Eighty percent of adults with Asperger Syndrome do not have full-time work. This not because they can’t do the work. It’s that they can’t manage to be socially acceptable while they get the work done. ‘
Countless studies show people would rather have pleasant and personable co-workers than a co-worker who is always right. I try [...]

The best writers in the history of the world are graduating from college, right now. So everyone can just shut up about how no one can write anymore.
Newsflash: No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests [...]

A lot of people ask me how I manage to keep a job when I have Asperger syndrome. So I'm doing a series this week on the topic, because it’s true that most people with Asperger’s are not doing well at work. The work place rewards social skills, and people with Asperger’s have a social [...]

It’s time to admit that Take Your Child to Work Day is an outdated relic of 1970s feminism, and we can put the whole thing to rest.
Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. [...]

There’s a huge market for telling women how to be happier. Maybe it’s because women read more than men. Or maybe it’s the discrepancy that women know when they are overweight and men don’t. Or the discrepancy that most men think they are good parents and most women think they need to be better parents. [...]

Last year, the most commented-on post here was Five Things People Say about Christmas that Drive Me Nuts. And the year before that, the piece that made the most newspaper editors cancel my column was, Christmas at the Office is Bad for Diversity.
In general, my point on the Christmas stuff is that religious holidays [...]

It's a season of joy, right? You are probably thinking that you can count on my blog posts to be a respite from seasonal joy. But still, I'm susceptible to peer pressure. Mostly because I think it's an obligation of a friend to be sort of cheery. Because cheeriness is contagious. And on some level, [...]

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, and you can bet that there will be no big financial announcements. This is because Jews make up a disproportionately huge number of people in finance. So when the Jews take off work for Yom Kippur, there is not enough liquidity in the financial markets for anything really big to happen. [...]

Here’s a guest post from Carmen Van Kerckhove. I have learned so much about race from her blog, Racialicious, that I asked her to write five tips for dealing with race at work. She always surprises me and this is no exception.

Rule 1:  Don't be colorblind.
People say this all the time: "I don’t care if people are [...]

I used to write about my brother Erik a lot. I wrote about how I retooled his resume to make his dead-end job at Blockbuster into the perfect collection of achievements. Then I let him guest post while he was getting ready to quit the investment banking job he was sick of.
Now he's at Microsoft [...]

Did you see the rally for Obama in Los Angeles last Sunday? It rocked my world: Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and California First Lady Maria Shriver talking to a packed stadium at UCLA. (Watch the video here.)
For one thing, Michelle Obama is a great speaker in her own right and she is teaching us how to talk [...]

Christmas does not belong in the workplace because it undermines diversity at work. And businesses that promote diversity have more profits in the long run than companies that do not have a diverse workforce.
A big problem with Christmas is that those of us who have no reason to celebrate it have to spend a month [...]

One of the biggest opportunities today is working in overseas markets.
These jobs are rising fast as the trend toward globalization continues, and the Harvard Business Review estimates such positions will skyrocket as baby boomers retire; few of the younger generation are willing to take on the long hours these jobs typically entail.
This means lots of opportunity [...]

Ryan and Ryan P found this great test by JT O'Donnell to find out personality type. Of course, we have each taken tons of personality tests, but what I really liked about JT's test is that it was only twenty questions, and it revealed each of the three of us perfectly.
The test immediately explained why [...]

This is a guest post from Nina Smith whose blog is Queercents.
I was out at work long before I had the courage to come out to my parents. As a twentysomething marketing coordinator, I would often shoot the breeze in my boss' office, and during one such gab-fest she asked if I was gay.
I [...]

Last week I was on a radio show that I've been on a bunch of times. It is a major radio station in a major city. The host likes me because I say inflammatory things like, "If your boss is terrible, stop complaining and start looking for another job." Then listeners call in and tell [...]

Just after I redesigned my blog last March, Cory Miller sent an email to me giving me some suggestions on how to tweak the layout to get more traffic.
My first instinct was to delete the mail because I had just spent $3000 on a blog design and I didn’t want to hear it was already [...]

At some point in our lives we each have felt surrounded by people who see the world incorrectly. Sometimes it's the accountant who works for a management team that doesn't understand numbers. Or it's the artist who works for a marketing team that doesn't understand font. Sometimes we feel so certain that we are right and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]