Entries for July 2008

If you believe what social news gathering site NowPublic has to say, these are the most influential folks in Silicon Valley. I say folks generously. It's mostly men. (You'll find a much better showing among the ladies in last week's list of the most influential people in New York. See Arianna Huffington at No. 2.)

At any rate, here's the top half of the top 50 list for Silicon Valley, as measured by online visibility, presence on Web 2.0 sites, interactivity and accessibility, and presence on microblogging platforms like Twitter:

It's easy to point out the screamers and the ragers as the bullies of the office. But some of the worst colleagues are calm, quiet, and incredibly selfish. Over at HR Capitalist, blogger Kris Dunn has pointed out this piece of workplace wisdom. Dunn calls them "information hoarders." You cross your fingers you won't need their help, because they're not interested in collaboration or support. They don't share. They make your job harder.

The problem with these sorts of colleagues, however, is that they're hard to confront and difficult to complain about. Adult tantrums and rages are easy to point out to a boss. Stealth selfishness is harder. Saying something like "Joe is so not a team player" may ring catty and, by the way, is lovely corporate-speak.

If it's just one colleague who operates like this, you can probably survive. If your office is populated with these kinds of people, and you're not one of them, I think you may need to find a new office.

"Lazy teens!" That's the headline on this morning's Examiner. Apparently Washington, D.C., area teens are bereft of summer job opportunities and they don't really mind. Urban teens are losing out to immigrants and suburban teens are seeing their opportunities swallowed by retirees. Instead of fighting the trend, today's teens are reportedly kicking back, firing up the Xbox, or watching movie matinees—and happily freeloading off their parents.

But folks, this is nothing new. Despite these bad tidings, the threat of aimless teens has been around for a long time.

"If I knew you in the schoolyard versus knowing you now, what's changed?"

Trainer and speaker Marcus Buckingham asked this of a woman in an Oprah workshop posted to the show's site. Most of us would have a variety of answers to this. I'd probably say that I'm less bossy, more sensitive, a bit less brave, and more aware.

Anxiety over the financial repercussions of taking a sick day had 50 percent of Ohioans heading to work when they should have stayed home in this past year, according to a new survey.

The poll, conducted by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health, found the chief reasons employees in swing states Ohio and Florida were not taking sick days were because those days weren't paid or because they felt pressure from their employer to show up.

Last night, I was cleaning house while listening to a rerun of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and looked over long enough to catch sight of a preproduction Ford Flex given to the family.

For all the hype, however, the car's designer reportedly couldn't escape a round of layoffs at the struggling U.S. carmaker.

There's been quite a bit of lamenting lately about the import placed on internship experience.

This needs some clarifying:

You don't actually need to have a fancy internship on your résumé. Really. You need something that gets a hiring manager's attention. That's what internships do—they open doors and allow you to put great corporate or creative names on your résumé—and they ultimately get you attention.

If you get steamed about CEO compensation, then you'll love Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, who has been winning major kudos in the British press for turning down a salary increase earlier this year.

The BOE's annual report said a review committee determined King was entitled to a raise of about a third—from 290,000 pounds (about $575,000) to as much as 400,000 (about $794,000). But King has previously "called for wage restraint to keep a lid on inflation," the Guardian reports, and so found it appropriate to refuse the increase and remain at his current salary.

The federal minimum wage rose 70 cents today to $6.55 an hour. It will rise again next year to $7.25. The move has its fair share of detractors who argue against government price-setting.

Business owners who pay minimum wage to train teenagers in their first jobs often find the increases frustrating, as it makes the training more expensive, and the teenagers aren't bearing major financial burdens.

The cubicle was born 40 years ago this month. In 1968, it was not called a cubicle, but an "Action Office," invented by Herman Miller executive Robert Propst. (Hat tip to the Kansas City Star.)

From the Herman Miller website:

The Action Office system was the world's first open-plan office system of reconfigurable components and a bold departure from the era's fixed assumptions of what office furniture should be. With the Action Office system, Propst assailed traditional, complacent office design with a concept that fit the way people really work. Wildly successful, the Action Office system transformed the workplace, as well as Herman Miller and the entire furniture industry, which scrambled to copy it.

A catchy Wired Magazine ad caught my Internet-scrolling eyes this morning, and I ended up reading the magazine's cover story on Internet celebrity Julia Allison.

It's a strange story for several reasons. Allison is a Web star—probably unrecognizable to most people that pass her on the street (at least outside Manhattan or San Francisco). But Wired reports that Allison, who works as a dating columnist for Time Out New York, has built her fame on little other than relentless self-promotion:

I recently interviewed Jon Gordon, author of The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal With Negativity at Work, while he was in the middle of a long drive with his family. Believe it or not, Gordon could actually bring himself to be grateful for the price he was paying at the pump. That kind of gratitude can pay off for us in the workplace, Gordon says. (Much more on this next week, especially on how older workers who can't afford to retire can avoid negativity and complaining.)

Gordon's thoughts on gratitude:

It's everything. I think it really is everything. And all the research on gratitude is so powerful. You see that you can't be stressed and thankful at the same time. It's the way our brains and bodies are wired. So you focus on gratitude and you won't be stressed. It's the best stress reducer....

OK, you're paying $4 a gallon for gas, and I'm as upset as anybody. But you can say: We're not paying $8 a gallon. And we live in a free country. We live with so many amenities. We live with so many free things that we can enjoy.... Instead of focusing on that complaint, you can now be grateful for what you have. And which emotion's going to uplift you? Gratitude. Which one's going to enhance your longevity? Gratitude. Which one will strengthen your immune system? Gratitude.

In the second half of the 20th century, the employment rate for women grew fairly steadily, but growth has stalled since the late 1990s, according to a report from Congress's Joint Economic Committee (as reported by the New York Times).

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that women were particularly hard hit and did not recover from their job losses in the 2001 recession, unlike previous recessions, and that "wives are no longer insulating families from economic hardship in times of higher unemployment and falling or stagnant real wages," the report's authors conclude.

Some HR choices are hard. There just isn't much gray area in this firing decision:

An internal affairs report says a Daytona Beach police officer demanded free coffee and tea from a Starbucks and threatened employees with slower emergency response times if they refused.

Lt. Major Garvin, a 15-year veteran, was fired July 8. According to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Chief Mike Chitwood says Garvin recently failed a polygraph test that he insisted on taking.

Despite sluggishness in Russia's overall labor market, Moscow's labor market is hot—boasting a 0.9 percent unemployment rate, writes Peter Cappelli at Human Resource Executive. There are lessons here for the United States. He explains why:

The intensity of Moscow's economy and the stagnation in the rest of the [Russian] economy are related. Despite having a population that is, by world standards, highly educated, the Russian economy is being held back by an apparent skill shortage....