A Family’s Career Journey
What happens when a family goes through career transitions together? My first of a series of occasional
guest blogs appears today at www.careerdiva.net and is now reproduced here. Read the rest of this entry »
Combining Great and Leadership
On Saturday, I traveled 100 miles round trip the original Hall of Fame of Great Americans on the Bronx Community College campus that once belonged to New York University.
The 630 foot sweeping colonnade punctuated by busts of famous Americans was designed by Stanford White at the turn of the last century.
The “greats” were clustered by categories—statesmen, inventors, authors. Still, many of the names that might be synonymous with commerce seemed in short supply. As an example, George Westinghouse was primarily known as an inventor.
The only clearly recognizable business bust was that of Andrew Carnegie, as well known as a philanthropist as he was an investor. Even he was a fairly late arrival, added some three quarters of a century after the Hall was inaugurated.
Only the day before a newly released book from Random House arrived. Entitled When Remarkable Women Lead, it was written by two McKinsey consultants. McKinsey appears to gain traction when the economy goes into the reverse. They have recently been in the news for their recommendations for streamlining Conde Nast.
The first two chapters seem like a direct descendant of the book The Managerial Woman by Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardim which coincidentally came out in 1976, the year that Andrew Carnegie’s bust was added to the Hall of Fame. The authors promote the idea of “Centered Leadership.” I’m interested to see how they develop their theme.
Tags: consultants, female executives, leadership
A Way to Make the Fifties Happier
The headline was definite. “Americans Least Happy in Their 50s and Late 80s,” trumpeted the results of the Gallup-Healthways Well Being Index.
Surely the results came as no surprise to any card carrying fifty something member of the sandwich generation.
An ever lengthening to do list that includes teen and late teen child rearing, ministering to aging parents and squeezing in the possibility of a last promotion or two in a tanking economy is not exactly the best recipe for happiness. Who has time to contemplate happiness anyway?
The forties are long forgotten and the sixties look almost effortless by comparison.
Perhaps we’ve had it backwards all these years. Instead of a work family balance juggle that escalates in the fifties, maybe we need to consider an alternative. Why don’t be consider a ten year work hiatus in the fifties, an early and limited retirement, until myraid family responsibilities come back to a manageable size. Then we can retrain and have at least a decade of work ahead without distraction. Maybe then the fifties would be the happiest decade of all.
What Stanley Kaplan Wrought
Stanley Kaplan who died on Sunday at the age of 90 came of age during The Great Depression and sought entry to medical school at a time when minorities were subject to stringent quotas.
Although he graduated second in his class at City College in New York City and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa he felt his religion and his affiliation with a public school worked against him. He wrote, “I had a double whammy against me.” The experience made him an advocate of test preparation.
More than that, some would say the late Mr. Kaplan was a visionary and an entrepreneur. He certainly spawned a crowd of competitors, The Princeton Review and even his former opponent The College Board among them.
Still Mr. Kaplan’s lasting legacy may not be his family or his philanthropy. He may well have planted the seeds of the salvation of the newspaper industry. As Karen W. Arenson reported in The New York Times, “Today, Kaplan is a diversified education company with than a quarter-billion dollars in revenues and is the Post Company’s largest business.”
Other newspapers have followed suit. In Britain, The Daily Mail and General Trust, the tabloid conglomerate, last year brought in 18% of its revenue from its information subsidiary.In 2008 it acquired subidiaries through its Hobson’s division that are familiar to anyone who has filed a college application recently—Naviance, College Confidential and AY Recruiting, which processes the Common Application and provides recruiting services for many schools, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation among them. They have a subsidiary scouting for such opportunities.
Just as Mr. Kaplan found a niche in the lucrative world of for profit test preparation, newspapers have profited from it. And it is possible other imitators may not be far behind.
Tags: entrepreneurship, New York Times, newspapers, small business, test preparation, Washington Post
On the Anniversary of a Lay Off
Commemorating an anniversary seems an appropriate way to inaugurate a new blog. July 29 is the day I was laid off from one of the nation’s leading department stores.
As anyone who has been laid off knows, it is a painful experience. In my case I had helped train the personnel manager who fired me when several years earlier, recently divorced, she arrived at the store to begin her retailing career on the selling floor.
Although mentoring someone 17 years older was a stretch, as an entry level operations manager I persevered, even as she jumped the promotion line ahead of the rest of us 20 somethings into middle management. Clearly we were never on the same track.
Just as I had discharged my obligation to train her, she discharged hers in dismissing me. Her parting was a direct, “You’re just not……(fill in the name of the store here.) And perhaps it was true, from her perspective. As the freelance journalist that I later became, I learned there are many sides to a story.
It took some time to find my footing first. Unemployment and its partner, battered self-esteem, seemed like near constant companions along with a newly found passion in personal finance to preserve a small nest egg and stretch unemployment insurance benefits.
The period of unemployment set in motion an abiding interest in careers and management and one of the mainstays of my journalistic portfolio—personality profiles of senior management. I continue to grapple with the idea that a dismissal was “strictly business.” In all business transactions there is always a personal relationship, chemistry or the lack of it, that greases our interactions.
In the coming months, as companies stop shedding jobs and the nation regains its collective footing, this blog will answer questions about careers in the post Great Recession economy. Feel free to add your thoughts to the conversation. We’ll offer tips and suggestions, reporting and insights so you can better understand your career and the individuals—your colleagues, your managers, your subordinates, your customers—who influence and in some instances hold sway over it.
Today’s question—How did you negotiate a company leave taking? What would you do differently now if you had the chance?
Tags: Careers, layoff, mentoring, unemployment
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