Quizzes:
Career Activist Quiz
Career Marketability
Job Hunting Etiquette
On the Bookshelf:
Re-imagine. Tom Peters
Job
Interviews
Laid
off Now What?
Job
Interviewing Secrets
Business
Books- Reviewed
If
you're captivated by Trump, you've gotta get his book. Trump freely
dispenses platitudes, opinions, observations, anecdotes, and gossip;
but his book is more entertaining than enlightening.
How
to Get Rich. Donald
J. Trump and Meredith McIver. Random House. 272 pages. $21.95. (Also
available as an
audio CD). Fresh off the mega-successful television ''reality''
series, Apprentice, Donald Trump offers his sage wisdom to
the masses in print and by audio.
'MBA
in a Box' covers all
basics of business. A varied group of contributors offers lessons on
everything from innovation to keeping the financial boat afloat. MBA in a Box. Joel Kurtzman, Glenn
Rifkin and Victoria Griffith et al. Crown Business. 448 pages. $18.95. Although the title reminds me of old junior high school
jokes (``Hey, do you have Prince Albert in a box?''), it's still an apt name for this top-line tour of business necessities such
as sales, marketing, HR, leadership, finance and so on.
" . .
a longish introduction that outlines his motivations for putting
out this volume,as well as profiles of his contributors.
It's tempting to excerpt that intro here, but the book's chapter titles
may be more revealing. They are:
Innovation: How Breakthroughs Happen.
Sustainability and the Environment:
A Business That Makes Nothing But Money Is a Poor Kind of Business.
Finance & Accounting:
"We're Not in Kansas Anymore" - Getting Real About Numbers
and What the Numbers Mean.
Strategy: Make Sure You Take the Right Fork in
the Road - On the Importance of Strategic Direction.
Human Resources: Why Brains Trump Brawn.
How to Be a Leader and Live to Tell About It
Marketing: Find Out What They Want and Give it To 'em Just
That Way .
Communication: A Fool May Talk, But a Wise Man
Speaks.
There's Many a Slip 'Twixt the Cup & the Lip:
Good Ideas Gone Awry.
Some of us work for just the paycheck.
To others, a salary is almost a fringe benefit; our compensation is
more than money. It's not just merging-and-acquiring multimillionaires who live for their next deal.
Or artists and other creative types - or even book reviewers. There
are plenty of people who could make more money doing one thing but found a comfort
level (or groove) doing something else. It's pretty common, in fact.
Few young people go to college expecting to be sales reps or a parts managers,
but the world needs 'em and they can often make a nice living doing
these things.
But the challenge of making sure that what one does is meaningful and
rewarding on and off the job remains. Integrating one's work with the
rest of their life is a good idea, especially in this time-impoverished era.
Here are several recent books that approach the subject from different
angles.
The
Seven-Day Weekend:
Changing the Way Work Works. Ricardo Semler - Portfolio. 256 pgs.
$22.95
Ricardo Semler is a Brazilian entrepreneur and visiting scholar at Harvard.
Based on this book, he's probably someone you'd want to work for. His approach to management appears loosey-goosey and laissez-faire,
but as a means of empowering employees, it's a clever way to get the most from them. Semler is big on flex time, open management, and other
enlightened approaches that may appear to be counter-intuitive for maximum productivity and profits. But he's crazy like a fox, since his
style of doing business leaves little room for the incompetent, lazy
or corrupt to hide.
His style of writing is playful and irreverent, but one discerns that
beneath his roguish persona is a person quite serious about work, life
and getting the most from each. Fun book, but could be helpful for managers
who need justification for loosening the reins.
Leave
the Office Earlier:
The Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time...and Feel
Great About It. Broadway Books
256 pg. $12.95 Laura Stack is an efficiency expert, so her approach
is to direct the reader to examine and assess behaviors with the goal
of reducing unnecessary and extraneous actions. Experience indicates, however,
that those who need this book the most may approach it with the best of intentions, but assuming they finish it, and it doesn't
wind up buried under a pile of papers and folders on the floor, they
probably won't act on its instructions. Same as it ever was.
Fire
Your Boss. Stephen M.
Pollan with Mark Levine; Harper Resource. 288 pgs. $23.95
Pollan's book is more inspirational than procedural, with anecdotes
and asides to amplify his assertions. The thrust of his message is that
one must take an active, rather than passive role in life and that you must
do what you like, or even love, rather than just work for the money. Fortunately, the message isn't conveyed in an overly preachy or paternalistic
manner, so it's not too tough to take. In fact, Pollan's wisdom may trigger a few revelations and self-examination, but like the other books,
subsequent action on the part of the reader remains an open question.
The
One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting With Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way.
Darlene Cohen. Gibbs
Smith Publishers.144 pgs. $14.95
Zen philosophy makes a lot of sense in a world where logic and empiricism
often seem beside the point. Darlene Cohen's slim volume offers soothing advice to those who are constantly pressured from within and
without to keep busy and productive. (That's all of us, right?) It's
mainly a matter of focus, according to Cohen, so she offers gentle advice and
exercises to align the mind with the matters at hand. The desired result, she says, is "to live seamlessly." It's an admirable goal,
though not easily achieved. Perhaps, that's where the Zen comes in...
Howard Kaminsky and Alexandra Penney
have written two works chock full of personal mottoes and sayings designed
to ease the tension at work. Magic
Words: 101 Wise Ways to Navigate Life's Sticky Situations. Howard Kaminsky and Alexandra Penney.
Broadway Books.
304 pages. $17.50
Writing to Learn
Why are these writing exercises effective in enhancing interview performance? We credit Writing-to-Learn theory. James Britton, considered by many to be the father of the Writing-to-Learn movement, asserts that writing is learning because writing enables learners to organize their knowledge "and extend it in an organized way so that it remains coherent, unified, reliable." Janet Emig notes that "writing through its inherent reinforcing cycle involving hand, eye, and brain marks a uniquely powerful multi-representational mode for learning." Other scholars expand on Emig’s "reinforcing cycle." "It’s a physical activity, unlike reading," writes William Zinsser. "Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism -- pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor -- for getting our thoughts on paper." David Joliffe asserts that this physical act of writing compels writers to become "actively involved" with what they’re writing about. Through writing, Joliffe says, participants "generate challenging ideas … engage in a substantial process … practice analysis and synthesis … and demonstrate a personal commitment to their ideas…" Suzanne Cherry calls writing "thinking on paper."
Composing written responses to interview questions works because it helps candidates learn and remember concepts and content, improve thinking and cognitive abilities, organize their thoughts, enhance communication skills, bolster their self-image, and make connections. Demonstrating thoughtfulness and organized thinking is positively associated with interview performance, according to a study by Maurer, Solamon, Andrews, and Troxtel. Noting that cognitive ability in applicants has been shown to be a "strong and consistent predictor of job performance," and, in fact, to predict job performance more "accurately and universally" than other constructs (largely because this ability indicates candidates’ ability to rapidly learn job requirements), Huffcutt, Roth, and McDaniel posit that applicants with higher cognitive ability may exhibit greater effectiveness than other candidates in responding to situational and abstract questions. Writing-to-Learn’s claims to help its practitioners organize their thoughts and make connections suggests that the Writing-to-Learn approach would be one way to sharpen communicative abilities for interviewing.
"writing tends to be a more responsible and committed act than talking." Thus, writing-as-interview-prep suggestions include:
- writing an autobiography, which can reveal areas that you may not wish to discuss with an interviewer;
- practicing describing yourself by citing professional characteristics with examples from school and work experience;
- writing detailed proof statements that are tantamount to 30-second commercials about yourself;
- identifying about 30 accomplishments and writing 100-400 words on the top 12 of these, followed by isolating skills demonstrated by each accomplishment;
- composing success stories to prepare for interviews.
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