Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Newbie College Grads - If you're among the 48% heading home, you didn't learn game theory

I have no idea what they teach in college these days but it must not include game theory.  Otherwise, the 48 percent of the newbie graduates who, reports Monster TRAK, are heading home wouldn't be.  They would have great jobs or have already passed the startup phase of the businesses they launched in their dorms or rundown apartments near campus.  My hunch is that it was game theory, which was the rage when Rupert Murdoch was matriculating at Oxford, that turned this raw mass of rebellion and protoplasm into a guy who sure knows how to make a buck and bounce back beautifully from profesional setbacks.

Ivy League - So dumb about careers

"Ivy League Slaves in New York" reads the headline in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.  The article, no newsflash, is about the usual schlep of these to glam media jobs in Manhattan.  What's unusual and puzzling is that they're making these sacrifices of high rent, low-status/paying jobs in a dying industry.  Most of Manhattan and other traditional media capitals are in a bunker mode, hoping the threat of new-media will pass.

"Looks like my Gen will be working until the iPhone drops from gnarled liver-spotted hands," muses Nexter

Gen Nexter from Greenwich, Connecticut doesn't mind working.  What he does mind, he tells us off the record, is "Looks like my Gen will be working until the iPhone drops out of our gnarled liver-spotted hands."  He wants Obama and it looks like Jim Webb to shore up Social Security and protect pensions.

Best Career Advice: Find Your Passion & It Teaches You

After a lackluster start in life and his law career, Franklin D. Roosevelt wandered into politics.  Joseph E. Persico describes the new beginning in "Franklin & Lucy":

"He [Roosevelt] leaped into the fray as a man who had suddenly discovered his reason for being."

Instinctively, Roosevelt got it that he should drop his rich-boy over-refined ways.  He "gripped the calloused hands of astonished dairy farmers."

Dr. Phil - How did he ever get THIS far

The tabloids keep gleefully telling us how Dr. Phil's TV show ratings are tanking, his wife is probably going to leave him and take with her $200 million, and that he's on Oprah's enemies' list.  But the real issue is not that Dr. Phil could be losing it all.  What we should be wondering is how did this guy get where he is or was.

Employers & their 15 minutes of power

"We received an overwhelming response - 654 people answered our ad for __________."  Clearly, this employer loves much too much the power of having us apply for jobs and freelance assignments.  Since only one person needs to fill that position or do that assignment, what does it matter how overwhelming the response was.  Moreover, there's no correlation between the number of those responding and the probability that this employer will select the right person and that that supposed right person will perform well.

Newbie BAs, BSs - Let the job find you

The media are having a lot of fun scaring newbie college graduates about the difficulty of finding a job.  That's what the media are supposed to do: Get our attention through fear.  Good for them.  But the reality is that jobs find us, if we allow that to happen. 

"Have Laptop, Will Adapt" - Silicon Valley Baby Boomer's Secret for Staying on the Top of Any Game

Silicon Valley is supposedly the land of youth.  Maybe.  But both on that left coast and everywhere in the U.S. there are over-50 Baby Boomers like Marsha Keefer - and myself - who are beating the odds of aging.  We're starting businesses, getting lured away from our successful businesses by clients who want us all to themselves, and then re-grouping and entering a whole new discipline.  Keefer's mantra is: "Have Laptop, Will Adapt."  She's agreed to share her "secret" or the rule for attracting work to her.

If 63 could be the new 48, then why didn't any corporation hire me?

Age has taken on plasticity, and not just because of the miracles of cosmetic surgery.  We are in better physical shape than our parents.  Also, thanks to the 1960s counterculture most of us don't think like them.  Right off, that takes off plenty of years.  And we were able to pile on higher education when it was cheap so we have the options of a much younger person.  Sort of. 

Saving Zoe Cruz - Women Who Can't Hang Onto Power in Their Companies

Zoe Cruz has joined Carly Fiorina et al. in being a fallen woman.  These achievers are very different types in personality, field of expertise, and management style, yet they were all alike.  They could not hold onto power in their companies.  I have a hunch I can save them and other female go-getters who do so well and then crash, fade or give up.