Archive for June, 2008

One of the primary functions of upper management is to ask their direct reports questions until they find a problem area. It’s actually not a bad practice and ensures that all the worker bees are engaged and trying to cover every possible scenario. Upper management doesn’t do the work, the leave that to guys like [...]

I read quite a bit of material related to the American workplace–anything from education, to career advice, to financial planning and investing. For the most part, most of these articles and authors dispense advice that is useful to the employee who is just starting out, but most of these “experts” really fall short when it [...]

Too many times I see people talk about job interviews as a way to convince the prospective company of making an offer. While this is obviously critical if you want to work for that specific company, I think it is far more important to use the interview process to figure out if the company itself [...]

Some people are obsessed with their job titles. They like to say that they’re a director, vice president, CFO, or CEO. What I’ve learned so far in my career is that job titles and their salaries can vary greatly from industry to industry, and sometimes even within the same industry. What people are usually interested [...]

Your boss almost always has an advantage over you when it comes to company information. They usually know more about what’s going on because they’re either making the decisions or having meetings about critical decisions that have been made. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You aren’t stuck with those additional responsibilities and [...]

There are many things that I have disagreed with throughout my professional career. These disagreements often involve me trying to rationalize the behavior of big business. Sometimes it’s unethical behavior all in the name of capitalism. I’ve seen too many employees compromise their own belief system in the name of “providing for their family.” The [...]

I’ve been through several major reorganizations in my career. The biggest change I had to go through impacted the management team for approximately 8,000 employees. All of the major bosses were either let go or transferred to other areas. The core production employees were relatively unaffected in their job security, but since I worked in [...]

I have often struggled with this question. My wife has a technical degree for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. They were required for her to get the job with the company she now works for. The ironic part is that because everyone has an engineering degree, they now want people that have better social [...]