Archive for November, 2008

Archives for Perfect Job

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In his latest book Punching In Alex Frankel a journalist and “brand observer” recounts his recent experiences working entry-level jobs for some of America’s best-known employers: UPS, Starbucks, the Gap and Apple among others.

Unlike those of us who prefer to learn about companies by reading academic case studies or magazine articles, Frankel discovers firsthand how employees are indoctrinated into becoming brand evangelists. He gets his hands wet by whipping up Frappuccinos, delivering packages, folding merino sweaters and selling car rental insurance.

“Whenever I neared the UPS building in San Francisco I felt a strange pull inward, a longing for something I couldn’t articulate,” he writes. Frankel decides to experience “what it felt like to be part of an interconnected global workforce by becoming a piece of it.”

Does a hive-like mentality pervade American retail jobs? If so, many of the worker bees appear to be drones, but according to Frankel the chain stores look for certain types of employees. The Container Store, for instances prefers compulsive neat freaks.

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Archives for Branding You

In this post-Enron era of mandated transparency, corporate annual reports offer greater insights to a broader range of stakeholders, not just investors.

Though annual reports suffer from an excess of glossy prose and disclosures, savvy corporations realize that it’s not just financial analysts and investors reading between the lines. Increasingly, job candidates are mining annual reports to better equip themselves for interviews and to gauge the corporate culture.

“The strongest candidates are the ones that dig into annual reports,” says Lori Blackman, president of DNL Global, a Dallas-based recruiting firm. “The job candidates’ objective should be to help grow the company.”

Here are some questions job seekers should keep in mind when reading an annual statement:

• Is the company profitable? Which lines of business turn a profit and which underdeliver?
• What are the company’s biggest business or market-driven challenges?
• Does the company focus solely on executive compensation or does it tout an equity distribution plan for rank and file workers, too?
• Does the company discuss its commitment to talent management?
• Does the company express a preference for home-grown rather than acquired talent?
• Does the company have a commitment to global diversity? Is this commitment reflected in their choices of directors and executives?
• Does the company have a viable global growth strategy?
• Is the company committed to building greener, more energy efficient operations?
• Does the company support volunteerism and creative philanthropy?

Profitability. The good news is you don’t have to be an MBA or financial analyst to make sense of the numbers. There are a wide range of articles on the web and various books available about how to read financial statements and annual reports.

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Archives for Career Advice

Have you noticed any similarities between your dating experiences and your job searches?

What these two puzzle parts have in common is a quest for better relationships. Granted, for some of us, both of these personal quests are fraught with frustration.

But in Shawn Graham’s new book Courting Your Career, he spins the metaphor in amusing and insightful ways. Networking is matchmaking. Career fairs are akin to clubbing. Cover letters are like pick-up lines. And job boards are linked to online dating (and about equally successful).

Graham, a fellow Fast Company Experts blogger, has served as a career counselor at UNC-Chapel Hill where he field-tested this metaphor and found that it resonated well with students. When you’re looking for a job you want to work with amiable people, right?

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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 Coaching

“If you see a fork in the road, take it,” and “You can observe a lot by watching” are some of the many one-line quips of baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra.  Yogi’s comments are both fun and a blinding flash of the obvious that often draw us back to simple truths.  My favorite is “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

One blinding flash of the obvious that is often missed, and that could be extremely pertinent in the age of employee engagement, is “Engagement requires thinking.”  In my experience, many employee engagement approaches are still one-way communication efforts on steroids that fail to tap into the ability of employees to think and act differently.  At a time when study after study confirms that only about 20% of employees are engaged in their current work, it’s hard not to conclude that something’s not working!  Maybe “having a best friend at work” isn’t the determining factor.  Why are so many employees simply checked out at the place where they spend 40% of their waking lives…at work?

Let’s start with a key premise that’s often missed in engagement efforts - that we want to solve problems ourselves.  From Sudoku to mystery novels to crosswords, we all love the challenge of solving a puzzle.  Obviously, we could just turn to the back of the book and get the answer or read the final page.  But what’s engaging about that?  We want the intellectual and emotional experience of finding a sense of achievement in our own thinking.  When people get a chance to solve their own puzzles, they own the result.  And owners think, act, and engage differently from non-owners.  They’re vested, they’re passionate, they won’t take no for an answer, and they’re willing to put in more effort than is required. Read More

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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