Learn about nice from Paris Hilton
We all know that networking is the way to build a career. It’s the how-to that’s so difficult. Today, most of the advice about networking says: Be nice, and people will be nice back. And, building a network helps a career because you can ask for a favor when you …

This is a piece I wrote for the new leadership section at Forbes.com.
Of course a good education and talent are keys to building a successful career, but for most people, school is over and the parameters of their talent were set on the day they were born. So what can you do now to get …

It’s hard to find a list of large, stable companies with good perks that will let you tour with your rock band once a month. So here is a very useful list with a very bad title: 100 best companies for working moms. For one thing, the title is insulting to dads. But also, these …

What’s the problem with most managers? They are so involved in getting their own tasks done that they fail to manage. Bruce Tulgan writes that undermanagement is an epidemic, and Adecco reports that half of American workers think their managers don’t take performance reviews seriously.
Continue this behavior at your own risk. The Financial Times (subscription) …

Jenn Satterwhite has been ranting in my comments section, which has made me very happy. She is bringing up difficult issues and she is making me nervous about posting responses. This seems good.
One thing Jenn brought up is that she wishes women would stop arguing among each other about the stay-at-home vs. career issues. I …

Henry Kasdon learned to break dance on his mom's tennis court. Now he's a dance teacher who is astute enough about marketing to change the names of moves from the Brooklyn to the Brookline. He is a successful dancer; he's getting ready to switch careers to trial law. “I want my kids to be taken …

I write a lot about how people have to be likeable to get what they want in life. I get so frustrated, though, because everyone thinks they are likeable. Maybe to their dog, yes, but in my experience most people are not nearly as likeable as they think they are.
I thought of this because I …

I interviewed Gloria Steinem. She’s promoting her new undertaking, GreenStone Media, a radio station founded by women for women. There were nine bloggers on the call with me and we each got to ask a question.
During the interview I was routinely sidetracked by:
a) Gloria Steinem is the revolutionary we talk about when we talk about …

I want to take on one intern for the fall semester. I say semester, though you don’t need to be in college.
My motivation is two-fold. Of course, I want to offload stuff I don’t like to do on someone who might like to do it. But also, I want to mentor someone (see my bit …

One of my best experiences as a mentor was when I inherited an IT department where the average age was 18. There were many men and one woman and no leaders. I sniffed around for who might be good at what in preparation for a departmental reorg. The woman, Sari, looked homeless at best, a …

Are you considering entrepreneurship? It’s all the rage right now because the bar at the start line has never been lower. Here are nine new ideas about entrepreneurship that will make you feel like you can do it, too. Right now:
1. You don’t need a venture capitalist, you are the venture capitalist.
Today, you can …

Here are three tidbits I’ve collected that haven’t fit in other places over the week.
Condoleeza has a workplace crush
Maureen Dowd brings to light the evidence that Condoleeza Rice has a crush on the Canadian Foreign Minister Peter McKay. Scroll down in Dowd’s column to see a great photo of the two of them looking at …

I write a lot about the importance of specializing in your career. The bottom line is that if you are great at what you do, you will get better hours, better pay, and more flexibility in how you run your life. But no one is great at everything.
Specializing means figuring out what you don’t do. …

Wendy Waters suggested that I write about how to deal with disabilities in the workplace. So here’s a story about my friend Ann, who has a really deep voice. It isn’t a sexy deep voice; it sounds more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat or Darth Vader on Prozac.
Her voice, which is a …

I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. At each anniversary that passes I write my story, and each year it changes a little. This year, I have been thinking about that moment when I accepted death.
I was at the corner of Liberty and Broadway when the first tower fell. I was too …

Check out this experiment, which shocked even me. Here is the description of it from Waxy.org:
A Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny started his own Craigslist experiment. The goal: “Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get?”
He took the text and photo from a sexually explicit ad …

Matt Rivers became an entrepreneur at age 17 when his favorite surf shop went out of business and he used his dishwashing money to buy it. “At first there was only one T-shirt rack and one shorts rack and when I sold a T-shirt I bought two more.” Today his Cape Cod-based business has one …

Kristen Ryan graduated a year ago and accepted a position in public relations. After two months on the job, she started having anxiety attacks, and after six months on the job, anxiety attacks were almost daily. Ryan says the anxiety was from the “pressures of life changes: Moving away from family, staring new job, transitioning …

In response to my musings about what it means to be a blogger who is just a blogger, Alexandra Levit sent me an article about bloggers who support themselves blogging. I read it twice. Then I started checking out all the blogs, trying to uncover the secret of the million-dollar blog.
Here is what I uncovered: …

Yep, it’s true. This week TIME Magazine quotes me, tells tidbits of my life, and pretty much makes it sound like my job is blogging.
So next time someone asks me that all-important question, “What do you do?” I’m thinking of saying, “I’m a blogger.”
Right now, when someone asks me what I do, the conversation goes …

Now that there is a baby boy in the Japanese royal family of little girls, the movement to allow a girl become queen will end.
It’s a good time to tell the story of Crown Princess Masako, wife of the Crown Prince Naruhito, who struggled unsuccessfully to have this male heir. (Her sister-in-law delivered the baby …

For those of you about to start another year at school, here’s a list of things to keep in mind: Twenty things to do in college to set yourself up for a great job when you graduate.
1. Get out of the library.
“You can have a degree and a huge GPA and not be ready …