Tag Archives: Employment

10 Ways To Be A Business Tool

This is not about being a “tool” in the utilitarian sense.  This is for all the other kinds – as The Urban Dictionary says:

A person, typically male, who says or does things that cause you to give them a ‘what-are-you-even-doing-here’ look. The ‘what-are-you-even-doing-here’ look is classified by a glare in the tool’s direction and is usually accompanied by muttering of how big of a tool they are.

As a public service, here are ten ways I’ve found one can earn that classification from just about everyone in business.  And yes, it was prompted by someone’s specific behavior recently but I’m not enough of a tool to ID them. Continue reading

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Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks

Some Great Advice

Over the weekend there was a minor brouhaha that emerged over AirBnB. For those of you who might have missed it, AirBnB is a hot start-up that lets you rent rooms in people’s homes as if they were hotels. The founders have decided that this would be a good time to cash out a little. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that – reaping the rewards is part of why we invest in our work. However, how they’ve chosen to go about it leaves a lot to be desired and that’s today’s thought. Continue reading

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The Toughest Management Lesson

Suppose you’re a young person who has just been promoted into their first management job. You’re supervising a bunch of folks, some of whom may have been peers. You know that there’s an awful lot to learn. Where to begin?
I’ve trained a lot of those kinds of folks over the last 30 years. I may have even been one myself at some point. So today’s post is about the thing that trips up a lot of managers, even those with a number of years of experience under their belts. Continue reading

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