The work world offers a continuum of means to stability. Huge risk takers might choose to pay off the Russian mob and try to corner to oil market in Siberia. If you’re looking for stability, you might try climbing a corporate ladder in a large, publicly traded company.
Climbing, of course, could lead to instability. The …

A lot of you know you’d like to be doing something more significant for your company, but no one is giving you the chance. This is your wake up call. You don’t need to wait for someone to bestow a title on you — you can take on a bigger role right now.
The key to …

This week’s Business Week just hit the stands, and what do you know? My blog is featured.
Lindsey Gerdes wrote a great summary of my blog, proving to me that other people can write a better summary of our work than we can write ourselves. (Yes, this is why you should hire someone to write your …

Giving advice about careers is easier than taking it. People are always calling me on this — spitting my advice back to me at my most vulnerable moments. Like when I was late delivering my column five weeks in a row, and my editor said, “Remember that time you wrote about how being late is …

Here is a message for people who say office politics don’t matter: You will die a slow, painful career death. This is because there’s no getting around office politics, and mastering them is essential to being able to steer your own career. Don’t take that as bad news, though, because mastering office politics is good …

Most of my girlfriends who make more than $100K a year were cheerleaders in school. We are from all over the United States. We are from all different types of companies. Only a few of us can do the splits. Yet we all bounced in short skirts and cheered for boys.
I chalked this up to …

A few months ago, I was interviewing this guy, Ben Casnocha.
The first thing you need to know about Ben is that he started a company when he was fourteen. And it’s still around today, four years later. Ben doesn’t run it, but my point is that it’s a real company.
But no, wait, that’s not my …

Hannah Schufreider may seem an unlikely person to be teaching you how to manage your career. She is a 12-year-old autistic girl living in Haverhill. Her days are spent being a little bored in school, reading Manga comics, watching Hannah Montana on TV, and going to fencing class on the weekends. Sounds like a typical …

I have a new column debuting on Yahoo! Finance today. I’m very excited.
Yahoo contacted me in November, right after I moved to Madison. And right after I signed the contract, they were all about the head shot.
This makes sense. Yahoo wants everyone to look good. Totally reasonable. If nothing else, there’s the fact that good …

I write a lot about how effective job hunters hunt all the time, and how it’s important to integrate this project into our life with their other personal and professional projects. And I write a lot about how networking is the new job hunt.
So I got excited that there’s a new category of job hunting …

A lot of people ask me how to become a syndicated print columnist (because I am one), and while I was answering someone’s questions the other day, it occurred to me that this is information that all bloggers can use as a way to make money from their blog.
Like publishing AdSense links or using affiliate …

One of my favorite topics is the science of happiness, which academia calls positive psychology. I love this topic because most of us think of our careers in terms of happiness. That is, we look for work that makes us happy. Positive psychology turns this hunt into a science. And then tells us to look …

The first time I had my own company, we ignored Martin Luther King Day. And it felt really bad, like I was not living my own values. Now I am careful each year to do something to mark the holiday. So today I’m posting a piece I wrote a few years ago, before I had …

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was overhauling my time management strategy. And believe it or not, things are getting a little better.
I have integrated my email and my to do list, which saves a lot of time moving information around my computer. And I have consolidated my work calendar and personal …

A reader asked this question: Would you mind writing a post about dealing with multiple job offers and declining some of them — politely and gracefully?
This is actually a question about networking. When someone offers you a job, they have identified you as someone they want to be connected with. That you have multiple offers …

It’s hard to look at the job you have and the job you’re looking for and figure out if the gap between them is due to bad job hunting skills or to something else. The best way to get the answer to this is to understand what a good job hunter looks like, and see …

There is plenty of data to show that diversity is good for the workplace. But in general we don’t really create it for ourselves, because we like to work with people who are similar to us.
“In terms of innovation, diverse teams way outperform non-diverse teams, but people are very comfortable working with people they have …

Forget the idea that networking is a job-hunting tool. Networking is the job hunt. But networking is not just passing out your business card and e-mailing your friends’ friend. Networking is making yourself buzz-worthy so people want to be connected with you.
This is not the old networking that celebrated extroverts and crushed introverts. Building buzz …

Over the course of the last year, I’ve interviewed a lot of people about entrepreneurship. The common thread running through all the interviews is that entrepreneurship is different than it was even five years ago. Barriers to entry are lower than ever, and if you measure success in terms of personal growth and flexible work, …

As thousands of U.S. companies ship jobs to other countries, the resounding response from young people is, “Who cares? I wouldn’t want one of those jobs anyway.” To the new U.S. workforce many of those jobs look boring, routine and uncreative – the equivalent of a manufacturing job to a baby boomer.
Kris Helenek is a …

My second son was born a year and a half ago with hemifacial microsomia. That means half of his face is deformed. I’m not linking to a description of the birth defect, even though I know you will Google it. I’m not linking because the pictures are always the worst cases. He does not look …