When I discovered Deloitte has someone in charge of figuring out how to recruit and retain the new workforce, I knew I had to talk with him. It’s Stan Smith, and his title is Director of Next Generation Initiatives. I was amazed to hear how forward thinking he is in an industry known for being old and stodgy.
Based on his research, he wrote a paper called Connecting Across Generations in the Workplace. I could reference that paper every day. Here are some gems:
Gen X will finally have their moment: The shrinking workforce actually creates more demand for Gen-X than Gen-Y. The baby boomer retirement will create a 2% drop in the workforce among 24-34 year olds, and a 31% drop among 35-45 year olds.
Women will drive change in the consulting business: Women have more consulting-oriented skills than men do, they will make up the more than 60% of the workforce by 2010, and they will only work at companies that accommodate their need for flexibility.
Deloitte backs up the revolution with data: Deloitte’s data shows it is men and women in Generation X and Y. “The real revolution is a decrease in career ambition in favor of family time, less travel, and less personal pressure.”
I wrote about Stan in Time magazine, I wrote about him in the Boston Globe, and I put the articles on my blog, and every time I’d mention him, there was no link, which is so annoying to me. I scoured the web for a link to his paper, and I looked for his bio. Nothing.
I am not the only online publisher who is annoyed. I wrote about his study for my Yahoo Finance column that runs tomorrow, and my editor emailed me: “Why are you linking to Deloitte’s home page? Where’s the study?”
Nowhere, of course. Well, on Stan’s desk, probably. And in a lot of CEOs’ in boxes. But not online. And to a significant portion of the world, if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.
So I’ve solved the problem. You can now download Connecting Across Generations in the Workplace right here. And I think this encapsulates where we are in the publishing world: A blogger publishing a document from the Fortune 500 in order to be able to link to it from future blog posts.
It turns out that money actually can buy happiness, but not a lot of it. At some point, well under $100,000, the happiness value of a dollar starts to plummet, according to Richard Easterlin, economics professor at University of Southern California. This is because social interactions impact happiness more than money does.
But here’s a new way to look at the money and happiness equation, from a new study by Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London: If you make sure to see a friend or relative in person almost every day, that is like increasing your salary by $180,000 a year.
However buying incremental happiness with a six-figure income is very costly. For example, Powdthavee says if you are going to relocate from a city where your family and friends live to a city where you have no family or friends, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being far from those people.
Powdthavee drives home the importance of making a conscious choice about your time when he writes, “Since it normally requires both time and effort to achieve either higher income or a stable social relationship with someone, the weight attached to each individual’s investment decision thus depends upon the type of possession — money or friendship — that he or she believes will yield a larger impact on happiness than the other.”
It’s great that Powdthavee does the money vs. relationship math for us, because as humans we are absolutely terrible at predicting what will make us happy and maybe shouldn’t even bother. For one thing, we are all likely to tell ourselves we’re happy, whatever we are doing, in order to justify what we’re doing. This is a fine predisposition for maintaining our sanity, but it’s not a great attitude to have if you are trying to figure out how to change your life to be happier. Our judgment about our own happiness is so bad that Andrew Oswald, economist at the Warwick University has written a paper that to calls for researchers to stop drawing conclusions based on asking people if they are happy.
So I recommend believing that the research is right and your personal predictions are wrong. But the caveat with all this money research is that when we ditch our relatives to take a high paying job, we’re not actually interested in the money, per se. It’s something else.
In a study where people make decisions about sharing money, Harvard University economist Terry Bernham showed that when it comes to money, we don’t strive for some idea we have of what is “enough” but rather to have a little more than our friends. The Economist describes Burnham’s study and reports, “What people really strive for is relative rather than absolute prosperity. And this is likely to be particularly true in individuals with high testosterone levels.”
The Economist concludes that this is totally rational behavior, because while more money has not been shown to get more sex, more money does buy the social status to have more choices for sex partners. So money isn’t an end in itself, but social status is, whether we like it our not, because it has been our means to preserve our DNA.
This explains the study that blogger Gautam Ghosh quotes showing that someone who is a gatekeeper for a hospital can be happier in their work than a doctor based on their perceived contribution to the community. And it also explains the drive to forgo a big salary to make art: If your art hangs in the Guggenheim, you get your choice of girls to go home with, even if your home is sort of shoddy.
So what can we do?
1. Recognize that you should make relationships your top priority. Really. Most of us say we do this, but many of us could not actually point to a time when we took a big hit in the money department just so we could preserve regular date night with our significant other.
2.Admit it’s an uphill battle to care less about social standing. But it’s worth it. The more you care about where you stand in relation to others, the less happy you’ll be. Social standing can take so many forms. Instead of patting yourself on the back for not buying a McMansion, be honest about the fact that you didn’t want one anyway. Understand how you measure your social rank, and try to tame it. For my part, I tell myself that if I check compete.com fewer times a week, I’ll be a happier person. (Maybe true. But look, I still linked to it.)
3. Trust the research when you are faced with a tough decision. Yes, all research is like diet research — one decade cheese is bad, next decade cheese is good. But just because the research is not perfect doesn’t mean you should go off and do whatever your gut tells you. Your gut tells you pizza is great and so is grilled cheese. But duh, it isn’t. And your gut tells you that you will be happier with a little more money, and you could relocate from family if you make sure to visit a lot. But you know what? Duh. You know the truth.
Hat tip: Senia Maymin
By Ryan Healy – People often ask why I decided to get into this whole career blogging world that I have come to love. Usually my answer is something about giving my generation a voice in the corporate discussion, or standing up for all of my peers and friends who openly discuss their bitterness towards work. These are true statements and they are some of the reasons I decided to make my voice heard. However, this is not actually why I started blogging.
One evening last fall my dad called. We often discuss random topics and potential business ideas. But this call was different because he was unusually excited. He went on a tangent about baby boomers retiring and Gen X being too small to fill their shoes. He told me about the shortage of experienced workers in the non-profit community, and the need for baby boomers like him to begin passing the torch to the younger generations.
I said, “I’m sure this is all true, but what can we do about it?”
My father said, “You and Dan (my brother and a budding entrepreneur) should write a book with Mom (a talent development expert in the banking industry) about the passing of leadership from today’s managers to generation Y.”
It was an interesting idea, and given my initial experience in the working world, I could see how bridging the gap in leadership is necessary. The book never happened. Who knows, maybe it could have worked. But what has transpired from that original idea has been pretty cool.
I studied the topic like crazy. I turned every happy hour conversation with a random peer into a learning experience, and I started writing. I probably spent five to six hours a day reading, writing and studying the topic on top of my 9-to-5 job. Then I started a blog to get some more insight and to make my voice heard. All of a sudden a famous columnist and author asked me to write a weekly column for her. I jumped at the chance.
For months now I have been writing about what I look for in a job, how I like to work, changes I would like to see. Many things I write seem to resonate with young and old alike, and of course, many people disagree with my posts, from all generations. I do not represent the views of an entire generation; it would be ridiculous to pretend I do. But that is why a blog is the perfect forum for this discussion; we can all have our say.
Sometimes the comments turn into a generational argument, and I will admit to getting a little heated and protective of my generation. Then I read comments like this one from Pirate Jo:
“The fact that today’s 20-somethings have all these options and don’t have to waste their youth on multiple, crappy jobs is a GOOD thing. I’d never want to stick them in the same situation I was in. In fact, I’m thankful for them. They’re saying the same things Gen X has been saying for ten years, but none of those damn old-school bureaucrats would listen to us because there were too few of us to matter. Now that Gen Y is joining our ranks, it’s going to make things better for ALL of us.”
After reading a comment like that, I remember that my goal was to create a dialogue, and in fact the whole idea came from a baby boomer father. I remember that I created Employee Evolution as an open forum for people to communicate with each other regardless of whether or not I agree with them.
The point of all of this is not to start an argument or to say that generation Y is better than others. We have been lucky enough to enter the job market at a time where we do indeed have the upper hand and we have the technology and means to speak freely about the topic. Some of the ideas I discuss can help us all, some will not work for everyone. If we all drop our protective guards and listen, including me, we can continue this great discussion. We can create some changes for the better; we can influence baby boomer managers to share their knowledge with generation Y and we can engage my generation enough to slow down and learn from the managers who want to help. Or we can just keep arguing.
Ryan Healy's blog is Employee Evolution.
One of the hardest social situations to face is starting a conversation with someone you know very little about. You might already understand that the key to being a good conversationalist is to be a good listener; You need to ask questions that will get to the interesting part of someone, and then be truly interested in listening.
You don’t need to be extroverted to be a great conversationalist; you need to care about other people. You need to trust that you will find other people interesting because you are a curious, engaged person. The good news for introverts is that this means working a room doesn’t require comfort with crowds as much as it requires comfort with yourself.
The problem is that it’s hard to figure out how to get to that interesting part of someone. But here’s some encouragement: Forty percent of young people think they are shy, and the percentage gets higher over time. However most people do not have a shyness disorder to overcome, they just need a little more practice. For example, “Most socially confident people deliberately learn specific skills, like understanding the predictable format of a conversation with new people, and focusing on the topic rather than on how one is being perceived,” according to Erika Casriel, writing in Psychology Today.
So I found someone who is in this situation a lot, and actually gets paid for it: Moira Gunn, author of the book Welcome to Biotech Nation. Her radio show, Tech Nation, is known for introducing hard-core scientists to people who aren’t especially interested in science. She finds a lot of people to interview by going to the International Biotech Conference, and she does the interviews herself even though she knows very little about biotech.
The way that Gunn gets such fun and interesting interviews out of her subjects is by not having a preconception of what they’ll be talking about. She wants to find that spot where they are engaged and knowledgeable, because anyone on any topic will be interesting if they have that. She says the key is to be open to where the other person wants to go, and to listen.
It’s Gunn’s job to figure out a way to connect with these scientists and part of the fun of the interviews is hearing her do that, because it’s what we have to do all the time when we make small talk. Yes, the scientists are extremely smart, but Gunn says the hard part is to get them to the point where they are talking about something comprehensible.
“This is not about all the science someone needs to know. This is about what really connects with people,” says Gunn. “I have a rule. You get one strange word a segment.”
What’s an example? “Nucleotide.”
One of Gunn’s favorite interviews was with a food safety researcher who ended up talking about mussels. He told her that you are only supposed to eat them in months that have Rs in them, because in June, July and August the water is warm and bacteria levels go up, and muscles are basically filters.
Gunn’s favorite part of this interview wasn’t even the science. Mr Food Safety is a vegetarian. Gunn laughs out loud when she tells me. She is great at small talk because she can go to the International Biotech conference and find comedy.
Gunn has done interviews with difficult people for years, and by now she is able to get even the worst conversationalist into territory where he is interesting. But she’s had a lot of practice.
You have to practice making conversation if you want to be good. “Building confidence is like learning to swing a golf club. It boils down to knowing what the critical skills are and practicing them. Even Tiger Woods still practices for hours every day,” says Bernardo Carducci, director of Indiana University Southeast’s Shyness Research Institute (also in Psychology Today).
Of course, in order to practice this you have to open yourself up for some awkward situations. But there is no way to grow without being awkward at first, so try it. It feels good to be able to find the interesting thing about anyone you talk with. I find the more confident I am in my ability to do this, the more open I am to the whole world. After lots of practice I have a deep belief that everyone has something to offer if I can just get the guts to start the conversation.
Companies are having a hard time recruiting and retaining young talent, and as a result are accommodating what would have once been considered extreme demands. “The scales have tipped in favor of knowledge workers, creating a seller’s market for the next 5 to 10 years,” writes to Stan Smith, National Director of Next Generation Initiatives at Deloitte.
Here are some reasons why so many younger workers have gained the advantage when it comes to negotiating the terms of a new job.
The workforce is shrinking.
The Department of Labor reports that from 2000 to 2010 there will be a 30 percent decrease of workers in their 30s and 40s. In addition, many Generation X parents are choosing to leave the workforce or cut back on hours in order to be home with their children. This trend is so pronounced that it’s creating a shortage of managers already.
Many young people want their own businesses.
The barriers to starting an Internet business are low. Viral marketing via a personal e-mail list and a few key mentions on prominent blogs can potentially catapult a good idea into a successful business. Since young people can effectively fund their own companies this way, many do not want to pay their dues by working for someone else and learning the ropes. The flexibility of owning a company is not only appealing, but also a way to avoid menial labor at the bottom of the corporate ladder. In fact, many young people are choosing the excitement of entrepreneurship over the stability of a good salary.
If entrepreneurship is the first choice, a corporate job is a backup plan. Matt Humphrey, 20, and three friends just founded SlapVid, a company that cuts the cost of providing video content online. Humphrey thinks of the MBA program he is now in as sort of a backup plan in case SlapVid does not take off at the end of the summer. And in the event that he does not have another idea for a company before he graduates, getting a job at someone else’s company is a second-level backup plan.
Parents are a safety net.
More than 50 percent of college graduates will move back home with their parents this summer. And most parents will like it. It used to be that returning home after college was seen as a sign of failure. Today, however, economists and sociologists see such homecomings as a smart response to exorbitant housing prices in big cities, and entry-level wages that do not cover living expenses.
Three out of four of the founders of SlapVid are getting financial help from their parents. And Humphrey’s parents are typical in their enthusiasm for their child’s adventure, and the tight relationship they share. “They know they might have to support me for longer than they planned for,” Humphrey said. “They’re definitely up for that. If I want to do something really, really cool, they’ll support me all the way. They call me every day to see how I’m doing.”
With such parental support, there is no need for a company to play the parenting role, which is what happened when baby boomers entered the workforce. And if there is no paternalism in corporate life, it becomes a scramble to figure out what businesses can leverage to scoop up young employees.
The intimidation factor is diminished.
“People going to college today are working harder than I ever did in school,” says Bill MacGowan, chief human resources officer of Sun Microsystems. “These kids will find work easier than I did.” In return for their effort, they expect to be well compensated by employers. As consummate consumers, they use technology to customize the way they view information, and they expect the same kind of customization when it comes to selecting jobs. They negotiate for vacation time, mentoring and training, flexible schedules, and even tricked-out laptops.
And when it comes to negotiating, young people assume the adults at the office are on their side. Generation Y has been raised by parents who often acted more like friends and mentors. In fact, often a wide community was involved in helping a Generation Y child succeed — including teachers, coaches, and private tutors. As a result, young people bring unprecedented confidence to the negotiating table. Some even have their parents in the room for added help, and many respected companies are willing to engage parents in the hiring process if that’s what the candidate wants.
Indeed, the scales have tipped and young people are in charge. For people who have been in the workforce for a long time and expected to be in charge, the new reality is difficult to accept. But it’s possible all employees will benefit from some of the changes. After all, demands such as more flexible schedules, are appealing to all employees, regardless of age.
With 85 million baby boomers and 50 million Gen Xers, there is already a yawning generation gap among American workers–particularly in their ideas of work-life balance. For baby boomers, it’s the juggling act between job and family. For Gen X, it means moving in and out of the workforce to accommodate kids and outside interests. Now along come the 76 million members of Generation Y. For these new 20-something workers, the line between work and home doesn’t really exist. They just want to spend their time in meaningful and useful ways, no matter where they are.
The first challenge for the companies that want to hire the best young workers is getting them in the door. They are in high demand–the baby boomers are retiring, and many Gen X workers are opting out of long hours–and they have high expectations for personal growth, even in entry-level jobs. More than half of Generation Y’s new graduates move back to their parents’ homes after collecting their degrees, and that cushion of support gives them the time to pick the job they really want. Taking time off to travel used to be a resume red flag; today it’s a learning experience. And entrepreneurship now functions as a safety net for this generation. They grew up on the Internet, and they know how to launch a viable online business. Facebook, for example, began in a college dorm room.
Read the rest of this article at Time.com.
We have been together for fifteen years and we have two kids. We have been in couples therapy enough different times for me to know that I hate being in couples therapy with him because he never changes. It’s always been more productive for me to go to therapy alone, where at least I can get things done. But now we are desperate, so I’ve capitulated.
We park the car and walk into the building of the couples’ therapist. I remember one couples therapist telling us that we are in good shape because we drove there together. Today I know that we would have driven in separate cars if we had two cars.
I delegated finding a therapist to my husband. After all, my first book just came out and I blog almost every day. I am busy. I know my penchant for delegating is part of the problem, but I thought this would be one last hurrah.
We get to the office. The sign on the door says “Divorce Law Offices” and there is a list of people with Esq’s at the end.
I say, “We’re going to a divorce lawyer? I don’t want a divorce.”
“It’s Wisconsin,” he says, “It’s not like New York City where there are skyscrapers devoted to therapist offices.”
We see a mediator.
I start talking. I tell him we are not there to get a divorce. We’re there to keep our marriage together. Is there someone else we can see?
My husband says he’s thinking he might be there to get a divorce.
I see we are a parody of a couple who cannot communicate. When I was doing research for a column about divorce law, I talked with a lot of divorce lawyers, and each one said that so many divorces could be avoided if the people would talk. One attorney told me he helps one couple a month get back together, and that’s his favorite part of his job. I tell myself, based on this, that divorce lawyers are good at keeping marriages together because they see so many marriages fall apart.
We talk about our marriage. I think things are difficult because my husband gave up working to take care of our kids and it didn’t work out.
My husband thinks things got bad because taking care of our son who has autism is extremely difficult and we take it out on each other so we don’t take it out on him.
There is truth to what my husband says. Eighty percent of parents who have a child with autism get a divorce. But I don’t want to blame my failing marriage on my cute little five-year-old. Not that I don’t want someone to blame. I do. But I think it is more complicated than that.
I explain how my career is going great. I tell the mediator I have a busy speaking schedule and a six-figure contract for my next book. I even talk about my blog, and the estimated 450,000 page views a month, even though you can trust me on this: Our divorce mediator from Middleton, Wisconsin does not read blogs.
At this point, I think my husband is going to tell the mediator about how he gave up his career for the kids and me and he is totally disappointed. But instead he says to me, “A lot of people I talk with say that I am being abused by you.”
I am shocked. It’s a big allegation. But I say, “A lot of people I talk with think I should get rid of you.”
That’s as bad as it gets, right there. Because the mediator interjects and says that if you want to try to stay together for the kids, it’s worth it. He says, “The research shows divorce is very hard on kids, and especially kids under five.” But he adds, “You won’t be able to hold things together just to parent the kids. You will need some love for each other.”
I say quickly that I have that. It is easy for me to remember how much fun I had with my husband before we had kids. It’s easy for me to remember that every time I look-but-don’t-really-look for men to have an affair with, I find myself looking at someone who is like my husband: I still love him.
My husband is not so quick to say he still loves me.
So all I can do is think while he thinks. I think about the research about how a career does not make people happy. When you are in love and someone asks you how you are, you say, “I’m so happy” even if you are unemployed. When your career is going well and your marriage isn’t when someone asks you how you are you say, “My career is going great.”
The mediator starts talking about how the next step will be a contract to follow rules of engagement. “You have to start being nice to each other,” says the mediator. Right now that seems almost impossible.
We have to wait, though. My husband is deciding if he has any love for me.
He asks the mediator, “How do I know if it’s love?”
The mediator says, “If you care about her life, for right now, that’s enough.”
Finally my husband says to me, “I’m so sorry that life is not better for you when your career is going so well. You’ve worked so hard for this.”
The mediator nods. Next meeting we will move on to the rules of engagement.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This story continues….
5 Communication lessons learned in marriage counseling
Hooray that Brazen Careerist was recently mentioned by Emily Meehan in the Wall Street Journal and Karyn McCormack in Business Week.
And, in an effort to be a good citizen, I spoke at the Rotary Club in Madison, (where they sang God Bless America after lunch). The topic was how to recruit and retain young people. My speaker’s bureau liked the video so much that they put a clip of it on their site, here.
Finally, thanks to Steven Grant’s suggestion, you can buy Brazen Careerist t-shirts. Workplace fashion will never be the same…
By Ryan Healy – Vacation days are a benefit. We are allowed 10 or 15 days of vacation per year so we can completely relax and forget about work. I have full intentions of forgetting about my job for the six days I am in California. I might check my e-mail once or twice, and I am available by cell phone, but unless there is an extreme emergency I have no plans of working. Vacation is great, I’m relaxed, I’m enjoying my family, and I don’t have to deal with that pesky thing called work.
However, right now I am sitting in an ice cream shop in Napa Valley, California. I am using six of my precious vacation days. And what do you know? I am writing a column. I do not separate writing, networking or designing my website from working. I am doing all of this for my career, and therefore it is all considered work. However, since landing in Oakland four days ago, I have spent at least one to two hours a day doing some type of work. In fact, my partner Ryan Paugh and I actually launched the brand new version of Employee Evolution. The funny thing is, I am completely, 100% relaxed and I wouldn’t want my vacation to be any other way.
My brother, Dan, runs SloopyMenus.com, an online food ordering business at Ohio State University. As I write this, he is sitting directly across from me on his laptop emailing restaurant and bar owners, setting up meetings to talk about advertising and tracking his website statistics for use in his sales pitches. He has already taken three or four business calls and has spoken with his partner once a day. He also wouldn’t have it any other way.
Does this mean that we are not actually on vacation? Or does this mean that his business and my website aren’t actually work?
The way I look at it, they are both definitely considered work, and we are both definitely on vacation. Spending an hour or two per day doing a little work on vacation is just fine in my book. I completely understand why people want to escape their jobs and not even worry about it on vacation. However, if you need to run and hide for a week at a time, it can only mean one of two things. You either dislike your job or you work way too hard.
The problem with having an arbitrary ten or fifteen days of vacation where you can escape from your cubicle is that it implies we need to completely escape to stay sane. I don’t know about you guys, but if I need to pretend that work doesn’t exist when I am on vacation, then I am in the wrong line of work.
The Motley Fool has created a solution to this whole problem. Employees at “the fool” do not have any vacation days, but they certainly take vacations like the rest of us. There should be no such thing as vacation days. By telling employees they are allowed fifteen days off from work a year, you are in effect telling them that they will need to escape the daily grind. With new technologies and telecommuting being more and more common, “vacation days” will ultimately be a thing of the past. But I can guarantee you; I will still take plenty of vacations
Obviously, companies like the Motley Fool must put an extraordinary amount of trust in their employees, but we are all adults. How many grown people do you know who would completely blow off a deliverable because they want to go on vacation and ignore work for a few days? If employees feel trusted, they will trust the company which will in turn increase worker morale and output. It’s a win-win situation.
Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.
Time magazine just hired me to write a piece about workplace trends among young people. One of the things I wrote about was how much people value the opportunity to volunteer for non-profit organizations through their company. And one of the best examples of this is Salesforce.com.
So I called the publicist there and set up an interview with the CEO, Marc Benioff. I also scheduled a Time magazine photographer to take photos of Salesforce.com’s volunteer program in action.
But Marc skipped out on the interview. And, even though he was missing in action, the publicist went ahead with the photo. After about five phone calls I realized that Marc had disappeared and I was stuck with a photo from a company that I couldn’t get a quote from: useless.
So for my first thing I’ve ever written for Time magazine, I was going to miss my deadline. Everyone can be their best selves in the best circumstance. But in bad circumstances, it’s very hard to be your best self. We learn how pulled together we are by watching what we do when things go badly.
I screamed at the publicist. At first I screamed at him for letting the photo happen when he knew he would miss my deadline with the interview. At one point he told me he believed Marc was having a personal problem and I said, “Well it had better be a death in the family.” Yep. I said that. Nice, huh?
Finally, in a huff, I told the publicist I was not using Salesforce.com in the piece I was writing. I was very pissed off and I wanted to punish everyone for messing up my article. But to be honest, I didn’t have another photo lined up. And I was pretty much screwing myself.
Then I got the voicemail from Marc Benioff. He knew that I was angry, that I took his company out of the article, and that he missed my deadline. Still, he left me a message. He told me he was really sorry, and then, instead of leaving a message which would be of no use to me, he left me a long message giving me every quote I could need for my story about Salesforce.com and volunteering.
This was super smart of him, but most people wouldn’t do it. Most people would accept that they were pulled out of the story, most people would be too scared to call a journalist who has been screaming on the phone, and most people would not have the poise and composure to basically interview themselves on voicemail and do a good job. I liked seeing the difference between what a regular person would do and what a star performer does.
So I wrote my article (with Salesforce.com), got it in almost on time, and then someone came to my door with flowers. From Marc. A big arrangement with poppies and bergamot and cabbage. Cabbage! Isn’t that interesting? When I saw it I got giddy. I’m a girl who loves getting flowers.
He sent a card that said he was sorry and what can he do to make it up to me. Apologizing was not difficult for Marc. It seems that for him it doesn’t matter who is right or not. He just wants to have a good relationship. He’s a good influence on me: As soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to call the publicist and apologize for being rude.
No one has ever sent me flowers to get into an article before, but you know what? It’s really smart. Some places I write for would fire me in a second for accepting flowers in exchange for an article. But my blog is different. So I’m gonna tell you that flowers can sway me. If you want me to write about you on my blog, send me flowers. And no carnations. This is not prom.