Penelope Trunk

Office Politics

What Generation Z will be like at work

Posted to: Management | Office Politics
July 27th, 2009
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It’s great fun to track trends to try to figure out what the future holds. The Generation after Gen Y is a mystery. Sort of. There are some things we know. And what we know, we know doesn’t change much. For example, people thought Gen Y’s sunny optimism would die down under the ardors of [...]

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Tips for coping when your startup is out of cash

May 15th, 2009
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My company is running out of money again. Well, really, it already happened. But it’s happened so many times that I am sort of used to it. It's a routine. You may recall that part of the routine is not paying my electric bill. But there is more.
1. Focus on something you can control.
You might [...]

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How to pick the people you work with

Posted to: Job Hunt | Office Politics
May 6th, 2009
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Pick who you work with very carefully. Because you are likely to become like them. So the first thing is to know what’s important to you about you – what you want to become. What you like about yourself. And then, surround yourself with people who match your aspirations for yourself.
Here are some ideas:
Choose people [...]

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How to blog about a co-worker (or someone else close to you)

Posted to: How to blog | Office Politics
April 27th, 2009
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What you know the most about is what you can offer the most insight about. And you probably know that telling stories is always more compelling than talking in generalities. But if you tell stories, you need people to be in the stories. So if you want to write insightfully, then using stories about people [...]

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Take Your Child to Work Day should be cancelled

Posted to: Diversity | Office Politics | Parenting
April 23rd, 2009
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It’s time to admit that Take Your Child to Work Day is an outdated relic of 1970s feminism, and we can put the whole thing to rest.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. [...]

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Try to give hugs to more people at work

Posted to: Office Politics
February 17th, 2009
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The house manager comes in my front door at 8am. I tell her, “The exterminator is in the kitchen but I forgot to get the cats and bunny out of the house, and the cleaning woman is in the dining room, but she cannot clean while the exterminator is here, and I forgot to [...]

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How to talk to a friend who's been laid off

Posted to: Networking | Office Politics
February 10th, 2009
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Being laid off used to be taboo. But not anymore. And most of us have thought through some sort of plan for if it happens to us. Gone are the days when people pretend this is not happening.
One of the things my ex-husband and I did well, as did our peers, was learn to tag-team [...]

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The art of knowing when to hide and when to reach out

January 21st, 2009
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Ryan calls me from the office. I say, “Don't talk to me now. I'm sulking.”
He says, “Okay. What are we doing about the five-year sales projections?”
I say, "I told you. I need ten minutes."
“Nothing is going to change in ten minutes,”
“In ten minutes I’ll be more pleasant on the phone.”
“Okay.” He hangs up.
I eat two [...]

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Why you're lucky to be in the office between Christmas and New Years

Posted to: Office Politics | Productivity
December 29th, 2008
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One of the reasons my column runs in more than 200 newspapers is that I send out one blog post a week to about 1000 editors. I have to do the list manually because, big surprise, most editors at most papers do not subscribe to blogs.
Today I was besieged by out of the office responses. [...]

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Vulnerability is the key to likability at work (and on the farm)

August 26th, 2008
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This is the last thing I should be writing on my blog. Because it's now clear that the blog is a great dating tool. Propositions all the time. So I should not tell you this, but here it is: It turns out that I'm a lousy girlfriend.
Not the bad in bed type. Well, sort of. [...]

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Five things that are about to stop sucking at work

Posted to: Diversity | Office Politics
July 24th, 2008
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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 [...]

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Figure out how much you should be paid (and three cheers for transparent salaries)

Posted to: Money | Office Politics
July 11th, 2008
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Do you know the salary of every employee at your company? I think you should.
I mean, who is being protected by secret salaries? Certainly not the employee—the more transparent salaries are, the more accurately an employee can assess his or her value to a company.
You'd think that companies benefit from secret salaries and that's why [...]

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Will you get promoted? Take the test

Posted to: Office Politics
April 29th, 2008
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One of the most important indicators of whether or not you should switch jobs is if you are in line for a promotion. It's not so much that you should be climbing a ladder, but more that if you are not being recognized for great work then you're probably not doing great work. And if [...]

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Start-up skill: Find people who compensate for your weakness

April 2nd, 2008
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The update on my company is that Ryan Healy and I are not talking to each other. Well, he is talking to me, but I am giving him the silent treatment.
Still, I am confident that things are going well. First, because I am bad at the silent treatment—I have too much to say all the [...]

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Try to be funny, even if you're not

February 29th, 2008
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Men are hard-wired to think they are funny. They use it as a courtship technique. A study by Eric Brassler at McMaster University finds that women rate men as more attractive if they make more jokes. And men are somehow aware of this, because they are more likely to make jokes if women are around.
This [...]

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Three specific ways to improve your social skills

January 16th, 2008
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Now that I do a lot of public speaking, I am flying a lot – two or three times a month. There are a lot of perks to travel, like expensive hotel rooms and a break from my kids. But my favorite perk is meeting sales guys.
Warning: here come generalizations with no data to back [...]

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Twentysomething: 5 ways people get screwed early in a career

Posted to: Managing Up | Office Politics
January 15th, 2008
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This guest post is by Susan Johnston who is 24 years old and blogs at The Urban Muse.
By Susan Johnston – It's easy to get screwed when you're fresh out of undergrad and starting a new job. Nobody tells you this, because it doesn't make a particularly inspiring message for a graduation speech or greeting [...]

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How to deal with getting fired (from Yahoo)

Posted to: Journalism | Money | Office Politics
December 27th, 2007
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I just got fired from Yahoo Finance.
The long road to my quick termination started in the spring, when I grew friendly with one of the higher-ups in engineering at Yahoo. When he became my boss's boss's boss at Yahoo, he suggested that we meet if we were ever both in New York at the same [...]

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5 Communication lessons learned in marriage counseling

Posted to: Negotiating | Office Politics
November 28th, 2007
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In case you are new to the drama that is my marriage, here is the post about our first day of counseling, which now has 171 comments. And here is the post where I blame my whole marriage on the institution of shared-care parenting, and also where I find out that the population of available [...]

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Stop thinking you'll get by on your high I.Q.

November 20th, 2007
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My son's I.Q. is in the top .05% of all preschoolers, but he attended preschool in a special education classroom. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism typified by a distinctly high I.Q. and a notable lack of emotional intelligence. Asperger's is thought to be genetic, and it is surging among kids in places [...]

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