Contemporary Authors

• Mike Steib - http://www.mikesteib.com/about/

  Mike Steib is CEO of XO Group Inc (NYSE: XOXO) and the author of The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life (TarcherPerigee, 2018). XO Group helps millions of couples navigate and enjoy life's biggest moments together through industry-leading digital and media products that include The Knot, The Bump, The Nest, and Gigmasters. In his career, Mike has helped to launch or scale more than a dozen innovative businesses, generating more than one billion dollars in new revenue across digital marketplaces, media, local, mobile, video, ad tech, and ecommerce.

  Mike joined XO Group as president in July 2013 and assumed the CEO role in March 2014. During Mike’s tenure, XO Group has transformed from a traditional online media company to a digital marketplace that connects young couples to the event professionals, services, and products that they need to successfully get married and become parents.

  Mike serves on the board of Fortune 500 financial services company, Ally Financial (NYSE: ALLY), and is Co-chairman of the Board of Literacy Partners, a nonprofit that has provided family support services to thousands of New Yorkers for over forty years.

  From 2011 to 2013, Mike served as CEO of Vente-Privee USA, an ecommerce venture backed by American Express. Previously, Mike spent 4 ½ years at Google helping to build Google’s mobile and video advertising businesses. Before Google, Mike was the General Manager of Strategic Ventures at NBC Universal, where he received the GE Imagination Breakthrough award. Mike earlier served as vice president in the NBC Corporate Development group. Mike worked previously at Walker Digital, an internet incubator, and at McKinsey & Company.

  Mike has been recognized as one of Crain’s New York "40 Under 40," Multichannel News “40 Under 40,” Folio's "100" honorees, TV Week's "Twelve to Watch," TV Week's “Hot List,” and has received a CEO World Award and a Stevie International Business Award.

  Mike has appeared on NBC's Today, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business, as well as in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, Fast Company, the NY Post, AdAge, AdWeek, Newsday, Parade, and others.

  Mike received a BA in Economics and a BA in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a named inventor of three digital media patents and played a supporting actor role in the independent film The Mad Ones. He is married to Kemp Steib, the CFO of The Second Shift, a marketplace for highly skilled professional female talent.

The Career Manifesto: Discover Your
Calling and Create an Extraordinary
Life
Publishers Weekly.
264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p82. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life Mike Steib. TarcherPerigee, $18 (288p) ISBN 978-0-14312-934-9
Steib, CEO of the XO Group media company, taps into the frustration overachievers feel when their career trajectories fall short in this motivating and action-oriented guide. Steib identifies what he calls the five pillars of success, namely purpose, plan, productivity, people, and presence. These five pillars, Steib asserts, will help readers reconfigure goals, increase productivity, and overcome obstacles both in and out of the office. To stimulate this transformation, he offers up a series of necessary steps, including "telling yourself the truth," "thinking for yourself," and "changing your stripes." He details exercises aimed toward gaining a sense of direction and control, such as creating "impact maps" and "happiness matrices." Steib's chapter on increasing productivity to the point of getting "10 times as much done" is particularly sharp and widely applicable, imparting beneficial advice on following effective habits such as generating "if-then" formulas, managing willpower, and systematically measuring results. In chapters devoted to "people," he explores "achieving impact with others" in various capacities, such as through networking, attending meetings, and collaborating on projects. For a brief discussion of "presence," Steib brings in insights from happiness studies. His book lays out a sound and logical approach, with easily applicable and customizable advice aplenty. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life." Publishers
Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 82. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
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/A517262119/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=403218ec. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262119
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• Parade
  https://parade.com/640336/m-b-roberts/ceo-and-author-mike-steib-says-manage-your-time-as-if-you-only-have-five-hours-to-live/
  Word count: 627

  CEO and Author Mike Steib Says Manage Your Time As if You Only Have Five Hours to Live
  January 30, 2018 – 6:00 AM – 0 Comments
  M.B. Roberts
  By M.B. Roberts
  Smiling young woman taking colorful reminders from glass wall
  (iStock)
  Career Manifesto

  Mike Steib’s new book, The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life (TarcherPerigee), began as a google doc he created to motivate his employees. Now, the CEO of media and tech company, XO Group who has worked as an executive at big-time companies such as Google and NBC Universal/General Electric, has expanded his original message in hopes of inspiring those of us who daily navigate the corporate world.

  In his manifesto, Steib covers several enormously important topics, from making a commitment to managing stress in and out of the workplace. He touches on particulars such as how to take control of your inbox and key questions to ask yourself before making a career change.

  Here is an excerpt from the book which challenges us all to manage our calendars as if we only had five hours to live.

  Zero- Base Your Calendar

  Zero- basing is a popular management thought exercise for resource allocation, in which every business initiative and every department mentally starts with zero resources, then builds up to the investments needed to achieve the outcomes that are important for the company. Teams that use this approach escape incremental thinking, free themselves of the cognitive bias of sunk costs, and find that they end up moving investment from parts of the business that are less important (but have traditionally been resourced) to newer or potentially more valuable parts of the business that can create more upside with those resources. Companies that approach resource allocation in this way outperform their peers in revenue growth and profit growth. We are going to use a similar approach and zero- base your time allocations, applying your limited hours and energies only to the things that matter most to your impact and personal success.

  To zero- base your calendar, let’s begin with the basic requirements: you need to sleep for eight hours; you need to perform essential personal tasks, like eating, bathing, performing personal hygiene, and getting dressed, which in the aggregate should take you about two hours a day; you need to exercise. That is eleven nonnegotiable hours. Presuming your career plan involves a traditional job, and you are striving for high performance, you probably need to work around sixty hours a week, or an average of eight hours a day not including your time for lunch (for this exercise, we’re treating all days as equal, even though you will likely invest more hours in your work on a Monday than on a Saturday). Five hours remain. Five precious hours a day, teeming with potential to change your life.
  fivehourstolive

  “Now wait,” you are thinking, “those hours are spoken for, too—I have tons of stuff going on.” This is exactly the point. You have five hours of discretionary time a day, and now that you have set your life’s goals and your Career Roadmap, it is time to zero- base those last five hours and invest them in the way that has the highest return on the impact and happiness you are pursuing in your life. Cooking, cleaning, volunteering, spending time with your family are all demands on that precious five hours. So are your social media obsession, your adult kickball league, your commitment to watching every episode of The Bachelor, and your repeated urge to play Temple Run on your phone.

  Reprinted with permission TarcherPerigee 2018.

• Inc
  https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/need-to-discover-your-calling-want-to-live-a-fulfilling-life-this-is-book-for-you.html
  Word count: 676

  Need to Discover Your Calling? Want to Live a Fulfilling Life? This Is the Perfect Book for You
  Mike Steib's 'Career Manifesto' is the perfect guide to crafting a better -- and more fun -- career.
  By Jeff Haden
  Contributing editor, Inc.
  WRITE A COMMENT
  CREDIT: Getty Images

  By his own admission, Mike Steib was an A student and overachiever who landed a great job... and was absolutely miserable.

  "I had a corporate development job, meeting with senior people, working on multi-billion dollar acquisitions. A kindergarten teacher asked me to speak at a career day where the kids ask prepared questions like, 'Do you bring your lunch to work?'

  One little girl asked me, 'Is your job important?' I answered, 'Capital allocation is a driver of economic value, but I thought I would be a leader and an operator and not a guy making bubble charts...'

  "The little girl interrupted me and said, 'I'm sorry, mister, but I'm just supposed to write down yes or no.'

  "And I realized the answer was, 'No.'"

  That night Steib, now the CEO of XO Group -- which includes brands like The Knot, The Bump, The Nest, and GigMasters -- decided things had to change. The result is the outstanding new book, The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life.

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  Career Manifesto started out as an idea when Steib was working at Google. "It seemed like everyone at my team was an unhappy overachiever," he says, "wanting to know why they hadn't been promoted. They weren't upset because they were bored or wanted to make more money. They just saw getting promoted as a sign of success."

  So Steib set out to help them, using his own career as a guide.

  "I realized that no one was going to come to some young director of corporate development and say, 'Hey, we heard you want to be a leader.' You have to make it happen yourself."

  So he started an intern program just so he had someone he could manage. In time, he became the guy who could manage interns -- and people started to notice his leadership skills. (After all, if you want a higher level job, don't wait until you get the job to display the skills required -- show you can do the job before you get paid to do it.)

  Over time he fleshed out his "career manifesto," helping people identify their purpose, what matters to them, and how to craft their own career.

  "It was almost like planning a vacation on TripAdvisor," Mike says. "How to think about what you want to do that aligns with your purpose, what roles make sense, what size company, what type of company... every step along the way."

  What started out as ten pages is now a comprehensive guide. The first sections help you determine your purpose and your plan; the rest provides an actionable blueprint to becoming more productive, more effective, more fulfilled... and better able to make a difference in the lives of the people around you.

  Plus a portion of the proceeds go to Literacy Partners, a non-profit that provides family literacy programs to thousands of people in New York.

  Make your life better.

  Make other lives better.

• Monster
  https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/mike-steib-the-career-manifesto
  Word count: 816

  How to make work meetings more productive
  What if you didn’t have to attend another one of those drawn out, unproductive meetings? XO Group CEO and “The Career Manifesto” author Mike Steib told Monster how you can make your meetings matter.
  Anne Fisher, Monster contributor
  How to make work meetings more productive

  Imagine a world in which you didn’t have to sit through another long, boring meeting that you could probably care less about. How much more could you get done with all of that extra time?

  This isn’t an idle question, says Mike Steib, author of The Career Manifesto: Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life. “The average person attends 62 meetings per month, with 90% of us multitasking or daydreaming through them,” he says. That amounts to 50 hours per year, or about a full workweek. “Those meetings need to be better than all of the amazing things you could do with an extra week added to your life,” Steib declares.

  As CEO of media and tech company XO Group (the parent company of popular apps, including The Knot and The Bump), Steib says he coaches his team on “some of the most common challenges people face in their careers.” His new book covers everything from big-picture, long-term career planning to everyday, nuts-and-bolts tactics for making a bigger impact at work right now.

  “These are all things I wish someone had helped me with when I was starting out,” says Steib, who was an executive at Google and NBC Universal/General Electric and launched a string of startups before landing his current job. He is donating all proceeds from this book to Literacy Partners, a New York City–based nonprofit that offers free classes to low-income children and adults.

  Monster recently spoke with Steib about how you can make the most out of your work meetings.
  Q. Why do you view most meetings as a waste of time?

  A. Have you ever walked into a meeting where someone says, “So, what should we discuss today?” That meeting should never have been scheduled. The only reason to meet is to get something done. No meeting should be on anyone’s calendar without a specific purpose—that is, a clearly defined decision or other action that needs to happen by a stated deadline.
  Q. In the book, you offer a list of steps for a productive meeting. What are a few crucial things everyone should do when planning a meeting?

  A. The first one, which has been in use for years at companies like Apple, is a directly responsible individual, or “DRI,” meaning one person who’s accountable for the meeting—and, just as important, for following up to check on the results.

  Second, you need the right attendees, which means only the people who are necessary to achieve the goal and no one else. The more people in the room, the less likely you are to have a productive and honest debate. And having someone without the relevant expertise or authority chiming into the discussion can destroy the meeting’s flow. There is no magic number, but I can tell you that if there are 12 people in the room, you are not going to get anything decided. And if you know someone who just loves to hear himself talk, don’t invite him.
  Q. How important is it to set a detailed agenda beforehand, rather than winging it?

  A. Very! You need a well-thought-out agenda to keep the meeting on track and force it forward. That includes a timeline, with how many minutes you want to spend on each item. Distribute the agenda in advance, so everyone who will be there has a chance to focus on it and prepare for his or her part in the conversation.
  Q. What if your boss, or someone else who outranks you, is the one calling the meetings? Should you suggest these changes, and maybe volunteer to do the extra work?

  A. Yes! A good manager should embrace your offer to help. Taking on the task of organizing important recurring meetings and helping to make sure it produces results, is a great way to develop your leadership skills through some extra hustle—and a great way to get noticed by the powers that be.

  Are you reading this in a meeting right now? Sounds like you need a new job, like yesterday. Join Monster today, so you can get job alerts, plus career advice like this, sent directly to your inbox.

  Anne Fisher has been writing about career and workplace trends and topics since 1996. She is the author of If My Career’s on the Fast Track, Where Do I Get a Road Map?