Peter Drucker—“the father of modern management”—was perhaps the greatest management teacher of all time. Yet, few professionals know that Drucker’s teachings on self-management are equally profound. In Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life (Berrett-Koehler, 2009, $19.95), author and Drucker scholar Bruce Rosenstein presents Drucker’s prescription…    Continue reading

In a useful BusinessWeek report called Managing the Global Workforce we learned that winning the war for talent is a challenge that few corporations are well-equipped to handle. I wouldn’t call this news, but it’s certainly a macro-trend: as corporations morph from multinationals into transnationals that establish talent centers around the globe, talent management becomes…    Continue reading

Until recently, Jonathan Bernstein, a baby boomer and small-business owner in the Los Angeles area, had plans to “semi-retire.” On turning 60 in 2011, Bernstein had hoped to cut his workload in half, and he and his wife were contemplating purchasing a home in a state with a lower cost of living than California. But…    Continue reading

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…    Continue reading

Despite the numbing loss of over millions of jobs – and the worst job market since WWII— young professionals, job-seekers and career changers can and do get jobs today. They are accomplishing this by adapting to a morphing workplace, determining how they can add value to the industries and jobs that matter now, and swiftly…    Continue reading

Terry Hird is a professional negotiator in Silicon Valley who enjoys teaching others the craft. Arranging a time to interview him by phone didn’t involve a lot of back and forth. It was a take it or leave it proposition. Well, not really, I suppose I could have held out for an in-person meeting and…    Continue reading

Fernando Ara faces an extreme virtual commute from his Orange County, CA office to Madrid, Spain. Ara is in the vanguard of worldwide cross-border telecommuters. Ara is the U.S. country manager for Redkaraoke, a social networking website, but works out of his California-based home office and travels when necessary for meetings. Ara’s colleague, Justin Abbott,…    Continue reading

One evening in May 2006, the president of the China division of a $10-billion-a-year multinational locked himself out of his office. Using his handheld, he fired off a nasty e-mail to his secretary, ordering her to start checking with her superiors every night before she went home. He also CCed others in the company before…    Continue reading

It’s no joke: there really are too many lawyers. And there are too few nurses and accountants. At least, that’s the employment outlook this year. What if you could glimpse the future and foresee low demand for your skills in 2012? Would you change careers based on that data or would you continue to chase…    Continue reading

If you’re applying for a job at a global company, you may be asked to take an aptitude or personality test. Hearing this, you may be nervous about your test-taking or language skills. Don’t be. We spoke to several experts in global testing, and here’s what they told us. What Companies Want to Know. Companies…    Continue reading

Carol S. Dweck, author of Mindset, the New Psychology of Success, contends that your success or failure in life, career and relationships is attributable to a fixed or growth mindset. The fixed mindset believes that your personal qualities – intelligence, personality and character – are set in stone. The growth mindset believes that your qualities…    Continue reading

Most of us want to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with our work. But the vast majority of us aren’t what HR experts call “engaged” by our jobs. What can we do about that? First, we can realize that this is a universal problem. A recently released study of 88,612 workforce members in 18…    Continue reading

Clients who don’t know what they want can chew up countless hours of your time with exploratory emails, phone calls, meetings, and requests for more details if you let them. Ditto for blood-sucking zombies who milk you for free advice but have no intention of ever hiring you. Here are some suggestions for “training” indecisive…    Continue reading

When you go above and beyond the call of duty at work, you expect a reward for your efforts. But the payoff is often delayed – or worse – and it’s rarely what you were expecting. What’s typically at stake for employees is a cash reward and heightened organizational stature – a big step toward a…    Continue reading

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…    Continue reading

When we initiate contact with a recruiter – or they call us – we tend to think of them as our recruiter. That’s when the communication quandary begins. Almost always, recruiters work for employers not job seekers. A typical misconception is that although many recruiters can and often do offer career advice, technically they’re working…    Continue reading

We saw it this week: the economy hiccups, companies restructure and employees scatter in search of shelter and protection for the career they’ve fought so hard to build. In times like these, many are faced with difficult decisions.  Should I stay with my company or seek another position in another company?  Should I go back…    Continue reading

My first article for msnbc.com. addresses a topic that aligns two of my main interests: careers and social media. Every unemployed person I interviewed for the piece had a LinkedIn profile prior to their layoff but hadn’t developed it sufficiently. They were making up for lost time quickly. But still, it’s difficult to pull together…    Continue reading

Globalization has expanded the opportunities of where we work and for whom we work. But how do global firms ensure that the people they hire locally are suited – from a standpoint of analytic skills, aptitude, and personality – for globally collaborative assignments? According to hiring consultants and human-resources executives at international companies, it’s crucial…    Continue reading

Are you buzzword compliant? Maybe that’s the problem – in the careers field they’re no longer called buzzwords. They’re called keywords, and without them, your résumé will slide into a black hole in cyberspace from which no search engine can find you. Sounds dire, but getting the right words into your résumé is pretty simple…    Continue reading