Okay, so Danica Patrick still has not won a race, and now that the Indy 500 is over, a new round of complaining has started. There is truth the complaining. Patrick does have very good equipment in a sport where equipment matters a lot. And she does have more sponsors in a sport where other …

The more you like your job, the more you should network. If you have a great job, you probably have a lot to offer people. Do all your favors now, when you don’t need any in return. The problem with networking to get a job is that you are not that attractive when you need …

Happy Memorial Day. I am working today. I used to think it was lame to work on a holiday. I used to think it was a sign of poor boundaries when I would go into an office to catch up when the rest of the world was at a picnic.
But today I am working and …

Just about every major business publication has run something about how diversity improves business performance. If you are on a diverse team, you’ll probably have more success than if you’re on a homogenous team. And, to some extent, we can each control the teams we’re on.
For one thing, you should pick companies to work for …

Blogging is good for your career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.
Ben Day blogged his way into a career as a high-earning software consultant while maintaining the freedom to schedule frequent jam sessions and performances as a keyboard player. Blogging gave him the opportunity to stand out enough to …

I get a lot of email, and the biggest whiners are the people who refuse to kiss up to their boss and therefore have stalled careers.
Newsflash: You have to brown nose, but the professional phrase for this act is “manage up”. This is such a basic pre-requisite for career success that I am shocked when …

Ever since I bought a pair of MBT shoes I have been waiting for the media to jump all over them.
I have been waiting for five months, and finally, there is one little tidbit in People magazine: In Grey’s Anatomy “Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl have been wearing sneakers by MBT — whose unusual sole …

Networking is not getting favors from other people. Networking is giving favors. A good networker is always sniffing for a way to help whoever she is talking to.
If you are at a loss for how to do this, read Ken Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Lunch Alone. When I interviewed Ferrazzi about building networks, he spent …

Networking is not getting favors from other people. Networking is giving favors. A good networker is always sniffing for a way to help whoever she is talking to.
If you are at a loss for how to do this, read Ken Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Lunch Alone. When I interviewed Ferrazzi about building networks, he spent …

You do not need to have an intellectually challenging job in order to be happy in your job. You need to feel like you are meeting a core need by being at your job.
I interviewed Sonja Lyubomirsky, assistant professor of psychology at University of California at Riverside, who studies what makes people happy. She stressed …

The reason you should do what you love is because you won’t work hard at it if you don’t love it. And hard work is, in fact, more important in success than raw talent. The guys who wrote Freakonomics also write a column in the New York Times magazine, and this topic is the focus …

When it comes to finding a career, the huge soul search is hugely overrated. At some point — usually much earlier than people think — you should just start doing something. Anything.
While the soul search is routinely touted in the self-help section of bookstores, it is not the most practical approach. The first problem with …

Here’s a piece in the Boston Globe about learning how to react constructively when someone makes offensive comments at work. In fact, the majority of people, it appears, will say nothing, even though a comment offends their sensibilities.
Decades of research into bystander apathy shows that people freeze when they are in a group. “In one …

In a moment of publicity genius, Salary.com compiled research to determine the value of a stay-at-home mom. The verdict: $134,121 a year.
And then the arrows started flying. The economists complained that the math is sloppy. (By the way, one of my brothers is an economist so I know that economists think everyone’s math is bad …

The deluge of press about the difficulty of attracting and keeping Generation Y employees is amazing.
Here’s an example of a press release pandering to the media infatuation with the topic. Even the sheep are suffering : “Fewer and fewer people are choosing the sheep and beef industry as a career. There are huge job choices …

The most fun I ever had interviewing someone was when I talked to Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University. It was about a year ago, and I thought I would just ask him a fast question about how much money someone needs to be happy. (Answer, about $40,000 a year. That’s enough to …

I spent two hours this week writing an article about autism. My son was diagnosed with autism and I could write five hundred pages about dealing with the diagnosis. But then I reminded myself about specializing. About focus. Specialists get a lot of good things in this world, and people who dabble in everything get …

Most jobs turn out to be very different than what you were told about in the interview. So your first task in your new job is to figure out what the job really is. Most people don’t do this which is why there is a whole cottage industry of people who coach for the first …

Movie mogul Mark Gill, the guy who produced blockbusters on a shoestring like “March of the Penguins” ($77 million at the box office) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (six Oscar nominations) has been fired. Well, officially resigned, but really he was pushed out because he can’t get along with his boss.
The New York Times …

My husband and I both want to be home with our kids while they are young, and we downsized our standard of living enormously to do that.
I made a career change from software company executive to writer. This has been great for me. It’s a career that can grow big, but there is lots of …

The reason you need to take breaks from your work is that if you don’t pick your head out of the trees you’ll never see the forest. Great ideas do not come to those continually mired in details. Your brain needs a moment to relax. Most of us know this intuitively. The problem is that …

The best companies to work for are those that understand that priorities among workers are changing. In fact, Laura Shelton and Charlotte Shelton conducted a nation-wide survey about worker priorities, published in Generation NeXt. The survey showed that for Generation X, “Recognition scored very low, and power and prestige ranked dead last. Salary, a major …