Here’s a collection of interesting ideas from people who are talking about the value of business school:
1. Business school is not an effective means to self-discovery.
Most business school applications require that you tell what you’re going to do with the MBA. This is because most business schools think it is a waste to get an …

Scott Newberg flew into Logan airport in the middle of the night. He went straight home to his office, and in the dark room the blue light of his computer glared — a screen full of unfinished work that piled up while he was gone. He sat down at the keyboard, and that's when he …

I hate to dis Catalyst because they have provided great research to support women in the work place. But here’s a bit from their most recent study: “Most large U.S. companies have made scant progress in advancing women…to leadership and top-paying positions over the past decade.”
DUH!!!!
It’s clear at this point that women are basically stuck …

The mood you come to work with sets the mood for your workday. This is the conclusion of a study by Wharton professor Nancy Rothbard. (Shout out to Wendy for sending this link to me.)
This study is a rallying cry for personal responsibility. Rothbard challenges you to stop blaming your boss or your co-workers for …

The way you talk about yourself is very powerful. Whether or not you are conscious of it, the way you tell stories of your life frames how people see you, and how you see yourself. So you may as well do this consciously, and also be conscious that people get the most tripped up in …

The odds are that you will probably consider self-employment at some point: Eighty-nine percent of people in the United States who make more than $50,000 a year are self-employed, according to Entrepreneur magazine.
As with all decision points, the way to make the best choice is to know yourself. If you get bored easily, do a …

If I had a dollar for every time I checked the traffic on my blog, I would have a decent income from this thing. The software I’m using is Performancing Metrics, and I adore all the ways it can slice and dice my numbers.
Last week I had uneven traffic, and my overblown analysis of just …

The current issue of Psychology Today asks: Are you too sexy for your job?
This article has good information about managing your image. Here are the nuggets I liked best:
1. Wear short, low-maintenance hair.
“Both sexes perceive women with long, straight, blond hair as being sexy and those who have short, highlighted hair as smart and confident, …

The idea of having a perfect online identity is not realistic. Instead, maybe you should focus on making your offline identity one that you’re proud of.
First of all, no one is getting away with anything online. Today recruiters are expert and tireless Internet researchers when it comes to scoping out candidates. I just read a …

The best thing you can do if you want a flexible schedule is ask for it. Younger workers are finding more and more success when they ask, which should give everyone encouragement to request flextime if they want it.
Laurie Young is a founder of Flexible Resources, a company that specializes in finding flextime jobs for …

Here’s some advice for those of you who don’t like your job: Maybe your job is not your problem. Maybe it’s that you are not trying hard enough to make friends at work. People with one friend at work are much more likely to find their work interesting. And people with three friends at work …

One of the best ways to get what you want is to be an extraordinary performer at work. Stars get more training, more mentoring, better projects and greater flexibility. Fortunately, you don’t need the perfect job situation in order to be a star, because most star qualities come from you — from taking your basically …

Since you know you are going to have multiple careers in your life, changing is not high stakes. Don’t make a huge deal about it and don’t spend five years searching your soul. Just start testing the waters — put a toe in the current to see how it feels. Then take a leap, and …

You do not deserve a raise just because you have been doing your job well for x amount of months. It is your job to do your job well. That’s why you were hired.
Also, do not complain about your salary not being at market rate six months after you take your job. Because if you …

We spend so much energy trying to decide what career will make us happy, what job to take, what kind of boss we need. But today happiness is actually a science, and we can teach ourselves to make better decisions faster based on what we know about happiness.
This science of happiness is such a popular …

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of good social skills on your career. In fact, across the board, in a wide variety of businesses, people would rather work with someone who is likeable and incompetent than with someone who is skilled and obnoxious, said Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School, whom I spoke to …

Here are three pieces of etiquette advice that made me go, hmm:
Don’t wear flip flops to work.
“U.S. style gurus are warning that the casual shoe once mainly seen on the beach could be damaging to careers. Shoes convey the mood of a woman. Wearing flip-flops conveys the mood that you are relaxed and on vacation. …

Here’s one of the hottest topics in management training: How to manage the current crop of twentysomethings. Really. Baby boomers are sitting in seminars for hours and hours trying to demystify the alien ways of the new work force.
But what about the opposite situation? One of the most classic pieces of career advice is to …

I swore that I would not write about the Devil Wears Prada because the bad boss topic has gotten so much play lately.
But now respectable news outlets like CBS News and the Chicago Sun-Times have crossed the line for me: As an excuse to run a trailer for the Devil Wears Prada, they are going …

There’s disconcerting news in CareerJournal today. They list the top ten professions, using generally the same criteria that Salary.com used to come up with its list of the ten best professions. And the only professions that are (only sort of) on both lists are: “analyst” and “social worker/psychologist”.
Analyst is such a broad term that it …

Most people who want career coaching from me set up an appointment. My brothers send random emails that they tag as urgent. Here’s one my brother sent at midnight last night:
“Why don’t you ever write about how to interview someone? What do I do when someone goes on and on about himself and I don’t …

Amanda Congdon, co-founder of Rocketboom, got fired last week. Congdon performed a fake daily newscast, which was downloaded by 300,000 people each day. Her audience was bigger than Connie Chung’s.
Congdon announced the end of her participation in Rocketboom in her last video blog. Her partner, she says, proposed many stories to offer up in place …

Here’s some career advice. Stop obsessing about how smart you are. Instead, get some exercise and you’ll perform better at work — athletes do better in the workplace than non-athletes. Even off the field. This advice is true in a wide range of scenarios — across age groups, job descriptions, and types of exercise.
Athletes make …

Getting a call from a recruiter is like getting asked to the prom. It doesn’t matter if the offer is sub-par; it’s always flattering to be asked. But there’s a lot of advice about how to get a prom date and not very much on how to attract recruiters.
The best way to encourage recruiters to …

Time magazine’s cover story is How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are. There are a few good tidbits about how your sibling experience affects how you are at work.
Adult life is made up of relationships – at work, in marriage, among friends — and we learn the skills for these relationships through siblings because …

The Wall Street Journal gives terrible advice this week on “going from maternity leave to permanent resignation.”
Columnist Sue Shellenbarger writes, “Once a mother is absolutely sure she isn’t going to return to work after maternity leave, I believe she’s obligated to reveal her intentions to her employer.”
WHY? There is no description in the column about …

I am a big advocate of blogging to give yourself an advantage in your career, but, as Seth Godin says, you need to have “candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, and controversy,” (by way of Global PR Week.) In short, you need to have something to say that will interest other people.
I believe that each person has …

Recently, Aaron Karo performed stand-up comedy in a string of sold-out shows. He also bills himself as an author, a public speaker, and a sitcom actor. Karo has always juggled a few careers. After college, he went to work for an investment bank. But he was also writing a weekly newsletter that had tens of …

I decided I needed a short blog entry in between my long ones. Being a good writer is important if you want to be able to communicate ideas at work. And writing short helps.
The faster and more concisely you get to your point, the more likely your audience will understand your message.
We sound most authentic …

You’ve heard the axiom, “You’re only as good as your network,” but how do you get one? It used to be that a network was a Rolodex: A flip-book full of beer-stained business cards collected at an industry brew-ha. Today, your network is the people you truly connect with, and their friends.
Isabella Tsao understands networking. …

The business pundits can write forever about how important diversity is. But we are not achieving it, and the people losing out the most are black men. Associated Press writer Erin Texeira did the world a favor by writing an article that describes the black man’s experience of confronting constant racism, especially at the office.
The …

On some level, it’s fun to quit a job. It’s fun to remind people that they don’t own you. It’s fun to feel that burst of freedom as you walk out the door. But it’s no fun if you don’t quit right.
Before you quit, you need a semi-plan for what you’ll do next: You will …