Archive for November, 2008

Archives for Research

Here are three telling data points which, when properly assembled, paint an unflattering picture about working in America today:

• The wealthiest 1 percent sees their income dramatically outpace others;
• Men in their 30s today earn less than their fathers did in the 1970s;
• A parents’ economic success is one of the biggest pointers to their children’s future economic success.

Those are key findings of a study that evaluates economic mobility, or the ability of a person to move up or down the economic ladder within a lifetime or from one generation to the next.

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Archives for Career Advice

Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko – The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need is anything but a simple comic book, even if it closely resembles one.

Aimed primarily at recent (and impending) college grads, Bunko is a graphical story told in illustrated panels. Pink says it is the first US business book rendered in the Japanese “Manga” style – an entertaining, fanciful yet unintimidating way to assimilate information.

Pink’s hero is stuck in a dead-end job. One night, as if in a fairytale, a hot looking (give or take her pointy ears) career adviser named Diana shows up at his office offering to show him the way to a better life. Bunko summons his mentor by rubbing chopsticks. (Don’t over-think that one.)

Diana badgers him a bit, but Bunko needs both a push and encouragement.

Pink, who authored A Whole New Mind and Free-Agent Nation, is a gifted writer and perceptive thinker (well known to FC readers). Unlike old-school business gurus, Pink doesn’t do all of the thinking for you – he leaves some room for you to flesh out his ideas. The corporation isn’t the center of gravity in his writing – it’s what’s best for the reader.

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Archives for MNC

Recruiters and hiring managers say that the demand for executives to globalize business operations and tap worldwide markets has exceeded the supply of globally experienced executives – at least in America.

As business schools race to add global curriculum, dozens of new alumni-education programs and executive education courses suggest that there is a market waiting to be served – expensively and immediately.

One of the more interesting new programs stems from a firm that has been evangelizing the discipline of global leadership for years, the Center for Creative Leadership, a non-profit executive education group. CCL, as it is known, is launching a program in October called Advancing Global Leadership.

“What makes this program unique is a business simulation,” says Mike Kossler, CCL Senior Enterprise Associate. He says the US$3,500 program will run simultaneously in Brussels, Greensboro, N.C. and Singapore. The three sites will collaborate to “simulate what it’s like to work in a global environment and lead a dispersed team.”

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Archives for Branding You

Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success is one of the rare career books that is often counter-intuitive in its guidance yet stays with you a little longer than expected. I was both amused and engaged by chapters entitled “Be a Sponge,” or “Assume the Job Description Was Wrong” or “When Writing Your Resume, Don’t Be Too Honest.”

A former professional beach volleyball player, software executive and IPO survivor, Trunk reinvented herself a few years ago as an author, blogger and career columnist for Yahoo! Finance and the Boston Globe (The Climb).

It’s not so much that Trunk advocates lying on your resume, what she preaches is closer to spin control, though she doesn’t call it that. “If you’re too honest you sound like a psychopath,” she says. After all, a resume is “not a list of every truth in your life. In my mind it’s absurd that people give advice that says ‘Don’t lie on your resume’ because it’s totally useless advice. ”

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