I completely forgot about the resolution I made last year (December 2, 2007 to be exact - why wait for the New Year’s rush?) to write the magnum opus. It must have been simmering on the back burner as the thousand and one priorities got in the way because as the year wore on Jack and I returned to working through details. We even submitted a proposal a couple of weeks ago. Now, with two days to go before year’s end, it is almost complete.
Kevin, our SVP Sales, and Loida, our bilingual trainer, are on their way back from Sao Paolo, Brazil having worked very hard with our friends at Kienbaum, our reseller there. At the same time, Madhu, our technology guru, is on the way to New Delhi and Noida, India, hopefully to return with new business relationships. As I send up prayers for their safe travel, I recall Thomas Friedman’s assertion that The World is Flat and think, no, it’s textured.
If people are what make business work, why are they getting laid off while companies fail to cut back on other, presumably less important things?
As CEO, should you keep the corporate jet, continue to fly first class or bite the bullet and go coach?
What is the sound of one stock dropping?
Dear President-elect Obama,
Welcome to the ranks of Chief Executives, those of us, large and small, at whom the buck stops. I voted for you, not just because I agree with so many of your values but because you have a compelling Vision. And that’s what it’s going to take to get this enterprise called the USA back on track. Like any other CEO, I’m also here to offer my advice, based not only on my own experience but that of those CEOs whose companies we’ve worked with. I’ll keep it short and sweet, just the big three.
Someone asked me today to write about managing change. I know it’s a popular topic but when he said it, it sounded so absurd to me. Manage change? The very nature of change is that it’s unpredictable. I think what he really was asking was about how you manage your *reaction* to change: what you do when change happens, rather than maintain the illusion that you actually change the direction of the change.
So here’s my advice:
I was going to write something on the bailout but when I started thinking about it, I realized I’d already written what I wanted to say. This was originally published in 2002. The situation is just more of the same (snafu, for the literary) so I’m going to recycle it here. My submission was entitled Enron End Run.
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My mother passed from this world last week at age 85, having suffered from Parkinson’s and dementia for too many years. This was my eulogy, which I called Lessons From My Mother.
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When I think of who my mother was, I think of her as a woman much younger than I am now. I think of the time when I was on my late teens and she was around 40, when it was her mission to teach me everything she knew about being a good woman.
I passed a van with a Career Builder sign on it while walking home from my chiropractor a little while ago. The sign said something like “Dreams have low ROI.” I guess that’s true if you have a career path that you walk on alone.
I’ve never applied to be on a list. You know, the ones that ask you what you’ve done and why you should be one of the 30 under 30 or 40 under 40 or people to watch in <insert name of city>. So I was surprised to get a Google Alert telling me that I’m on this list: WE Magazine’s 101 Women Bloggers to Watch Fall 2008!
Happy Labor Day to all who are off today. As an entrepreneur (who at one time in my life was not only a union member, but the grievance chairman for my location!) I’m celebrating my ability to work today. And mostly, I’m celebrating that at least one of my team is right there with me going back and forth over the web working on presentations with me.
John Edwards’ campaign manager said it the other day. And so have many hiring managers I’ve known in the past. This morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer subtitled their editorial on the Edwards scandal, “At least the hair still looks good.” Doesn’t that say it all?
I love getting emails like this one from Lissette, a freshman at the Art Institute of Charlotte majoring in Fashion Marketing and Management, especially when I’m feeling like I have something to pass on.
She said:
Another sad story about a “former employee” yesterday. The guy returns to the workplace, shoots and kills two employees who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why create more former employees when you can just not hire them in the first place?
This blog is one year old today. It deserves some recognition and a bit of celebration, if for nothing else other than surviving and growing. Not much different than a human being.
People used to have shorter life spans, primarily because infant death was so prevalent. Now it’s blogs that don’t last. I don’t know how many abandoned blogs dot the blogosphere but a quick search yielded someone making money from ads on abandoned blogs, which sounds to me like putting orphans out to beg, a la Oliver Twist.
I was the dinner speaker at a SHRM group just before Memorial Day weekend, which was also the beginning of our move to our new office space - a week long project involving more technology than I ever want to think about again! So while my dear management team was directing furniture placement and dealing with phone issues, I was getting to talk about my favorite subject, talent management and development across the generations and, more important, their Roles. It wasn’t a huge crowd, but I met a real HR star.
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