Jason Unger

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We ran a fascinating piece in CE Pro a couple of weeks ago, "The 4 Personalities That Lead to Innovation," that I've been meaning to highlight here.

It covers Jeff DeGraff's Competing Values, which looks at the different types of people and personalities required to make change and innovate in a work environment.

Considering that we're all entrepreneurs, understanding the different types of people one will deal with during a lifetime is crucial.

In short, here are the four personality types and what defines them:

Compete Types are intensely competitive. They are totally focused on performance and goals.

Collaborate Types are the "people" leaders who believe in something greater than the business itself and run their companies to reflect shared values.

Control Types represent incremental innovation by taking something that already exists and modifying it to make it better.

Create Types are all about creativity, innovation and growth. This is the profile associated with radical breaks from the past and breakthrough ideas.

Normally, I hate when people are put into a box. I never like to consider myself as an in-the-box person, but then again, that's exactly what my Predictive Index test said about me.

Jason will most strongly express the following behaviors:

- Flexible approach to 'the book;' often bends the rules and does things his own way. An innovative, out-of-the-box thinker who is undaunted by failure.

(I'm going to post my predictive index results in a future blog — look for it later this week.)

In any case, the article highly suggests that, when forming a team or a workgroup, you need one of each personality. And that's not easy to do, especially because we kind of like being around people similar to us.

So what are you? Do you create, compete, control or collaborate?

Believe it or not, I'm a manager now. At the ripe old age of 24, I have an assistant Web editor for CE Pro — meaning that things are changing for me and for the site.

So far, things are going well. Steve — the assistant editor — is catching on quick and picking up a lot of the stuff that was slipping through the cracks previously. The site has grown a lot in the past year and we've needed more hands, so he's a welcome addition.

Because of this, my role has changed as well — in addition to doing the things that I need to do, I need to make sure Steve has things to do. There's no shortage of work to be done, but I'm not just looking out for myself anymore; I'm looking out for him, too.

Add into the fact that I'm managing virtually — literally. He's in Boston, I'm in DC. So while I was there for his first few days, the rest of our relationship has been over IM. It's not bad; it's just different. When you're doing things over IM, words matter much more. There are no body signs or emotions you can pick up on — it's only what the words say and mean.

So as he picks up some of the things keeping me from new ventures on the site, I'm working on developing an expanded community and growing our lead-gen content.

Change is good; I'm honestly not sure where I would be if change wasn't always happening. Doing the same thing over and over again is mundane. When people my age are changing jobs every 18 months, I've been with the same company for 3 years (but am now in my third position).

I'm excited for the future.

Tuesdays are newsletter days for CE Pro, and I was inserting the ads for today's issue I noticed a pleasant surprise:

I've been kidding with Jenni, who manages ads for us, about getting a banner for jasonunger.com in an open newsletter spot for a while — and it finally happened!

Time. It's the one thing everyone wans more of, but rarely ever gets.

Author Tim Ferriss has made himself known for his 4-Hour Work Week, where he preaches outsourcing all of the mundane tasks that overtake our lives and focusing instead on the important things.

I'm sitting here today pumping out Web content. It's one of those things that comes in waves for me — some days it just flows, and others it's just a massive creativity block.

I haven't outsourced anything recently — I saw a news story about women outsourcing their pregnancies to India — but I'm getting things done.

It takes time to get things done, but the more you get done, the more time you have for the important things in life.

Try and get a couple of things done off your to-do list today. You'll find that the time is well worth it.

Career vs Love: Which Would You Pick? - Well, ideally you could have both.

But there's a reason the song isn't called "All You Need is a Job."

Video Of The Day: Comcast TiVo DVR - I'm hoping that TiVo as software becomes prominent in 2008, and that Comcast here in DC will start to offer the TiVo guide for their boxes.

It's a great middle ground for me and the wife — she likes the Comcast experience and I like the TiVo interface. This rollout looks like it could suit both of us.

Have Your Baby Before New Year's Day, Save Thousands - An interesting look at why December 28th is the "most popular birth date of the year."