Have you ever taken an employee survey where you are asked to respond to items like this?
“I have the opportunity to do my best each day.”
“I would recommend the company as a good place to work to my friends.”
“Even though I work as hard as a dog, have no personal life and have not seen [...]

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When the market is tight I often have job seekers tell me that they are very open to any kind of opportunity. Open to move for the right position, open to take a pay cut and open to ‘just about anything”.
The hope of course is that openness will help land a job more quickly on [...]

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Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride is where guests ride passively in a half-sunken barge through a darkened canal to an endless choir of animatronic dolls singing the same verses over and over and over again. I wonder in awe at the ability of that darn song to get trapped in the subconscious. Can you hear it [...]

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I am all for college degrees. In fact I have a couple myself. But for many people, getting the college degree didn’t happen either by plan or by circumstances. Despite this they have built a good career holding the types of professional jobs even though their peers in similar positions had degrees.
How does this happen?
Simple actually. These degree-less people [...]

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If you haven’t yet, you must see George Clooney’s movie “Up in the Air” – the story about a charming corporate road-warrior hired by spineless managers to fire their employees.
I saw it last weekend and as someone who spent 18 years witnessing thousands of people lose their jobs it was very hard to watch and [...]

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I had a client who just hated networking. This was not new of course, but he was really serious about it. He did not like to ask for favors. He did not like the fuzziness of it and it seem to him like a bit of a crap-shoot to meet with people in hopes that [...]

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When looking for a job we like and a successful career we usually think about skills, knowledge and motivation. I guess this makes sense. After all, jobs are about what we do. Work is the application of skills and knowledge.
The reasoning therefore, is to find organizations, that need your knowledge and skills and you will be [...]

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I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday week.  As for me, I’m spending much of it doing my all-time favorite thing. No, not eating – which does happen to come in at a close second. I’ve been reading.  And I spent much of Christmas Day reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, Nothing Was the Same. And [...]

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I am in Seattle today, my old home town. I love this place with the grey skies, moss on the sidewalks and the really good restaurants tucked away on side Seattle streets with the rain dampened sound of the city and the faint sweet smell (at least to me) of low tide in the distance.
I met [...]

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You know that a letter to an advice columnist is going to be good when it’s signed, “Anonymous.”  Personally, I’m thinking that if you feel you must hide your identity, you pretty much already know the right answer. You just want to go the other way.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading the Ethicist’s [...]

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