Archive for the 'Branding You' Category

Archives for Branding You

When a couple gets into a rut, they sometimes enter counselling to get a fresh, outsider’s perspective and, hopefully, reinvigorate the romance.

Similarly, a company seeking a surge of renovation can turn to the outside world by setting up a diverse team tasked with a particular focus.

Not slowed down by corporate bureaucracy, this multi-disciplinary group is, theoretically, agile enough to affect change and deliver innovation.

So contend the authors of a new book, “X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate, and Succeed.” Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman who conducted their research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, say that we live in an “era of open innovation.”

They contend that more “radical innovation” comes from smaller organizations and that universities are increasingly forming partnerships with industry to market independent research.

Archives for Branding You

How much do you know about the corporate culture of a prospective employer? Until you work there, you’re in the dark, right? By reputation, a manufacturing company might be known as a meat grinder or a large law firm as a cold and unfriendly place. Yet how much of this reputation is true and how much of it is sour grapes?

It’s imperative to discover the true nature of corporate culture before you accept a job offer. If the company likes go-getters, but you’re a slow-starter, look elsewhere. If the company likes consensus builders, but you shoot from the hip, maybe it’s not a good fit for you.

Unless you’re equipped with science-fiction powers of precognition, your options for evaluating the culture as a job candidate or job seeker appear limited to talking to people and power-reading on the web. The obvious place to start, the careers section of the corporate site, is usually a dead end. There you can read the type of gloss that belongs on a Hallmark greeting card. If reading about the CEO’s family values melts your heart, so be it, but I’d rather know if the company nurtures or chews up its young. And to get that kind of information you have to dig - deep.

Archives for Branding You

Just a quick note of gratitude to Guy Kawasaki for including My Global Career on Alltop.com, a cool new portal that showcases and samples the best of the web.

I met Guy several decades ago when he was an Apple Computer evangelist and I was a fledgling tech reporter in Silicon Valley. He was always a good sport about educating the press and fact-checking story details. In recent years Guy’s star has ascended as an author, blogger and venture capitalist.

Guy’s blog offers excellent career advice, particularly to budding entrepreneurs, inventors and executives. All the best tech & management gurus keep a sharp eye on leadership & talent management issues because without strong people skills, your chances of successful execution are nil. But then you knew that!  

Let me know how you like Alltop.

 

Archives for Branding You

Those who can’t do, teach;
Those who can’t teach, blog;
Those who can’t blog, Twitter.

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.

Archives for Branding You

Whoever said the more things change, the more they stay the same wouldn’t have a successful job search in 2008. Of course, some old ideas still work pretty well: Nepotism still beats struggling. Fraternities still spawn lifelong business partnerships.  

Pounding the pavement - well, maybe that idea should be retired, too. Fortunately, there are productive new career management strategies that can re-energize your job search and redefine your personal branding.

Old Idea: Graduate school
Fresh Concept: Immersion

A graduate degree still takes you farther in many ways than the school of hard knocks. Studies show wages are consistently higher for highly educated workers. But what savvy employers value now is immersion - they want you to start out as an expert and have skills they can’t find elsewhere, except perhaps at a higher price.

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 Résumé, 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 résumé, 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 résumé 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 résumé’ because it’s totally useless advice. ”