January 30, 2007 10:27
Brand Building Is About Team Building
It's brainstorming day at TIME.
The TIME 100 is an annual issue we do profiling the 100 most interesting, influential, newsmaking, world-changing people of the past and coming year. (No, you're not on the list. You were the person of the year; don't be greedy.) It's followed up by a celeb-stocked extravaganza in the swanky Time Warner building on Columbus Circle.
The TIME 100 is one of those brand-building business ideas that gets the bosses all hot and bothered and that the staff is then charged with executing. You must have some in your line of work. You know: the giant year-end sales event at your auto dealership. The Superbowl promo hand-delivering Nerf footballs to your satellite TV clients. The big supermarket roll-out for your bakery employer's line of organic edamame brownies.
Working on team projects like these can be both thrilling and frustrating. Ours starts up with a round of brainstorming sessions, one for each category of influentials: Heroes & Pioneers, Builders & Titans, Artists & Entertainers, Leaders & Revolutionaries, Scientists & Thinkers. Everyone on staff, from interns to top editors, toss out their suggestions: Nelson Mandela! Hugo Chavez! Oprah!
Then, to spice it up still more, we're meant to suggest celebrities or other notable folks who could write the profiles. Let's get Bob Newhart to write about Ellen DeGeneres! Ooo--how about Jesse Helms to profile Bono? Let's profile Condoleeza Rice--and get her write about Oprah!
As you might imagine, this adds a whole new level to the administrative danceathon; you need people to wrangle celebrities who're wrangling celebrities. As our then managing editor Jim Kelly wrote in last year's issue,
How do you juggle 100 different writers, most of them famous people like Laura Bush, Sandra Day O'Connor, Tom Cruise...each writing a profile of one of the 100 people that Time has deemed the most influential people on the planet?...Tom Cruise, who wrote about J.J. Abrams, was the first contributor to turn in his copy to [senior arts editor] Belinda Luscombe, quite a feat given what else is going on his life. (As a writer, by the way, he is fond of italics.) Charles Barkley proved eager to write about the sensational Steve Nash, but as [writer] Sean Gregory discovered, Barkley's promise to call in the "late afternoon" turned into 11:30 p.m. Inspired by Tom Brokaw's writing about Jon Stewart last year, Adi [Ignatius, the deputy editor who supervised the issue] asked Brian Williams to tackle Stephen Colbert. Adi caught Williams on his way to New Orleans, and after some gentle ribbing about the deadline, Williams turned in a piece that deftly captured Colbert's brilliant delivery.
I pitched Rachael Ray, mainly because I wanted to get her autograph for a friend whose severely handicapped son is a huge fan. Mario Batali got to profile her instead. At first I cursed him but then I read his blurb:
Dinner at her house with my kids is tastier than I could have imagined. My boys went wild for the veal, meatball and pasta stoup, as she calls it, and, like her audience, were quickly softened to putty in her kitchen-confident hands, disarmed of their usual ingredient suspicions by Ray's "just try one" allure.
I wouldn't have had those personal bits; my kid's never "softened to putty in her kitchen-confident hands." And who knew Mario writes in TIME style?
More and more these days, it takes boldface names to sell products, from cars to magazines to edamame brownies. But it's important for us lowly staffers to remember there wouldn't be a brownie without us sifting the organic flour and designing the biodegradable packaging. We may not get invited to the glitzy launch party (what would we wear on the red carpet alongside J-Lo that wouldn't make us look like trolls, anyway?). But playing a role on the team has its own awards. It's no small thing to say, Hey, I helped make that happen.
January 29, 2007 4:00
Time Is a Valuable Commodity for Workers
Time. I think a lot about time, and not just because it's the name of the news organization I work for. Like most working people, I find time--or the lack of it--an eternal frustration, an unwinnable battle, the bane of my harried existence. My every day is a race against the clock that I never, ever seem to win.
This is hardly a lonesome complaint. According to the Families and Work Institute's National Study of the Changing Workforce, 55% of employees say they don't have enough time for themselves, 63% don't have enough time for their spouses or partners, and 67% don't have enough time for their children.
It's also not a new complaint. I bet our ancestors returned home from hunting boar and gathering nuts and carped about how little time they had to paint epic battle scenes on their cave walls. The difference is that the boss of boar hunting and head of nut gathering probably told them to shut their traps--or no survival for you.
Today's workers are still demanding control over their time. Difference is, today's bosses are listening.
I've been reading a report issued today called "When Work Works," produced jointly by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Families and Work Institute, Institute for a Competitive Workforce and the Twiga Foundation. Those organizations set out to find and award the employers who employed the most creative and most effective ways to give their workers flexibility. The report is a detailed and highly readable look at those methods and policies. I think every boss and HR operative should troll it for ideas.
Check out First Tennessee Bank. The report specifically cites a branch in Chattanooga with 157 employees, "virtually all" of whom have taken advantage of some of the bank's flex-time allowances, including unpaid leaves of up to 16 weeks and flexible scheduling for tellers. One key practice is an annual survey the bank administers to all of its workers, asking them to rate their managers for their "adherence to the flexibility guidelines." That way, a supervisor knows that if she insists a team member skip his niece's wedding to finish a project in time, she's going to hear about it from her boss.
Why are employers becoming more sensitive to workers' need for flexibility now? One reason, I think, is that some of them--the evolved ones--can read the demographic writing on the wall. The National Study of the Changing Workforce also found that:
• In 1977, 38% of the workforce was over 40; today, it's 56%.
• Women make up nearly half of the wage and salaried workforce.
• More households include dual-earner couples: 78% today, vs. 66% in 1977.
Meantime, the pressures of the 24/7 workplace are mounting. As a result:
• 39% of employees are not fully engaged in their jobs.
• 54% are less than fully satisfied with their jobs.
• 38% are somewhat or very likely to make a concerted effort to find a new job in the coming year.
When it comes to time, I think what we want most is to feel fully engaged in whatever we're doing at the moment--be it designing a pie chart or singing in the church choir. By giving us a little more control over how we spend our time, companies go a long way toward ensuring we're not timing our exits.
January 26, 2007 5:13
We Mommies Aren't Warring or Opting. We're Too Busy Making Lunch
Lately I've been reading a lot of blogs by SAHMs. This is in part for a story I'm working on, but also because I wanted to see how the issues of stay-at-home moms differed from those of us who can escape to an office.
You can't cover the workplace beat without reporting on women at work, and that road leads inexorably to the subject of work-family balance. Not only is the term clunky, the topic itself is just pocked with misnomers and politically weighted phrases. Take the so-called Mommy Wars. Lots and lots of ink has been spilled on these imaginary battles, which for me evoke armies of crazy-eyed mamas hurling poopy diapers over dissimilarities in potty training techniques.
If anyone actually asked us, we'd tell you we barely have time to groom our eyebrows let alone critique each other's choices. We've got lunches to pack and socks to match and deadlines to meet. And don't for a moment think the SAHM is exempt from deadlines; she might be filling out 1040s and managing her husband's client gift list and applying for a reverse mortgage--she just ain't getting paid.
Then there's the whole "opt-out revolution" thing. I hate that phrase, mainly because I didn't come up with it. When I dropped mention of it over a year ago in a story meeting at work, I was met with a row of blank stares from the editors. Since then it's become a rallying cry for those who want to believe women are opting out of the workforce in droves as well as for those who want to believe the opposite.
The fact is that 59% of women work. We work for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we have to.
It's never easy, even for those few of us who have the supposedly ideal option of working from home. As Amy Green wrote recently in the Orlando Sentinel,
Four years ago I launched a home-based freelance business in part because since college I'd always envisioned myself doing it with a family. Today that family probably isn't too far off, but like many women I worry about whether the workplace ever will want me back. I don't believe it's very easy for women who take time off for family, as noble as their decision may be, to return to the workplace without consequences. I worry about providing for my family. But the tug of a mother's responsibility is strong.
I know what she means. I took time out of the office for different reasons, but the consequences are somewhat similar. When I returned for the first time in three months this week, I felt like a Cylon on the Galactica. People stared at me when I entered the conference room; I missed a regular meeting because I didn't know it had been rescheduled; there were strangers in the cubicles. I have a couple of supervisors who keep me tethered with projects, but without them I might be shuffling toward the air lock.
Even stars have these troubles. Katie Holmes is reportedly struggling to find her way back into a Hollywood career after a baby-making hiatus. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Resuming a movie career is sometimes difficult in Hollywood, where a break can turn into a permanent vacation from the fast-moving business if an actor isn't careful. Stars of much bigger stature than Ms. Holmes, including Meg Ryan and Demi Moore, have found it tough to regain their momentum after taking time off.
We'd like to think it would help if more of our bosses were women. But our march to the corner office has stalled somewhat. There's much fingerpointing in academic and HR circles over whose fault this is, but it seems more productive to me to applaud and emulate the employers who have figured out how best to retain and promote its female workers. Catalyst, the research group, is doing that with its annual awards; this year, for instance, it's toasting PricewaterhouseCoopers for its programs to "reduce turnover, maximize value for PwC’s clients, and increase the productivity of the firm’s staff" and Goldman Sachs for "supporting women in their career growth through recruitment, engagement, advancement, and retention."
Parents in China should be so lucky. No opt-out options or work-from-home arrangements for them. Again from the WSJ:
Chinese authorities estimate that 22 million youngsters in China have been left at home while their parents migrate to cities to find work. The numbers of the so-called liushou ertong, or "left behind children," are growing steadily in China's vast rural areas. They represent a personal toll of China's explosive growth.
Whether we stay at home, work from home or commute to an office, we American moms typically get to tuck our kids in at night. And for that we should be grateful.
January 25, 2007 11:07
Resumes Are So Five Minutes Ago; Check Out the "Digital Portfolio"
We don't live in a parchment-and-ink world anymore. So why aren't our résumés as colorful, interactive and technologically bedazzling as our work?
That's the premise behind a new business called Protuo.com. I was intrigued by a release they sent me titled, "Résumés Dead as a Dodo; Digital Portfolios Rule." I usually toss such overwrought declarations, but I've long wondered about the future of the résumé in our digital era and so I checked it out.
The idea is pretty neat, at least based on the sample portfolios on the site. Protuo claims to be the "first Web-based career portfolio management service." Not only is the paper résumé dead, see, so is the whole concept of compiling a list of accomplishments just in time for a job search. The savvy, modern worker should instead keep a constantly updated C.V. online--the better for prospective employers to locate you even before you get bored with the view from your current cubicle.
"We're all free agents now," Keenan Hogg, president and CEO of Protuo, tells me. Hogg, who worked in marketing in the wireless industry, teamed up with his father, a longtime HR exec, to launch the new service last week. They hope workers of all ages in industries from consumer electronics to public speaking might make use of the service, which costs $9.99 a month. Protuo is in discussions with employers who would also sign on for access to workers' portfolios.
The sample porfolios are essentially like simple, cleanly designed web sites devoted to your career. The opening page might feature a handsome photo of you, with a positioning statement, professional objective, preferred job functions and a list of competencies. It's like a colorful cover letter. Tabs on the side lead to pages listing your education and experience. Here's the fun part: if you're in advertising, say, you might upload actual ads onto a page featuring your past work. Another page might feature a job-searching blog authored by yourself.
Why would you pay someone 10 bucks a month when you can create your own web site for the price of a domain name? The point is the convenience, ease and access to employers, says Hogg. The site is offering free registration for a few months, so I tried it out.
Registering is easy. But once I got to the part where I was supposed to design my portfolio, I was completely stumped. A page resembling a Microsoft Word document pops up accompanied by lots of icons labeled Flash Manager and Format Stripper. I had thought the site was designed for HTML dummies like me, but that's clearly not the case. Elsewhere on the site it says I am supposed to be able to adopt the "skins" of the sample portfolios, which I'd happily do--but I see no option here to do so.
There's a pretty fancy product tour, but beware there's an audio element (you probably don't need your boss listening in). It looks like the team spent a lot of time on this feature, but it's more like a product pitch than an enlightening how-to. It's also not quite finished; the tutorials on managing your web site are "coming soon."
The "best-fit match" is potentially even more interesting than the digital portfolio. "It works like an online dating site," says Hogg. Job seekers fill out a lengthy questionnaire that Hogg compares to the one on dating site eHarmony's, which helps match them to jobs and employers. But this too must be a coming attraction, as I could find no link to it on the home page.
It might take a while for Protuo to get the kinks out, but you've gotta admit the idea's pretty cool. Let me know about other products or services that reshape the traditional job hunt.
January 24, 2007 10:48
Reinventing Yourself When You're a) Canned or b) Not Canned
What will I blog about if I'm canned?
I've been mulling this over ever since my company announced layoffs last week. I wasn't terminated in the first sweep, but I could well be if enough people in my category don't volunteer to vamoose.
Being booted won't be the end of the world, I think. But I will have to reinvent myself. I'm convinced I won't find another job as a staff writer on a magazine, as those jobs are already as rare as a hit movie starring Kate Hudson. And in this new media landscape, I'm not sure I'd even want such a job.
American workers are like an army of Madonnas: we're brilliant at reinventing ourselves. After posting about our ongoing layoffs, I heard from readers about their own three, four or five layoffs, each leading to jobs in new industries and sometimes new towns. After being laid off by a giant banking conglomerate, my brother in law reinvented himself as an Internet entrepreneur; now he runs a giant e-mail business. After being cut by an investment brokerage, my brother--okay, he didn't reinvent himself. He's still a bond broker. But he makes a lot more money at it.
We're especially adept at bounding back from public humiliation, which is what a layoff can feel like. I mean, check out K-Fed. The former Mr. Spears was only yesterday written off as Fed-Ex. Now he's starring in a Nationwide Insurance commercial to air during the Super Bowl that features him rapping about becoming a huge star. The last scene reveals the rap-star dreams are just that, as he flips burgers at a fast-food joint.
See? That's funny! Kevin Federline has a sense of humor! Now I want to buy insurance from him.
Layoffs don't have to precipitate a reinvention. Me, I started out as a reporter at a trade weekly covering the advertising industry. Then, for no good reason, I became a copy editor at a women's magazine. Then I ran a ragtag group of weekly newspapers covering Manhattan. Then I edited a magazine for financial planners. Then I was a financial writer, then a Tokyo correspondent--what's that you say, Mr. Recruiter? You want to see my résumé? I'm flattered, but I told you--I'm still for the moment employed.
My point is that though we may stay in our professions or even our very same jobs, industry demands we workers reinvent ourselves constantly as we move forward in our careers. Each promotion may bring on added responsibilities and projects that expose us to things we previously knew nothing about. In my business and probably in yours, the Internet is the vast and still new frontier that we cowboys and cowgirls are trying to conquer. If I intend to keep working as a journalist, I have to come up with a whole new notion of what being a journalist on that frontier means. The blog is what I've come up with so far.
My problem is that I blog about the workplace. And I can't very well continue to do that if I don't have one. Unlike my colleagues Jim Poniewozik, who can keep blogging about TV so long as he owns one, and Lev Grossman, who can go on blogging about nerds so long as he is one, I can't credibly keep writing about the office if the only one I have is in my converted attic.
Any suggestions? Keep in mind I already blog occasionally about funerals. For no good reason.
January 22, 2007 9:00
One in Five American Workers Suffer Mental Illness
"This project is driving me bonkers."
"My boss is certifiable."
"If the dude in the next cubicle doesn't turn down his freaking iPod, I'm going to throw myself a nervous breakdown."
We all like to goof about how work makes us whacko. But mental illness isn't a joke for one in five workers. That's right: 20% of Americans suffer some form of mental disability, and that stat extends right into the workplace.
Last Friday, I interviewed Stephen P. Hinshaw, professor and chair of the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has a new book out titled The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change. We talked about how mental illness and the attitudes toward it affect the workplace. Following is our conversation:
Work in Progress: How does mental illness affect the ability to work?
Stephen P. Hinshaw: Let me pause and say there are many forms of mental illness; depression is different from schizophrenia. But many forms erode a person's sense of hope. Life seems to be a huge burden. It's hard to get motivated and stay focused. Some forms can rob a person of energy and organization. Again, with treatment, these kinds of symptoms and impairments are often readily handled. The stereotype that mental illnesses are impervious to help is just wrong.
WIP: What are the most common forms of mental illness that afflict American workers?
SPH: Depression. It can be quite severe and can lead to suicidal thoughts or actions, but it is also surprisingly common. It is twice as frequent in women as in men. Women have a lifetime risk for depression of over 20%. On any given day, one in five women will experience a major depression. Men suffer it about half as much.
Another common form [of mental illness among working adults] is substance abuse. This is controversial; we've wondered for thousands of years if the overzealous use of illicit substances is an illness or a behavior that can be controlled. There are many forms of mental illness, including bipolar disorder and depression, that are associated with substance abuse. It can be a way to deal with the disorder. It can also temporarily mask symptoms of mental illness, though in the long term the effects of abuse end up exacerbating rather than masking them.
Anxiety disorder is another common illness [among workers]. It can range from fairly mild phobias to agoraphobia to panic attacks. It can restrict the range of territory a person can cover. If somebody has a panic attack, the feeling is similar to literally having a heart attack. Most people will somewhat reasonably say, I'll do anything to prevent another one from occuring. Some find safe harbors or islands of safety; they say, I'm not going to drive past a certain point, or, eventually, I won't leave my home. That's due to the terror of having another panic attack. Quite obviously, this has major implications for work.
WIP: Are any of these conditions brought about by work?
SPH: Well, I'll frame it this way. Much of work and much of life involves stress. Many major forms of mental illness have some genetic predisposition. But none are caused by a single gene, hence in none of them is genetic cause sufficient. And so if one has genetic liability, it may well be that life stress and work stress pushes them over the threshold into a range of mental illness.
WIP: How does mental illness among workers affect the employer?
SPH: Employers are in a bind. Employers want to maintain the productivity of their workplace; yet they have to be sensitive to the morale of employees. They are subject to stereotypes about mental illness that exist in our culture, meaning they're predisposed to believe mental illness is permanent, hopeless and threatening.
Of course, modern day employers recognize there's legislation to prevent discrimination, most notably the Americans with Disabilities Act. Recent statistics tell us that under the provisions of the ADA, at least 95% of workplace accommodations that are made have to do with accommodating for a wheelchair, visual impairments and other physical disabilities. Under 5% have anything to do with accommodating a mental disorder.
WIP: Should workers disclose their mental illness to their employer?
SPH: It's a tough call. Unlike many physical disabilities, mental ones are hidden. If I'm in a wheelchair, it's quite apparent. If I have a history of depression, I can choose to tell you or not. Many prospective employees are afraid they'll never get the job if they make such an admission. And many employees are quite loathe to disclose a mental illness to an employer. But then they forgo the possibility of reasonable accommodation if such an admission is made. Most accommodations an employer might make are relatively low cost and easy to implement: flexible work time, allowing leave to see a therapist, different kinds of supervisory arrangements. The irony is that by failing to disclose their condition, the employee promotes secrecy and shame--and prevents accommodations that might help everybody.
WIP: How often does mental illness lead to job loss?
SPH: Statistics are hard to pin down, but what we hear is alarming. One third to a half are at risk of having to scale back so much as to be underemployed or unemployed.
WIP: How have employers dealt with mental illness among their workers in the past? And how have attitudes changed?
SPH: Employers have responded in a thousand different ways. If confronted with erratic behavior, they were quite likely to decide the person is unmotivated or otherwise unfit for the job. In the final chapters of this book, I address how many levels of change could come together. If we have a different set of media images about mental illness, if we have legislation that mandates equitable coverage for treatment, if we have a society that is open to frank discussion of pain of mental illness rather than banishing to the back burner--then employers may recognize that openness about the topic and the provision of reasonable accommodation will benefit the company, the worker and the morale of everyone. What we have now is such an either-or dichotomous view: you're either productive and working or irrational and not working.
WIP: Tell us about the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act.
SPH: In 1996, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Mental Health Parity Act. This was a first step toward guaranteeing equal coverage for mental disorders on a par with physical disorders. There are, however, major loopholes in the 1996 legislation. Some of these have to do with the size of firms that are under its provisions; some have to do with limits on coverage. The bottom line is there is a decided lack of parity even under the provisions of this act. The Paul Wellstone Act seems to close up many of those loopholes. In the interim, three-fourths of states have passed their own parity legislation--but exempt from those state acts are the millions of self-employed individuals who aren't on state plans. And symbolically, federal passage could really send a message that mental illness is real and treatment is of vital import.
January 19, 2007 9:57
Let's Not Shrink From Tackling Stress on the Job
A couple of months ago, I saw a shrink.
I was just beginning to recover from a nasty bout of a chronic illness that doctors think might be triggered by stress. Although I've lived with the illness for 15 years, the prolonged hospital stay scared me into making a resolution: I would do whatever it takes to avoid ever facing two weeks of pureed peas again.
I'd never in my life considered therapy, because therapy is for crazy people and I am a productive, resourceful, highly functioning member of society. I juggle a demanding job, a household and a large family with--okay, not with grace, but with decent proficiency. I don't drop a lot of balls. Okay, I do, but I pick them up with style.
Me and stress, we're old friends. Not friends exactly. More like frienemies. Okay, I hate stress, that pushy pest. Like many people I know, I'm stressed most by my work, even though--or maybe because--I love it so. I could quit my job and move my family to a trailer park in Lodi, N.J. But if I did, I'd probably find myself hanging out at the nearby D.M.V. just to breathe in other people's anxiety.
The logical thing, I thought, would be to take whatever steps necessary to reduce stress on the job. First I exercised my said resourcefulness by researching the accommodations offered by my employer. One of those accommodations is a doctor-recommended arrangement to work temporarily from home. Another is an employer-subsidized gym membership, through which I can kickbox my way to serenity. Then I remembered getting a brochure on something called the Employee Assistance Program.
When I called and explained my mission, the nice lady referred me to a list of therapists. She told me sessions would be covered by insurance, which made me far more open to the idea (aside from being stressed, I am extremely cheap). I called a few in my area and settled on one with a nice phone voice whose practice happened to be next door to my kid's daycare.
This therapist was nothing like Dr. Melfi on The Sopranos, which is a good thing because I find Lorraine Bracco intensely annoying. We discussed some things I found stressful, and she made some useful suggestions. I'm not sure when I'll seek her out again (with layoffs looming, right about now is probably a good idea). Still, knowing I can add her to my arsenal of ways to deal with stress is comforting.
I share all this because a) I am apparently getting way too comfortable with my audience and b) I've been reading a just-published book titled The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change. Okay, not so much reading it as staring at the creepy cover art of some medieval shrink slicing into a conscious subject's brain.
In the book, Stephen P. Hinshaw, professor and chair of the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses the ways that society stigmatizes people with mental disorders, the effects of that stigma, and how to change it. Among the most important battlegrounds for his campaign is the workplace. (He has much more to say on this subject, so I'll follow up with a Q. & A. from our interview.)
Stress, it turns out, is a widespread workplace affliction that can very often lead to or exacerbate truly debilitating mental disorders. "Much of work and much of life involves stress," says Hinshaw. While many major forms of mental illness have some genetic predisposition, "in none of them is a genetic cause sufficient" as the only explanation. "And so if one has a genetic liability, it may well be that life stress and work stress pushes one over the threshold into a range of mental illness." When that happens, workers often miss work or even quit jobs.
In that sense, stressed-out workers can have an enormous effect on employers' bottom line. By Hinshaw's measure,
• about one in five Americans will suffer from a mental disorder in the course of a year.
• Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
• Untreated mental illness costs $105 billion in lost productivity each year with U.S. employers footing up to $44 billion of the bill, according to the national mental health association.
Yet employers have a history of ignoring or even discriminating against mental illness among its workers. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 forbids them to fire workers with mental illnesses. And the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 was, says Hinshaw, "a first step toward guaranteeing equal coverage for mental disorders on a par with physical disorders." Another bill awaits Congress that closes many of the loopholes in the 1996 act.
Still, secrecy still shrouds mental illness in the workplace, reinforcing the shame of society at large. I don't know if we're ready for a day when coworkers hang out at the coffee machine jibing each other about their bipolar disorders; after all, even physical illnesses untainted by shame are often taboo topics in the workplace. But we can start by treating mental ill health with the same respect and dignity we give, say, cancer.
To begin with, let's stop treating stress as a minor side effect of work. Employers should offer help coping with job-induced stress, and workers should accept it. Employers' support and employees' trust could result in a "win-win," as Hinshaw puts it. Say Tony Soprano urged it and Christopher got help. Who benefits? The organization at large.
January 18, 2007 1:56
Inside a Layoff: Why We Care So Much About Our Jobs
If you keep up with media news, you'll know that my company has been gearing up for massive layoffs. The axe swung today. Seeing as this is all I can think about, and seeing as layoffs are, after all, the big gorilla of workplace issues, I figure today we can talk about the horrible reality that is job loss.
First, the facts. My company, Time Inc., is reportedly cutting nearly 300 of its 11,000 workers. In my division--Time magazine--the company will lop off about 40 heads. Some are being canned outright; they're getting their pink slips today. The rest of us are being asked to volunteer. If enough of us don't march willingly down the gangplank, they'll start pushing.
Am I terrified? Nah. It's this third cup of tea that's making my hands shake so hard.
Not surprisingly, layoffs have a staggering effect not just on the laid off but on everybody in the workplace. It affects our performance (just count all the tired old metaphors I've used so far in this posting). It affects our families (my husband jokes that his nascent small business will provide us with all the instrument cases we can eat). It knocks about our emotional equilibrium, hobbles our confidence, widens our chasm of self doubt.
Why do we care so much? It's just a job, right? And don't thousands of people lose their jobs every day? In November alone, 136,415 people were laid off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That's 136,415 anxious, depressed, possibly even hostile people, according to research by industrial and organizational psychologists who study the effects of layoffs. Rainer Seitz is one of them (a layoff expert, not a layoffee). Seitz, who teaches management at the Washington State University Vancouver, says the effects of a layoff ripple far beyond the axed employees to coworkers left behind and even the job market as a whole.
"We care so much because we attach a significant amount of self worth to our work," says Seitz. There's also what experts call a psychological contract between employees and employers: in essence, I'll work hard for you, and in return you let me keep my job. The breaking of that contract perhaps explains our feelings of betrayal.
The remaining workers--the so-called survivors--suffer too. They can experience decreased productivity, increased stress, depression, anxiety, lowered morale and job dissatisfaction. A decrease in organizational commitment--loyalty to the employer--is common, adds Seitz. "There's also survivor guilt: Why was I spared?"
Research has found that the manner in which a layoff occurs can rile workers just as much, if not more than, the actual firing. For instance, a lack of advance notice can really rub workers the wrong way. Failing to adequately and thoroughly explain the reason for the job elimination--even if it's a macro reason like an industry downturn--can also tick us off.
"There's also an interpersonal component of procedural fairness that creates a strong perception of unfairness," says Seitz. In other words: "Were people treated with respect, dignity and sensitivity?" Or were you escorted out of the building by a security goon?
I can't think that far yet; I'm still sifting through the pages of detailed layoff information sent out by our union (why do we need a freaking worksheet to figure out severance?!). Here's my plan. Like many of my colleagues, I'm going to hope for the best but prepare for the plank.
Some additional reading about layoffs:
* Check out this collection of articles at Fastcompany.com about how to survive a layoff. I especially liked a piece titled "Diaries of a Downturn," with short takes from readers about what they did while jobless (one tip: learn how to tend bar).
* About.com has a useful site with resources for surviving a layoff including information about severance packages, collecting unemployment and preparing for the job search.
* This op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor is titled "My Pink Slip Had a Silver Lining." This MBA is stunned to find himself out of work and has an epiphany: he hated his job anyway.
* Here are a bunch of useful articles about job loss collected on CareerJournal.com. This piece advises on "almost painless" ways to make a career change.
* The American Management Association has a free webcast on Jan. 24 about handling a difficult performance review.
* Waiting around for layoff news? Go waste a few minutes at CareerBuilder's Age-o-matic, launched just today. The highly scientific site lets you see what you'll look like in 50 years--or if you stay in your "soul-sucking" job.
January 17, 2007 2:13
More Women Are Working From Home; We're Just Not Going Anywhere
This might be what you call a good news, bad news situation.
Nine in 10 women have used flexible work arrangements at some point in their careers. Good news: more women are taking advantage of new flexibility in balancing home and work. Bad news: those workers can get comfy in their fuzzy pink slippers, because they're sure not gonna see a corner office any time soon.
A just-released study of 400 professional women attending Simmons School of Management's leadership conference last April found evidence of women's changing attitude toward work. Besides the unexpectedly high number of women who take advantage of flexible work arrangements, the Simmons professors who authored the study--Mary Shapiro, Cynthia Ingols and Stacy Blake-Beard--seem surprised by women's aims in pursuing flexibility: not to scale back or "opt out" of careers, as the media hype and previous research would have it, but instead to keep their thumbs emphatically in the pie so as not to lose their full-time status.
We're not clinging to our jobs because of some Gloria Steinem blabbedyblah about a woman's right to a career. So why the sticky thumbs? Simple: we need the money. A huge number of these women--86%--earn more than half their household income; a third bring home all the bacon themselves. Reality ain't romantic.
And why the new embrace of flexible work arrangements? The researchers theorize that more women are beginning to see themselves as free agents who work for She Is Me, Inc. In the past, this attitude was discouraged by the white men who dominated the workplace and who could afford to marry themselves to one lifetime employer. Today, corporate bankruptcies and outsourcing imperil the very notion of a lifetime job. Even white men are free agenting now.
But it's still women who seek flexibility out of need. As the authors write:
Whether they negotiate boundaries around the job, telecommute, stay in a job that permits balance, or make a lateral move instead of a promotion, women are trying to "make work work."
That suggests these women know they may have to take a detour in their climb to the corner office. So maybe this news, from Futurestep (Korn/Ferry International's outsourced recruitment subsidiary), won't surprise them:
More than half (61%) of 1,320 global executives surveyed say they believe that telecommuters are less likely to advance in their careers in comparison to employees working in traditional office settings.
There's more:
Despite this assertion, nearly half (48%) of respondents indicated that they would consider a job which involved telecommuting on a regular basis and the vast majority (a combined 78%) stated that telecommuters are either equally or more productive than those who work in offices. When asked which type of flexible working arrangement they found most attractive, nearly half (46%) of respondents most preferred the option of working flexible hours.
In other words, execs know telecommuters are just as if not more productive than office workers, and many would seek such an arrangement themselves--but they still insist such a work arrangement means career harakiri. (Random unsolicited Japanese lesson of the day: hara means belly, and kiri means to cut; the oft-used harikari is not, I repeat, not a word. And karaoke is pronounced kara-OH-keh, not carry-OH-kee. And although it may taste like it, uni is not whale snot.)
No wonder we're stuck with status quo at the top. Here's further proof from a study released today by recruiters and personnel managers Hudson:
More than three-quarters (76%) of U.S. workers report to a Caucasian boss and just one-third (34%) state their boss is a woman. At the same time, less than half (43%) of employees indicate that there is racial, ethnic and gender diversity on their company's executive team.
Yep, there's more:
Twenty-two percent of employees know someone who they think was denied a job, promotion or pay increase because of their gender.
As a woman currently working from home, I have to shout out a call to arms here. I don't for a minute suggest we should all surge (if you will) back to our offices full-time. But we do have to collectively work harder at changing the attitudes of our bosses and coworkers. Keep those thumbs in the pie. Just let the bakers know you're there.
January 16, 2007 2:17
Unhappy With Your Paycheck? Try Levitra
Back in November, I posted an entry titled, "I Feel Bad About My Paycheck." Truth be told, the best thing about that posting was its eye-roller of a headline, a rip-off of the Nora Ephron best-seller. The posting itself was a brief rant on some news that day about over-paid execs.
To date, the posting has been my No. 1 comment-getter.
I am still an addled newbie when it comes to the mechanics of blogging, but I do know that to keep a blog is to obsess over comments. (Just in case you're even newer to this than I am--what up, Dad--"comments" are those messages at the bottom of a post, containing readers' thoughts about the subject/posting/blogger.)
Comments matter. On blog postings or product reviews, they offer evidence of consumers so engaged they'll bother to fire off a public opinion. It's free and instant feedback from a vast and varied focus group.
And so I check a few times a day to see if someone, anyone, has posted something, anything. Given my subject matter, I'm not exactly deluged. At least, that's what I tell myself; if I used this space to, say, hate on Ann Coulter or lay down odds on American Idol 2007, I bet I'd be buried in feedback. As it is, I have exactly two regular commenters: 1) my college pal Gerry, who I suspect is merely warming up his typing fingers for the imminent launch of his own far superior blog, and 2) a friendly guy named Sam who originally contacted me about my book and who happens to work in the HR field.
So when my comments box began to fill up a few weeks ago, I nearly gagged with excitement. Then I saw the comments.
"Buy Levitra online," said one. Another advertised Internet casino gambling. A company called PayDayLoan is apparently an avid fan.
All pegged their comments to the aforementioned posting, "I Feel Bad About My Paycheck." Which leads me to the conclusion--probably well known among bloggers--that spammers are exploiting a whole new frontier. There must be some diabolically designed bots out there that troll for certain key words in postings, then shoot off unsolicited ads, in the hopes that the blog is set up to automatically post all comments. Ta-da! Free ad space.
Which leads me to more questions: why this posting, and why these spammers? The word "paycheck" must be the trigger here. But why would a spammer presume someone writing about their pay would be tempted to buy drugs via Mexican pharmacies? Did they figure I feel so bad about my paycheck that I'd want to gamble away its sorry, post-FICA balance online? Or that my salary brought on pain so awful I'd want to sample Soma, an addictive muscle relaxer?
This is so wrong on so many levels. First off, these blog publishing platforms--mine is called Movable Type--ought to build better spam filters (yes, IT guys, I've hurled these spammers to the "banned commenter" dungeon). Second, how dare spammers prey on workers so bereft as to bare their poorly paid souls in their blogs with nefarious and even dangerous offers? Imagine if this happened in the real world--say, if OTB counters surrounded check-cashing storefronts. Okay, so there's a precedent.
As a result of this devilish sandbagging, I've only been able to publish one comment to this posting--a really smart, well-written note on Supreme Court proceedings regarding pay. It's written by a Peter Mullison, who is neither related to me or selling anything.
I cherish these comments. My friend Penelope Trunk, an established blogger, once told me she responds to every single commenter. I'm just starting to, although in general I don't really know what to say, other than "thanks for reading" (which, come to think of it, is the highly imaginative message I scrawl when I sign my book). I can only dream of a day when I'm so besieged by reader comments that I can afford to bitch about it, as my colleague Joel Stein did recently. In his L.A. Times column, he wrote:
I don't want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don't listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.
A blog, however, is an attempt to engage in conversation. In my view, pretty much any product or service today invites conversation. This is in part what my editors meant when they named You the Person of the Year. We office workers often toil in anonymity, shielded (or buffered) from real feedback. Oh, we're fed back, all right, by our supervisors, who love to tell us how much we suck at drawing PowerPoint pie charts. Today, though, the people who really count--our customers, our readers, You--can feed back too online. Just try Googling your company's name sometime.
Comments do matter. If you read his column through, you'd see that even Joel winds up reading--and responding to--almost every message. But his commenters aren't flogging erectile dysfunction drugs. Or maybe they are. My point is that I'll take your comments, good and bad. Just stop trying to get my precious readers hooked on Internet poker.
January 12, 2007 1:16
Latinos in the Office Can Work It to Their Advantage
I don't like career self-help books. I have my reasons. For one, the so-called advice is often outrageously, even condescendingly, obvious: "Build yourself a network!" "Research your prospective employer online!" "Don't forget to flush!"
For another, the books' purpose for existence seems more often than not to be furthering the careers of their HR-consultant/career-adviser authors. I'd ask these folks to leave the bookstore shelf-space for those of us who don't know how to do anything else.
Given my beat, I receive about two of these books a day. They must have an audience, judging by the relentless onslaught of titles in this category. Indeed, when I put the galleys out on the give-away table where I work, I notice they disappear rather quickly. Everyone I work with is smarter than I am, so this leads me to wonder if common career sense isn't so common.
One recent title caught my eye. "The Latino Advantage in the Workplace," published in December 2006 by Sphinx Publishing, posed an interesting challenge in its subtitle: "Use Who You Are to Get Where You Want to Be." What did authors Mariela Dabbah and Arturo Poiré mean by that? And did Latinos really have an advantage in the work world?
Before I called the authors to get some answers, I tried to think of recent news stories involving Hispanics in the workforce. My Google News search results were annoyingly dominated by the immigration debate (gracias a whole lot, Lou Dobbs). There were the reports a few days ago about workers of Hispanic descent suffering more workplace injuries, mostly by dint of holding the more dangerous jobs, scaling scaffolding in highrise construction and such. There was the news of workplace raids in Texas by immigration agents searching for undocumented workers. There's an interesting and sobering article in Hispanic Business magazine about the labor gap for Hispanics, for whom unemployment is about a percentage point higher than of the population as a whole:
...the U.S. workplace has a long way to go before it attains representation equal to population. The top companies' reports on the Hispanic percentage of their total work force ranged from 3.2% to 31%. The firms with the highest percentages were in the service industry, and the firms with the lowest percentages were in technical fields. ...As for Hispanic representation in management positions, only 5% of the listed companies reported a percentage that exceeds (and only slightly) the national Hispanic population proportion of approximately 14%.
The Latino advantage in the workplace wasn't looking so great.
I was cheered by CareerBuilder's forecasts for hiring trends in 2007. One in 10 employers said they'll be targeting Hispanic job candidates most aggressively of all, and half of employers recruiting bilingual employees say English/Spanish-speaking candidates are most in demand in their organizations.
And Inroads, a national minority internship program, just announced its partnership with the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting to "create a talented, experienced employer base for America's leading companies."
"Latino Advantage" is indeed a career self-help book in the classic mold, with worksheets and bulleted advice and sidebars of anecdotes ("Marisol is very friendly and proud of her Latino roots..."). The cover features Dabbah and Poiré posing back to back, looking every bit as friendly and competent as you'd expect two successful career experts (both, coincidentally, from Buenos Aires) to look. Interestingly, the book begins with a dissection of "what it means to be a Latino"--no easy answer here--and then with a section on the value system unique to the community.
Work in Progress: Your title and subtitle seem to be acknowledging stereotypes in the workplace and urging readers to take advantage of them.
Arturo Poiré: Yes. I think the approach was the opposite of what you normally see in books trying to help minorites--which is that your diversity is an obstacle, we can help you overcome it. We're saying, recognize the things you have--the things that are good that differentiate yourself.
WIP: I assumed the advantages you referred to would begin, first and foremost, with bilingualism and biculturalism. Yet you begin the book by talking about the values you attribute to Latinos--loyalty, honesty, respect for authority.
AP: When you're a minority, you're more identified by what's different than what's the same. We thought Latinos share a lot of values with non-Latinos. So we wanted to show we're actually one and the same. Values are very, very important for Latinos in general. Most are brought up in homes with these values. It carries into the workplace.
Mariela Dabbah: We wanted to point out that these values might not be first to jump to people's minds. Take goal setting. Even Latinos might not think that's a cultural thing. But somebody at some point in your family's history set the goal of coming to America.
WIP: How do Latinos let employers know about these characteristics?
AP: Normally in interviews they teach you to have canned answers so people don't think you are different. We say you can give examples of your own experience growing up in a bicultural family. Show how that adds advantage to you in the workplace: you're used to two different cultures at home, that makes you adaptive--a good translator of ideas in the workplace.
MD: It's a known fact that Latinos are very adaptable and flexible. Many of us, or our parents, were raised in countries that were unstable and you never knew what's going to happen. You adapt constantly and come up with a Plan B, C and D. When you're here, you can use that to your advantage as a person who adapts easily to change. But you have to be careful, because Latinos are also known for being too adaptable; they try on so many roles that they can't settle on a strong long-term plan.
WIP: You're talking about a hugely diverse population of more than 40 million. Can you really generalize about their values and behaviors?
AP: I think you can. Adaptability, flexibility, you see these consistently. Some things really are cultural. If you look at attitudes to debt, that is a really cultural thing too.
WIP: What are your thoughts about corporate affirmative action? Should Latinos take advantage of diversity programs meant to increase minority hiring and advancement at companies?
MD: You need to use all available means to getting ahead and getting the job you want. Find who the diversity officer of a company is, meet them, send them your resumé. Remember they have an interest in presenting a diverse array of candidates. Many companies have Latino networks now. Use these networks to meet people. Obviously we want people to advance on their own merits, but you need to use cultural background as one more asset.
January 11, 2007 2:23
Boomers Want to Keep Their Jobs. But Can They?
Study after study proclaims baby boomers make for smarter workers, nicer colleagues, kinder bosses, and, heck, just all-around better people than the rest of us. Maybe it's all true; far be it for me to knock the collective talents of 78 million people. But it occurs to me: could it be that all this affirmation is lulling boomers into the belief that they can keep their jobs forever?
I just received research conducted by Personnel Decisions International, which calls itself "a global HR consultancy firm specializing in leadership development and talent management." After noting that 22.5 million boomers will retire in the next 10 years, according to the Census, PDI set out to discover: "what knowledge, specifically, do baby boomers have that Generation X-ers do not?"
Surveying the feedback of 23,953 mid-level managers, PDI found that boomers are "more likely to receive higher performance marks" than Gen X-ers in areas like "knowing the business," "using technical/functional expertise," "coaching and developing," and "managing execution." Gen X-ers tend to receive higher marks on "developing oneself," "showing work commitment," "analyzing issues" and "demonstrating adaptability."
The coming exodus of these valuable workers is causing all kinds of hand-wringing among some economists, HR managers and older-worker advocates. Many are coming forth with solutions on how to stanch the bleeding. "BOOMERS SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED TO KEEP WORKING," shouts a November 2006 report:
One way to soften the blow of boomers' retirement, according to a new report from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), is for government to encourage boomers to stay in the workforce longer, or at least not encourage them to leave.
That report from the NCPA, which describes itself as "nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D.C., that advocates private solutions to public policy problems," lists examples of government policies that encourage seniors not to work:
* Social Security withholds a portion of some people's benefits if they earn above a certain amount before they reach the normal retirement age.* Those who continue working past the early retirement age continue to pay Social Security taxes but do not get those taxes back as additional benefits.
* The reward (in terms of greater monthly benefits) for people who delay their retirement is too low for many retirees.
* The rewards for early retirement increase whenever life expectancy increases.
The thing is, all the worrywarts who believe government incentives and other enticements will lure boomers into retirement are most likely wasting their energy. It appears a great many boomers expect to keep working well beyond retirement age.
Not all of them want to, of course; given the choice between a cubicle and a hammock--well, who would? The main motivation is, as always, money. Many--no, most--boomers simply don't have nearly enough saved to fund their golden years. And so they expect to hang on to their salaried jobs far longer than workers have in the past.
But here's the scary part: they may not have that option. Recent research from consultants McKinsey & Co. found that
U.S. workers are far more likely to be forced into early retirement than many of them expect and that many significantly underestimate the costs they'll face in retirement.
Even scarier:
Almost half of all preretirees expect to work past age 65, yet only 13% of current retirees have done so. Health problems and the loss of jobs are the factors most likely to force people out of work prematurely.
Sobering. Thoughts?
January 10, 2007 3:07
Google's Cafeteria Is Better Than Ours
I thought our cafeteria was nice.
I'm a big fan of our company caf, the second-floor canteen in the Time-Life building where we stock up on oatmeal and chicken curry and a salad bar I like to believe is unfailingly sanitary. There are stations for freshly made sandwiches and grilled dead meat and "Oriental" noodle specials (cooked in a wok with a modicum of soy sauce, just like over thar in the Orient). The prices have crept up since a new catering company took over, and the frozen yogurt self-service machine is starting to smell suspicious. But it's still the best company caf in the neighborhood; I know because workers from PricewaterhouseCoopers and FedEx next door used to sneak in before they cracked down on security post-9/11.
But I have awoken to the knowledge we are suffering prison-quality sustenance compared to the lucky stiffs over at Google. I've been trolling through sister mag Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For via its excellent web presentation. It devotes a lot of space to Google, the No. 1 best company to work for this year. Check out the slide show of gorgeous food at the languorously named Oasis Café (ours, fyi, bears the imaginative name of Time Café). Here's the caption to one droolsome image:
Oasis Café entrées (from left to right): Shrimp Scampi with Jasmine Rice; Steak Milanese with sauteed mushrooms & shallots, steamed green beans and fried green plantains with honey glaze.
As the article notes: no wonder Google gets 1,300 resumés a day.
Job seekers and the perennially envious employed can check out the other bells and whistles on Fortune's Best Companies web extravaganza. You can click to lists of the 10 companies with the least expensive, on-site child care (No. 1: Men's Wearhouse, at about $240 a month. Who knew?). You can filter out the 25 top-paying employers by state (in Tennessee, it's First Horizon National; in Colorado, it's PCN Construction). Eagle-eyed readers will note that the maps of employers are powered by--of course--Google.
I don't think the site is a great tool to find a job, unless you're a recent or soon-to-be college grad completely clueless about where to apply. A tool called "find the right company for you" asks users to click on the "qualities you are looking for in a great company," then lists a mere six vague choices like company size and job growth. When I entered my preferred qualities (blue eyes, likes children--I mean, ethnic diversity, low turnover), here's the answer I got:
There were no companies to match your requirements. Please try again.
Fine. Who needs ethnic diversity? I'm my own U.N. Here's the answer I got:
There were no companies to match your requirements. Please try again.
I'm starting to smell a conspiracy. Have the best companies to work for blackballed me? Is it my unusually high consumption of company-provided Splenda? Or my penchant for bringing noisy snacks to important meetings?
To find out how exactly Fortune comes up with its rankings, I called Lee Clifford, the assistant managing editor who oversaw the package this year. Fortune's ranking is produced by the San Francisco-based Great Place to Work Institute, a research group that developed something called the Great Place to Work Trust Index, described on its web site as "a proprietary employee survey." About 1,500 companies contacted the institute or were recruited to participate. Any company that is at least seven years old with more than 1,000 U.S. employees is eligible.
To choose Fortune's 100, more than 105,000 employees from 446 companies responded to the institute's 57-question survey on subjects including attitudes toward management, job satisfaction and camaraderie. "The cool thing is that the employers don't get to see the completed surveys," says Clifford. The employees are chosen to represent a cross-section of the company, too. ("As we know, companies would send it to 400 people in their PR department if they could. And let me tell you, these employees are honest.")
Then the institute conducts something called a Culture Audit on things like demographic makeup, pay and benefits programs, as well as the company's management philosophy, diversity programs and such. The vetting doesn't end there, according to Fortune's web site:
After our evaluations are completed, if news about a company comes to light that may significantly damage employees' faith in management, we may exclude that company from the list.
Ooo. Like what kind of news? "An example would be, say, the CEO is indicted and the stock tanks and they have to lay off half the workforce," says Clifford. "It's happened from time to time. Even though the employees wrote glowing things in the summer, you might assume things weren't quite so rosy anymore."
Fortune's isn't the only list in town. Working Mother magazine publishes its own compilation of 100 best companies to work for, geared, naturally, for the working mom (among the top 10: IBM, PwC, S.C. Johnson & Son). The Financial Times also has a similar ranking with a focus on Europe.
Corporations like to flaunt any and all awards or citations, no matter how obscure or ridiculous (see yesterday's post about the national association of professional organizers' awards). But it appears the cachet of being a good employer trumps all. In a 2006 survey by PR Week/Burson-Marsteller, CEOs from 252 companies said that among media scorecards, Fortune's 100 Best Companies was the most influential. The Financial Times' ranking came in 7th, Working Mother's 8th. BusinessWeek's Best (and Worst) Managers of the Year is 9th.
So when those surveys land on your desk, don't shovel them to the bottom of your in box. It's our chance as employees to weigh in on our employers and to express our satisfaction with the quality of our cafeterias. I plan to request a new yogurt machine.
January 9, 2007 3:42
Of Ramen, Fat Bastards and Professional Organizers
Today's posting is a compilation of news from the world of work.
* NOODLE MAN DIES
Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen, has died. He was 96. "The company sold 46.3 billion packs and cups around the world last year," according to the obit in the New York Times, "earning $131 million in profits."
WHY THIS IS A WORKPLACE STORY: It begins with career failure. Again, from the NYT obit:
In 1958, Mr. Ando -- virtually penniless after a credit association he served as chairman went bankrupt -- began experimenting with ways to prepare flavored noodles by simply adding hot water.
WHY I CARE: I'm not into instant noodles. That's because I grew up in Japan, where real ramen--its noodles hand-kneaded, its stock painstakingly stewed from pork bone or other dashi--is available near every train station. But I didn't even taste real ramen until I was an adult, mainly because the noodle is considered low class and my ojosan mom would serve us dirt before she took us into one of those joints.
So, like many Americans, my introduction to instant ramen came at college. Then I read that some college kid in Japan nearly died from eating too much instant ramen; the stuff had built up a wax lining in his gut. That grossed me out, and now I never eat Cup Noodles except when Northwest Airlines serves it midflight from New York to Tokyo.
But inventing instant ramen is a career accomplishment not to sneer at. I'd love an epitaph of that caliber. It would rate me an obit in the NYT.
* FAT BASTARD LISTS PRETENTIOUS POSEURS
FAT bastard--the Seattle-based wine makers, not the flatulent and hirsute Mike Myers character in the Austin Powers movies--has come up with a list of the 10 most pretentious public figures of 2006. Only Bacchus knows why. I can only imagine that brainstorming session involved a lot of cheap red wine. Here's their list:
1. Paris Hilton2. Tom Cruise
3. Donald Trump
4. Bill O'Reilly
5. Madonna
6. Martha Stewart
7. Oprah
8. Barbra Streisand
9. Kevin Federline
10. Jessica Simpson
WHY THIS IS A WORKPLACE STORY: It isn't.
WHY I CARE: I don't. The list would've been better if it included, like, Soledad O'brien. Don't you just know she's a wad of tightly wound self importance underneath that I'm-everybody's-BFF exterior?
* PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZERS AWARD EACH OTHER
According to MarketWire,
The Los Angeles Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO-LA) will honor the best in their business Saturday, February 3, 2007, at the 2nd Annual Los Angeles Organizing Awards, at The Olympic Collection Conference Center in Los Angeles, CA.
Did you even know there were people who call themselves professional organizers, let alone a whole national association of them? Take a look at these awards:
The Container Store - Best Organizing Product ResourceCBS 2 / KCAL 9 - Most Supportive Media Outlet
Neat - Best National Organizing Show
1-800-GotJunk? - Most Eco-Friendly Organizing Resource
Garage Envy - Best Garage Design Company
Get It Together LA! - Best Closet Design Company
The Paper Tiger - Best Organizing Technology
Organize Your Garage...In No Time - by Barry Izsak, Best Organizing Book
National Council of Jewish Women Thrift Shops - Most Organizer-Friendly
CharityBrother P-Touch Label Maker - Best Office Organizing Product
3M Command Products - Best Residential Organizing Product
Barry Izsak - Most Innovative Organizer
Donna McMillan - Best Organizing Coach or Mentor
National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization - Best Educational Resource
WHY THIS IS A WORKPLACE STORY: Oh, this item is rich in interest for the office worker and those who own us. First of all, office- and home-organizing is apparently a booming industry worthy of national congregation and red-carpet award events (complete with "Master of Ceremonies and Los Angeles area comedian, Dave Linden"). Second, if you're considering this line of work, the award categories alone can tell you a lot about a burgeoning industry. Just from reading this list, I learned I could go into garage organizing, say, or organization coaching; I learned The Paper Tiger is some sort of software product that helps digitize filing. I learned there's a national organizing show (are there timed organizing contests? container displays?). If I wanted to learn more about becoming an organizer, I'd start by checking out the NAPO web site, where I'd learn about its mentoring, education and training program.
WHY I CARE: I love it! Most Eco-Friendly Organizing Resource! Best Office-Organizing Product! And there's a National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization--fantastic! ...one time I wrote about an event-planning association that awarded things like Best Gift Bag. I think workplace awards are meant to confer importance or relevance to things that aren't necessarily important or relevant. But who's to make that judgment? And who does it hurt? As MarketWire says:
"We are part of an organizing craze," said NAPO-LA member Kristine Oller. "We love a great container, but what we really love is the transformation of our client's lives."
Kristine sounds a little crazy. But any business that inspires insane joy in its workers has got to be worth awarding.
January 8, 2007 11:39
"MySpace for Professionals": A Social Networking Site Geared for Careerists
I'm kind of dense. Despite my 15 years in the journalism biz, I sometimes don't recognize a news story until it hits me over the head--a few times. Typically, the magic number is three. So when I realized today that I had heard about this new workplace tool three times in as many days, I thought I should check it out.
The tool is called LinkedIn. It's a social networking site for grown-ups--a MySpace for professionals, if you will--that's gaining a small but steady following. John Challenger of outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas first mentioned it to me during our interview on Friday, when he forecast that sites like LinkedIn would take off this year as a job-hunting tool. On the same day, I received a press release from the company, touting its recent growth. Then today, Sree Sreenivasan, the multimedia tech guru and dean of students at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, sent me a link to his column on Poynter.org explaining how LinkedIn helps him track and expand his voluminous contacts.
Sree explains the nuts and bolts:
You first create a free account, then fill out a profile of yourself and then explore the "find people" space to see which of your contacts is already in LinkedIn. Then you can ask them to connect with you. Once they do, they become your "first-degree" connections and their connections become part of your network, as "second-degree" connections.The connections of those second-degree folks become your "third-degree connections." All of this is done through the system. My math's no good, but it adds up fast. As of this writing, I have 317 direct connections; 43,000 second-degree connections and 1.4 million-plus connections in my network. I can search my