Patrik Runald and his wife Susanne sold their things and left Sweden to build a global career. He and his wife, key employees of a Finnish security software firm, moved to London three years ago, resettled in Singapore and then tried Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. When the Runald’s pine for Sweden they go to the nearest Ikea…    Continue reading

In a piece called The Worst Jobs in Science, Popular Science magazine takes us places the angels at the Discovery Channel would refuse to tread. After reading this list, to which I have added some commentary, tell us about your worst job! 10. Orangutan-Pee Collector Apparently an analysis of Orangutan urine is a leading indicator…    Continue reading

In the burgeoning marketplace of self-actualization gurus no one is hotter than the ubiquitous Tim Ferris. For someone who purports to only work four hours a week, he apparently classifies the other 36 hours of self-promotion as rest and relaxation. I was skeptical, but on the advice of a respected comrade I tuned into a…    Continue reading

If my friends hear me utter the word Facebook one more time they are going to excommunicate me from their buddy lists. I’m adding to the noise only because Facebook demands the immediate attention of all 30 million of us members. Today’s poll reads: Which brand is the best toothpaste? Frankly, if I could entice…    Continue reading

Would you create and distribute a video résumé or hire someone who sent you one? Video résumés can be more revealing than a job seeker intends. That hasn’t stopped a few thousand mostly young job candidates from posting them on You Tube or e-mailing them to recruiters and employers. Most of the early video résumés have…    Continue reading

Until recently, Gap Inc. was on my short list of leading socially responsible corporations in this country. This is a company that has trailblazed new paths in how it treats employees, the community and the environment. How many companies produce reports that ask What Is A Company’s Role in Society? How many companies have an…    Continue reading

Startups are finding it harder to launch with world-class talent and that is putting qualified job candidates in the catbird seat. “Startups aren’t the destination employers for top talent anymore, and it’s a candidate’s market right now,” writes Dave Lefkow, CEO of talentspark, a Seattle-based talent management consultant. I followed up with Lefkow to find…    Continue reading

Until a few days ago I had never heard of Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University. I hadn’t heard about his trailblazing work in computer science studies – particularly in virtual reality and creating a playful way to teach computer programming to children. But then someone sent me a link to his final lecture,…    Continue reading

The Gap’s track record of hiring and failing to properly manage some of the world’s lowest cost clothing manufacturers continues to shame them. On Sunday the UK’s Observer broke the story that in a New Delhi, India sweatshop factory run by an outsourced manufacturing firm, children as young as 10 were working up to 16 hours…    Continue reading

In a piece called The Worst Jobs in Science, Popular Science magazine takes us places the angels at the Discovery Channel would refuse to tread. After reading this list, to which I have added sage career commentary, tell us about your worst job! 10. Orangutan-Pee Collector Apparently an analysis of Orangutan urine is a leading…    Continue reading

If you lose your job as a result of globalization, House Democrats want to extend employment benefits to you to ease your transition. There’s a good chance that Republicans, also capable of reading polls, may jump on this bandwagon, too. Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, told the Wall Street Journal that benefits…    Continue reading

Wait, is this the year that education rises to the top of the national agenda? Don’t count on it. For the most part, America has terrific colleges but getting there is a bit of an adventure.   The latest evidence – you guessed it – those pesky SAT scores. The average math score dropped from…    Continue reading

Will working abroad fast-track your career? The answer has often been yes for men, but a question mark for women who used to be passed over for foreign assignments. In the book Get Ahead by Going Abroad authors C. Perry Yeatman and Stacie Berdan contend that women are better suited for foreign assignments than men…    Continue reading

There’s a whiff of future shock in Radiohead’s grand experiment to let fans choose how much to pay for downloading the band’s new album In Rainbows. The British alt-rock band isn’t the first music act to try this experiment, but this is the most disruptive effort yet. Controlling both the means of distribution and marketing,…    Continue reading

Gap Inc.’s disclosure that it lost a laptop containing the personal information of 800,000 job applicants leaves me wondering what on earth they were thinking. Why were these applicant records stored on a laptop rather than accessible over a virtual private network (VPN)? Is convenience more important than privacy? The data was lost by an…    Continue reading

Have you heard? Crackberry is now a word. Webster’s Dictionary defines the noun as “a person who uses a Blackberry addictively or obsessively or the device when used this way.” Webster’s doesn’t just add words to the dictionary in a wanton manner. A new study by Robert Half Management Resources finds that 69 percent of…    Continue reading

EDS, the wayward outsourcing giant, is stumbling to compete in the global economy. Cost-cutting was the theme of Wednesday’s announcement to shareholders that the company is beefing up its workforce in low-labor-cost regions while offering “packages” to 12,000 U.S. employees. A company spokesman said, “In order to remain competitive, we must constantly rebalance our workforce…    Continue reading

I’d like to announce the launch of AfterRusty, a social networking site for my friends, fans, relatives, creditors and associates. You may have heard about corporate alumni networks where ex-employees bitch about their old company. AfterRusty is for people who know me, wish they knew me, or thought they did. For a limited time, I…    Continue reading

Though the Bush administration touts a low unemployment rate, these are subpar years for job creation in America. The August jobs report, the worst in four years, marked a rare net decrease in the number of employed workers. For an economy that creates about 50,000 to 100,000 more jobs each month than it loses, the…    Continue reading

Opponents of globalization contend that there is an economic race-to-the-bottom underway as first-world economies will be forced to cut their standard of living in order to compete with third-world economies. One prominent supporter of globalization counters that most of the support for this argument is anecdotal – there’s not much smoke and little substance to…    Continue reading