is interesting, he's delightful, he tells stories, he looks like he's having the time of his life. A lot of technology writers, and unfortunately some of the ones who were probably just fired, view themselves as, oh, I'm a writer, I want to sit and type and review and write. And now they're unemployed. Now here's the irony. Of all the people who were let go from Yahoo, David Pogue probably would have been better off than any of them let go because he already has so many business. He's got his own publishing arm, he's got speaking gigs, he's got lots of revenue sources, he's probably least in need. And royalties, I can't even imagine all the royalties he must have from so many books over the years. So he's the person who actually needs the job the least and yet his division is essentially wiped out and he's still there why is that and what can we learn from that? I believe the real reason is his versatility. He sees himself as a communicator, not just a writer. Now, he may see himself as primarily a writer and write more than he does other things, but he's also a fabulous storyteller and a communicator. I've seen him do wildly, wickedly funny, funny videos where he does reviews of products, technology products, but he's always doing it with a new twist, with a certain flair. He lets his personality come out. And that attracts followers, it attracts likes and subscribes, it attracts all of that attention. And that's essentially, I believe, what is job fireproofing. David Poe, because he has so many ways of reaching directly to audiences. Could be a book, could be an online article, could be a video on YouTube or on Yahoo. It could be a keynote speech where he's reaching an audience directly. But also the video of that can go on Yahoo and YouTube. He's using all of his tools, his writing abilities, his voice abilities and his speaking abilities, his movement abilities. Now, it may be, certainly with the time done at Yahoo, he had some outside production help making some of his videos, but some of the times there were videos he made himself, sometimes with just an iPhone to prove the point. And from what I saw from him, he's constantly innovating, he's constantly learning new stuff, not just about new technology, which in theory every technology writer and reviewer is doing, but he's learning about how to use the technology to actually communicate. Now this is, I think, especially relevant to so many of you because I know a lot of you are full time communicators. You work in public relations departments, public affairs departments, communications departments, training departments. And what worked five years ago, 10 years ago, or even a year ago doesn't necessarily work work today. And that's why I think that we all have to pay close attention. When we see fellow communicators with their jobs fired, I feel sorry for them, I feel bad for them. But we got to learn how to protect ourselves now, in a sense. And I don't want to sound smug. I could be wiped out at any time, but at least I don't have to worry about a big company or firing me. That's giving me a nice office and a big paycheck. Because I don't work for any company. I work for myself. And I have clients that are big companies, small companies and governments. I have a diffuse client base. So I'm not dependent on any one company firing me because numbers are down for a quarter, but I know many of you still are, and I think it's time to start planning for the future. Here's the real problem with Yahoo. At some level, there's still a middleman, there's still an intermediary. Nobody has to go to a Yahoo Digital magazine, whatever that is, to get information about food. If I want information on how to make an omelet, I can just go to Yahoo, type in make omelet, and I'm going to have a gazillion videos right in front of me. I can see the top one or two in terms of rating and views, and I can just click that. And that's what I need. I don't have to go to Yahoo for that. And that's the real lesson, I think, is people don't need bigger companies, they don't need intermediaries to be a barrier between them and someone who actually creates content. If you are a content creator, I think you're making. Unless you're the most brilliant novelist of all time and people are just going to salivate over your words, I think you're making a huge mistake by fixating just on text. You should be thinking about how do you communicate your ideas by speaking, creating your own videos, being a guest on shows, creating your own YouTube channel, creating your own podcast, as I've done. And that way you have more direct relationships with customers, clients, prospects, advertisers, if you're in the media business, and so Yahoo can't fire you because you're not dependent on them. The other thing is, when you have an audience, when you have a relationship with fans, as David Pogue did through his longtime standing of the New York Times, it gives you so much leverage if somebody like Yahoo does want you. Again, I'm not privy to any HR issues where I've seen his contract, but I have to imagine that he made it pretty ironclad that he gets a very, very large sum of money for a salary for a set number of years. And if they want to fire him, they got to pay the contract anyway. That's why he's still there. Those of us who are in the communication business have got to realize if we don't keep learning, we're going to die. Now, I mentioned a moment ago, the exception of novelists. Still, you look at the best novelists, some of the most successful novelists, they're also people who are often the best on the talk show circuit. And that's not a recent phenomenon. Go back to the 60s and 50s. Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer. They were staples on the Tonight show and Dick Cavett and Firing Line and all the other talk. Top talk shows of the time. So if you actually want to sell books, you got to sell yourself through speaking on video. Now, 50 years ago, your only way of doing that on video was to be a guest on a talk show. There were so few slots, it was really hard to get. These days the slots are unlimited. There is nothing preventing you from being the David Pogue of your industry. Even if you have a full time job. Be creating videos. Start your own podcast, start your own Kindle publishing company on the side. Assuming of course, that your corporation, your current boss, doesn't prohibit that. Don't do anything that's going to get you fired. But you got to keep learning and all of us can do a better job. Maybe not David Pogue. He seems to be doing a good job. But I constantly tell myself I have to do a better job. I published my first book more than 20 years ago. Things have changed a lot now. I have published half a dozen books. But even I let some of my publishing skills and insights get old because there's been so much radical change in the way you can publish a book on Kindle and promote it in Kindle Unlimited in just the last three years. So we all have to do a better job. I have a lot of competitors, friends of mine, who do public speaking training, presentation training, and frankly, have not kept up with the times I have to learn new technologies. Earlier this week, I trained a client based in Africa. It's not enough to just talk over the phone, it's not enough to talk over Skype. I had to learn not only how to use Skype, that part's easy, but how to find the right software, put it on my computer so I can record a conversation with Skype, record someone's speech, and then figure out how to capture it, play it back within Skype so they can see it, and a full training session can go by. Now folks, I'm not asking for applause there. It's not exactly like making an Apple computer from scratch. But still, there's technology involved, there's complexity involved, there's trial and error, and there's time it took to learn how to do that. Frankly, most of my competitors, certainly my age or or above, have not taken the time to do that. And that's how I'm able to train clients from Africa and in Asia and other places. And they're not because they haven't taken the time to learn the new technology. So if you're a content creator. If you think of yourself as a writer, it's not enough anymore. You think of yourself as, oh, I've got a nice cushy job at a newspaper of all places. Obviously, I don't have to tell you about how precarious any job is at a newspaper. Old media companies are, in my view, going to continue to decline. In fact, Melissa Mayer has been the CEO of Yahoo, has been widely criticized for spending money going after people like Katie Couric at large salaries when there's no evidence that young people, millennials, people who spend their time online absorbing news, know or care about Katie Couric. And she's been criticized for not bringing in new YouTube stars and podcasting stars. I think the criticism is well justified. The lesson for you, and the lesson for me is we have to continue honing our craft of communicating through writing more effectively, speaking more effectively, using our voice, using our bodies and using video and audio and learning the technologies as they come. If we don't do that, we're going to become dinosaurs. We're going to become unemployed.

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Question Question Time we always take questions to this show. In fact, so far, and I'm hoping we're able to continue this policy, every single question that you write to me will be answered and has been answered on this show as it relates to public speaking or speaking to the media or speaking during times of crisis, unless we just did the same question in the last week or so. This question comes from B. One of our YouTube regular viewers, and she says, TJ, how do you feel about saying ain't in a speech? Is ain't all that bad? It depends. I don't want to give you a blanket rule and say you should never use ain't. If that is your style, if you routinely use ain't, especially if it's obvious that you know it's not the perfect grammar but you're using it because that's how you speak and that's the effect you want to have, then by all means use it. You hear a word bandied about a great deal and I feel misused a lot. And that's the word authenticity when it comes to speaking. And the reason I have mixed feelings about it is quite often there are politicians who I feel are the absolute phoniest people alive and they are described as authentic. And then there are other politicians I happen to admire or respect and People say that he and she are incredibly inauthentic, so it is subjective. But as it relates to saying ain't or not or using proper grammar, the main consideration is how you normally talk. I'm not worried about using a word like ain't or the occasional wrong word or the occasional bad grammar. If that's how you always talk. I'm a lot more worried by you trying to use bigger words or fancier words or more complex words than you do in normal conversation. Gary Vaynerchuk of tv, Wine, Library and social media fame and new media is well known for cursing and using the F bomb all the time. Well, he does it in real life. He does it in meetings, he does it in speeches, and he does it on his online videos. For him, it works. It's who he is. And if it annoys some people, he says tough. I'm not going to suggest that he change that. But if that's not how you normally talk, if you never curse and all of a sudden you start cursing because you want to seem young and hip and I'll be like Gary Vee, people will see through that. You won't seem authentic, it'll seem phony and contrived. All things being equal, is it better to use good grammar most of the time? For most people, yes. But if you have a particular Persona and background, if you are, you know, one of the characters on that TV show where it's a bunch of and I'm not a regular viewer, obviously, but if you, if you're running around the backwoods shooting ducks in Louisiana and all of a sudden you have perfect grammar, when you're giving a speech that might seem odd, speak the way you normally speak. When you are at your most relaxed, most confident and most engaged, do that and the grammar will take care of itself. I'm TJ Walker. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success. Thanks for joining me.

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