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Until fairly recently the main measure of a company’s success was determined by its financial bottom line. Was it making a profit or was it sustaining losses? Although companies have been managing their activities by using their financial profits as their guiding light for a very long time, many stakeholders have sustained losses while the company’s shareholders have celebrated their wins.

Times are changing, and the way companies measure their success is too. Now in addition to watching financial outcomes, companies are assessing their impact on their physical surroundings and their community as well. When companies pay attention to the people they touch, the environment they impact, and the profits they make, leaders make more sustainable decisions overall. In fact, this way of doing business is causing companies to rethink how they produce their products and provide their services. In the process, the entire company system is becoming stronger.

Although the term triple bottom line may refer to specific reporting requirements, often it is used as shorthand for ventures that are socially responsible, green, and profitable.

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Archives for Perfect Job

In a weak economy the tendency is for workers to hold onto their jobs a bit longer than they would otherwise prefer. Is it possible that in a downturn the best thing to do is counterintuitive – quitting corporate America to freelance, start a business or return to college? Better now than never – even if you don’t succeed.

In her book, Escape from Corporate America, Pamela Skillings, a career coach and blogger, says that moving back and forth between solo ventures or startups and corporate jobs is “really the only way to develop, learn and grow.”

Why not take a break from corporate life? Skillings reasons: “So what if you fail? Or what if you discover that solopreneurship isn’t your calling after all?  Sure, it would suck. But you can probably always get a job similar to the one you’re thinking about quitting.”

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Archives for Perfect Job

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 Perfect Job

Do you think of climate-change management as a legitimate career possibility?

Today, the money fueling climate-change management is found in scientific research and government sponsored grants. But corporations may consider hiring specialists to help them anticipate and mitigate the business impact of climate change.

Not only is climate-change management a relatively new course of study on campuses such as UC-Berkeley, it’s also a new career path, at least in the United Kingdom. A scan of several leading U.S. job boards shows a wide range of related environmental services jobs, drawn from diverse disciplines such as meteorology, geology and engineering.

Futurists, take note: Jobs that are today lumped into the environmental-services bucket may morph into something a bit more strategic.

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Archives for Perfect Job

Beyond the razzle-dazzle of beer bashes and company play days, “every company needs a signature experience that sets it apart.” That’s the thrust of a Harvard Business Review article called “What It Means to Work Here” by Tamara J. Erickson of the Concours Institute and Prof. Lynda Gratton of London Business School.

In other words, why spend the prime time of your life at Hyundai when you could be at Honda? Or at Novo Nordisk when you could be at Pfizer? True, it helps focus your decision when one company wants you and its competitor does not.

The authors state that “people also choose jobs-and, more important, become engaged with their work-on the basis of how well their preferences and aspirations mesh with those of the organization.” I’m not sold on that thesis, however. It is difficult at best to both assess corporate culture before we take a job and determine whether it meshes with our sensibilities, too.

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Archives for Perfect Job

Here’s a profitable way to mine your static social networking connections. Morgan Stanley’s Rainmaker program takes mid-career professionals who travel in upscale social circles and trains them to become financial advisors.

Rainmaker’s stated “goal is to transform you into a successful financial advisor running your own profitable practice in just three years.”

On the other hand, in three years you could become a PhD, an MBA, go to med school or become a master chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. But being a stockbroker is kind of cool. If my stockbroker is reachable by phone past market close on the west coast it’s only because there’s an office party that day or he’s required to be there. Otherwise, one assumes, he has a regular 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. tee-time.

The payoff is appealing.

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Archives for Perfect Job

Have you ever wandered into an office staffed by 55 employees who are mostly 24-years-old and in their first job out of college? It might be kind of fun, right?

And in this particular office above Union Square in New York City, they throw the occasional staff party billed as the “Thursday Night Hang.” The workers in this firm called Connected Ventures run three pretty cool companies: a site called CollegeHumor.com; a t-shirt company called Busted Tees; and a video community site that predates YouTube called Vimeo.com.

One evening at a company party, they recorded the following video, for fun, on a single take. It wasn’t intended to be a recruitment video; it just turned out that way. Note, it takes about 40 seconds or more to get grooving and some of the words in a song you will hear are mature. Don’t worry, nothing else about the video is mature, it’s all in fun.

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