Bruce Tulgan tells the four reasons you have to fire a low performer, and the best way to get low performers to leave on their own.

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A lot of people ask me how living in Madison is going. For those of you who don't know, I moved from New York City to Madison, WI about six months ago. I can't believe it's already been six months, because I still feel like I'm in culture shock.

It is shocking, for example, that five blocks from where I live, people go ice fishing. Or that the town seems to revolve around schedules for the University of Wisconsin athletic teams. But the most shocking thing is the lack of advertising.

In New York City, the bombardment of advertising is so extreme that it all adds up to a reliable source of information about what's going on in the world. Everything has an ad on it. The streets are literally lined with advertising. And there are newsstands every block, so the world's headlines, too, are impossible to miss.

In Madison, we pass one or two billboards a day, if we drive across town. When this blog was mentioned in Business Week last month, I spent an hour driving around Madison trying to find a copy of the magazine. That's when I started thinking about how isolated I am from the advertising world.

But it really hit home tonight when my brother sent a link to me about the mess in Iraq.

I wrote back: "The most interesting thing in here is the reference to Britney's head. What's up with her head?"

He wrote back: "She shaved it. Do you live in a cave? Did you know Anna Nicole Smith died? There was commercial-free round-the-clock coverage on the major TV networks."

In fact, I didn't know about the incessant coverage. We don't have a TV. I have never had a TV, although I have a lot of respect for the content on TV. That's why I don't have one — because I know I'd watch it all the time. I'd watch it all the time because it is actually useful for finding out what a large segment of the world is doing.

As a kid, I went to other kids' houses to see what I was missing. As an adult, I have always lived in big cities where you end up knowing what's on TV even if you don't have one. Probably in a large part because of the ubiquitous advertising. And when I found myself falling behind in those big cities, I could easily pick up a magazine.

Now that I'm in Madison, I need to take drastic measures. I am not buying a TV, but I am doing the next best thing: A subscription to People magazine. I know a lot about this magazine because it is laying on every available table top in New York City even though no one wants to admit to actually paying for it.

Knowing what's going on in popular culture is important. It's the world we live in. To be oblivious to popular culture is to snub one's nose at the majority of society. And how can you claim to have good social skills if you are not interested in the majority of the people in this world? Good social skills means being interested in what makes other people tick.

Think about this in terms of work. It is clear that in order to get along with your co-workers you need to know how to understand what they want and how to give it to them. And in a large study of workplace preferences, Terry Bacon, reports in his book, What People Want, that good management means good social skills. "Most people leave a job because of their boss," says Bacon. What makes a good boss? Someone who is concerned about what other people care about.

So either you need to know why Britney's head is interesting this week, or you need to start caring more about popular culture. Being socially competent isn't about just the brainiacs, or just the culture snobs. Social competence is being able to relate to anyone, and that means caring about a wide range of people.

I had a teacher in college who spent a semester convincing the class that reading the Iliad is important because all other college freshman are reading the Iliad and it is part of the common experience of college life — something to talk about. People magazine reflects the common experience of adult life. You can say that People isn't that good, but you know what? Neither is the Iliad unless you like wars.

It used to be that finding a good paying career was the path to adult-life stability. Those days are over. What we think of as stability has to change, and how we get to that stability has to change.

Here's a summary of the new employee of today's workplace: Most will change jobs every two years. Most will start their adult life by moving back in with their parents. Most say that money is not their number one concern in evaluating a job.

You think it's a recipe for instability, right? But what else is there to do? Work at IBM until you get a gold watch? There are no more jobs like that – companies are under too much pressure to be lean and flexible (read: layoffs, downsizing, reorgs), so workers have to be, too (read: constantly on the alert for new job possibilities).

In fact, stability is a big goal for new workers today, precisely because the old paths to stability don't necessarily work.

For example, staying in one job forever is today's recipe for career suicide. At the beginning of one's career, it is nearly impossible to find something right without trying a bunch of options. After that, you will experience more personal growth from changing jobs frequently than staying in one job for extended periods of time. And if you change jobs frequently you build an adaptable skill set and a wide network which are the keys to being able to find a job whenever you need to.

Another example of the fact that common paths to stability no longer work: Professional degrees used to be viewed as a safe path, but now they box you into uncomfortable spots. PhD's are having lots of trouble finding work due to the documented glut of qualified candidates, and the MBA is not a huge help to your career unless you go to a top-ten school. Doctors are having a hard time working a schedule that accommodates kids and pay back school loans, which is creating a surge in interest in the field of opthalmology – probably not what your parents had in mind when they were encouraging medical school.

The lack of stability is affecting people across the board: "All well-educated workers, even those at the top, are at much greater risk of economic reversals than they used to be," wrote Jacob Hacker, professor of political science at Yale.

Finally, tried-and-true paths to financial stability are no longer reliable either. This is the first generation that will not do better financially than their parents. Anya Kamenetz describes in her book, Generation Debt, that young people today are in a much worse financial situation than their parents were, so the expectations for stability have to change. This financial situation is due to increasing college costs and decreasing parental ability to foot the bill. And real salaries are decreasing for entry level jobs. So new workers start life with more debt and less ability to pay it than their parents' generation.

So it's not surprising that the new vision of stability is not a house, two kids and pension. Most young people are priced out of housing markets in the cities they want to live in, like Boston. San Francisco and New York are seeing an increase in one-child families because people can't afford two, and there are no more pensions. Period. The goals are more fluid – and they do not focus on old tropes of financial success like a house and a 401K.

Key values today are time and relationships. Stability means knowing you can get yourself work that is fun and accommodates those values. The stable people are those who can manage to consistently get work they enjoy that pays their bills.

It used to be that you worked really hard and paid your dues so you could retire rich and do what you love. But we know now that most people don't really retire, so paying dues in order to get that is nonsense. Stability is knowing you have a life where you can do what you love, during your whole life, not just at the end.

The new way to find a good job – one that creates this stability — is to change jobs. A lot. And to keep an open mind about what a job really is, because what it is not is a lifelong commitment to one company.

Here are ways to use frequent job changes to create stability in your life:

1. Build up a strong skill set quickly.
Go to a job to work on a great project, and leave when your learning curve flattens out. The faster you build up your skills to create an expertise, the faster you will be able to set yourself apart from everyone else, and find good jobs quickly.

2. Get good at making transitions.
There are moments in a person's life that typically throw everything out of whack because you can't continue working in your job. Sickness, relocation, unexpected wrenches in one's plan. When you are used to changing jobs, and you have taught yourself to deal with work transitions, then when your personal life requires huge transition, your work can accommodate that instead of get in the way. Changing jobs will be easy.

3. Make the most of the in-between-jobs time.
You can use job changes to make transition less risky. It's very hard to know if you'll like something until you try it. If you have been in corporate marketing for ten years and you want to try entrepreneurship, that feels like a big risk. But if you think you might like to start your own business but you're not sure, taking a pause in between jobs to try this new business isn't such a risky move at all.

4. Get out of paying your dues.
The idea of paying dues worked fine when there was actually payoff (think: Retirement communities in Florida funded by pensions.) But today paying dues doesn't have nearly the payoff it used to, and in fact, creates instability by creating unreasonable expectations for a job you become overly invested in. So get out of paying dues by changing jobs frequently. Laura Vanderkam, workplace reporter for USA Today, wrote a book called Grindhopping about how to hop from job to job as a way to avoid paying your dues.

5. Keep your finances in order.
As long as you keep your overhead down, so that you don't need a salary that requires 100-hour work weeks, then job hopping is actually a way to ensure financial stability. You know you are not going to stay at a job forever, and you don't know when it will end. But you will always able to get work when your needs or your company's needs change if you are good at changing jobs. This won't be true, however, if you are a financial mess and have enormous overhead.

The best financial security today is to have great job hunting skills that never stop. Go to the best job, do it until you find another best job. This is the kind of person who will always be able to get money when they need it.

And don't let people tell you that job hoppers will get penalized in the marketplace. Generation Y is job hopping every other year, and they are in incredible demand throughout the workplace. Demographics are shifting, and forcing hiring practices to shift as well. Take advantage of this. Create a stable life by getting good at changing jobs.

My friend Dylan sent me a warning that poetry can ruin your career.

But before I knew that, when I was a blogging beginner with no idea what to post, I posted workplace Haikus. And my career was not ruined. So here's another poem, from my friend Ben:

Employed

She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled with important papers to read
after dinner; she does not want to return phone calls. When she gets home,
she wants to kick off her shoes and waltz around her kitchen singing, "I am
a piece of work."

by Beverly Rollwagen, from She Just Wants

The first summer job idea is you better get one. If you are in college, now is the time to gather experience so that you will have some idea what you want to do with your life when you get out of school. Graduating from college is a very hard transition. One way you can make it emotionally treacherous is to try to support yourself with a job when you have no experience in a job.

There are lots of different strategies to take when you are looking for something to do in the summer. But each strategy has one thing in common – starting now is better than starting later.

There is wide consensus that you really must be doing something in the summer that teaches you real world experiences. So don't sign up for summer school thinking that businesses will be impressed. Surely you already have enough school under your belt. Eighteen years, right? Summer is the time to try something new.

Look for something that will help you grow personally and professionally. Even if you don't have a great startup idea in your back pocket, you can still think big. You have good reason to demand that your summer job be fun and stimulating — there are enough jobs out there that you don't have to take a terrible one.

Also, don't restrict yourself geographically. When you have two kids and a mortgage then relocation is terrible. But in college, relocation is an adventure. Apply for summer jobs all over the country.

1. Get money to go to start a company.
You have to have an idea, but if you have a good one, Y Combinator will give you about $15,000 to move to Cambridge, MA and be surrounded by people like you doing the same thing. This is a great way to learn how to build a startup. The arrangement is friendly and supportive, and even if your company doesn't get off the ground during the summer, you will learn a lot.

Relatively few women apply to do programs like this one. So I am taking a moment to encourage women to try it. Starting a company is not only about being able to program a computer. It's about being able to see an unmet need and find a solution. Apply by April 2.

2. Experiment in social entrepreneurship.
Experience just announced a fellowship program that matches students with non-profits for the summer. The students not only get paid to do good, but they also get paired up with mentors from management consulting firms, which really makes this is a great learning opportunity. The fellowship program was only recently announced, so you may benefit from the fact that a lot of students don't know it exists. Apply by March 1.

3. Call someone you want to work for.
Really. Just try it. The trick is to call someone senior enough who can make an independent hiring decision, but junior enough that there are not three layers of assistants protecting him. The person you call will be flattered, and mostly likely will listen to you.

Tell this person about what you can bring to the company. (Probably your most appealing offer will be some combination of your wet-behind-the-ears enthusiasm for working and I'm-younger-than-you flair for technology.) Also, tell the person your goals for the summer, so the person can understand how they fit in. Then ask for an internship. You just might get one.

What if you try all three of these ideas and they don't work? Keep trying. You will spend a lot of your life job hunting. You may as well get good at it now, before your life depends on it.

When you look for a job or change careers, what you're really looking for is a way to improve things in your life. But it's hard to figure out what will really make things better and what will only make things worse.

There are some things we all know: People who are in love are happier, and people who are chronically unemployed are less happy. But most of us aren't dealing with such clear-cut extremes.

Most of us ask ourselves on a regular basis, "What's the best kind of work situation for me?" Yes, we're all unique, but in truth we aren't as unique as we think we are. So there are some rules we can all live by when looking for work we'll love.

Forget the deep analysis. Our brains are simply not optimized to figure out what we'll like. Instead, they're optimized to figure out how to like what we have.

This helps us on an evolutionary basis: We eat what's available, we take care of whatever kids we get, and so on. It doesn't help us in a job hunt, where we have to guess what we would like if we had it.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, spent his whole career studying this sort of problem and published his findings in "Stumbling on Happiness." Gilbert concludes that we're basically unable to know if we'll like a job until we try it, so self-analysis and market analysis aren't going to get you very far. Start trying stuff.

You don't have to quit your job to try things. Try new stuff on the weekend, volunteer for a project part-time, or ask for a temporary appointment to another department, for example. Be creative in how you learn about yourself. A job change doesn't have to be now or never — it can be a process.

That said, here are some guidelines you can use for deciding what you're going to try:

Read the column at Yahoo! Finance

When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I spent a lot of time listening carefully to how other people talked. 

So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign.

1. Tell your designer you five most important things, in order.
This is what you want to convey in your blog. This will help the designer make interface choices – to help your audience focus on what you want them to see. For example, is your about me section really important? It is if you have a lot of expertise. Is your RSS information important? It is if you are aiming to build a large, loyal audience.

Also tell your designer the message you want to get across about yourself – are you friendly, authoritative, technical. This will help the designer figure out a look for your blog. The best way to get a design you love is to be really, really clear about what you want right here, at this stage.

2. Don't ask your designer to train your dog.
Can your designer keep your dog from sleeping on your laptop? No. Of course your dog is not part of the designer's job. Yet people dream up all sorts of non-design problems to toss over to the designer.

Problems like a boring bio, or a bad topic, or terrible category names (I have this last problem) are not design problems. If you comments section never gets used, the designer can't fix that. Things are just going to be empty. And no designer can overcome the ugliness of a headline that is five lines long. Only you can rewrite incompetent headlines. Unless your blog is about design, design cannot compensate for lame content.

3. Don't reinvent the wheel.
There are established conventions for blog design, and you need to have a totally incredible reason for bucking those conventions. For example, About Me is a heading and it goes on top. Just do that. Don't bother with being inventive. It's not worth it. Spend your energy being inventive with your content.

People want to know how to navigate your stuff as soon as they get there. I'll learn a new navigation system to use Photoshop. There's a lot of return on my time investment. I'm not learning a new navigation system to get through a blog I don't even know if I'll like. And don't tell me that your radically new, reinvented blog interface is intuitive. It's not. Because I intuitively look for an interface that is similar to the 55 million other blogs

4. Keep your design opinions to yourself.
There's a reason you are not supporting yourself as a designer: You are not one. If you want to tell the designer what to design, then don't hire one. My point is, leave the designer alone. If you don't trust the designer to come up with something good on her own, then don't hire her. If you think the designer doesn't get it, then ask yourself if you have conveyed the information the designer needs.

In short, a bad design is often your own fault: You either hired someone who can't design, or you gave bad information during point number one (above). In either case, you cannot solve this problem by becoming the designer yourself. You have to solve this problem by looking inside yourself to see where you went wrong. If you hired a bad designer, here's an article on how to hire a better one.

5. Talk about your expertise, not the designer's.
Instead of giving the designer instructions on how to do his job, tell him about your job. Note: This will be very difficult for people who have no idea what their goals are or how they are going to reach them. This is why good designers will not work with people who lack vision for themselves. Here are some examples:

Bad: What about blue? I really like the color blue.
Good: This design feels very edgy to me, but this blog should look like part of the establishment.

Bad: Good blog designs usually have an email me button on the top.
Good: My readers need to know how to contact me very easily, and I don't think they'll see the email me button where it is.

6. Know your own limitations.
With trepidation over the amount of work entailed, I agreed to add photos to my blog. I like how they look. But it turns out that my stock photos are pretty lame. And after about twenty emails from people explaining this problem to me, I have learned a bit about photos. So, like every project, you do your best at the stuff you're best at, but there's always room to learn. My learning area is the photos.

One reader who complained about the stock photos is Annie. I asked her for suggestions on how to use photos differently and she sent some links. The links Annie sent showed me a different way to think about blogs. My favorite is HellomynameisHeather.

I'm annoyed that my new blog design has created a picture problem that I have to deal with, but it's been a good opportunity to explore something new. And that, after all, is what blogging is all about.

Bruce Tulgan runs through 8 things in 2 minutes — tactics that will make you feel confident and effective as a manager.

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Barack Obama is dissing the baby boomers. But he's doing it tactfully. So he's got a wide range of people talking about generational issues in politics, and I'm eagerly anticipating spillover into the workplace, which also needs this frank discussion.

One of the companies I founded was an online marketplace for city governments. My business partner was a fiftysomething guy who had been dealing with city governments forever.

Our investors in the first round were all his friends, most were over 50, and some assumed I was dating my partner because why else would he start a company with someone so young.

Investors treated me like it was an impossibility that I could have learned things fast enough to get into a room with them. And one investor asked me to leave a meeting at such an inappropriate moment that even my partner was shocked.

Then, about a year later, when I was looking for a job, the guy I interviewed with said, "Kids now think they can learn on the job and they don't need an MBA. What do you think of that?"

I couldn't believe it: He was calling me a kid in my job interview, even though I had already launched two companies.

He did this because he thinks it's culturally acceptable to treat someone like they don't know anything just because they're young.

I've been holding off writing about Obama because the first (and last) time I took a leap into politics with my column was when I campaigned for Howard Dean, the week before he imploded. I told myself I learned my lesson: Politics is too volatile for a workplace writer to forge a path through.

But here I am again. Writing about politics. Writing about Obama and hoping he doesn't implode next week. I have to write about him because while this is not an official endorsement, when he talks about leading a new generation I get giddy over the idea that we could be wrestling ourselves out from under the clutch of the baby boomers.

Obama talks about teamwork and community and the end of the me-me-me in-fighting that has characterized the recent history of baby boomer politics. A report in Newsday says:

"Obama represents the transition from the Baby Boom to Generation X… He spoke of a post-boomer sensibility, of moving beyond the divisions exacerbated by undue self-focus."

I have this conversation with my (baby boomer) agent, and she says, "Everything to you is about generations." And okay, there's truth to that, but there's also some hot air, because the baby-boomer generation is so huge that everything has been about them by default.

I am from a generation that had very limited power to do anything, anywhere, except live in the wake of the boomers. Even when it came to the Internet revolution in the 90's, most of the people who got rich were the baby boomers who invested in companies that Gen-Xers operated.

This is why I get excited about Generation Y. It's amazing to see this group, with all their demographic power, open up the world to change.

For the most part, I focus on change in the workplace. There were a lot of things that my generation wanted at work — for example, flexible hours, personal growth and the abandonment of competitive, ego-focused hierarchy in favor of team work. But we had trouble pushing through these workplace values because there were too few of us. The baby boomers could always just say no.

But generation Y wants so many of those gen-X things, and generation Y has the demographic power to make it real. It excites me to see this happen at work.

Obama is the political corollary. Finally there are enough voters, maybe, to vote for someone who is not a baby boomer. I don't know if it will happen. But just that we're talking about it is exciting. Because once we talk about baby boomers giving up control of politics, the talk of baby boomers giving up control of corporate life cannot be far behind.

But there's a workplace lesson from Obama as well. He's very tactful as he disses the boomers. He makes it clear that he is a bridge builder. That he is respectful of the fact that everyone has a place in history. And he is, above all, someone who has empathy for diverse backgrounds. These are all the same kinds of skills we need in the workplace today.

We are all engaging in a generational discussion at work, even if it is not as overt as an interviewer calling you a kid. We all come to the table with preconceptions and biases, but we all have to work together. So, in the near future, at lest, it's the people who are best at building generational bridges who will succeed. This is something I personally work on every day, and Obama is a great role model.

It used to be your workplace identity was tied to your company. "An IBM man" is a phrase that comes to mind. Companies kept track of best practices, hot management ideas, and recent innovations in the business world.

Today our identity is separate from our company. We manage ourselves with the care that used to be reserved for special product lines. We realize if we don't care for our career no one else will. And we cannot depend on a corporation to keep up to speed on ideas. We have to stay on top of new ideas for ourselves.

So, here are four ideas that you should consider using to guide yourself:

Pick a pace that's right for you.
Today waiting the typical three to five business days for a package to arrive seems like an unbearable amount of time to some people, and news travels in real time — text-messages sent from parties to bloggers at home, ready to post.

Alexander Kjerulf self-published his book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5, because he thought the typical publishing cycle was too long. "I'm an impatient sort of guy," he says. The book sells well on his blog, and he feels certain he did the right thing, for him.

Fast all the time isn't right for everyone all the time. Adrian Savage, author of the book, Slow Leadership, writes daily on his blog urging people to accept that often workplace success comes from downshifting into a slow gear for a while.

Sloppy networking leads to sloppy results.
The founders of the professional networking site LinkedIn tell people in no uncertain terms that building a network has to be about people you know well. Yet every day thousands of LinkedIn users invite near-strangers into their network.

Newsflash: People you don't know cannot vouch for you. People you have not connected with in an authentic way will not be move to help you when you need it. It doesn't matter how full your LinkedIn account is, or how heavy your Rolodex is, if you haven't really connected with these people, it's not a network.

The opposite is true as well. If you build a strong network, its effects will ripple. Josh Boltuch, Elliott Breece and Elias Roman spent their last semester at Brown University launching Amie Street, a new model for selling music online. They had no marketing budget to get the word out, but they did have their network.

"We sent a few hundred emails to friends and family." The crux of the marketing pitch? "We told everyone that a requirement for being our friend is to sign up for our site." A few weeks later, without saying anything to the founders, someone told Mike Arrington about Amie Street.

Arrington has one of the strongest networks in startup America. Getting your startup on his blog TechCrunch is like getting your book on Oprah. And there was Amie Street, right there on Mike's blog one day.

The next day, Amie Street had thousands of registered users.
What can we learn from this? That solid networks make solid results.
The Amie Street founders had a network that cared deeply for them – their friends and family. Mike Arrington's network is truly dedicated to helping him find the best new startups. Amie Street is a success today because it started with a truly meaningful network.

Get away from jerks or become one.
If you want to enjoy your work, surround yourself with people who are enjoyable. Most people can tell an obnoxious person right away. But even in light of one of those horrible interviews, candidates often tell themselves they can work with jerks and not be affected.

"If you think you are going to change them, it won't happen. It's easy to resist at the beginning, but if you work with an asshole you're going to become one" too, says Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford University, and author of the book, The No Asshole Rule.

Rude interactions have five times the impact on your mood that
positive interactions do. Sometimes you can encourage rude co-workers and bosses to be more positive. But not if you're dealing with the worst cases.

How can you recognize those types you need to get away from? Sutton says they are addicted to subtle putdowns, interruptions and they use sarcasm as a way to make a (supposed) joke.

Respect your unconscious decision-making skills.
When you try to make a well-formed, thought-out decision, you will probably do a bad job unless the information in front of you is very limited, according to Ap Dijksterhuis, professor of psychology at Radboud University Nimengen in the Netherlands.

He found that in situations with a lot of variables, like which soccer team will win the World Cup, people consider too much irrelevant information–which city the game is in, for example–at the expense of more important information–such as the track records of the teams.

The good news is that our unconscious minds are very good at processing lots of information. We have known for a while that trusting our gut is a good idea. But Diksterhuis's research (subscription required) shows that sleeping on a problem gives your unconscious time to sift through information and actually makes our gut decision better.

Ta-da! It's my new blog design. This is a big moment for me because when I started blogging, I never dreamed that it would matter so much to me that I would actually pay to have a custom blog design.

There is an important lesson here about starting something new. Many people who have successful businesses say that if they had known how much work it was going to be they never would have started. I found this was true with the companies I've started. And at Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog that has grown astronomically in the last year, JD has a nice description of this process of growing in unexpected but exciting ways.

Meeting our goals might depend on being ignorant of how much work it will really take. If I had thought I was going to post six days a week I would have procrastinated every day forever because the amount of work would have seemed unbearable. But in fact, once you fall in love with what you're doing, like any small business, the long hours don't feel so long.

In some cases, though, you cannot help but know that you are about to start something that will be a lot of work. That's how I feel about adding photos to the blog. I never expected to have photos, but my designer, (Rob Brown, who I really liked working with), showed me that the photos add a lot.

The only way I could get myself to agree to make the photo leap is to live in denial — a tactic I used for starting many clearly difficult projects. This means that we are launching a new design, but I have still not learned the ins and outs of photos. So this photo of workers at a desk is what Rob picked as a demo. But it looks good, doesn't it?

I just want to tell you about these links. Each of them made me really happy to find. Maybe one, or all four, will make you happy:

1. How to ruin your image with your signature file.
This is a great post about the stupid fonts people use in their signature file and what those fonts mean about the person. The bottom line: Don't use a special font. Express yourself through your ideas, not your font choice.

http://lmnop.blogs.com/lauren/2006/10/americas_most_f.html

2. How to survive high school
This would not be notable except that it's part of Wikipedia's how to section. First, I didn't know there was a how to section. (Okay. Update. Daniel, at Om Strategy, sets me straight on the wiki world. Wikihow is not Wikipedia.) But then I was charmed to see that this topic is listed. Although I am pretty sure that all the how-tos in the world would not have gotten me through high school unscarred…

http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-High-School

3. How to find a synonym, or just do something cool on your computer
When I taught creative writing, I told my upstart students at Boston University that they should never use a thesaurus because you should write like you talk and if you can't come up with the word on your own, you can be pretty sure you don't use it when you talk.

So, putting that advice aside, I went hunting for a synonym for spark. And I found this amazing site that doesn't just find synonyms. It literally makes language come alive. Words slide and gyrate and bump into place. I found myself looking for synonyms I didn't need just to watch what happens.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

4. How to force companies to be socially responsible with just one click
via TechCrunch:

"DoTheRightThing is a Digg-like site where people submit stories about companies acting in ways that can be considered 'good' or 'bad.' Other users then vote on the goodness or badness of those actions and add comments. The site calculates an overall 'goodness' score, ranging from 'severe' on the negative end to 'pioneer' on the positive end."

It's interesting to read what companies are doing and see how they score. Also, it's fun to harbor a fantasy that this site will get influential enough that companies will have to respond to accusations that get voted to the top.

At a point when I didn't have the money to hire an assistant, I ran an ad for an unpaid intern. I ran it on a lark, thinking I'd be lucky if anyone in the world would want to work for free.

The number of responses I received was incredible, not just in quantity, but also in quality.

The intern I chose was smart, talented, and fun — all the things I want in a coworker. And I was nervous she would leave. So every day, I thought to myself, "Am I doing everything I can to keep her? Am I teaching her enough? Is she getting enough out of this job?"

People aren't managers because they have the title. They're managers because they make the people they lead feel good about themselves and what they're doing. I knew this before, from books, but I really learned it with my unpaid intern.

Most managers have a title and pay their employees. These are management crutches. If you want to be a really good manager, ignore those formalities and make people believe that they're getting something even more important out of the manager/employee deal; that way, you'll help them to grow personally.

Read the column at Yahoo! Finance

Between the ages of 20 and 30, most people have more than 8 jobs. This is a positive thing for a number of reasons. First of all, Daniel Gilbert, psychologist at Harvard, says that we really don't know what we'll like until we try it. So having a lot of jobs when you start your adult life is a good way to figure out what to do with your adult life.

But, job hopping is a good thing for everyone to do – not just twentysomethings – because it's a way to maintain passion in your work. Frequent changes keep your learning curve high and your challenges fresh. Finally, frequent job hopping, coupled with high performance allows you to build a professional network much faster than someone who stays in one position over a long period of time. And a vibrant network will make finding jobs easier, so job hopping will not be a difficult path.

Human resource people complain a lot about job hopping. They say companies would rather hire someone who stays a long time at companies because that will mean the person will stay a long time at their company. Of course this is true.

It's clear that job hopping benefits the employee, not the employer. But when the majority of young people are job hopping, and companies are having a hard time attracting young people to work recruiters don't have the luxury of writing people off just because they job hopped. Recruiters write people off because their resume looks like they won't contribute enough to the company.

So, the trick with job hopping is to make sure your resume always shows that you make a huge contribution wherever you go. That can be independent of job duration. You can show that you are loyal to a company by exceeding their expectations with your outstanding performance. Loyalty is about delivery. Show that on your resume, the same place you show job hopping.

A resume is not a laundry list of job and duties. It's a document about a story. You resume needs to show the story of a person who contributes in large ways wherever you go.

Think about this. Someone wrote a great SuperBowl ad, then six months later went to Nike and launched a new shoe that's a success, and a year later went to Google and rebranded some of their software to increase user base 50%. Most people would not care that this person was job hopping. Most people would want to hire this person, even if he only stayed a little bit.

Of course, most of you don't have such enormous accomplishments, but you probably do have accomplishments. And you do have a story about how you chose to leave when you did. When I explained my own job hopping, I talked about how I went to companies, launched great, successful software products, and then moved on. I never felt the job hopping held me back, though I always had to explain it in interviews.

That's the thing about job hopping. People want to hear an explanation that makes sense. They don't want to hear you failed, or didn't get along with people, or have no attention span. Not every job will be the pinnacle of success, but a good resume writer can make every job look like it was some sort of success, and that your level of success increased with each hop, because with each hop you got more responsibility.

I know that a lot of you hop because you don't know what to do with yourself. But you'll probably be able to find some consistent string running throughout all your jobs. Maybe it was customer service, maybe all your jobs were sports-related, you'll have to figure out the story. But a good story weaves everything together into something linear, and, if you're lucky, it'll point you toward what you should do next.

Bruce Tulgan is back. Here he talks about what to ask for and what to give when recognition is deserved and the coffers are empty.

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One of the most dangerous ideas in the workplace today is that racism is gone. Because it's not.

Jesse Rothstein, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows the prevalance of racist thinking, even today. "Some people think racial discrimination is something that ended in 1972 or something. Some people think that segregation persists because minorities cannot afford the neighborhoods."

But in fact, Rothstein found that there is a threshold for the percentage of people living in a city who are minorites. And once a city crosses that threshold, white people start leaving. In terms of white flight, Rothstein says, "There's a real difference between a school with 5% minorities and a school with 6%."

These are the people you work with. The white people who would leave a school district if it wasn't white enough. No one wears a percentage sign on their shirt to let you know where they fall on the continuum of racist thinking, but we all fall somewhere.

I have written before about how subtle discrimination is. It's not okay to be racist in an overt way. There is wide cultural agreement on this. Which means that the racism goes to places that are hard to pinpoint. For example, I reported that when we read resumes, we judge people who might be African American more harshly.

The advertising industry is so suspect in its hiring practices that the New York City Commission on Human Rights recently issued subpoenas in an investigation of systemic discrimination against African Americans. And an interview in CareerJournal unveils a long list of excuses the advertising industry uses to explain the lack of African Americans in high level positions.

In a new twist to an old story, Miriam Jordan reports in CareerJournal that employers are coming up with new reasons to discriminate against African Americans: "There is a perception that Latinos closer to the immigrant experience might work harder than black persons," says Joe Hicks, who is African-American and vice president of Community Advocates, a nonpartisan group that aims to advance interracial dialogue.

So what can a white person do to improve the situation? Start with herself, of course. The more you understand your racial prejudices, the less they will show up at work. In the mean time, I polled a few people, and here are a some annoying things that white people say that African Americans wish they wouldn't.

1. Don't praise someone as articulate, as if you're surprised. There has been a lot of dicusssion about Joe Biden calling Barak Obama articulate. My friend says he has experienced this problem many times in his life, but would never come out an say anything because he'd be labeled "too sensitive." He quotes Michael Dyson, professor at the University of Pennsylvania: "Historically, articulate was meant to signal the exceptional Negro. The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate."

2. Don't discuss politics. It is a mine field of offensive and inappropriate comments. The number of political issues that have underlying race issues makes politics too risky to contend with at work.

3. Don't make racial jokes or comments against any race. Often whites think it's okay to joke with a black coworker about Asian, Latinos, etc. This makes most people of color uncomfortable and also think "If whites joke with me about Asians/Latinos, etc. what are they doing when they're with Asians/Latinos?"

4. Don't say "you people" when referring to people of another ethnicity. It creates a division between you and the other person where a division is not necessary.

And finally, here's a story someone sent me to illustrate how careless white people are at the office: "I recently changed positions within the same organization and willingly took a job in an office in a predominately black neighborhood. Whenever we have joint office meetings or we are in the main office only my white counterparts ask, "How are things going over there (code for "I wouldn't be caught dead over there, do you feel safe, has your car been stolen?") This question comes from people who never spoke to me before, and it was an every-meeting type question. In one meeting I responded with, "I don't have a problem working around or with black people." No one has asked since.

When I was younger and traveled more for business, I got hit on by just about every man I traveled with. This is not uncommon among women I know.

Of course, most times it's not that bad. The guy usually looks a little silly, and the next day the girl usually feels a little more powerful in the client meeting because her counterpart showed such pathetic judgment the night before.

Please do not write to me about how this situation is sex harassment and can get very bad and whatever. I know. But let's be real, men hit on their travel partners all the time and it's mostly just a fumbling bunch of absurdities like, "I've never asked anyone this before…." Or "I'm so attracted to you I can't help myself…" Lines the men think are original but actually are standard fare for dark corners of hotel lobbies.

Last week, I was in New York City to talk to editors about my book (coming out in May, hooray). Each day, I looked really good for the meetings, and I had a swanky hotel room and an expense account to boot.

Now I can see why affairs happen so often on business trips. If you are single, a business trip is just an extension of your single life, and if you don't sleep with random guys in real life, it's unappealing to do it on a business trip.

But if you're married with children, a business trip is like an escape to Disney Land. There are no kids to feed and bathe. There's no husband for annoying talks about checkbook balances and the next day's school lunch. There is only freedom and fun. And what does anyone want to do with freedom and fun except have sex?

I wish I could tell you that I'm too busy with my great career and big ideas to think about a little one-night stand. But really, I was consumed with the idea.

A lot of people send emails to me to ask about issues related to marriage. Mostly because people who have a career and young kids don't really have time for the marriage. And they think that because I have career advice I have marriage advice. And I do, sort of: It's very hard to do kids, career and marriage. And be on guard that often the easiest thing to let go is the marriage.

I know what you'll tell me: The best thing to do to save the marriage is date night. But the thing about date night is that the best time to do it is on a business trip. When there are only inappropriate dates.

Instead of acting on my fantasies and destroying my marriage, I did what all good journalists do: buried myself in data gathering.

This cheating issue is widespread: Sixty percent of men and forty percent of women have an affair during marriage. And these are not long-term events. Ten percent don't even last twenty-four hours. This screams business trip to me, but maybe because I was just on one.

The Des Moines Register reported, in an article that I can't link to, that thirty-two percent of people feel like they are married to their co-workers, and in fact, people do better work when they have this sort of relationship with a co-worker. So it's not that big a leap to cross the great divide and suggest a rendez-vous while you're in a grand hotel.

Oprah's in-house therapist has addressed this situation — where you feel very close to someone you work with all the time. And, in a shocking turn of events, she recommends that you don't act on it. (For you pragmatists, the increase in workplace performance you get from feeling very close to a co-worker dissolves when you start swapping spit.)

Of course people ignore this advice in droves, and forty percent of workers actually have an on-going relationship with someone at work. (Considering that? Here are some tips to do it without killing your career.)

Based on my experience and my research, I am declaring that it's normal to think about having a one-night stand with a co-worker, and it's normal for your mind to travel to fantasy land on a business trip. I used to think it wasn't. But it is. I think if we all admit this, we can all get good at having the feelings and not considering the option of acting on them – which would not only help save marriages but also help stop sex harassment at work.

Chances are half of your colleagues at work are desperate for a nap. Many adults don't get enough sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation, the problem particularly "acute" among younger workers: one in three struggle to get out of bed each morning.

What's keeping them up at night? Not work worries. Marie Gagnon, 24, is a regular at Rumor, a nightclub in Boston. Though she's employed in a 9-to-5 job at an insurance company, she can't imagine staying home every weeknight: "I don't want to be bored," she says. "I love the energy of Rumor."

What time does it get rolling? Midnight. Gagnon says clubgoers with jobs go home at 2 a.m. and the college kids stay later. Maybe they'd all get to bed earlier if they knew that research shows lack of sleep can make you dumb and fat.

Those who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night might as well be drunk. The Sleep Foundation determined that people who remain awake for 18 hours straight function similar to drinkers with a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent, the level states use to determine whether someone is legally impaired to operate a car.

And, when you don't get enough sleep your brain starts thinking it needs to store food, according to Eve Van Cauter, a researcher at the University of Chicago. Leptin, a hormone that helps regulate hunger and body fat, drops from lack of sleep, triggering hunger.

What to do about sleepiness? The most obvious solution is to change your lifestyle. "I used to try to go out every night in college," says Gagnon, "but now that I'm in the real world, I've cut back." Her job as a claims representative starts at 9 a.m. She says as long as she's home by 2 a.m., she can get to work on time. This leaves her short of sleep — most people need seven hours a night. To compensate, Gagnon sometimes puts in longer hours and drinks coffee — "five or six cups at a minimum."

But this is a risky strategy; after so much caffeine, the body's response to the stimulating effects of coffee can become dulled. Which is why even after six cups, she still feels a slump in the afternoon: "I usually have to go in early the next day or stay later to manage my workload."

Sleep researchers advocate alternatives to Gagnon's strategy. "A bright light will keep you awake," says Daniel Kripke, professor of psychiatry at University of California San Diego. For those of you in the light bulb market, look for "a bright white or bluish light. Fluorescent without ultraviolet." Administer the light to yourself in the morning, when it is most effective in the battle against sleepiness. But "it probably has some benefits if you use it later in the day, too," he says.

Napping works. However, napping is considered an office disruption, so you might have to book a windowless conference room to get away with this one. But a nap is well worth the risk. It will rescue your lagging performance, according to Sara Mednick, sleep researcher at the Salk Institute.

Mednick currently is studying two groups of people in her lab. Those in one group do not get a nap, and their performances decreased as the day progresses. The other group napped and their performance not only did not go down, but it sometimes goes up after the nap. Mednick, not surprisingly, is gung-ho for naps, and in fact, she says, you can actually train yourself to be the kind of napper who can shut your eyes for 10 minutes and wake up refreshed.

"You only need to practice for a couple of weeks," says Mednick. Alas, the chronic under-sleeper probably does not have the discipline to nap efficiently and so risks waking up feeling more tired than before.

Luckily, there's the caffeine nap. Caffeine can clear your body of the chemical adenosine, which makes us want to sleep. Researchers at the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in England were investigating ways to prevent drivers from falling asleep at the wheel and causing car crashes. They found that the best way to regain alertness if you feel like you're falling asleep is to chug a cup of coffee and then immediately take a 15-minute nap. The idea is to get the sleep in before the caffeine takes effect. So you have to start napping right after that cup of coffee — or a can of caffeinated soda — goes down. Not a bad solution, but certainly not long term.

The only long-term solution is to get a regular seven hours of sleep. So among all this research, the advice that stands out as the best is from Kripke: "If you don't like how you feel the next day, then don't stay up too late."

Most of us will change careers. Most young people will change careers at least three times — after they find one, when they are thirty. So work life is really about a series of careers, and we all need to get good at the process of choosing a new career. We all need to get comfortable with the inherent uncertainty during the process.

Here are nine ways you can make choosing a career less stressful:

1. Squash perfectionist tendencies and get comfortable in gray areas.
It's fine to be lost and not sure what you're doing, so don't rush yourself to solve the problem. Maybe you can just look at the problem differently, and it won't look so bad. And, don't feel like you need to get the right answer in your hunt for the right career. Being right is not important. Just do your best and see what comes of it.

2. Don't wait for a new career to start being creative.
Every job is creative. Every job presents problems that need solving, and problem solving is a creative act. If what you mean by creativity is that you want to paint with watercolors, then go home at night and do that. Why do you need to get paid to make art? It's enjoyable and fulfilling and a fine thing to do in your free time, even if you have only fifteen minutes of free time a day. Raymond Carver is famous for writing short, short stories because he didn't have enough time in the day to write long.

3. Stop looking for a career to save your life.
A job is not a life. A job is something to do with your time that is rewarding and fosters personal growth. A career can't make you happy. Relationships will make you happy. Figure out what you can get from a career and what you can't. Once you recognize that you will rescue you, not your career, there's a lot less pressure in the career hunt realm.

4. Relax about the career choices you make.
Try something. If you don't like it, try another thing. There are not rules that say you have to stay in the career you choose. In fact, moving from one career to another at a breakneck pace til you love something might be good for you, and taking ten years to figure something out is fine. The life or death decision is about living below your means. As long as you do this, you have lots of choices in life. If you don't live below your means, you get stuck in a career.

5. Don't wait until you know yourself.
You never really know yourself. It's a process. If it's a precondition for finding a career, then you could be learning about yourself forever and never feel ready to choose a career. Forget the soul-search and just try something. Ironically, the best way to learn about yourself is to do things and see if you like them, so the inactive, soul-searching time is, in some ways, counter-productive. Try testing the waters with a lot of lower risk moves, instead.

6. Stop choosing dead-end fields.
All things being equal, you're better off choosing a career in a field that is growing, not shrinking. Once you identify your talents, focus them on a field that has a future. If you write well, go into interactive marketing — one of the fastest growing fields — and not print journalism, which is in trouble. If you like to help people, go into nursing –huge demand, and not centralized, slow-moving nonprofits, which are falling out of favor with donors.

7. Don't overlook the good points of the job you have.
You can save the world from almost any job, you can shift from a dead end to a hot spot in almost any field, and you can learn and grow if you get good at managing your boss. These are all things you can control. You don't need a specific career to accomplish these things. So maybe you don't even need to pick a new career.

8. Make a lifestyle choice before you make a career choice.
Figure out what you want your life to look like, and then choose a career that will enable that life. If you don't know what you want from life, how can you possibly know what you want from a career? What we want from life might change. That's okay. You have to start somewhere. So figure out what you want, and an try out careers that might give you that. If you change what you want from life, you can change your career.

9. Talk about yourself the way you want to be.
To figure out what sort of career will suit you, try talking about yourself like you're already there and see how it feels. We intuitively know what stories feel right, and we can make a career change more efficiently if we create stories about our process. You might actually surprise yourself by figuring out what you want to do by figuring out what story seems natural to tell.

Here's what a bad boss is: Someone who lies, cheats, steals, or touches you after you've told him, in writing, not to. If you have one of these bosses, quit complaining and start applying for other jobs.

All other bosses aren't truly bad — you're just bad at managing them.

One of the most important parts of being competent at work is managing up: Making sure you give your boss what he or she needs, and then getting what you need in return. That's no one's responsibility but your own.

Here are 10 ways to manage your boss:

Read the column at Yahoo! Fianance