We picked Sparky at the pound because my son wanted a lap dog. I am not a fan of lap dogs. They scream Paris Hilton to me. A study at the University of California at San Diego confirms our hunches that people pick dogs that resemble them, and sure enough, the rat terrier is like my son in that they are both delicate and jumpy. I think I am more labrador—strong and fun—so I thought I was being an extra good mom getting a dog I would never choose myself.

At the dog pound, Sparky sat in my son’s lap, but as soon as we got him home, he looked for larger laps. It turns out, Sparky prefers adults. At first we thought it was my son’s jumpiness. We told the kids to be calm around the dog.

But the dog got snappier as the week went on. And growly.

During this time, however, the Farmer and I were becoming attached to him. Sparky jumped into our laps every chance he got, and his rat terrier nature meant that  he would find a snuggly part for his nose every time he sat down. He is kissy and cuddly and loving. To adults.

So I said we had to give him back. I am mercenary in this way. Very practical. The point was to get my son a dog because dogs are calming for people with Aspergers. And the dog hates kids, so the dog has to go.

The Farmer, who does not have Aspergers, fell in love with the dog. And the Farmer, who said when I met him that he did not want animals in the house, now proposed that we get two dogs. One for the adults and one for the kids.

So, the Farmer was at my goat mentor’s house, and she needed to get rid of her dog because he bit a goat. The dog was big and good with kids, so the Farmer brought him home as a surprise: Max.

If Max and the Farmer were in that University of California study, everyone could have pegged them as a pair. Max is strong, sturdy, a little scraggly and has a sort of a slouch like he holds the weight of the world on his shoulders. Just like the Farmer.

It turns out that Max wants to be petted every second. He wants to sit in the kids’ laps. He follows the kids around. And, the truth is he has no interest in the goats—he just wanted someone to play with.

Sparky sees all the attention that Max gets, and it turns out Sparky can be nice to kids after all. He doesn’t want to be left out.

So now, everyone is happy. Sparky is nice to the kids, and Max is no longer nipping goats to get attention.

And I can’t help noticing that this illustrates three truths about hiring and firing employees:

1. Initial selection is largely dependent on being similar to the hiring manager. The term for choosing people (and dogs) who are like you is homophily. Miller McPhearson, a sociologist at University of Arizona, confirms that race and ethnic background are the biggest factors in this selection process. But those of you who are upper-middle class have a different set of hiring criteria to meet. Lauren Rivera, at Kellog School of Management, shows that when it comes to the upper-middle class, hiring managers discriminate based on extracurricular activities and how you dress rather than on race and ethnicity.

2. If the boss likes an employee, it doesn’t matter how terrible he is to everyone else. The employee will not get fired. So often people write to me to tell me that their co-worker is terrible but never gets fired. This is how the world works. It's such a ubiquitous problem that Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford Business School, wrote the book The No Asshole Rule to quantify the costs of keeping a jerk instead of firing him. (The cost, by the way, is about $150,000 year.) The only thing you can do is work to become as well liked by your boss as the terrible co-worker is.

3.  Bringing in someone new to the team can make everyone change, in unexpected ways. People are always responding to each other—everyone changes as other people enter the picture. Sometimes this means the leader introduces someone who is not as talented as others, but has a good personality, to help the team. Sometimes you have to experiment. We got lucky with Max. Which is good, because I don’t think I could handle a third dog.

Photos by Melissa Sconyers.

A survey from Deloitte ushers in this decade of trust. Deloitte reports that most people who are job hunting are doing it because they don’t trust their employer. And most Human Resources executives think the number-one factor in turnover right now is transparency—less transparency means more turnover.

When it comes to transparency, corporations are ahead of individuals, but only by necessity. Soon, though, people who are not transparent will not make it in the workforce. Here are ways to think about transparency to make your own career path one of transparency and trust:

1. Transparency is about doing good.

Omidyar Network (a nonprofit funded by the guy who invented ebay) just funded a company that helps government move toward transparency. It’s significant that the company is named SeeClickFix—government transparency is not about finger pointing and sensationalism. Clearly, it should be about improving the lives of citizens, fixing what can be fixed.

But personal transparency is easily misunderstood. There are so many blog posts about people dumping their life story, their darkest secret, or their second-best-friend’s darkest secret. The posts are predictable and boring, and most importantly, not what transparency should be, because it is not aimed at helping other people. It’s aimed at helping the writer only.

2. Transparency has a goal of kindness

I was having lunch with AJ Jacobs a few years ago, as he was doing the antics he wrote about in his hilarious book, The Year of Living Biblically. He was telling me about how he was testing out the Ten Commandments: specifically, thou shall not lie.

As someone who lives in a family full of Asperger’s, I know that an instinct to lie is actually a gift. The instinct to lie is what allows us to think through the following steps in a conversation:

1. Consider the other person’s feelings
2. Empathize
3. Think of something to say that is not a lie but does not hurt anyone unkindly.

That process requires us to cultivate an ability to lie, which, in turn, cultivates an ability to self-edit. There should have been a commandment: Thou shall self-edit, because it’s kind.

So there is a moral obligation that goes along with transparency. Transparency is not a carte blanche to disregard peoples’ feelings in the name of truth. In fact, that is not transparency, that is Asperger’s. And it’s a debilitating way to live because it’s so completely anti-social.

Here’s an example of someone acting unkindly in the name of transparency: A student at the University of California –Davis veterinary school had a baby mid-term. A professor asked the class presidents to help him run a poll to determine her fate as a student in his class.

Here is the email that went out to the students.

Dear Colleagues,

One of our classmates recently gave birth and will be out of class for an unknown period of time. This means she will undoubtedly miss one, or more, or all quizzes in VMD 444.  Dr. Feldman is not sure how to handle this and has requested the class give input and vote.  He has provided us with 6 options on which to vote and is open to any other ideas you may have.  Most likely a CERE poll will be up next week and a voting will close no later than Wednesday.  If you have other suggestions please email them to Dan or I ASAP. We will alert you to the opening of voting. Below are listed the options that Dr. Feldman has suggested. Please reserve comment on these options and provide us your opinion on them by voting when the time comes.  Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

a) automatic A final grade

b) automatic B final grade

c) automatic C final grade

d) graded the same as everyone else: best 6 quiz scores out of a possible 7 quiz scores (each quiz only given only once in class with no repeats)

e) just take a % of quiz scores (for example: your classmate takes 4 quizzes, averages 9/10 points = 90% = A)

f) give that student a single final exam at the end of the quarter (however this option is only available to this one student, all others are graded on the best 6 quiz scores and the % that results)

Please let us know if you have other thoughts on how to handle this situation and please keep your eye out for the upcoming vote.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Your Presidents

The professor is Edward Feldman DVM, Chair of the Department of Medicine & Epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. He has confirmed that he thinks this process was appropriate. Here is the full story, reported on ScienceBlogs.

This is not transparency or collaboration. It’s witch hunting. Know the difference.

3. Transparency is being a real person.

Most of you know that transparency is a trend. But many of you lie, and not to be kind. You say what you think you should say. Like the blog post about how you are leaving your job and how great your job was and how sad you are to go, when everyone at your company knows you hate your boss and that’s why you left after less than a year. It doesn’t mean you can’t write a goodbye post. It just means you have to do it in a more honest way. Like, thank specific people for specific things instead of writing the post like it was the best job of your life.

Here’s another example. Periodically, I email women who publicly bash me for post on Tech Crunch: Women Don't Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children. For those of you who didn’t read it, I wrote that women don’t get VC funding because women don’t ask for it. And the reason women don’t ask for it is because you can’t have a life if you run a VC-backed company. Women want to have a life outside of work.

In the 5oo comments on TechCrunch, and subsequent 100 posts bitching about my posts, many women tell me they are doing their family and their company and they’re happy and that I’m demotivating to women. But my point, which many people miss, is that VC backed companies are very different than non-VC-backed companies.

Here’s what I get in return. That women who did not understand the distinction apologize to me, and women who did understand the distinction have lost their marriages while they’ve been running their VC-backed company and taking care of their kids.

Don’t argue with me on this, ok? I’m right. The reason you don’t know I’m right is because women don’t announce they sacrificed living with their children’s father in order to run a startup. Who would announce that besides me?

My problem though, is that women are willing to lie about what life is like for them in order to tell other women that they “have it all” and so can everyone else. I get angry just writing this. The biggest secret in business today is that the divorce rate for women with young kids running VC-backed startups is nearly 100%. And the reason I can report this statistic with such confidence is because the number of women you need to ask to get the statistic is so small.

So I think the worst offenders of transparency are the ones who claim it as their value and then lie. To themselves, and to everyone else.

You do not need to be transparent at the expense of your true self. You don’t need to be transparent about stuff you can’t personally cope with. But you do need to be completely honest with yourself about why you draw the boundaries that you draw. Transparency is about personal honesty first, public honesty second.

My grandma spent a lot of time telling me I was special. That’s exactly how she’d say it: “You’re special.” And I used to think she was lying, saying that to make me feel better. Now that I’ve read some parenting books I know that you should give specific reasons that your kids are special. As they pop up. Or something. Anyway, her telling me I was special actually made me feel like I was less special. Like she knew I knew I wasn’t and she was trying to fix it.

Of course, this is from my childhood full of trying to get my parents to love me. And of course, this is a problem with the farmer because he married me because he thinks I’m special and I still have a problem feeling special.

I am not sure I can ever fix this stuff. I’m trying. For one thing, I realize that spending time with a person is what makes them feel special, rather than telling them they are special. So I think part of the reason I like the farm so much is that the lifestyle is all about spending time with each other. For example, we go out to our forest (a five-minute walk from our house) once or twice a week.

I know the kids feel special that we are with them because when I first met the farmer, I felt special being there with him. There is nothing to do, really, where we live.

And there are drawbacks to that, for sure, but I like that we just have to be here. Together. It’s not necessarily quality time. It’s just time.

I’m starting to think that there’s no difference between time and quality time when it comes to feeling special. You can’t shortcut it by adding quality to the front.

I was really struck by the book, Abolishing the Performance Review, by Samuel Culbert, professor at the UCLA school of business. Culbert says that complimenting someone you manage does not produce better work from them. Rather, it’s sort of a shortcut to good management that doesn’t work. Like adding quality in front of time for parenting.

This makes sense to me. Because people compliment you only on stuff they think you don’t know. Like my grandma telling me I’m special.

And hearing compliments about stuff I do know—that I’m a good writer, for instance—does not help me. Helpful is someone telling me how to be a better writer still. For instance, an editor told me that I needed to use more research when I used only stories of my life with no supporting research. (And, look, here is research to show that people like research.)

So the constructive advice helps me do better. Compliments don’t make me better. And telling me what I do wrong and nothing else—well, of course that doesn’t help me or anyone because no one tries to do stuff wrong. They just don’t know what else to do, which takes us back to a need for constructive advice.

So—this management book about how you should not compliment people expecting improvement to ensue—I wasn’t going to write about it. It struck me as stupid, because I thought how I love being managed with compliments that tell me something I didn’t know. But actually, I realize now that what I love is someone who tells me how to be better. And all managers should be like that.

It’s fundamentally very caring: To take the time to see what someone is doing poorly and give them advice on how to be better. It’s much more caring than a simple compliment or mere criticism. So really, this comes back to what I’ve always thought: good management is about truly caring.

Too often people talk about time management in an abstract, detached way: Work a four-hour week, disavow your possessions, try polyphasic sleep. But all of time management comes down, really, to your heart, not your to do list. Figure out a new way to manage time, one that divides the day for doing good, instead of just doing.

To confront this issue—as a parent, a manager, or anything else—is the crux of adult life. Who are your relationships with? Who do you care about most? And how do you deal with the heartbreak of not being able to give enough time?

I asked the farmer if rodeos are bad for the animals.

He said, “City people probably think so. But most farmers don’t.”

He told me that if I really hated it, we could leave.

I really hated it before there were any animals. Before there were animals there was the flag, rising above the dirt ring, and the announcer saying everyone should sing the Star Spangled Banner to honor “the flag that protects our troops, and our churches and our great country.”

I looked over at the farmer for churches, and before I could roll my eyes, the announcer said, “Everyone please rise in the name of Jesus and sing the Star Spangled Banner.”

I told my kids to stay seated.

The farmer stayed seated out of solidarity even though he hates standing out. It was a great moment of compromise for us.

We watched the rodeo. There was a clown. The kids did not quite know what was going on and they wanted to know why the cowboys had weird clothes. But then Ronald McDonald came out — right into the bull ring. The kids recognized him immediately, and then they realized the clown was not a cowboy; with Ronald McDonald present, the world seemed to fall into place.

Then out came the animals.

In between cowboys falling violently to the ground, the announcer would say jokes like, “My girlfriend says she wants to get married. I told her I hope she finds someone nice.”

The theme of the evening, in general, was “real men get thrown off bulls and treat women like crap.”

Until the women came out. They were acrobats on fast running horses. Sort of like the clowns, only dressed like Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. The most special time, I think, was when two girls did tricks on one horse. The girls did not share a horse because the tricks are more difficult that way, it was more like the girls shared a horse to make you think they'd be available for a threesome after the show.

Luckily, this was lost on my sons. And the farmer acknowledged that this was not a family values kind of thing.

Okay. So we stayed. And then, the clown started talking about doctors. He said there are 120,000 doctors in the US and there are 70,000 accidental deaths a year. And there are 80 million gun owners in the US, and there are 12,000 accidental deaths a year. Then he shouted out, “So doctors are more dangerous than guns! So Washington, keep your hands off our guns and our health care!”

I looked at the kids. They were concentrating on their popcorn.

Then, out of nowhere, the clown brought out a wig, that had dreadlocks, and he put on a Rastafarian hat, and he started pretending that he was Barack Obama. He said, "I feel so presidential." And he made jokes about whether Obama is a US citizen.

Why am I telling you this?

First of all, it made me feel lonely. I have heard the doctor/gun owner argument before, but not in a stadium, in Madison, WI, which is one of the most left-leaning cities in the country. And I know there is racism in this country. But I can’t believe that not a single person in that stadium yelled out anything after a racist joke. I would expect, actually, that people would boo and hiss and throw things into the ring. But no one said a word.

I felt lonely that I live in a city where this could happen. I wish I could find a place where I feel like I fit in. I think I find it, and then I don’t. And really, how could I even think that I’d fit in at a rodeo? But I kind of thought the place would be full of people like me and the farmer. Now I think I don’t even know what that means.

Another reason the rodeo makes me sad is that McDonald’s sponsors it. My ticket stub says “All-Star Rodeo Challenge. Pre-show: McDonald’s Cowboys 4 Kids”. Somehow the whole thing is more upsetting because it’s sanctioned by McDonald’s. And they know better.

My company, Brazen Careerist, just launched a company section in our social network. The reason we did that is because according to Cone, 50% of generation Y communicate with companies through social media. And Jeremy Owyang, from Forrester Research reports that, "In approximately two years social networks will be more powerful than corporate web sites. Brands will serve community interests and grow based on community advocacy."

Today, young people see corporate brands as an extension of their identity—this is why Facebook has been so successful with corporate fan pages – young people want to express themselves by linking themselves to corporate brands they like.

And, people who manage their careers well end up paying more attention to a company’s reputation for caring about people and community than what any given job description is. After all, a job description can change the day you walk in the door, but how a company participates in the world around it is not likely to change quickly.

Okay. So. I confess to being relatively close to the McDonald’s brand. I didn’t use to be. I never ate at McDonald’s in my life until I moved to Madison. But in Madison, it’s a long, cold winter, and McDonald’s has great indoor playgrounds, all over the Madison area. And each is different and fun in it’s own way. So we tour them all winter.

Also, now that I understand the beef industry a little better, I understand that McDonald’s single handedly cornered the beef industry, yes, but also listened to consumer outcry over animal conditions, and meat quality, and improved both (by hiring Temple Grandin)

So I like McDonald’s. But today, I can tell you that if I had a job at McDonald’s, I’d be lonely. Because they sponsored an event that teaches kids prejudice and hate and racism. And if companies want to attract good employees, they need to be good corporate citizens. Those are the type of companies we want to work for.

One of the most important changes in work life is that we do not define our career by working for one company—we change jobs too frequently. Today, we define ourselves by the integrity with which we manage our career. That requires working with companies we respect. The integrity of individual companies matters more today than it used to—it affects the bottom line for those companies on both the consumer side and the employee side. We watch corporate brands closely, to see how we will use them to extend our own brand.

Finally, since it’s Martin Luther King Day, and since Psychology Today just published a study that says people feel better if they do an act of activism, I have a proposal:

We should each twitter today:

@McDonalds Racism is not okay and neither is hate. Please stop your support of the All-Star Rodeo. http://bit.ly/4AiXT1

UPDATE! Here's a response from McDonald's:

Hi Penelope,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This appears to be a local pre-show program in support of a local Ronald McDonald House Charities fundraiser. Rest assured, McDonald's does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. We are currently looking into this matter.

Jessica Thompson

Manager, U.S. Communications

McDonald's USA

But what we have is actually a semantic problem rather than a leadership problem. The issue is that in the age of the Internet, what it means to be a leader is changing. And we need a new way to talk about leadership so we can talk about identifying leaders.

The old view of leadership is doing it from the top.
To baby boomers, leadership is a game where you try to get to the top and then everyone will follow you. Baby boomers have had to compete forever, for everything, because there were so many of them trying to get on the same “path for success.”

Tammy Erickson’s book, What’s Next Gen X, has lots of fun tidbits about generational conflict. To Gen X she says, “Your expectation to be treated individually – to be allowed to play the game by our own rules – contrasts with boomers’ willingness to play by established rules in competition for individual rewards.”

Baby boomers competed for a big salary which they translated to a visual trophy: a McMansion. This gives us a visual for the lack of interest Gen X has in Baby Boomer style managment: McMansions for sale with no buyers.

Leadership style is generational.
Other generations do not compete with near the gusto of baby boomers. And we have, in our midst, a generation primed for leadership, faced down by a generation that does not understand that leadership is changing.

People lead in the way they would like to follow. This is why Gen X is notoriously hands-off in the leadership space; Gen X doesn’t actually care who is in charge as long as the work gets done.

Like Gen X, Gen Y is uncomfortable with ranking and hierarchy, but for different reasons. Gen Y understands teamwork better than Baby Boomers or Gen Xers. Gen Y spent years being on a soccer team where everyone wins, and in study groups where people actually help each other. Leadership according to Gen Y: everyone is working together, in a non-competitive way.

Beware of BS books about women leaders.
Here’s one that just came through my email: The Next Generation of Women Leaders. The book features the baby boomer generation of women leaders. There are women who climbed the corporate ladder like it’s 1970. There are women who did not have kids. There are women who got MBAs it their late twenties when it has been shown that this is a good career move for men, but not for women who want to have children.

In general, I think you should stay away from most business stuff targeted at women. And this is no exception: Look for the next generation of women leaders among people who are leading collaboratively, in a non-linear way. Because while men and women can both lead this way, no woman ever got to the top of anything, with kids, without a innovative plan that relied on lots of people to help. (Cathy Benko's book on Mass Career Customization a great starting point for non-linear career advice.)

The way to be a good leader is to lead from the middle.
The Internet has changed the idea of authority. The old ways of gaining authority, by jumping through corporate or academic hoops have been superceeded by the democratized and ubiquitous access to information. Changes in authority necessarily lead to changes in leadership.

I recently heard the term  “leading from the middle” (thanks, Grady). There’s a lot written about it. Here’s one book: 360 Degree Leader: Developing your influence from anywhere in the organization.

And, lest you think trade magazines are dumping ground sub-par writing, check out Furniture World. Dan Caughlin writes about leading from the middle: "To be a leader, take a stand on a given issue, decide what you believe in, and work to influence how other people think in the way you believe to be most effective.”

I like this thinking – that leaders are giving ideas rather than giving orders. The idea that new leadership is about influencing rather than dominating makes sense because the generation that grew up on the Internet - Gen Y – is better than everyone else at expressing ideas as an influencer.

And I also like this because at Brazen Careerist we give people the opportunity to build a profile page that aims to make you known for your ideas, and not just your resume – which gives more meaning to your career and allows people to hire you for your real potential to contribute.

Get a tribe.
Seth Godin reshapes the idea of leadership with his book, Tribes: We You to Lead Us. At a recent TED conference, Seth talked about Tribes. He explains that the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Tribes come together based on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change.”

While I would never be called early adopter of technology (I didn’t try twitter til it was in Time magazine) I like experimenting with tools for building tribes. My top three tools are this blog, my twitter feed, and my group on Brazen Careerist. All three allow me to shape a conversation, but also learn from the conversation, which is what leading from the middle is all about.

A lot of times I write about how if you are not learning something new when you write a blog post, then you are not writing anything that other people will learn from. I think this is true with leading, as well. If you are not inspired in a fresh way from the middle, then no one else in the middle will be inspired.

That’s why collaborative leadership is exciting to me. As a Gen X-er it’s hard for me to want to be part of a group. But as an intellectual, isolation scares me, and I love the idea of collaborative learning, which is what good leadership involves.

But I couldn’t be happier. For one thing, it’s a sign that my company, Brazen Careerist, is doing well. Remember when the company was running out of money and my electricity was getting turned off? There was no one worrying then that I was the wrong person for the CEO position. No one cared because it looked like we were going under.

But then the media started talking about how we could be LinkedIn for Gen Y and we started moving fast. I don’t worry about of money anymore, and we are moving at a faster speed because we can see where we are going, how we’ll make money, and how we’ll grow the community.

1. Know where your strengths are.
The thing that makes me great is my writing. I have spent my whole life writing, constantly trying to figure out how to earn money writing. My favorite thing I’ve ever written is this blog. I adore the conversation, I adore the format, the never-ending research, and the self-referential links, because that’s how my mind works: connecting random stuff together all the time trying to figure out the best path to happiness. Blogging is my dream-come-true media.

But I also love building companies. So I was in heaven for two years turning my blog brand into a social networking company.

I am great in that phase of a business–thinking, philosophizing, finding holes in markets, finding holes in ideas. I never give up. I always have another idea, and I don’t mind feeling lost day after day, week after week.

2. Watch where you gravitate.
But now the company needs to run fast, to execute a model we have confidence in. I am not fast at execution—I do not keep ten thousand things in my head at one time. Here’s a good example: I flew to DC to talk with investors and had about five hours to retool our presentation to incorporate a new marketing plan. I spent two of those hours writing a blog post.

And the more responsibility I had for running a large team, trying to hit many goals at once, the less work I did. Honestly, I just didn’t know what to do. I was outside my core strength.

And I know this:  the first sign that you are outside of your strengths is when you can’t make yourself do the work you need to do.

3. Find people who complement your strengths.
To get out of germination mode and reach our launch, I needed to surround myself with people with complimentary skills. I spent two years looking for business partners before I found Ryan Healy and Ryan Paugh. The way I knew it was a good fit is that as soon as I suggested we partner, they said yes, and then had a million ideas of their own.

Then, when the company was stuck financially, I found a new board member who runs a company with $150 million in revenue. He met with me every week for six months to help me focus on cash flow.

When the company was clearly moving too fast for me to keep up as CEO, I badgered another board member to be CEO. He told me a number of reasons why that wouldn’t work – he had had two huge exits and he wasn’t planning to be CEO again, and another company wanted him to be CEO,  and he wants to watch his kids play football. These are all good reasons that I overcame, and I got him to agree to be interim CEO.

4. Do what differentiates you.
So I’m going to be Chief Evangelist. This is a great job for me, because basically, I keep blogging, and talking to the media, and I go to SXSW with my fake tan.

Most of all, I am certain I’m right about Brazen Careerist. LinkedIn is a place to display your network, not build your network. Facebook is too personal to use as a platform for managing your professional life. The way to build your network is through conversation, and Brazen Careerist is a great tool for that network-building conversation that gets you control over your career. (And hey, you should sign up!) I can talk about this all day.

5. If you really can do the job, you’ll be doing it already.
Recently, I did a live chat on the Washington Post web site, answering fifty questions in sixty minutes about how to use social media to help your career.

The chat was fun, and people asked interesting questions. It was great exposure for Brazen Careerist. But during that hour I couldn’t help wondering: Who is making sure we’re hitting marketing numbers? Who is going to hire the new head of sales?

Now I have an answer: Ryan Healy.

In any office, employees gravitate to the job each should be doing, no matter what the titles are. Sometimes we gravitate to a job and it’s not available, and we go nuts doing something we shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes we gravitate to that job and it’s such a good fit for us that we do it even without a title.

Ryan Healy has been running day-to-day operations of the company for a while now. Without the official authority. Because he’s great at it. While I am thinking of ideas and philosophizing, Ryan is always asking, “What are we getting done?”

A lot of people say they should be doing a job they do not have the authority to do. Here’s some news, though: You’d be doing it already if you were great at it. Ryan Healy is now Chief Operating Officer at Brazen Careerist because he’s already shown he can do the job. That’s how you get serious promotions:  doing the job first, in an outstanding way.

Okay. So what you can expect from me is more blog posts, because when my blog traffic goes up, it’s good for Brazen Careerist. And you can also expect to see less of me feeling frazzled and crazy and fighting with Ryan. Because I’m not anymore. I’m back in my sweet spot, and I feel so lucky to be here.

Amanda is a white-girl rapper, darling of the hipsters, and hot-girl candy for the intelligentsia. Right up my alley, right? My favorite line so far is "My rhymes are painful and fresh/My p*ssy's tastin' the best."

Today, Ryan Healy and I were in D.C. for a marathon strategy meeting with a board member. The second half of the meeting was about marketing strategy. The first half of the meeting was about finding a strategy for ending how Ryan and I are at each others' throats over subjects that having nothing to do with the company.

When the board member left the room for a minute, we had this conversation:

Me: It's so awkward to be left in here with just you.

Ryan: It's not awkward. The meeting is going well.

Me: Right. It could be more awkward. Like when it was us not talking in the airport.

Ryan: At least we weren't sitting together on the plane.

Me: Yeah. I know. I changed my seat so we didn't sit together.

Ryan: Really? So did I.

Then the board guy came back and I bitched about how a vendor we hired was doing no work, and how a year ago I told Ryan we should fire them and then Ryan told me to shut up and so I did.

Then board guy said some obvious things: Ryan should not tell me to shut up, I'm the CEO, and I should take decisive action faster.

Then we all talked more, and Ryan and I started getting along again. And we all plan the next twelve months of the company, getting excited about the community. This is how it always goes with us.

But the whole time, Amanda Blank is running through my head. Why does she say "My rhymes are painful and fresh?" Why are her rhymes painful? I ask myself this. And then I answer philosophical questions about why LinkedIn appeals more to Gen X than Gen Y. And then I go back to Amanda.

She says, "My p*ssy's tastin' the best."

I have never said that. I am too shy. Even when I was her age, and I was running around in a bikini in Budweiser ads for spending cash, I would not have said that.

And this is why her rhymes are painful. Because they exude so much self-confidence. And every regret I can think of is about self-confidence.

There's a really interesting study from Harvard, reported in the Atlantic, that I have spent way too much time reading.

The study follows Harvard students for more than 70 years to determine what makes people happy. Here is something: The fact that people are totally pulled together and focused and in Harvard has no bearing on whether they'll have a happy life.

Here's another thing: There best indicator of if someone will be happy in the future is if you are 47 and close to your siblings. After I read that, I started calling my brothers more often. Really.

But you don't have to wait for your mid-forties to find out if you'll be happy.
Look at how you frame your life now. If you frame things in a positive light, you'll be happier later in life. The optimists win. Plus, the Harvard study finds that people get better at optimism as they grow older. And I believe that. Maybe when I have a startup at 70, I will trust myself enough to act decisively and avoid all management conflicts.

And then this becomes clear to me: I have spent way too much time in my life worrying that I was doing my life wrong. But now I see that I can change. Right now. Right now I can be someone who assumes I am making good decisions. Because we each have to make decisions. So we may as well assume they are good. There's not really anything else to do.

Besides, no one was ever penalized for believing in herself, even if her raps were not safe for work.

My favorite research on this topic is from John Mirowsky, professor of sociology at University of Texas, Austin.

Mirowsky finds that people who work are happier than people who don't because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative. This was true regardless of age and race and the amount of creativity that a given job had.

He concludes that people make choices to be more creative if they are gainfully employed. But also that we have more control than we realize over how creative we make our worklife. He says, "One thing that surprised us was that the daily activities of employed persons are more creative than those of non-employed persons of the same sex, age and level of education."

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you're probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

Here are five ways to make a job more creative. And if you want to be good at managing creative people tell these tips to everyone who reports to you:

1. Change your mindset. So much of solving our own problems is fixing our outlook. Bad situations breed creativity, but only if you feel responsible for fixing your own problems. So stop blaming your job or your boss or your work, and start looking to yourself to make your life more creative.

Also, you should know that it's as misguided to divide the world into creative and non-creative jobs as it is to divide the world into creative and non-creative people. All jobs have opportunities for creativity. Some have more and some have less, but you usually get more opportunities to be creative by demonstrating that you are a creative problem solver over and over again.

This usually means solving problems no one asks you to solve. That's right: Creativity at work is often about finding your own work, finding and solving your own problems. So most of you should blame yourself, not your job, for lack of creativity in your work.

2. Change your response to stress. We tend to respond to stress with routine responses – almost all of them bad for us in some way. Natalie Angier writes in the New York Times about our predisposed type of response to stress: “Regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed…Rodents were cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers." So when you have stress, try a new response and see what happens. No job prevents you from doing that.

3. Change the pace of what you do. John Freeman points out in the Wall Street Journal that changing the pace changes what it's like to do that task. You know this intuitively from dancing or sex. But it's also true of workplace tasks like writing email or cleaning our desk—both of which we often do quickly with no examination of whether or not that is a good pace for that task.

4. Try job hopping. This is a way to change your level of creativity on a larger scale. A big reason that job hopping helps your career is that people who job hop are more engaged in their work. Mirowsky explains this further: "People with a wide variety of jobs manage to find ways to make them creative."

5. Get in a long-term, intimate relationship. Be careful putting too much burden on a job. You need to be creative in order to feel fulfilled, yes. But there are infinite ways to be creative, and they don't necessarily have to relate to your job. Which is why the connection between a job and happiness is totally overrated. Intimate, long-term, intimate relationships matter most – and, not surprisingly, the act of putting two lives into one life requires creativity, always.

(Hat tip: Emily, Caitlin and Jay)

So it’s a safe bet that once you peg a trait in a generation, it likely won’t change much over time. But it could play out in interesting ways over time. Here are some ways that the traits of Generation Z might play out in the workforce of the future.

Generation Z will not be team players.
We know from Strauss and Howe that as generations cycle, the team generations (such as gen y) are usually followed by individualist generations. So it is not surprising to see trends that the same thing will happen over the next decade.
Gen Y are great team players.  In fact, they are so team oriented that they often feel that nothing is getting accomplished at work unless there has been a team meeting about it.

But they are not likely to teach the value to their kids. In typical parent fashion, parents stress what they are lacking so that their kids don’t lack it. This is why, for example, first generation immigrants often do not teach their native tongue to their American kids.

One way to read this trend is with baby naming. Gen Y is naming their kids eccentrically.  Throughout history, most people have had common names, and common names help people to fit in and be part of a group. Uncommon names make people feel different and encourage them to think of themselves more as individuals.

(For those of you who doubt the power of naming, check this out: If your name begins with a K you will strike out more often in baseball. If your name begins with a letter toward the end of the alphabet you could be economically penalized.)

Generation Z will be more self-directed.
One of the failings of the helicopter parent generation is that kids had parents telling them what to do all the time. And Gen Y is known for being good kids: rule-followers, close to their parents, very good students.

Which means they are terrible at figuring out what they want to do at any given time. No one taught them. Gen X, on the other hand, was left to their own devices at an early age and is very self-directed. (So self-directed that they are basically unmanageable, but that’s another story.) For Gen Y, the quarterlife crisis is not figuring out what you like or dislike by the time you’re 30.

This will probably not happen to the next generation, because parenting is less focused (via Dr. Eades), which means self-discovery is more prominent in childhood.  In an article in the New York Times magazine, Lisa Belkin explores the trend that parents are no longer spending tons of time and money dragging their kids to classes and specialists and guides to the world of overachievers. Parents are hanging out at home instead. And so are the kids. And everyone is learning about self-discovery. Because what else do you do with a chunk of unstructured time?

Generation Z will process information at lightning speed.
So much of the workplace today is about processing information. And the information sector will grow at twice the rate as all other jobs .  We see that the more native one is to Internet technology, the better one is at processing information.  We can spend time lamenting the fact that people don’t write essay-long memos by hand, and people don’t sit at their desks uninterrupted for eight hours a day. But what is the point of the lament? It won’t change. Successful leaders of the next generation will move past the lament, to watching how people adapt to the change and leveraging that happens in the workplace.

Besides, the next generation will be so good at processing information that they will open doors we can only knock on today.

Sam Anderson writes in New York magazine that, “The brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi, a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task [of moving through bits of information quickly] the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. Neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools."

It’s not surprising, then, that when Matthew Robson, a fifteen-year-old Morgan Stanley intern, analyzed his generation, the report he generated is basically a summary of how his generation collects and processes information. This ability will be the defining feature of his generation.

Generation Z will be smarter.
Generation Y is the most educated generation in US history. By far. It’s not just that they have access to more information and teaching. But also, they did way more homework than any of their predecessors (which, by the way, is thought to be maybe damaging, and another reason that Gen Y is no good at self-direction.)

But the next generation could be even smarter, thanks to neuro-enhancers. Today kids experiment with ADHD medications to use in off-label ways, mostly to be more focused on getting more homework done, so they can have time to party at school.

But today’s off-label users are mostly smart, rich, at-a-great-college kids who will have wild success in life anyway. And the downside to neuro-enhancers—squashed creativity—hits these kids too hard to keep up the habit.

Another approach would be to give less privileged kids access to neuro-enhancers. Scientists and sociologists surmise that this would actually be a socioeconomic leveling mechanism that we have not been able to achieve with education.

Margaret  Talbot wrote in the New Yorker that a “pretty clear trend across the studies say neuro-enhancers will be less helpful for people who score above average” and cognitive enhancing pills could actually become levelers, if they are dispensed cheaply. And Talbot quotes The British Medical Association as declaring: “Universal access to enhancing interventions would bring up the base-line of cognitive ability, which is generally seen to be a good thing.”

How does this affect the workplace? A wider range of people can do cognitively challenging jobs. And, if you think Gen Y is obnoxious about being better at processing information than the older people, think how Gen Y will feel when the next generation tells them their IQ is much higher. And they’re right. Gen Y will be getting on the Adderall bandwagon to stay competitive the way Baby Boomers today get on Facebook.

There is absolutely irrefutable data to support the idea that good-looking people do better in life than everyone else. Gordon Patzer, in his book, Looks, draws from a wide body of research to describe the advantaged life of a good-looking person from the time they are a baby (good-looking babies get better parenting) to the time they are in sales (the whole sales team performs better if there are more good-looking people on the team.)

As a result, I have jumped on the plastic surgery bandwagon. Super-smarty Chelsea Clinton got plastic surgery before she entered the work world. We should all do that. And while I haven't taken my own advice, I do find myself pinching and pulling at my nose to see what it would look like after a $10,000 investment.

But wait. Before you take out a loan to straighten your nose, maybe you should just start thinking like a tall person. Being good-looking means having the right mix of a lot of things, and for you, being tall might be the final keystone to hold it all in place. (Wondering if you're already tall? Fast Company has the answer: over 6'3" for men and over 5'9" for women, which, by the way, makes me half-an-inch into the land of the tall.)

Tall people make $789 more per inch per year, and are 90% more likely to ascend to the CEO chairs of Fortune 500 Companies, according to Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book. She scoured the sociology, psychology and workplace research to determine why tall people succeed (she herself is 6'3"). And Cohen discovered that the behaviors tall people display can be mimicked by anyone in order to get the career benefits of being tall.

Here's what Cohen says to do, based on the research she's gathered:

Be unforgettable. Due to evolutionary programming, when a tall guy walks into a meeting, everyone registers that he's there, and remembers what he says. This is a huge boon for someone who's also an ambitious, talented worker. So be noticeable. Figure out a way that when you walk in the room, everyone registers it. You can do that through interesting (but professional) clothing, cracking jokes when you walk in, etc.

Act like the boss. Tall children, from a very young age, are deemed the "leader" of their friends. Other little kids literally look up to them and often treat them as they would a slightly older child, and as a result, they're more likely to function as the leader for the rest of their life. Even as interns, other office workers give them the physical space and attention usually reserved for a leader. So act like a leader.

Find a way to look down on coworkers. Literally. An eye cast down is a really powerful behavior — it's the body's way of signaling a power imbalance in your favor, and you can create that power imbalance with some attention to your positioning. Thus, stand whenever you can when coworkers are sitting, and avoid walk-and-talks and casual standing around the office where coworkers are looking down at you.

Guard your personal space. Close friends hold conversations 18" apart; friends 2-3' apart, and bosses and employees four feet apart. Coworkers naturally give tall people four-or-more feet, which means that from the beginning, they're treated with boss-like reverence. You can mimic this body language — simply send out the physical vibe of professionalism, not chumminess, even in casual conversation. You'll see that people step back, and give you more space.

Don't be shy. Tall people often build an oversize personality to fit their oversize bodies. In the workplace tall people are more likely to yell or make demands or pull off a tongue-in-cheek toast to the boss. Socially, they take chances, and those chances are rewarded.

Focus on image rather than competence. Tall people aren't actually better workers, but in surveys, their bosses think they are. Which means that though competence matters, the perception of competence matters much more. So stop spending so much time on your work, and start spending more time on this list of ways to look tall.