About twenty-five years ago, one of my friends told me he wanted to quit his job because he didn’t trust his boss. He was in the kind of job where he had complete autonomy and didn’t really have too many occasions where he had to interact with his boss. I kept probing, trying to understand what trust had to do with what he was hired to do. In my estimation, he was at the top of his grade, top salary, …
If I were young and just starting out, knowing what I do now about business, education, and careers, I would have done things so differently. But, since I’m well past those years, now I take that knowledge and experience and help youngsters find their passion and a way of earning a decent living. One thing we can all agree on is the fact that it’s stupid to choose a career based on how much money you can make. Between the …
In the business world, if you want to find out what people think of you, it’s usually done in the form of performance evaluations by your supervisor. These scheduled evaluations usually center on your work, although it often focuses on your attitude. If you are being evaluated by someone who doesn’t like you or is envious of you, these evaluations are useless, but if they’re done by people who like you and who use them to help you and the …
Did you ever look at the contents of women’s magazines? One of the things that stands out is that those magazines always had articles about how to please your man, yet none of the men’s magazines had articles about how to please your woman. I take that back. The only way those men’s magazines discussed how to please your woman was to talk about the “things” that women like. Consequently, they showed pictures of diamonds, big houses, stylish clothing, and …
I once asked a young man if he would rather be smart or nice. I wasn’t asking him if he would rather be seen as smart or nice; I was asking him if he would rather be smart or nice. It was interesting to see him wrestle with this question. I specifically asked him because of his niceness factor and because of his intelligence. Perhaps one of the reasons I was so interested in his response is because I have …
It seems like such a silly premise that laziness could be contagious, or even inherited, but there are certain characteristics that give the allusion that it could have some basis in fact. It’s a far cry from being scientific, although it wouldn’t surprise me if, someday, some research scientists get money in grants to study the clinical implications of laziness as an inherited gene. They may even call it the genilazy gene. In past generations, without the distraction of computers, …
Before you go running to your boss telling him that studies show you will be more productive if you work from home, ask yourself if this is really so. On the one hand, you can miss the unproductive meetings that managers and head honchos seem to think are so important but, instead, take up valuable time, accomplishing little or nothing. You can also avoid all the ASAP emails that you feel compelled to answer immediately simply because everyone knows you’re …
In my day, women married young, had babies when they were scarcely past their own childhood, and also divorced at a fairly young age. I remember hearing mothers telling their very intelligent daughters not to let their boyfriends think they were smart because otherwise, they would end up as old maids. They were also told to work as secretaries until they married the boss (it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man) …
There have been so many times when we have heard someone say, “This is a business decision, not a personal one.” But, is that really true? When I was much younger, I used to think that there was a necessary divide between business and personal decisions; now I think that we make business decisions based on our personal beliefs and emotions and then we justify them rationally. For example, when fax machines first came on the market, I wanted one. …
Women have always known that they can get what they want by making men think it was their idea. So, why don’t they remember that in the workplace? If we look at it differently, studies also show that when we talk to someone, we remember 65% of what we said and only 35% of what the other person said. Many is the time when someone is recounting a story to me and at the end of it, I’ll ask, “And …