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    Entries in career (177)

    Friday
    Sep062013

    Critics

    From the Wikipedia page on Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)

    Perhaps one reason Sibelius has attracted both the praise and the ire of critics is that in each of hisJean Sibelius is not hearing any of your crap. seven symphonies he approached the basic problems of form, tonality, and architecture in unique, individual ways. On the one hand, his symphonic (and tonal) creativity was novel, but others thought that music should be taking a different route. Sibelius's response to criticism was dismissive: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic."

    You are either a creator or a critic.

    Choose wisely my friends.

    Have a great weekend!

    Wednesday
    Aug142013

    Time heals all wounds, just not fast enough if you've lost a job

    I caught a really interesting piece in the Wall St. Journal online recently titled After Divorce or Job Loss Comes the Good Identity Crisis, a look at some interesting research that examined just how long it takes the average person to get past, get over, and move forward from a dramatic life event such as a divorce or a job loss.

    We've all heard and perhaps even advised friends and colleagues that 'time heals all wounds', the key question for the wounded is often 'How much time?' John McLaughlin, Untitled, 1963

    Turns out it may be as long as two years for folks to get it back to 'normal' following a major life change.

    From the WSJ piece:

    Whether you've lost a job or a girlfriend, it won't take long before someone tells you, Dust yourself off. Time heals all wounds. Yes, but how much time?

    Experts say most people should give themselves a good two years to recover from an emotional trauma such as a breakup or the loss of a job. And if you were blindsided by the event—your spouse left abruptly, you were fired unexpectedly—it could take longer.

    That is more time than most people expect, says Prudence Gourguechon, a psychiatrist in Chicago and former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It's important to know roughly how long the emotional disruption will last.

    Once you get over the shock that it is going to be a long process, you can relax, Dr. Gourguechon says. "You don't have to feel pressure to be OK, because you're not OK."

    Oh, so don't feel pressure to be OK because you're not OK. Thanks Doc - that helps bunches if the traumatic life change involves the ending of a romantic relationship, where no one is going to force you to jump back into the dating scene before you are good and ready. Heck, maybe you never get back in the game. Sure, that kind of stinks, but again there are worse things that can happen. Like...

    Like having the traumatic event be the loss of a job, especially if it was a good job and if you didn't see the axe coming - whether it was a layoff or even a term for cause that you should have seen coming but were blind to what was about to happen.

    If the WSJ piece is right, and getting over the loss of a job might take up to two years to bounce back from, then that might be one of the reasons for the increased difficulty that many out of work job seekers have experiences in getting back to work in the last few years.

    In this recovery period after losing a job, people are likely to feel depressed, anxious, and distracted - just the kind of feelings and 'tells' that will pretty much destroy a job seeker in the interview process. No one wants to be the hiring manager that signs off on taking on board the guy who was an emotional wreck in the interview.

    Two years to get over a big loss, including a job.

    Important to try and remember when the guy across the interview table, who suddenly found himself on the job market unexpectedly, has only had two or three months to process everything that has been happening to him.

    He's tense, he might be getting depressed, and the pressure that is mounting on him at home is only getting more intense by the day.

    Hard to 'get over' the trauma of a job loss under any circumstances for sure. And probably almost impossible when with every day that passes without a new job that  the 'two year' time frame doesn't seem to get closer to ending, but rather just keeps moving into the distance.

    Thursday
    Aug082013

    Job Titles of the Future #7 - Professional eSports Player

    Like lots of guys of a similar generation, I grew up playing sports, watching sports, talking about sports, etc. My Dad and my other adult male relatives were all big-time sports people as well - simply put, there was not a day of my youth through teenage years where sports in some fashion was not a part.

    Fast forward about, well let's just say several years, and while sports are still a big part of many American kids lives, (certainly girls sports are a much, much bigger thing today than when I was a kid), there are lots more and different ways modern kids can choose to spend their time, energy, and as we will see in a second, to feed their appetite for competition.

    And just like traditional sports like basketball and football have for many years offered at least the most talented and driven kids a pathway to fame and monetary gain, we are starting to see these newer forms of competition also present similar opportunities.  

    What am I getting at?

    Check an excerpt from a piece in the LA Times - Online game League of Legends star gets U.S. visa as pro athlete

    International stars in sports such as baseball, hockey and basketball have long been afforded special immigration status to play on U.S. teams. Think David Beckham, the former Los Angeles Galaxy soccer player from Britain, or Dodgers rookie phenom Hyun-Jin Ryu, a pitcher from South Korea.

    Now add Danny "Shiphtur" Le, of Edmonton, Canada, to the elite list.

    Le, an online gamer, is one of the world's top players of League of Legends, a virtual capture-the-flag game in which two teams of fantasy characters compete for a glowing orb. Le is so deft at racing down the virtual field and opening up gaps for teammates that he recently became the first so-called eSports player to be granted a type of visa normally awarded to athletes featured daily on ESPN.

    With a generation of children having grown up playing video games, the decision by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been widely perceived as elevating America's newest professional sport to the same class as old-school stalwarts.

    And in a worldwide competition in which the winning team can take home $1 million in prizes, the ability to sign the best players — whether from Canada or South Korea or Russia — was seen as a must-have for U.S squads.

    Did you catch all that?

    A professional video gamer from Canada was granted a special type of visa, (probably a P1A), to live and compete in the USA with the rest of his elite team of gamers.

    I know you are thinking this is a kind of joke, or at least a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of occurrence. After all we are talking about video games, for gosh sakes. Not football, not baseball. Stupid video games.

    Except that I bet video games in general, and specifically League of Legends, the game in which Le and his team competes in, are a much, much bigger deal than you realize.

    How big?

    More from the LA Times:

    In the U.S. bracket of the championship series, eight teams compete against one another on Thursdays and Fridays at a West Los Angeles TV studio.

    The games are broadcast online and draw more than 1.7 million unique viewers. A typical National Hockey League game on the NBC Sports Network last season drew a quarter of that audience.

    Gaming industry analysts estimate that more than 32 million people worldwide play the game, about half of them in the U.S. The rest come from Europe and Asia. By those calculations, 1 in every 20 Americans plays League of Legends. That dwarfs baseball, from Little League to Major League Baseball.

    Like I mentioned at the top, I grew up playing traditional sports under the watchful eye of my Dad who also grew up playing those same sports. It would have fulfilled both our dreams had I become an NBA star. But alas, short, slow, and unable to jump very high (mostly) did me in.

    A new generation of kids is going to grow up playing games like League of Legends, under the watchful eyes of their Dads who also grew up playing League of Legends, (or World of Warcraft, or similar).

    And if those stats are accurate, or even close to it, that 1 in 20 Americans are playing League of Legends then there are going to be lots of career opportunities that will spring up from that ecosystem. Sure just like baseball and football there will be the select few like Danny Le that will become elite-level professionals, but there may also be a need for more event organizers, promotions, marketing, expert analyses, training courses, and on and on.

    Professional eSports Player, that has a pretty cool ring to it, and it makes the list as an official SFB 'Job Title of the Future.'

    Monday
    Jul012013

    Job Titles of the Future #6 - The CEO Sober Companion

    Whether it is a hard-charging, world-commanding, and impossibly tall and good-looking CEO, or the global head of marketing that never seems to sleep, hits every major city in her empire at least every quarter, while always being the smartest person in the room,  it seems like more and more the work of a big-time corporate executive is never done. 

    Just like Knicks' legend Patrick Ewing once said about big shot corporate executives, (ok, he said something kind of like this, not actually this, but I needed a sports reference to try and get this post qualified for the 2013 Edition of The 8 Man Rotation E-book), "Sure, sometimes we party pretty hard, but we work hard and all the time too."  

    Or if you don't dig the stretched to the breaking point Ewing take, how about this one from America's favorite (fake) CEO - Kenny Powers who put it more plainly - ' I'm the MF, CEO!'

    The work demands, the inflated egos, the sense of entitlement, the feeling of invincibility that we often see possessed by people that have essentially been tremendously successful their entire lives - all these quite often combine with lots of money, opportunity, and some enabling behavior by friends and colleagues to drive CEOs and other execs into some bad, bad decisions regarding alcohol, drugs, and other inappropriate actions.

    And having the CEO of a big, possibly publicly traded corporation running into scandal, trouble with the law, or even simple lack of attention to the requirements of his/her position caused by one too many whiskeys or painkillers is the kind of risk that more and more companies are deciding to attempt to mitigate. And one of the ways in which that risk is combated is with the 'Sober Companion'.

    What does the 'Sober Companion' do? Check the details from this recent NY Post piece:

    Trying to reason with his multimillionaire client while plying him with black coffee, Chuck Kanner ducked and narrowly missed a bottle of whiskey aimed at his head.

    “He’d be sitting there [meeting] with people like Bill Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani and Mario Cuomo, spaced out, and I’d be saying: ‘Dude, this is not OK!’ ”

    The unseemly row aboard the drunken CEO’s yacht in the Caribbean was all in a day’s work for Kanner, a so-called “sober companion” who makes his living keeping high-powered business executives on the straight and narrow.

    He is part of an elite team of advisers and confidantes who work undercover, often 24/7, as personal assistants, bodyguards, researchers and potential investors, so the Masters of the Universe can get help for their addictions — while saving face as they rule the world.

    So maybe personal assistants or even executive bodyguards are not all that new, and are certainly not 'Job titles of the future', but this new spin, or expansion of duties - for the assistant to pose as a consultant of some kind with the job of making sure the exec doesn't over imbibe on booze or drugs, well that seems like a brand new take on an old problem.

    And I think it's also symbolic of the age that corporations and executives live in today. Don Draper could pretty plausibly get away with being drunk half the time and acting on pretty much every desire he wished. Sure, the times and expectations were a little different, but there were also no blogs, and no Twitter, and no Instagram to potentially capture and broadcast to the world all the monkey business he was up to, and that in today's age would be all over the web.

    Sure the 'right' anser to this problem is to have CEOs and execs that know better. 

    But until we are pretty sure that the million years or so of human tendency towards making bad decisions with booze and drugs is pretty much done, you might want to look into hiring one of these 'Sober Companions' for your exec team as well.

    Today, it doesn't take much (maybe about five scotches and a bad decision), to destroy billions in company value.

    Wednesday
    Jun192013

    Everything Zen #1 - The obstacle is the path

    Way back when I wrote about one of my favorite books that I've ever read called Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, a collection of Zen stories about leading people, organizations, and personal development. I've carried that little book around with me for ages, and even after all this time still occasionally leaf through the lessons and am usually surprised both by how simple and on-point most of the ancient lessons remain today.

    So on a sluggish Wednesday where I'm still shaking off the after-effects of the SHRM Annual Conference, I figured I needed a little inspiration to dive into the Inbox and voice mail, so of course I turned to a little Zen. And then I figured since I dig these Zen sayings and stories so much, (and I need some more 'theme' series around here for these kinds of days), let's call today's post the first in the Everything Zen series, a semi-occasional look at how these lessons can help us to get over on what seem like modern problems, but mostly are pretty much the same ones the ancients wrestled with themselves.

    So here goes, Zen Lesson #1 is simple - 'The obstacle is the path'.

    The obstacle isn't something standing in the way, it is the way itself.

    That's it. 

    I know, not very profound. But if you think about it a little, and open up to the concept that the barriers that exist between you and where you are going or what you are trying to accomplish aren't distinct from the task or journey itself, that they actually are the task and journey too, then it kind of frees you and empowers you to approach and attack them differently.

    They become less daunting, less intimidating, and maybe your attitude towards them can subtly shift from fighting with them, (and getting angry or frustrated or bitter), towards seeing and dealing with them as just another part of the path you're already on.

    I know, deep thoughts.

    So that's it from me today, time to face the unread messages in the Inbox, (takes a deep cleansing breath).

    The obstacle is the path...