Even if you buy into this mindset, though, it can be tough to think like an entrepreneur in a 9-to-5 job. An employee has a fundamentally different way of viewing the world than an entrepreneur does.  One of the main ways you can tell if you’re an employee with an entrepreneurial mindset versus an employee with an employee mindset is this:  do you worry about being at your desk at 5:00 PM (and also, 9:00 AM)?

If you have the employee mindset, you’ll want to make sure you’re a team player. You’ll have a contract specifying a minimum of 40 hours per week, and you’ll watch that clock to make sure you are in your seat 40 hours (at a minimum).  The employee mindset says that the “where” (sitting at your desk) is more important than the “what” (getting results).   The employee is banking on ‘face time’ being the critical measurement of success.  If you have ten hours of work to do or two hours, the hours will be the same.

The entrepreneurial employee’s mindset is different. If you’re in at 10 and leave at 3, it doesn’t matter as long as you get the job done.  If you need to be there at 5 (or 6, or 7), fine.  If you can leave early, also fine.  The employee with the entrepreneur’s approach knows that his or her “brand” is based on whether or not goals were met.  Whether you sat in your desk an extra two hours after your work was done for the day, just so you were there at 5, doesn’t matter.

Has anyone in a professional career has ever bragged in an interview about how they could always be counted on to stay in the office until 5:00?   Employers don’t care.  Clients don’t care, either.  Skills and results are the only thing that matters, right?

Unfortunately that’s not true. A lot of lip service is given in the corporate environment to work/life balance and the idea that only results matter, but anyone who spends more than a day or two in a cubicle knows this isn’t true.  Whether or not you have butt firmly planted in chair at 5:00 matters nothing to your next job, true.  But in office politics – the business of surviving in and flourishing in your current job – ‘face time’ is critical.  Look around the office and see how many people are coasting, working at less than full potential, simply so they have their tired face visible when 5:00 rolls around.  These people may understand, deep down, that there is no real reason to be adhering to a 9-to-5 schedule, but that’s the corporate culture and it seems unlikely to change.

If you feel the desire to be in your seat at 5:00, fine. Many people are more comfortable not rocking the boat.  But if you feel that you NEED to be in your seat at 5:00 or you’re going to be disciplined, you’re not in an organization that values results.  You’re being paid to fill a budgeted position so a manager can move up the corporate ladder by pointing to his management of a team of 20.   And before you think you can just coast along showing up at 5:00, remember this:  managers with that mindset weren’t born.  They were sitting in your seat 20 years ago, waiting for the clock to move past 4:59…

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the 5 o’clock test is an original article from the website brip blap.

If you spend any time working with a small group of people on intense, timeline-driven projects with limited resources you’ve experienced some – or maybe a lot of – tension. You’ve probably also read, with some trepidation, stories of people showing up at the office with an AK-47 dressed all in black.  How likely is it that the person next to you will snap?  Recent events showed us that even mild-mannered professors can snap (although the “mild-mannered” part might have just been a cover for a seething, troubled pysche).  What flips the kill switch?

Anyone who chooses to strap on steel-toed boots, load up an automatic weapon and go shoot at Suzy because she didn’t help him on the March budget presentation would have gone crazy working on a horse farm, too. I’ve never killed anyone, but I’ve wanted to “kill people” in fits of anger.  I never came close to translating that fit of anger into an actual, concrete series of actions to kill that person; for example, going to the gun store, buying ammo and studying schematics of the fourth floor.  Yet office shootings do occur.

I’ve been in arguments in the office over the years. Occasionally profanity-laced and often with raised voices, only twice did they reach the level of actual physical violence.  One was not surprising, the result of a fraud investigation I was leading; the subject threatened me and I had to be escorted by security in the evenings after his termination.  It was all bluster, though, and nothing happened.

The other incident, I’m sad to say, was initiated by me. A fellow manager and I had argued over responsibilities on a shared project, ranging from staffing to budget to the question of “ownership” of the results of the report.  The argument escalated over two days.  On the second day, I was working at a client’s office about an hour by public transportation from my company’s office.  A phone call from the other manager (I’ll call him Jim) came late in the afternoon after a stressful afternoon working on a particularly difficult set of audit items.  In the middle of the Russian winter, I was in the midst of (yet another) semi-cold/semi-bronchitis episode and in no mood for yet another go-around with Jim.  Jim – at least in my opinion – was a bit of a Crip, and I was hanging with the Bloods (you’ll have to read my article on life in the salt mine to fully appreciate that reference).  Jim was everything I disliked about expatriates in Russia; disdainful of the language, the people, contemptuous of their education and unable to stutter out a single word in the language of the country in which he lived.

I’d like to say I remember the real initiator of the afternoon’s meltdown, but I don’t. I do remember standing in front of my (mostly female) staff in a conference room, doing that cartoonish move where you hold the phone receiver in front of your face, yelling at the top of my lungs while his voice rang out in an echo from the earpiece.  Choice words were exchanged.  After slamming the phone down, I calmly put all of my stuff together in my bag and walked out.  My staff assumed I was going home for the day.

Instead, I walked the mile to the subway station seething. I walked into the station, got a token, caught a train, sat and seethed.  It arrived at my company’s office after 45 minutes.  I walked past security, took off my coat and dropped my bags, and walked down the hall.  I turned into the cubicle area where Jim worked, and saw him over the low walls.  Thunderous yelling between the two of us commenced.  I taunted him in Russian, which he didn’t understand.  He grew louder and more threatening until I picked up an office chair and threw it as hard as I could directly at him.  At his head.  All of this I did calmly, premeditated and without any “fog of rage” type of intention.  I meant to do it, more than an hour in advance of actually doing it.

I’m not a small guy and back then I was not small at all. I had the strength and body mass to throw something as awkward as an office chair with a great deal of velocity, and I didn’t take anything off of it.  I missed, though, and both Jim and I were restrained by several of our colleagues.  The odd part was this:  the principals of our little company never even came out of their offices.  Motivated by fear that I was the guy with the bullet with their name on it?  Or just indifferent?

After that, things were better. Jim and I weren’t asked or expected to work on anything together, or even speak.  We crossed paths again but had the good sense not to engage in a fistfight in an office building where the security guards carried sawed-off shotguns.  Jim drifted back to his home country after a while, forgotten by both the expats and the Russians in my office.  I faded away slowly, burned out by illness and rage, until I left Russia for the relaxed pace of Manhattan.

I’m not sure what might have happened if I had access to a weapon that day. Probably nothing; I’m not stupid.  In America that would land you in jail, but in Russia I would probably have ended up having a couple of those aforementioned shotguns’ butts applied to my skull – if I wasn’t having my right arm blown off first.  But for a while I had a brief glimpse of the level of rage that could be set on fire by something as trivial as work; started by work, fanned by exhaustion, stress and contempt.

I don’t get as angry anymore. By stages I’ve moved away from that type of work to contracting jobs, which demand little and pay well.  I haven’t been in a fight of any sort in at least ten years, although opportunities have arisen.  Once you’re married and have children, it’s easy to think of the consequences for THEM and to back down; nobody needs daddy in the hoosegow.   But I wonder how many people lurk in these high-stress jobs in cubicles.  How often does someone spend the hour commute home fantasizing about killing their boss and telling themselves that their fantasy is just “blowing off steam?”

The fantasy occurs more often than we’d like, I bet. The short-term mentality promoted by stock markets and corporations,  far-flung “communities” creating longer and longer communities and the pressure to superconsume are constantly testing the stress points of millions of people.  If we’re “lucky”, the most vulnerable have health problems or depression and drop out before they hurt someone else.  The easy availability of firearms doesn’t help (and yes gun-owners, I know it would have helped if someone else is armed and can shoot the shooter; are you REALLY going to feel better if HR issues you – and everyone else -  a handgun at employee orientation)?

I don’t think there’s a solution; there have always been people who kill for their own dark, unbalanced reasons. But at some point as a society we’ll have to look at the way in which fear of unemployment and consumerism and access to firearms will continue to create fearful office environments, leading to more stress and a downward spiral.  It’s not a path anyone wants to stroll down.  I’m sorry I was part of it.  If you think it’s not lurking out there in the dark corners of the office at 3:45 on a grim Wednesday, you’re more optimistic than I am.

Note: A good read on this subject is Going Postal, a book written by Mark Ames, a guy whose writing I much admire (much like his partner, Matt Taibbi) for their writing for the eXile, both in Moscow at the same time I was there (where I didn’t know them although I think based on hazy recollections that I met Mark at a party). Mark’s got some terrifying stories in his book, which should serve as an anthem to anti-cubicle life if there ever was one.  Oh, and yes, that’s an affiliate link, if you buy the book through that link I will become minutely wealthier-ish, so please, if you were planning on buying it, do so through that link.  Thanks FCC for the requirement to do that extra disclosure:  the world is safer in your hands.

photo by darkpatator

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workplace violence is an original article from the website brip blap.

If you had to rank the biggest rewards from blogging, #2 would definitely be the recognition of your peers (#1 is communicating directly with readers – I love getting emails, even if I’m Mr. Procrastination in answering them). But in the #2 category I was surprised to hear from Flexo over at Consumerism Commentary that I’m one of the nominees for “Best Personal Finance Blog for Careers.”

I’m doubly surprised considering the quality of the other nominees:  Bargaineering,Brazen Careerist, The Digerati Life and Squawkfox.  I’ve appeared with Jim (and Lynnae of being frugal – another nominee for “best frugality blog”) on Marketplace Money.  SVB of The Digerati Life is a blogging friend and a fellow member of The Money Writers network, who has a far better employee-to-problogger/webguru story than I do.  Kerry from Squawkfox has a fantastic blog that, like mine, goes all over the place (and has written some great pieces on resumes).

And if you’ve read this blog for any length of time you know how much I like Penelope Trunk’s writing; she’s amazing.  I also owe her a lot; she and Lazy Man were the first two big-time bloggers to get in touch with me, link to brip blap and – most importantly – encourage me.  Without the two of them I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be doing this today.

So given all that I’m actually not even going to ask you to vote for me, though feel free to go here and vote.  With all sincerity I can say that it’s just nice to be nominated.  I’m very grateful.

And if you’re interested, #3 is making some money.  #4 is the simple enjoyment of creating something outside yourself.  And here are my Marketplace Money appearances:

• Fourth appearance
• Third appearance
• Second appearance
• First appearance

Off to the links:

• Writing a Financial Mission Statement: I have a mission statement for this blog – if you were around for the first 3-4 months of brip blap you saw it. I haven’t had it up in a while, but I may dust it off soon and repackage it as my financial mission statement. To summarize it? You need to have just enough to stop worrying. More is too much, less is not enough.
• Ten Things Millionaires Won’t Tell You: The only item I take exception to: “I shop at Wal-Mart.” I’m having a bit of Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus thinking about Wal-Mart these days. I have justified buying things there in the name of saving money, but Wal-Mart’s an economic menace: they are on the wrong side of the debate on unions, health care, buying American, supporting local communities and even – in the long term – frugality. Buy products from there, and see how long those crap products made by non-union child labor in Malaysia last you. I’m still going to be a millionaire, but I’m not going to do it shopping at Wal-Mart.
• Square Foot Gardening: How To Grow Vegetables In Your Own Backyard: Awesome. If you didn’t see it the first time around, check it out. I spent the last weekend prepping the herbs for the garden. Next weekend? Citrus trees. The next? Veggies. Did I mention it’s in the 70s here in Florida?
• Credit Card and Debit Cards No Longer Have Automatic Overdraft and Over Limit Protection: That’s fine with me. Keep track of your spending.
• Selling Wine – Almost Like Blogging: I like the concept of limited networks: networks with an optimal size that would suffer from growing. I’m in the network with Lazy Man, of course, so I know what he’s talking about. I was lucky to make it in on one of the last couple of rounds of expansion of the neighborhood, and I’ve enjoyed being in the network immensely – but I’d be slow to add new members, too, considering how well we interact right now.
• 10 Ways to Save Money on a New Car: I know it’s not popular to buy new, but I’m very much in the “buy-new-and-drive-for-10-years” category of car buyers; I’m simply not comfortable buying used, and I’ve had very good luck buying new so far. Please knock on wood for me.
• Graduate School Costs & Options: Side note: graduate school is a more cost-effective career investment than undergraduate, but due to the fact that you can’t get the one without the other it’s actually less effective as an investment. Discuss!
• New Credit Card Laws to Protect Consumers Begin: By and large, good news.
• Free Online Tax Filing, Tax Preparation Services & More: If the kind souls at TurboTax would accept me into their affiliate program I might promote their software – that I’ve used for about six years – but they don’t, so check out these alternatives
• Those Who Don’t A-S-K Don’t G-E-T: Absolutely true.
• Dear President Obama: We Need Healthcare Reform Right Now.: I restrain myself – again – from political shrieking, but yes, ram it through and be done with it. American health care is broken. I’m not voting for anyone who doesn’t at least TRY to do something.
• Being Frugal is Foolish: I know Jim’s doing a Devil’s Advocate post, but to a certain extent I agree.
• Online Tools for Mindful Consumerism: Check out GoodGuide – I was quite surprised about some of my favorite “good” products.
• Independent Contractor vs. Employee: What’s the Difference?: It’s a distinction that most people don’t get, but if you have someone who works IN your household, they are an employee, not a contractor. How did that come up? Read the next article…
• How I Made My Peace with Hiring a Housekeeper: I agree. I hate cleaning, and it’s one of the activities I’m willing to outsource to simplify and improve my life – much like I enjoy outsourcing the maintenance and upkeep of my cars.
• On The Brink by Henry M. Paulson Jr.: I had a few choice comments about Mr. Paulson. I am, to put it mildly, no fan.

photo by hiperia3d

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linklings, plutus award nomination edition is an original article from the website brip blap.

Modern corporate life has warped some of my perspectives on careers, the nature of work and even the way people relate to each other. No experience did more damage to my sweetly naive belief in the goodness of humans and the purity of the capitalist model than my time with a company I’ll call The Salt Mine. One lesson in particular stands out:  the importance of visibility (or lack thereof) versus the importance of output.

At The Salt Mine, we did large projects for clients. We estimated the number of hours we would need to finish a job, then take the “official” rates of each of the people assigned to the job and come up with a rough estimate of the total cost to complete the project.  We’d make sure to shoehorn in plenty of hours for the highest paid consultants, and despite long, stern lectures on the necessity to report all hours worked we’d see staff, again and again, pressured to report working 10 hours when they were clocking in at 8 am and leaving at 11 pm.

To make the whole thing just a little more unpleasant, the managers (an intermediate role between the staff and the executives) were required to bill so many chargeable hours per week. As a manager, you had an odd choice to make – under-report your time and risk looking like you couldn’t keep up with your peers, or overreport your hours and risk making the projects you were shepherding less profitable (and it would be illegal, a la Tom Cruise in The Firm, but that’s just a minor detail).

For a while that practice created an uneasy balance between insane working hours and a reasonable, measured approach to working effectively until you were tired, then giving up for the day. Deadlines had to be met, too, and many of the staff were junior, inexperienced people, requiring mentoring and training.  Time spent training was not billable, though.  So we muddled along, trying to keep projects profitable while making sure we billed enough hours to justify our jobs.

Fade to six months later.

The executives had a wonderful idea. Business was good, but hiring good people to execute projects cost money.  Managers were getting the work done, and for the most part everyone left work at a reasonable hour by Salt Mine standards (7 or 8).  So let’s take this environment, and start publicly shaming managers by posting their billable hours by week on a big scoreboard visible to the whole office.

Keep in mind these were billable hours, not just hours worked. If a manager spent a day in training either for himself or training others, it wasn’t billable.  Billable meant you did work on a specific project for a specific client.  Billable time suddenly became very important.  The rumor went around that top billers would be promoted, and bottom billers wouldn’t.  The rumor was soon converted to policy, and the mayhem commenced.

You might think that ruining the profitability of the projects would bother the executives, but the simple truth was that revenue from the clients was based on a fixed fee. The profitability was merely an internal measuring stick, but since all of the consultants were on salary, 8 hours worked cost the firm exactly the same as 14.  Managers, though, were faced with the prospect of eating their own hours to make the project appear more profitable – but then looking shabby on what we called “the leader board” – or overbilling, making their billable hours look good but having horrible profit margins on their projects.

a separate piece of crap

The managers quickly separated into two groups. One engaged in mutually assured destruction.  The idea for this group was to work 120 billable hours per week, and to hell with profitability.  Face time, especially in front of the client, became the single goal of this group.  We’ll call these The Bloods, for the colors of their eyes.  The second group collapsed, effectively.  They knew they couldn’t keep up the manic pace and decided to work like they’d always worked – work 6 hours when 6 hours were necessary, get training, go out for lunch, and so on.  We’ll call this group the Crips, for the crippling of their spirits as they watched the leaderboard publicly declaring that they weren’t carrying their part of the load.

Stop and consider what you would have done. I’d argue almost everyone in corporate America thinks of themselves as Bloods.  They’d like to think they could just “do their job” but too often face time becomes critical for middle management.  I thought I could laugh off the pressure.  I was a mercenary, and had never considered even for a second making a long-term career out of The Salt Mine; it was a stop on the journey there and back again.  But that leaderboard changed things for me.  I had one of The Salt Mine’s largest clients to manage.  With tens of thousands of billable hours budgeted, I had the ability to create vast amounts of work for myself (necessary or not) and proceeded to do so.

So as time went on, the leaderboard settled into a bit of a pattern. I managed to hang on near the top – never the most hours, but never down in dreaded less-than-60-hours-per-week time.  My health suffered; my relationship with my girlfriend at the time wound down; and the patient mentoring I had done with my staff turned into barks of “just give it to me I’ll do it hell’s bells am I the only one who can get crap done around here give me that bottle of Tums yes you make yourself useful.”  I was Madonna, in other words.

I’d like to say the story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. My stress level went through the roof.  After a serious illness my doctor told me, without humor, that I was killing myself.  Despite hovering towards the top of billable hours and winning new business right and left, I was given a backhanded promotion (promoted in grade but not allowed to refer to myself by the new title for another year for headcount reasons).  Colleagues who had coasted along at the bottom of the leaderboard weren’t fired, or held accountable, or given last pick of clients for the next year, or stripped of staff:  nothing happened to them except that they went home at 6 like normal people.  After one or two near-physical altercations in the office and one more health scare, I jumped ship after my demand that my salary be doubled was laughed off.

It’s a funny story – not a funny ha-hah story but a funny stepping-on-a-rake-and-putting-out-an-eye story. I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, but I look back on those times and wonder.  It’s not a great mystery, if I’m honest with myself.  I lost sight of the forest for the trees, too immersed in day-to-day details to step back and wonder why I was submitting to this treatment like I was some kind of corporate Andy Dufresne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_dufresne) – except I was tunneling for freedom.  That period of time might have been one of the best times in my life to talk to a career coach, or read 48 Days to the Work You Love, or even read The Four Hour Workweek.  But I didn’t – but because I didn’t, I’m able to share a cautionary tale with you.  If you’re in that same situation, let me know and I can point you to a resource that can help you get out of that mess.  Like a soldier in a dated war movie, I can gasp out “go on, save yerself!  I’m done for, but you can still save yourself!”  I hope you do.

And maybe it does have a happy ending; I learned my lesson and got out.

(photo by kevindooley)

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in the salt mine is an original article from the website brip blap.

This sums up how I spent my evenings on most of my business trips over the past decade and a half:

No, really. Most of the time.  (Watch here if you can’t see the embedded video).

Hey, have a happy New Year.  Enjoy the bubbly.

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most of my business trips over the past 15 years is an original article from the website brip blap.

I’m sure I butchered that title, somehow. I don’t speak Spanish.  What I know I’ve learned from Dora, and I’m not sure that girl is playing with all her marbles, linguistically speaking.  I would never think to claim I could speak Spanish, for any reason other than maybe comedy.  Yet people do this all the time when they write their resumes.  One resume like this crossed my desk and created a “career FAIL” moment.

My audit department – eons ago, when I was still a corporate senior manager – had a fair amount of work in Latin and South America. I managed projects in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where my ability in Russian (and sometimes, German) made my work easier.  I also managed projects in Latin and South America, but almost always delegated fieldwork to one of the managers who spoke Spanish.  At the time our products were taking off south of the border, so the managers and staff were being overworked and we decided to bring on more mid-level staff.

So the calls to the recruiters went out and the interviewees started bouncing in wearing crisp suits and coiffed up for success (this was pre-recession). Unfortunately most of the candidates spoke the Spanish of the mandatory-high-school-language type:  they learned it, forgot it and now struggled to stammer out basic phrases.  In addition, business Spanish (or any language) may vary significantly from conversational Spanish.  When I worked in Russia I knew the words for “accumulated deficit” and “limited joint venture.”  I lived in Germany when I was in high school and never learned that type of language – in German I’m conversational.  I can talk about food or the weather or sports in both languages, but in German I’m at a loss when discussing business.  Most people know the difference.  Some people don’t…

One go-getter – let’s call him Rico Suave – came in claiming to speak fluent Spanish. Fluent’s a strong word.  A lot of native speakers are barely fluent in their language.  Fluency, to me, implies a grasp of slang, culture and a wide variety of vocabulary past “chit-chat.”  Rico Suave claimed to speak fluent Spanish.  I asked if he would feel comfortable leading audits of business units where English was either poorly spoken or barely spoken at all.  He did.  I told him we were looking for someone to work in South America.  He expressed confidence.  I mentioned to him  that after he finished his interview with me, the next interviewer was a manager who was a native Argentinian.  A look of panic washed across his face.  I introduced him to my colleague, and suggested they conduct the interview in Spanish.

What happened next? He could speak Spanish, but not even well enough to discuss his own biography in an interview.  Was he nervous?  Sure.  Could he have prepared for the interview differently if he had known part of it would be in Spanish?  Maybe.  During phone interviews the need for Spanish skills had been stressed again and again.  Could he have avoided the whole problem by claiming to be conversational instead of fluent?  Yes.  I would rather have hired someone who spoke basic Spanish, because they’d learn all the specialized vocabulary in time.  But Rico Suave would have a tough time convincing me he could learn to be honest.

The moral of the story is simple:  dress up your resume as much as possible, but be prepared to be challenged – and meet that challenge – on key points. Don’t claim expertise in Dutch accounting if your experience in it came from a college course 15 years ago (yes, that’s me – that was time well spent).  Don’t sell yourself short, but remember that skills can be measured.  Employers aren’t fools – at least good ones aren’t – and if you’re lucky they detect the exaggerations and dishonesty before you’re hired.  If you’re unlucky, you’ll have a 90-day probation swing through the company and a gap on your resume.

photo by peasap

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yo no hablo espanol is an original article from the website brip blap.

Here are a couple of interesting facts:

• A survey by Management Recruiters International of 730 U.S. executives in 2003 found that 47 percent surveyed wouldn’t use all their vacation time, and 58 percent said that the reason was job pressures. This same study also found that 35 percent said that they had too much work to take a vacation and that 17 percent felt that their boss was not supportive of employees taking all of their vacation days.
• A study by Circadian Technologies found that the average overtime rate in extended-hours businesses in 2004 was 16.2 percent – that is almost one extra day of work each week. This is an increase over the 12.6 percent rate in 2003. Along with the increase in overtime came an increase in the absenteeism rate, up from 5.8 percent in 2003 to 12.4 percent in 2004. Of course this compounds the problem because when people don’t show up for work other people are asked to do overtime to pick up the slack. In general companies with high amounts of overtime had absenteeism rates of 17 percent, versus 9 percent in companies with low amounts of overtime.

To draw a conclusion between these two facts would be premature, but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support it. I see a lot of grinding overtime and delayed vacations in the corporate environment where I work. I also see a lot of “pseudo-vacations.” Here are a few examples:

• Employees take their BlackBerries on vacation with them and answer emails – sometimes even if they don’t need to do so.
• I had one colleague tell me he would never go on a cruise because he would be unable to check email or voicemail while at sea.
• Another colleague answered an email at midnight the day before she was scheduled to be induced to give birth.
• I once passed out from a raging fever and a bad case of pneumonia (a weird experience, waking up on the floor half an hour later) right before a meeting because I felt I could not miss it.  Instead of going to the hospital, I dragged myself into the office. Being recently unconscious, my contribution was minimal.
• I know people at work who have missed weddings and funerals and children’s birthdays – because they were “too busy at work.”
• I know more people than I can count who broke up with their boyfriends/girlfriends because they were too busy to maintain their relationships.

Just to keep things in perspective, I’m not a neurosurgeon and my colleagues are not oncologists. No one dies if our work is not done on time. Sure, some critical earnings info might be late or a SOX certification might be delayed, but these are big companies and there are many people to cover the slack. I always need to ask someone who is too busy for vacation: “If you are so mission-critical that you can’t miss work for vacation, would Massive Corporation, Inc. still be able to continue if you were hit by a bus?”

Many colleagues would answer “no” but the truth is “yes.” The corporation will continue if you go on vacation. I sometimes wonder if people are just frightened of demonstrating just how unimportant they are to the overall machinery of the company. I have taken several cruises and long European vacations and never once checked my email or voicemail. Once there was an emergency that needed my attention, but one of my staff stepped up and handled the situation, as I knew they were able.

(this post originally appeared in slightly different form back in 2007)

photo by cell105

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too busy for vacation is an original article from the website brip blap.

In a job market like this, it’s not surprising that one open position can receive many, many resumes. Often, your resume might have just a few seconds to make an impression. And that can be difference between getting in your foot in the door or getting that door getting slammed in your face.

Here are a variety of ways to make your resume better:

• Formatting – When used appropriately, bullets and bolding make a huge difference. The perspective employer  isn’t going read one long paragraph.  You may have noticed that this article is written with scannability in mind.
• Grammar and spell check – Microsoft Word provides a very good grammar checking tool. Spell checking tools are so abundant that  there’s no excuse for not using one. In such a competitive landscape, one spelling error could get you labeled as lacking attention to detail.
• Consistent tense and use of phrasing – This is one that a lot of people miss – and the one I have the most difficulty with, myself. Sometimes I don’t know whether to put older jobs in the past tense and current jobs in the present. That’s where it helps to have experts like those at Pongo Resume to help. Always stick either full-sentences or fragments. Switching back and forth between the two will only confuse the reader.
• Have more than one friend review it – Sometimes you spend so much time on you certain parts of your resume that you miss the obvious. Your friends will be looking with a fresh eye, just as a potential employer would.

Even if you have great form to your resume, there’s no guarantee to you’ll get the job. Experience, education, and the interview process are very important – the key is to make sure you don’t get passed by before you get show off those skills.

How To Fix covers a wide-ranging set of topics including household repairs such as how to fix a toilet and How to Fix a Lamp as well as computer topics like how to speed up your computer.

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How to Fix Up Your Resume (guest post) is an original article from the website brip blap.

As noted in this article (October 2009 Unemployment Rate 10.20% – Chart of the Day) unemployment’s high.  Too high.  I was in the 10.2% for about a week, but as of next week I’m right back at it with the same client after they got a budget increase.  Although I’m glad to return to work, what with the economy the way it is, I’m a little bit sad that my “break” only lasted about 7 days.  It was a very productive break in almost every category (except, obviously, blogging).  We made a trip to visit relatives, I got a lot of the paperwork related to our looming close on our new house done, and I even managed to surprise my son by picking him up from school on my bike. 

So due to the busy week, I’ll fly through a few links:

• Relocating To End Unemployment: Ten Things To Consider:  I didn’t specifically relocate to find work, but it’s not the worst idea.  One of my colleagues at my client does this routinely.  It’s tough to buy, sell, buy, sell (not to mention tough on his kids) but it might be better these days to be flexible.
• Best Ways To Invest Small Amounts of Money:  If you get $100 extra dollars, I’m not sure I’d apply it to bad debt, but otherwise – solid tips.  Invest in yourself – that’s never bad advice.
• Americans Not Ready for Retirement:  In the category of “where are all of the 80 year olds going to work, exactly”?
• Energy Gal’s Easy Homemade Hummus Recipe:  We make hummus from time to time, without the blender – I just use a fork, a bowl and lots of what the old-timers called “elbow juice.” 
• College Savings Accounts for a Bad Economy
• Our Journey To Debt Freedom: Cresting The Hill
• Finding Time for Positive Change
• How to Save on Health Care Without Skimping on Quality
• When Money Doesn’t Matter
• How to Earn Income for the Rest of Your Life: The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Annuities

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linklings, dude, where’s my break? edition is an original article from the website brip blap.

When I was younger, I was uninterested in the world outside the US. Things changed when I won a scholarship to study in Germany at the age of 15. I had a terrific experience, both personally and academically, that inspired me to continue my German studies and gave me the motivation to return to live and work in Germany someday . One of the main reasons I went into accounting was the knowledge that it was a worldwide profession – business travel, international business, and so on made it likely that I would have a shot at going overseas sometime in my work life.

During college I decided that I had studied German long enough and that I would fulfill my language requirements with courses in Japanese. This being the late 80s, Japan’s economy was on fire, and knowing Japanese seemed like a good idea. But when I showed up at the registrar to sign up for Japanese I found that the course was full. The university I went to had a fairly limited selection of languages, including mostly the usual suspects – French, German, Spanish and Italian. Despairing that I’d be stuck with a “boring” language, I noticed they had a course in Russian, so I signed up for that. I figured I could do fairly well in this language that was, at the time, a pointless diversion.

In the late 80s there was no real reason to suspect that (a) Russia would ever be open to Westerners or (b) a place that would offer any sort of opportunities to anyone other than academics and writers. That would of course change, but at the time the immediate usefulness of Russian was limited. Despite that, I studied Russian, and my professor – Dr. Don – was a real inspiration and one of the two or three best teachers I’ve ever had. He was young, enthusiastic, accessible and had a real passion for languages and linguistics. I stayed in the class past the minimum requirements and went on to be one of the first two Russian minors in my school’s history.

So approximately five years later, in late 1995, I was approached by a partner in the consulting firm I was working in. I had told everyone quite frequently that I wanted to work in Germany, and the partners had told me they would keep an eye out. Of course, Germany didn’t lack for accountants (still doesn’t), so the idea of me working there had a slim chance of success. However, the partner told me that they had received an unusual request from the Moscow office for short-term assistance for any Americans. The partner knew I had a Russian minor, and asked if I was interested.

Of course I was! I jumped at the chance. I did a phone interview and was all set to go in February of 1996. I flew to Russia and realized on the taxi ride into Moscow that I didn’t even remember the word for snow (“snyeg” if you’re curious). My Russian was rusty, in the sense that the Titanic is now a bit rusty. I had a lot of adventures in Russia, both in my initial four month stint and in my return for a year and a half for a different company, and in further visits and business trips there.

I took away five critical points from my work in Russia. I think these points are useful if you’re considering working overseas, or want a big-time corporate job. I’m not sure working in England would give you the same cachet as more exotic locations like Russia or Indonesia or China, but it might. See if the cons – a remote location, some hardships and an oft-over-exaggerated sense of danger – outweigh these pros.

1. I learned a foreign language really well – not just grammar, but some slang, intonation, and so on. This is only moderately useful if the language in question is Russian, but considering Russia has one of the hottest economies in the world and is used as a lingua franca throughout Central Asia, it is more useful than Italian or German.

2. I embraced a culture and by doing so, became more open to all cultures. I wasn’t close minded or terribly parochial, but I really learned what it was like to be immersed in a culture fairly alien to one’s own. I can’t say I went native. I lived in an apartment that cost 10 times what the normal Russian could pay. I spent more on a meal and drinks on a date than most Russians would see in a month. I had an Internet connection and a state-of-the-art computer. But I did make friends, and spent time at their homes and talking with them and doing things with them on the weekends that a lot of my colleagues – who uniformly didn’t speak Russian – never did. And that experience made it that much easier for me to relax in the future when I went to other countries around the world (although I never got comfortable with midnight steak dinners in Argentina…)

3. I learned true independence. If you want to learn how to deal with customer service problems in the US, try standing in line at the Russian phone service center and arguing with a 50 year old grandmother in Russian about your disconnected phone bill. And if that example’s too mild, try going cross-country in a four-wheel drive with two bodyguards to a former prison camp surrounded by radioactive wastelands, then eating lunch with a sobbing drunken bank director choking out patriotic Soviet songs while eating toasted pine cone seeds. If you don’t feel a little bit lost during that experience and a little bit more confident about handling yourself after it’s over.

4. I gained tremendous work experience. I had to constantly work not only on accounting, but on three different types (US, Russian and international), all while constantly switching back and forth between two languages, managing clients and handling a huge workload. I had been managing a staff of maybe 1 person, auditing $2 million dollars in sales per year companies at home. The next year, in Moscow, I was managing 25 people on an audit of one of the biggest clients of my firm in Russia, with audit fees alone of $2 million.

5. I created a massive shining bright spot on my resume that, twelve years later, still draws more attention, more conversation and more interest than anything else I’ve ever done. I’ve worked since then in locations from Turkey to Argentina, and nothing compares to the shock and amazement your average corporate worker expresses to me when they found out I worked in Russia. It has gotten my foot in the door at several companies; it has wowed recruiters and it has become an endless source of anecdotes that seem to fascinate people (or it could be just that they are polite but I think I can tell the difference).

If you’re planning on getting a job in the corporate world, you should consider a stint overseas, preferably someplace that isn’t ’safe’. At every step of my career there have been people competing with me for positions, assignments and promotions. Many went to better schools, had more certifications, had better connections or frankly were smarter or better looking. But I have yet to encounter many who could top the conversational firestorm I can usually unleash by dropping “that reminds me of the time I got arrested by Russian immigration on a business trip in Vladivostok” or “at least no-one is getting assassinated like the general director of my client in Moscow” and so on.

I suppose that despite my appearance, my mild southern accent or my calm outward appearance my willingness to go work in the wild East in the mid-90s, when things were just 30 minutes away from total chaos in Russia, makes me look like a super-confident, devil-be-damned risk taker to some people. It’s not true; I am a conservative guy in most of my actions. However, the appearance is enough to provide an ‘in’, and that’s usually what it’s all about in appearance-conscious corporate America.

(this post originally appeared on brip blap, in a slightly different form, in July 2007).

photo by Steve

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how working overseas helps your career is an original article from the website brip blap.