Episode 246: How to Be Great at Your Job with Justin Kerr

On today’s episode, I spent time with Justin Kerr. Justin is a self-described efficiency monster, He is the author of the rogue corporate playbooks How to Write an Email and How to Be a Boss. He is also the mouthpiece of the MR CORPO podcast and has been the youngest senior executive at some of the world’s biggest apparel companies (Gap, Old Navy, Levi’s, UNIQLO) running billion-dollar businesses while finding time to write 14 books, tour the country with his rock band and keep 100,000 bees on his roof. He is currently president of Imprint Projects in New York City.   Justin Kerr climbed to the top of the corporate ladder before reaching age 40. His book, entitled How to Be Great at Your Job takes the guesswork out of career success and breaks down what it takes to excel at your job. It covers the basics, like the universal requirements of every workplace—working with other people, making stellar presentations, communicating effectively over email. And it also goes into how to get promoted sooner, impress the people high up on the corporate ladder, and do it all while maintaining your personal life and without working crazy hours. With helpful tips and simple advice, this professional guidebook is just right for someone new to the workplace or for a mid-life career changer.

Specifics that we covered on the show include:

  • Background on who Justin Kerr and how the book, How to Be Great at Your Job came to be
  • On the term “efficiency monster”
  • On being caught with the email trap
  • The processes put in place to allow a person to be more efficient
  • On how to over-communicate that works best for a company
  • On building credibility over time
  • On doing work by breaking them into smaller components
  • On giving updates
  • On getting so far ahead and in return getting more work thrust upon you
  • How does Justin manages his time 
  • The best thing about the book

“Always be giving the updates because keep in mind the people you worked with are human beings and a lot of us can lose the side of that. We get titles and VPs and assistants but they are human beings – they get nervous, they have their own concerns, they are worried about their own boss – all of these different things. So telling people what is going on is just gonna lower the temperature a little bit.” ~ Justin Kerr

Relevant Links

The key takeaways from this episode include: how to work with other human beings, how to balance life and work, what to do if someone at work hates you, and (of course) the critical skill of how to win an “email fight”.


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