What do you do with your ideas? How do you get them traction? It used to be you made a sales pitch – to venture capitalists, to customers, to your boss.
But today young people are deconstructing the sales pitch – paring it down to its core information and parodying the BS that surrounds it.
The nail …

This is a piece I wrote for the new leadership section at Forbes.com.
Of course a good education and talent are keys to building a successful career, but for most people, school is over and the parameters of their talent were set on the day they were born. So what can you do now to get …

ASAP: a ubiquitous term coming from senior bankers. You might assume it means as fast as humanly possible, as in an all-nighter if necessary. But this is not always the case. For example, sometimes it seems asap is just a banker’s best effort at using the word please. As in: Leave a printout on my …

Here’s a new word for the workplace: Rankism. File it in your brain next to racism and sexism. And brace yourself for a big change at the office, because rankism is another kind of discrimination we should not tolerate.
What’s rankism, or rankist behavior? It is hiring an intern and ignoring her all summer. Or pointlessly …

John Annabel, of Northampton, walked into the office one day to find himself working side by side with a new employee whose only qualification seemed to be that she was having an affair with Annabel's department head. Annabel says people didn't particularly care that she was in the office doing no work until she started …

Of all the Google searches that end up at my blog, the most common is some version of, “How do I tell my boss that I’m quitting.” This seems to be a frequent topic at a lot of career sites; quitting well is a big issue.
A lot of the problems around quitting come from the …

You can judge someone’s personality by what his or her work space looks like. Take Tara Hirshfeld, for example. She’s set up her office on a picnic table. She has the laptop, the headset, even the office-type snacks. But there are leaves falling and cars honking. Intuitively, you know she’s not an accountant-type. And you …

The best thing you can do if you want a flexible schedule is ask for it. Younger workers are finding more and more success when they ask, which should give everyone encouragement to request flextime if they want it.
Laurie Young is a founder of Flexible Resources, a company that specializes in finding flextime jobs for …

One of the best ways to get what you want is to be an extraordinary performer at work. Stars get more training, more mentoring, better projects and greater flexibility. Fortunately, you don’t need the perfect job situation in order to be a star, because most star qualities come from you — from taking your basically …

You do not deserve a raise just because you have been doing your job well for x amount of months. It is your job to do your job well. That’s why you were hired.
Also, do not complain about your salary not being at market rate six months after you take your job. Because if you …

Here’s one of the hottest topics in management training: How to manage the current crop of twentysomethings. Really. Baby boomers are sitting in seminars for hours and hours trying to demystify the alien ways of the new work force.
But what about the opposite situation? One of the most classic pieces of career advice is to …

The Wall Street Journal gives terrible advice this week on “going from maternity leave to permanent resignation.”
Columnist Sue Shellenbarger writes, “Once a mother is absolutely sure she isn’t going to return to work after maternity leave, I believe she’s obligated to reveal her intentions to her employer.”
WHY? There is no description in the column about …

Blogging is good for your career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.
Ben Day blogged his way into a career as a high-earning software consultant while maintaining the freedom to schedule frequent jam sessions and performances as a keyboard player. Blogging gave him the opportunity to stand out enough to …

I get a lot of email, and the biggest whiners are the people who refuse to kiss up to their boss and therefore have stalled careers.
Newsflash: You have to brown nose, but the professional phrase for this act is “manage up”. This is such a basic pre-requisite for career success that I am shocked when …

Ever since I bought a pair of MBT shoes I have been waiting for the media to jump all over them.
I have been waiting for five months, and finally, there is one little tidbit in People magazine: In Grey’s Anatomy “Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl have been wearing sneakers by MBT — whose unusual sole …

Most jobs turn out to be very different than what you were told about in the interview. So your first task in your new job is to figure out what the job really is. Most people don’t do this which is why there is a whole cottage industry of people who coach for the first …

The new workplace currency is training. Title is not important if you’re not staying long term. Salary increases of 3 or 4 percent are ceremonial. So use the clout you earn to get training; it will make a difference in a way salary and title cannot because training can fundamentally change how you operate and …

Can we all just stop talking about promotions like they matter? A promotion has meaning when someone is moving up the corporate ladder at such a slow pace that every small step is grounds for celebration.
But there are no more ladders because no one stays long enough at a company to get up the whole …

How to tell when you should leave your job is actually very simple: If your boss loves you, stay. If your boss does not love you, assess where you went wrong, and decide if you can fix it. If not, it’s quitting time.
The problem is that most people take very little responsibility for making their …

First-time managers are generally nightmares to work for. They are people who got promoted by doing a non-management job well, and in fact they probably have little experience in management. Here are four of the mistakes that will undermine a new manager the fastest.
1. Focusing on tasks instead of people.
Before you were a manger, your …