Management

Advice for starting your own business

Feeling stuck? Uninspired? As though your New Year's resolutions have no spark? Maybe it's time to start your own business. It’s likely you intuitively know if you're actually an entrepreneur stuffed in a corporate cubicle. The entrepreneurship bug isn’t something that hits in middle age. It’s something that's inside you from day one — a …

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How to fire a relative

Learning to be a good manager requires that you perform a wide range of tasks from delegating, to coaching, to planning. When none of these go well, you need to perform the final task: Firing. Letting someone go is very difficult for most people – our instinct is to want to help people, or at …

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Couples therapy can help your career

Couples therapy: My husband is slumped at the edge of the sofa, sulking. I sit in the center cushion, upright and animated, ranting about why he needs to get rid of his bike.
The therapist tells me to be quiet, but in a couples-therapist way: “Let’s give him a chance to talk about the bike.” He …

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4 ways to make more time

Success in the workplace depends on being a good time manager, because it doesn't matter how good you are at your job if you never have time to do it. Here are the four most important steps you can take to end that feeling that you “can't get everything done”.
Prioritize ruthlessly
Most people who are too …

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The best way to break rules

The current business climate encourages rule breakers. Not the kind at Enron — those are law breakers. Rule breakers break with convention. Sallie Krawcheck, for example, was a top stock analyst in the 90s. She could have gone to a big investment firm where the heavy-hitters gave stock advice that, in hindsight, seems to have …

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Public Speaking 101

Each month my husband selects a concert for us to go to. I used to pick, but I would select music I knew, like Beethoven or Mozart, and my husband, the over-educated music student, would scoff at my pedestrian tastes. Now I am at his mercy, and I endure the type of music that requires …

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Lessons learned from SARS

Good decision-makers are good information-gatherers, but in the end, they trust their gut.
When a few people were infected with SARS from skinning frogs alive or working among chicken carcasses, China might have contained the problem. Instead, China made a very bad decision to cover up the disease.
In hindsight, it's easy to say which problems are …

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Landing a job later in life

I get a lot of email from people who are 50 years old and older and never expected to be unemployed at this stage in their career. Many of these people are annoyed that they are not appreciated for how much they know. Others are bitter, angry or indignant. Often times, these complaints come down …

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How to give a good performance review

Here's the worst performance review I ever received: “You were great.” The review was via email, and when I commented on its brevity, my boss said the “outrageous Internet salary” he gave me was testament to how much he wanted to keep me.
Apparently he did not know that survey after survey has shown that salary …

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