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Research at the University of Houston and the University of Greenwich in London, reports Bloomberg Business Week, confirms that conventional wisdom. At work what's called "impression management" is the name of the game.
Those who excel in that art are the players. They never let their true self break through their professional persona. Is that stressful? It could be. But because it's necessary most of us just do that. Those who don't are known as losers.
Joe Muto aka "Fox Mole" has moved onto the legal stage of attempting to be a headline-grabbing rogue.
He has been accused by the folks at Fox of grand larceny and other crimes, reports NEW YORK MAGAZINE. With a search warrant, the authorities came to his place of residence, searched, and went away with some gadgets and notebooks.
In his caper, Muto not only lost a glamour job at Fox but could be gaining some significant legal bills. Yet, all this might not bring him the payoff he might have expected - big advance for a book, getting on the lecture circuit, and perhaps putting together a blockbuster documentary a la Michael Moore on conservative politics.
The mother-daughter relationship is one of the most complex I have experienced. And, although my mother died relatively young in the mid 1980s, I still wrestle almost daily with whether she was a destructive or strengthening force in my life. My father, who passed away about five years before my mother, rarely gets on my emotional radar screen. Neither does my older sister, who also died relatively young, right after 9/11.
In her column in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Elizabeth Bernstein chronicles some of that. Of course there are so many of us females who speculate, even in social gatherings, how much smoother or better our lives would have gone had our mothers been more motherly from the get-go. Instead of shaming the speaker for being stuck in the past, we tend to listen up.
Our external and internal debates about the role of our mothers in how our lives have gone are much more frequent that the what-ifs about had we been born into wealth and influence, gone to better schools, majored in something different, or even didn't let that proposal go.
Full Disclosure: I decided not to have children not because of my stormy relationship with my mother but the genetic legacy from that eastern european part of the family.
The secret to hitting the target, be it in pitching for a new account or putting together an article, might simply be to do less. Back in 2009, Buddhist coach Marc Lesser explained that fundamental in his book "Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less." Support for that world view is growing and the social payoff of boasting about how busy we are and how many all-nighters we pull is, well, getting less.
BUSINESS INSIDER features the side effects of the all-nighter. One of the most alarming is that our Social Intelligence (Emotional IQ) plummets. That means that we may be destroying the important relationships we are attempting to cultivate through working so hard.
Money is a complex entity. Yet, to make it some will oversimplify the processes of making and losing it. One example of that might be that "reputational capital" has become a buzzword. Organizational leaders are being "educated" about the importance of building and protecting this capital.
But this may not be the real situation, at least not in the eyes of Wall Street. To those who invest, a scandal might just be a storm to wait out. If the fundamentals of the business are solid and there is trust in the leadership's ability to navigate through both crisis and smoother times, then investors could care less about the reputational capital.
I take a look at this phenomenon for financial information company Motley Fool. Here you can become acquainted with my arguments and make your own conclusions.
In this age of austerity, even K Street lobbyists, reports POLITICO, are feeling the pushback from clients who are unwilling to pay for services they might be able to do themselves through social media. Is the PRSA also fighting for survival? Will it have to find a fresh mission to attract financial support from those in public relations?
In his blog today - which you can read here- Jack O'Dwyer takes a look at where PRSA is now and where he envisions it should be. Singlehandedly over the years O'Dwyer has helped thousands of public relations firms obtain recognition for their accomplishments such as nailing down new accounts, solo flyers develop their brandnames, and undergraduates decide if public relations was the field for them. To me, that's the way to define effective lobbying.
Many I speak with are still undone by the reality that the PRSA barred O'Dwyer from covering its annual meeting.
We Baby Boomers monitor "Mad Men" like hawks, trying to pick up what people, places and things shouldn't be part of the set. Well, it was no mistake to have Roger Sterling do acid last night. The counterculture mostly happened for us during our school days. But even then, despite our political and cultural self-absorption, we noticed that those once buttoned-down businessmen were also testing out being alternate realities.
They did this, like Roger, mostly at parties with other establishment types who decided to be hip. They also did come to campus, though. Those of us matriculating at the University of Michigan, pursuing intellectual excellence, would encounter them here and there. We female graduate students had an advantage in connecting with that world of commerce because we were perceived easy to talk with.
Some of these men were truly interested in the new mindset of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. After all their career paths had been linear, from the MBA route to middle management in corporate America. No one I had shared time with ditched their establishment lives and ran off to India to boost their spiritual IQ. The interesting thing was realizing that it's wired into us human beings to take peeks into other lifestyles. Maybe that's why we follow FORBES' list of billionaires and TMZ's chronicle of celebrity fun and frolic.
Because of the counterculture, even we rigid academic types were willing to check out other mental models for framing experience.
It's not for us fellow myopic human beings to judge if Chuck Colson's conversion to evangelical christianity was sincere. Rather the pragmatic among us analyse this strategy for his dramatic comeback from being a Watergate jailbird to a leader of spiritual values. He is now dead at the ripe old age of 80, reports POLITICO. Defeated man tend to die much earlier, including by taking their own lives.
In this era when more and more of us are knocked out of our professional comfort zone, the Colson story has much to teach. Stripped of his former professional identity, in prison he found an entirely new one. He made it work.
As I struggle with career upheaval in my own way in the 21st century (Download Geezerguts) I have been inspired by Colson. In fact, he had replaced comeback Dominick Dunne as a role model for me. Some of us recall that Dunne was arrested for drugs in an airport while members of his family watched. He sold his dog to get money for the substances he needed. Then there he is penning articles on the melodrama of law for VANITY FAIR.
Colson's journey became so riveting when I realized that, after prison, he went out there and stood toe-to-toe with the world. Watergate, unlike Dunne's fall, was no private matter. Actually it was a symbol of how power can overtake every decent human impluse in our wiring. Colson turned out to be a man of courage.
I walked from my car in the North Haven, Connecticut parking lot to the AT&T mobile store as if I were headed for the gallows. The time has come: I had to go from a dumb cell phone to the smart one. I even wondered if they would allow an aging Baby Boomer like myself into such an advanced wireless center.
Right from the get-go, the transition was lacking both in angst and melodrama. A Generation Y salesperson actually came to me once I was about 1.5 feet away from the door. His name was James Hales. For the next 34 minutes he would gently and patiently lead me through the steps of selecting a phone and the appropriate plan and getting down the fundamentals for use. We - Hales had that wonderful way of creating the feeling that the two of us were in this together - chose a Nokia. Then we determined the best plan would not include migrating my Internet service from the current AT&T DLS service to a hotspot through the smartphone.
That done, what could have been the end of the world didn't end the world. I asked Hale to set up my voice features, including making a message for when I was wasn't there. In addition, I pushed it and requested he do my email account too. That he did. It involved a call to AOL.
The one last piece was for me to learn the fundamentals. A born teacher, Hales walked me through the basic menu and the swipe-throughs. They included getting through to the apps, taking a photo, and making video. He even informed me the software I could download for free from Microsoft for transferring photos from the phone to the my laptop.
I left the store knowing that I had accomplished the most important rite of passage of my career. I had crossed over from dumb to smart. I also realized that age has nothing to do with anything. It's all about not fearing technology.
Every Baby Boomer in Connecticut who hasn't yet made this passage should journey to North Haven Shopping Center on Universal Drive and ask for James Hales. Tell 'em Jane sent you.
Those who have made it big didn't fret over doing the right thing, at least as that right thing was defined and mandated by others. The late author Christopher Hitchens was excessive in just about every way. When he sensed he had cancer his attitude was more or less: time to pay the piper.
Being tethered to doing the right thing can box in our potential, never mind our ability to emotionally absorb the disruptions of an economy which keeps changing.
It took decoupling myself from the necessity of considering the right thing to always do to figure out the next steps in my career. Free to think out of the boring box, I landed three interviews for all sorts of exciting, well-paid work. It drained my energy to track a complete diet of healthy eating.
