Taking Care of Business

It's a newsletter ... it's a blog ... it's a resource dedicated to helping people survive and even thrive in the ever-changing world of work.

Business Book Club

Friday, August 20th, 2010

ReaderA few months ago I acted on a goal I have had for a long time—to start a business book club.

Although we have only met a few times, the coming together of this like-minded group of professionals has been more delightful than I could have ever anticipated.

Instead of being limited to my own conclusions on a particular book, I now have access to the ways that others with different backgrounds and expertise take in, interpret and utilize the same information.

It’s like arriving late at night to a vacation destination you’ve only seen in brochures and waking up in the morning and opening the curtains to find a beautiful, expansive view of the world your imagination could never have fully pictured.

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Being Self-Directed

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Computer programmerWith his usual talent for organization and clarity, Daniel Pink, the author of Drive, offers the following tweet-sized summary of the book: “Carrot and stick are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose.”

In these challenging economic times, it may seem strange to suggest that people are not primarily motivated by external rewards, but Pink makes a compelling case for the fact that internal motivation is what is really driving us, once basic living needs are met.

If you don’t believe this can produce something of real value, he is saying, just consider the many open-source Internet initiatives, e.g., OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, Wordpress, Linux, etc., with new ones cropping up almost every day, run by volunteers who have chosen to put their energy where their authenticity lies.

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Mini-Mart Surprise

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Image of Mini-Mart cashier

Summertime and the living is easy—but not for a Mini-Mart cashier at a rest stop on the Mass Pike.

That was the assumption I made when I stopped there for an iced coffee on a hot, sunny Saturday last month on my way to visit family in Connecticut.

The store was packed. A long line of customers in a hurry to be somewhere else snaked its way around the junk food displays, inching slowly toward the older woman on the other side of the counter.

“What an awfully hard job,” I thought, as I watched her selling lottery tickets and sodas.

The weather outside is beautiful, and you’re stuck inside. You’re on your feet all day, under constant pressure from impatient, sometimes rude people. You’re exhausted at the end of your shift and you don’t have much of in the way of material reward to show for it.

But even as I was creating this scenario in my head, I still was able to take in the attentive cheerfulness with which she waited on those who preceded me.

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Strength Training

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Image of jogger

The US government reports two different unemployment statistics. The one we are most familiar with is the one most talked about in the news media, something called the “U-3 unemployment rate.” It currently hovers just under 10%.

There is also the less well-known “U-6″ rate, which is now over 17%. It includes what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “involuntary part time, underemployed workers” and “discouraged” workers who have stopped looking.

For people struggling to stay positive after a year or more of unemployment, I’m sure that even the higher number must seem too low.

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A Conversation with Beverly Ryle I: Ground of Your Own Choosing

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

A conversation with Beverly Ryle, part 1

“Looking for work using the old methodology is a form of insanity.”

I talk about how I came to write the book, Ground of Your Own Choosing, and discuss its premise, that everything about the world of work has changed—except how we go about finding it.

Watch the video.

 

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A Conversation with Beverly Ryle II: the Resume

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

A conversation with Beverly Ryle, part 2

“If you are driving your professional life by an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper, you are not doing all you can.”

The obsession with the resume means a work-seeker is putting all his eggs in one rather fragile basket and overlooking alternative ways of communicating his value.

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A Conversation with Beverly Ryle III: Empowerment

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

A conversation with Beverly Ryle, part 3

“I’m trying to get people to be comfortable enough with looking for work on an ongoing basis, because that’s what a business owner has to do.”

To succeed in today’s environment, we have to think of ourselves as if we were small business owners.

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Fear Funk

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Fear Funk image

Sometimes it comes on gradually—the pressure you feel to find work, get your business in the black again, or restore stability to your financial future accumulates, causing sleepless nights or mornings when you sit at your desk not knowing what to do next.

Or there may be a trigger—one rejection too many, a bill you can’t pay, or a depressing headline saps your belief in yourself and better days ahead, and you have that sinking sensation of fear taking you over for a few days or a week or longer.

Fear is a natural reaction to change, and you can expect it to be particularly active when your work-life, that part of your existence that provides sustenance, purpose and identity, has been shaken like a snow globe.

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Pluck

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Plucky Old Woman

All we know about the woman in this photograph is that she was 80 years old in November, 1936, when Dorothea Lange took her picture, and at the time she was living in a camp for migrant workers outside Bakersfield, California.

If we think of her in the context of the times, we can deduce that she and her family were probably among the thousands of farmers forced to migrate from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California in search of work. This would mean that she had been enduring dislocation and acute poverty for some time.

Yet the old woman’s look is strong and her demeanor is positive. The shadow from the hand that shields her eyes from the bright sunlight obscures much of her face, but we can see enough to know that she is looking straight ahead and determined to keeping moving forward.

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The Daily Grind

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Dorothea Lange, White Angel BreadlineAt the Daily Grind coffee shop in Cortland, New York, I watched a steady stream of farmers in overalls, contractors in flannel shirts, and 9-to-5 employees in business dress, and I thought about how every town or neighborhood has a hub like this. Find a Daily Grind, full of regulars who stop in on their way to work, and you’ve found the heart of the work life of a city.

Listening to what was being said there, it became clear to me that the Cortlanders whose daily ritual I was observing were trying to make a living in a place where that is not always an easy thing to do—the town has an 11% unemployment rate and negative job growth.

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Staying Home

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Staying HomeA 2005 article in the London Evening Standard about overwhelmed working women advised them “not to struggle into work when ill but to stay at home and rest.” Likewise, the November 2009 issue of Working Women magazine cautioned readers against “dragging [their] fever-ridden [bodies] into the office.”

Under ordinary circumstances, this would be simply a matter of common sense, but the economic slowdown we are experiencing has eroded our sense of work security and had the effect of making people fearful that their absence from work, even for a day or two, could have disastrous consequences. In a new context, this simple advice deserves a closer look.

In Crazy Busy, author and physician Edward Hallowell talks about having to go to work regardless of your physical condition as if it were something that belongs to the past, like the experience of the lower classes as described in Dickens’s novels. But is it?

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My Focus for the New Year

Friday, January 8th, 2010

“Raise a glass half full to 2010!” said the headline.

Whenever I thumb through one of those women’s magazines, the kind with a photograph of a triple-layer chocolate mousse cake on the cover with a caption promising twelve effortless ways of slimming down, I usually forget what I’ve read as soon as I’ve read it, but the idea of toasting the new year with a glass half full resonated with me because it is both realistic and hopeful. Realistic because it acknowledges what isn’t there as well as what is. Hopeful because it offers the choice of where to put your energy with a more complete understanding of what’s missing.

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