Dan Erwin

Bitten by Pit Viper, Afghan Father Asks for Help from U.S. Military for His 5-Year-Old Son

This morning's NYTimes has a lovely story of the U.S. military's medical services in Afghanistan.  Although the U.S. provides care for Afghans wounded as a result of the war, they're being called on for a lot more than that.

Sadiq, a five-year-old Afghan, had been bitten above the lip by a pit viper coiled inside a sack of grain that he had opened.  His father, certain that his son would die without medical help, rushed the boy to a U.S. outpost, pleading for help.  In just a few hours, the boy's breathing was labored, but the marine outpost had no anti-venom, and had to call for a Blackhawk.  With a shortage of the helicopters, the first request for aid gained a refusal.

A short time later, there was a request for a Blackhawk for a five-year-old from another outpost.  Well, the story goes on from there and you'll want to read it.  It'll make you awfully proud of the U.S. military on this Memorial Day weekend. 

Quotation of the Week: Doug Suttles, COO of BP

Nothing has gone wrong or unanticipated.  We did believe we did pump some mud down the well bore. We obviously pumped a lot of mud out the riser.

    --Doug Suttles, to reporters on the status of the the current attempt to stop the oil gushing out of the well.  See the Washington Post, Estimates of oil leak gush past twice the previous levels; drill permits yanked

I've seen two interviews of Suttles on the News Hour.  Three things are obvious.  He's very, no, exceptionally smart.  And, he's also a very powerful guy.  Furthermore, he's very laid back, displaying little emotion.

As a result of those obvious conclusions, it's absolutely impossible to tell whether he's giving you the straight skinny or not.  The research is very useful when it comes to power and intelligence.  These people are better liars than the rest of us.  In a blog from April of these, Powerful people are better liars, I summarized the research.  Dana Carney of Columbia University found that when people have more power, they're more comfortable with themselves and also more comfortable lying.  As a result it's more difficult to assess their input.

In still another blog on deception and bullshitting, I alluded to Paul Ekman's research that found that most of us are terrible at identifying liars and lying.  My blog, Reflections on knowing when someone is Bsing, reveals that most of us are no better at detection than the flip of a coin.  Most liars can fool most of the people most of the time.

Is Suttles telling the truth?  The only intelligent judgment is that we're all clueless.

What's Happening to Entry-Level Salaries and This Year's College Grads?

If you were among the 24% of 2010 college grads fortunate enough to get a job, what kind of salary did you get?  An article on 'Glimmers of Hope' for Grads in this morning's Times has the research.  The study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers said that the percentage of grads with a job waiting has gone from 20% last year, to 24% this year.  Average salary for those with a bachelor's degree has slipped 1.7% to $47,673. 

Average salaries for finance majors are up to $50,546, while computer-related degrees are getting $58,746.  Liberal arts majors fell 8.9% to $33,540.  Furthermore, the jobless rate for college grads under age 25 was 8% in April, up from 6.8% in 2009, and 3.7% in 2007 before the recession.  The most shocking statistic, however, is that for high school graduates under age 25 who did not enroll in college, the jobless rate was 24.5% last month, up from 11.4% in April 2007.  And the salary differential is comparable.

Clearly, in spite of the Wall Street Journal's occasional head-in-the-sand articles that some shouldn't get a college degree, if you're without one, you're in trouble.  Still, I'd suggest that looking at entry level salaries and opportunities is a very poor way to make a decision on college majors.  And that's after working with managers and execs in top companies for more than 25 years. 

My own attitude toward undergrad business degrees is more than a bit jaundiced, and not merely because none of my three professional daughters or myself have a single undergrad course in business.  It's because the arts, on a long term basis, are liable to provide much more in the way of opportunities long term for the 21st century. 

First, let's dispose of one issue that is under the business table and few in the unwashed herd understand.  If you've developed your smarts to the place where you got in and finished your undergrad degree at one of America's top 25 or 30 colleges, whatever you major in is largely irrelevant.  There'll be a line-up for you that includes America's greatest firms.  One of my favorite physicians, who like me graduated from a pooh-bah ordinary college, has a daughter majoring in comparative literature at Columbia University.  She's perhaps looking at a university faculty position, but not at all sure.  "You do understand," I said, "that with a Columbia degree, she can do whatever the hell she wants to, don't you?"  She was with me on that topic.  At an undergrad level among those top schools, it's just as true as Jeff Pfeffer's (Stanford MBA prof) comment that the purpose of the top MBA programs was to save the top firms from bothering with a recruiting and selection process.  And if, like the huge majority of the population, you didn't graduate from one of those schools, you've got a different problem.

Although I think Penelope Trunk is often hilarious and sometimes spot-on, her advice that no one who wants a job should get a humanities degree is utter nonsense.  The real secret to getting a job right out of college is the quality of your face-to-face network.  Having a quality network, though, is unusual both for college students as well as for business people.  People who've figured that out and taken the necessary steps can usually count on a job in the worst of recessions.  That's because learning, creativity, innovation, adaptability, and adventuresomeness are much better developed with a liberal arts degree. 

I've alluded to this before, but here's a BusinessWeek article that some parents and students I know should paste on their forehead:  Not every corporate chieftain studies business in college.  Many of them major in history, psychology, or even philosophy. It may be one reason why they succeed.

As Louis Lavelle, the BusinessWeek writer says, there's a slice of big-company CEOs that have gotten a lot less attention, and are far more interesting: those who started their academic lives studying something completely unrelated to business.  Jeff Immelt of GE, applied math at Dartmouth.  Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan, psychology (plus economics) at Tufts.  Michael Dell was pre-med before he dropped out of college.  Carly Fiorina (like her or not) was into philosophy and medieval history.  Janet Robinson, the CEO of the NYTimes, English major.  Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, communications at Ithaca College.  Sam Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, history at Hopkins.

Although plenty of people would be hard-pressed to believe a 20-year-old philosophy major has much of a business future, here's the response from a raft of headhunters.  What an executive studied in college is almost meaningless.  Peter Crist of the executive search firm, Crist Holder Associates, notes that liberal arts individuals have one big advantage over those with an undergraduate degrees in business, engineering, or the sciences:  an expansive and inquiring mind.

Todd Bucholz, who wrote New Ideas from Dead CEOs, goes still further.  To me, studying business as an undergrad is like reading the car manual that came with our car before learning how to drive.

This is probably a total waste of my time.  It's so far from conventional wisdom as to be nearly totally unbelievable by 95% of the population.  Still, it was a fun rant!

See my protege's blog:  Liberal arts and business: A Power tool for success.

Maureen Dowd on Lies as Wishes

Maureen Dowd of the Times is one of those hilarious Irish Catholic feminists who can be a great deal of fun.  Her ability to insert the knife and twist it for an entire column is unsurpassed.  She's especially good with politicians.  Typically, though, there's more than a little truth in her column. 

I quote from today's column on lies as wishes. 

T. S. Eliot wrote about when memory mixes with desire. Politicians get in trouble when desire nixes memory. They know they are misrepresenting an experience, but can’t help themselves. Their desire to be the person they describe is too overpowering. Politicians are actors trapped in the same part, and some occasionally feel the need to punch up the script. They are salesmen engaged in the hard sell, and some occasionally get carried away.

On this occasion, Richard Blumenthal the attorney general of Connecticut who is running for Chris Dodd's senate seat got carried away and announced that he served in Vietnam when he never left the States.  If you've read Dowd, you can imagine how much she used the knife on Blumenthal.  Truthfully, the list of politicians and plenty of the rest of us who engage in aspirational lying is not small. 

The most fascinating insight which had never crossed my mind with much clarity is the notion of Bella DePaulo, a psych prof at the UC Santa Barbara.  Lies, she suggests, are like wishes.  When you wish you were a certain kind of person, but are not, and maybe not willing to do what it would take become that person, then it becomes very tempting to lie.

One of my past colleagues never finished his doctorate, yet on numerous occasions he introduced himself as "Doctor. . . . "  Although I have a great sense of having worked my ass off to finally get that credential at age 50, it's lustre lasted only a short time.  Most of the time when he made that claim I was not especially perturbed.  After all, some of the dumbest people I've ever known have a doctorate.  One day, however, he sat with a potential HR client who commented about his frustration with consultants who claimed the degree. I watched my colleague turn a bright red, and realized he wasn't a very good liar.  Touche.

Dowd's point, however, is not merely pungent, but also instructive.  "Lies are never merely about words.  They're more profoundly about identity."  That insight will reverberate for quite a while.  It gives me a new frame for assessment.

Maureen Dowd of the Times is one of those hilarious Irish Catholic feminists who can be a great deal of fun.  Her ability to insert the knife and twist it for an entire column is unsurpassed.  She's especially good with politicians.  Typically, though, there's more than a little truth in her column. 

I quote from today's column on lies as wishes. 

T. S. Eliot wrote about when memory mixes with desire. Politicians get in trouble when desire nixes memory. They know they are misrepresenting an experience, but can’t help themselves. Their desire to be the person they describe is too overpowering. Politicians are actors trapped in the same part, and some occasionally feel the need to punch up the script. They are salesmen engaged in the hard sell, and some occasionally get carried away.

On this occasion, Richard Blumenthal the attorney general of Connecticut who is running for Chris Dodd's senate seat got carried away and announced that he served in Vietnam when he never left the States.  If you've read Dowd, you can imagine how much she used the knife on Blumenthal.  Truthfully, the list of politicians and plenty of the rest of us who engage in aspirational lying is not small. 

The most fascinating insight which had never crossed my mind with much clarity is the notion of Bella DePaulo, a psych prof at the UC Santa Barbara.  Lies, she suggests, are like wishes.  When you wish you were a certain kind of person, but are not, and maybe not willing to do what it would take become that person, then it becomes very tempting to lie.

One of my past colleagues never finished his doctorate, yet on numerous occasions he introduced himself as "Doctor. . . . "  Although I have a great sense of having worked my ass off to finally get that credential at age 50, it's lustre lasted only a short time.  Most of the time when he made that claim I was not especially perturbed.  After all, some of the dumbest people I've ever known have a doctorate.  One day, however, he sat with a potential HR client who commented about his frustration with consultants who claimed the degree. I watched my colleague turn a bright red, and realized he wasn't a very good liar.  Touche.

Dowd's point, however, is not merely pungent, but also instructive.  "Lies are never merely about words.  They're more profoundly about identity."  That insight will reverberate for quite a while.  It gives me a new frame for assessment.

Does Every Warren Buffett Need a Charlie Munger? Narcissism Is More and More the Disease of American College Students.

The latest issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education reports that over the past 25 years, college students in the U.S. have scored steadily higher on tests for narcissism.  Walter Kiechel of Harvard called my attention to that intriguing statistic in a recent blog on Narcissism, Partnership and Strategy.  The report of Bergman, Westerman and Daly found in a meta-analysis (very thoroughgoing analysis) that over the past 25 years, Americans score higher on narcissism than people from other world regions.  In fact, almost two thirds of recent college students were fairly high, and the score of 2006 college students approached that of a celebrity sample of "movie stars, reality TV winners, and famous musicians."  Thank you People Magazine.

Great!!??  And if that isn't enough, "narcissistic tendencies such as materialistic values and money importance tend to be particularly evident in business students."  I've worked with a few narcissistic managers, but very few.  There's a good reason for that.  Narcissists don't usually believe that anyone can give them much help and most certainly wouldn't want a well-educated coach "screwing around with their gray matter"  (My translation of the unprintable I once received from a certain narcissist who's now dead and gone.)  That means, of course, that they're not very coachable.

By definition, the narcissist has a sense of his/her own grandiosity and has little ability to do much in the way of reality testing. They need a lot of affirmation and adulation, tend to listen only to the information they seek, and put up a wall "as thick as the Pentagon."  They're not especially aware of feelings and don't have much interest in listening to another's feelings.  Bill Clinton is the classic political narcissist, and Jack Welch is typical of the business narcissist (who married another one, according to the best reporters from Harvard Publishing).  

As you can guess, though narcissists can be a great deal of fun, they also can leave a lot of dead bodies strewn around the universe. 

How do narcissists develop?  The theory suggests that they grow up in a family in which they have no opportunity to develop their own feelings, and that one or the other of their parents uses them to gratify his/her own life (and failures).  I still remember with a great deal of clarity my own mother's anger at one of my academic screw-ups.  It was all about how people would see her, not about the help and support that I needed.  It was a typical set-up for the development of the narcissistic kid.  (I'd have been in deep trouble if my dad hadn't taken me out for a hamburger, recognizing that I must feel awful, suggesting that I and she would get over it, and that he hoped I'd redouble my efforts.  Then he put his arm around this growing teenager, patted me on the back and kissed me--in private.) 

Although Michael Maccoby gained a significant audience through his article and book on productive narcissists, like Kiechel, I'm skeptical.  They usually create a great deal of distrust and eventually disloyalty around them by taking credit for everyone else's work.  Furthermore, they have difficulty developing their business and strategy with insights from others, because they always know more than anyone else.  My experience has been that narcissists lack any sense of transparency, so figuring out what they're thinking and why they're doing something is almost a waste of time.  The information is practically never available.  And, if it does surface, it's usually for the purpose of manipulation.

On the other hand, a little bit of narcissism, tempered by an ever-developing sense of self-awareness and supported by colleagues who aren't afraid of giving straight messages can go a long way to personal and organizational success.  Thus my title, does every Warren Buffett need a Charlie Munger?  The answer is a definite and definitive yes.  A really tough spouse (like my beloved half-German) can be very good for the growing narcissist.  Usually though, it takes a number of failures and sometimes counseling to get the narcissist to start listening to feedback and doing something with it.

Kiechel closes his blog with three very useful questions:

1. Would this project or business be better off if I were sharing it.  Especially with people from diverse perspectives?
2. If I were to recruit a partner or two, who would they be and why?  Just imagine what complimentary skills might bring to the brew.
3. If you don't have a partner already, why not?

Be forewarned:  Ultimately Narcissists will use you for their own ends.

Quotation of the Week: Juliana Pankow, Columbia Teachers College

I can't think of anything else I'd rather do, which is a problem, because I might have to do something else.

--Juliana Pankow just graduated from Columbia Teachers College.  From New York Times:Teachers Facing Weakest Market for Jobs in Years.

Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County, NY, advertised seven teaching jobs.  It has been flooded with 3,010 applications from as far away as California.  The recession has penetrated the one profession long seen as recession proof.

Here are three rules for the 21st century.  They're fundamental to your livelihood and perhaps your very existence.

1.  There is no such thing as a secure job.  That's true whether you're in the cubicle or on your own, whether you're blue-collar or a well educated professional.  Whether you're a physician or lawyer.  Even the church or temple ministry has no promise of security.  (I don't know about your local mosque.)

2.  You are 100% responsible for your career.  No firm or profession can promise job security.  That's just not in the cards.  Anyway, job security has only a 70 year history.  Prior to 1940 it was far more difficult than today.  Imagine that!

3.  Make sure that your education and your experience can provide you with much potential for other vocations and careers.  If you're a Gen-Yer, you'll have somewhere between 12 and 20 jobs over your lifetime, and 3 to 5 different careers.  Don't get a narrow education.  Learn how to think and how to learn and never stop learning or thinking.

FYI:  The key skills for the 21st century are adaptability, entrepreneurialism and adventuresomeness.  They are competencies to learn and keep learning.  Implicit within them are the competencies of learning and thinking.

See my posts:

Squishy Skill #1: Adaptability

Squishy Skill #2: Entrepreneurialism 

Squishy Skill #3: Adventuresome

Initial Unemployment Claims Statistics Still Bouncing Around

For the first time in a month, unemployment insurance claims were up.  For the week ended May 15, there were 471,000 claims filed, in contrast to 446,000 the previous week.  Most economists were surprised by the figures.  The four week moving average for initial claims has gone up 3,000, from 450,500 to 453,000, an insignificant change.   

Initial claims have been stuck in the mid-to-upper 400,00s since November last year.  Of course, a one week bounce doesn't mean much, although economists would like to see it move below 400,000 as an indicator of a recovering economy.  It's pretty clear that companies are more confident as a result of first quarter earnings and hiring.  But hiring has not yet occurred in small business.

The central bank has reduced its forecast for unemployment to a range between 9.1% and 9.5% this year, versus 9.5% to 9.7% in January.  The current unemployment rate is 9.9%

6 Steps for Women Who Deserve a Raise

One of the continuing inequities in the American workforce is the paygap between women and men.  Even though women, on average, tend to be better educated than men, those women who work full time only earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.

FYI: To my amusement I've learned that a few women get frustrated by a man writing about this, but I have plenty of reasons, not least, three daughters and a wife, who are professionals.  At different times in their marriage all four made more than their husbands.  (Furthermore, it's important to take truth wherever you can get it.)  Although I've consulted to numerous female execs over the years, a dozen or so years ago, one client from among the top paid executives in America was especially instructive about the issue of male consultants working for female execs.  I asked her why she wanted to work with a man.  Her response?  "The image of me working with a male consultant has much more cachet than working with a woman."  I hope that by now that has changed.  Of course, she tossed me a bone: "Besides, you're more knowledgable than any women I know in the consulting business."  

Saturday's NYTimes has a superb report by Tara Bernard on the research of Hannah Riley Bowles, prof at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about getting the merit raise you deserve.  My review of the article follows, but with additional personal insights.

Bowles research is not at all quirky since Harvard has a long history of negotiation research in governmental, legal and business settings.  The essential conclusion of Bowles' study is that "if a man and woman both attempt to negotiate for higher pay, people find a woman who does this, compared to one who does not, significantly less attractive.  Whereas with the guy, it doesn't seem to matter." 

What's going on here, and what can women do about it?

Bowles suggests that women should frame their requests in ways that won't undermine their relationship with the boss.  So, you ask, do we succumb to the stereotype, or focus on the ends justifying the means?  Your call.

First, two facts help explain the problem: people associate men with higher pay because men tend to hold higher paying and higher level positions, and women are more likely to leave the workforce to care for children, so they end up with fewer years of experience.  Still, when all of those issues are factored into the difference, about 40% of the gap is unexplained.

Other research on gender and negotiation suggests that part of the issue can be tied to the negotiating process itself.  Bowles and her colleagues suggest six important steps for better pay success:

Get proactive.  When you deserve a raise, don't sit around and wait for someone to notice.  I often counsel both men and women that more than 50% of the time your boss won't know about your contributions unless you tell him.  That means that self-advocacy (get familiar with that skill and learn how to go about it) is an imperative in the 21st century.  That also includes consideration of the best timing to approach your boss.

Do your research.  That will pay, literally.  Know what other people are receiving for a position and task.  Search out the pay websites such as payscale.com and salary.com to uncover salaries for comparable positions in your area.  I've neglected one significant insight from Bowle's research.  When you talk to peers, talk to men in your network, and don't get caught comparing your salary to other women.  I regularly remind clients that solid research shows that the quality of your network is terrifically important.  People with a quality network both within and outside their organizations get promotions earlier, have more opportunities and get higher pay.  (One related blog: Who should be in my work network?)

Anticipate objections.  This can be a difficult one.  Once you start the process the responses are going to be reactive, so identify as many as possible and think through your responses to each of them.  If you have little background in negotiation, now's the time to start adding to your skill base.  Start with Fisher and Ury's bestseller, Getting to Yes.  Once you've gotten that down pat, pick up Negotiation Genius, by Malhotra and Bazerman.  For insight on anticipating objections, focus on chapter 3, Investigative negotiation, and chapter 13, When Not to negotiate.  Anything by Bazerman on negotiation is worth its weight in gold.

Negotiate at home.  This is an intriguing piece of advice by Bowles.  Think about how a raise might affect your life at home.  Women still carry a disproportionate load of household chores.  So, try to re-examine some of those roles, and think through how that might affect each partner's work situation.  Then re-negotiate those work responsibilities and relations.  As one writer says, the big secret in the American culture is that negotiating at home may be more challenging than at work.  Your workplace is probably more gender neutral than your home. 

Negotiate strategically.  Here's where women need to use a different strategy than men.  Bowles' research shows that if women explain why their request is appropriate and that they care about maintaining good relationships at work, and do it in an authentic way, they'll be more successful.  Be very careful about manipulating outside offers to support your request.  They backfire more for women than for men.  I've found that in the better firms, it's rare for an exec to be responsive to an employee who asks for a raise based on outside offers.  They're going to have to be extremely valuable for that to work.  Indeed, I'm aware of some instances in which the person was let go for making an outside offer part of his/her case.

Negotiate creatively.  Although the younger generation of men are more and more factoring family responsibilities into the mix, women, especially, may want such things as more flex time or working from home.  Think through all your needs and your bosses'.  That should be a major piece of the negotiating mix.   

When things get tough, remember that approaching the negotiating process from the perspective of soft skills (the relationship skills) is far more successful than from the hard (the money).  Best wishes.

NYTimes: A Toolkit for Women Seeking a Raise, by Tara Siegel Bernard, Saturday, May 15, 2010.

One of the continuing inequities in the American workforce is the paygap between women and men.  Even though women, on average, tend to be better educated than men, those women who work full time only earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.

FYI: To my amusement I've learned that a few women get frustrated by a man writing about this, but I have plenty of reasons, not least, three daughters and a wife, who are professionals.  At different times in their marriage all four made more than their husbands.  (Furthermore, it's important to take truth wherever you can get it.)  Although I've consulted to numerous female execs over the years, a dozen or so years ago, one client from among the top paid executives in America was especially instructive about the issue of male consultants working for female execs.  I asked her why she wanted to work with a man.  Her response?  "The image of me working with a male consultant has much more cachet than working with a woman."  I hope that by now that has changed.  Of course, she tossed me a bone: "Besides, you're more knowledgable than any women I know in the consulting business."  

Saturday's NYTimes has a superb report by Tara Bernard on the research of Hannah Riley Bowles, prof at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about getting the merit raise you deserve.  My review of the article follows, but with additional personal insights.

Bowles research is not at all quirky since Harvard has a long history of negotiation research in governmental, legal and business settings.  The essential conclusion of Bowles' study is that "if a man and woman both attempt to negotiate for higher pay, people find a woman who does this, compared to one who does not, significantly less attractive.  Whereas with the guy, it doesn't seem to matter." 

What's going on here, and what can women do about it?

Bowles suggests that women should frame their requests in ways that won't undermine their relationship with the boss.  So, you ask, do we succumb to the stereotype, or focus on the ends justifying the means?  Your call.

First, two facts help explain the problem: people associate men with higher pay because men tend to hold higher paying and higher level positions, and women are more likely to leave the workforce to care for children, so they end up with fewer years of experience.  Still, when all of those issues are factored into the difference, about 40% of the gap is unexplained.

Other research on gender and negotiation suggests that part of the issue can be tied to the negotiating process itself.  Bowles and her colleagues suggest six important steps for better pay success:

Get proactive.  When you deserve a raise, don't sit around and wait for someone to notice.  I often counsel both men and women that more than 50% of the time your boss won't know about your contributions unless you tell him.  That means that self-advocacy (get familiar with that skill and learn how to go about it) is an imperative in the 21st century.  That also includes consideration of the best timing to approach your boss.

Do your research.  That will pay, literally.  Know what other people are receiving for a position and task.  Search out the pay websites such as payscale.com and salary.com to uncover salaries for comparable positions in your area.  I've neglected one significant insight from Bowle's research.  When you talk to peers, talk to men in your network, and don't get caught comparing your salary to other women.  I regularly remind clients that solid research shows that the quality of your network is terrifically important.  People with a quality network both within and outside their organizations get promotions earlier, have more opportunities and get higher pay.  (One related blog: Who should be in my work network?)

Anticipate objections.  This can be a difficult one.  Once you start the process the responses are going to be reactive, so identify as many as possible and think through your responses to each of them.  If you have little background in negotiation, now's the time to start adding to your skill base.  Start with Fisher and Ury's bestseller, Getting to Yes.  Once you've gotten that down pat, pick up Negotiation Genius, by Malhotra and Bazerman.  For insight on anticipating objections, focus on chapter 3, Investigative negotiation, and chapter 13, When Not to negotiate.  Anything by Bazerman on negotiation is worth its weight in gold.

Negotiate at home.  This is an intriguing piece of advice by Bowles.  Think about how a raise might affect your life at home.  Women still carry a disproportionate load of household chores.  So, try to re-examine some of those roles, and think through how that might affect each partner's work situation.  Then re-negotiate those work responsibilities and relations.  As one writer says, the big secret in the American culture is that negotiating at home may be more challenging than at work.  Your workplace is probably more gender neutral than your home. 

Negotiate strategically.  Here's where women need to use a different strategy than men.  Bowles' research shows that if women explain why their request is appropriate and that they care about maintaining good relationships at work, and do it in an authentic way, they'll be more successful.  Be very careful about manipulating outside offers to support your request.  They backfire more for women than for men.  I've found that in the better firms, it's rare for an exec to be responsive to an employee who asks for a raise based on outside offers.  They're going to have to be extremely valuable for that to work.  Indeed, I'm aware of some instances in which the person was let go for making an outside offer part of his/her case.

Negotiate creatively.  Although the younger generation of men are more and more factoring family responsibilities into the mix, women, especially, may want such things as more flex time or working from home.  Think through all your needs and your bosses'.  That should be a major piece of the negotiating mix.   

When things get tough, remember that approaching the negotiating process from the perspective of soft skills (the relationship skills) is far more successful than from the hard (the money).  Best wishes.

NYTimes: A Toolkit for Women Seeking a Raise, by Tara Siegel Bernard, Saturday, May 15, 2010.

Paul Krugman and America's Real Fiscal State

Periodically I look for an analysis of our nation's fiscal state from someone I trust on such matters.  Here's what Paul Krugman, the Nobelist, has to say about that very subject in this morning's Times. 

So here’s the reality: America’s fiscal outlook over the next few years isn’t bad. We do have a serious long-run budget problem, which will have to be resolved with a combination of health care reform and other measures, probably including a moderate rise in taxes. But we should ignore those who pretend to be concerned with fiscal responsibility, but whose real goal is to dismantle the welfare state — and are trying to use crises elsewhere to frighten us into giving them what they want.

His statement comes in a comparison of our fiscal state with that of Greece.  There is, of course, no valid comparison when you're dealing with apples and oranges.  Or ripe apples and completely spoiled oranges.

So why do some try to make comparisons?  Is it just fear-mongering?  Krugman gives a definite answer to the question.

BTW, this is exactly the kind of article that recent college grads occasionally ask me questions about.  Their question is about the usefulness of such information.  My answer is straightforward.  Planning your career strategically means that you need to know some basics about the status of our economy and how it compares to other economies and what that might mean for your future.  Krugman gives me a fairly clear vision of how to look at the world in this article.  And, I trust that vision.

Quotation of the Week: Jane Goodall,

People say you can't change somebody who's older than such and such an age, because they're set in their ways.  It's not true.  If you can find a story, if you can make them think and not be defensive, sometimes the toughest person can change. 

--Jane Goodall, the internationally renown primatologist and student of Chimpanzee behavior.  Harvard Business Review interview, April 2010.

Aside from making a singular contribution to the universe, Goodall has her finger on a fundamental truth about people and their relationships.  Nothing draws them more closely together and changes their minds more successfully than a good story.  Often the story is first acted out in human history, but then retold in human conversation. 

Unlike the Greeks, who were masters of the tragic story, Americans do not respond readily to human isolation and testing.  We prefer the rescue of the cavalry at the last moment.  Yet no story, perhaps, is as inspiring to Americans as stories of individuals who, when facing difficulty, seize upon opportunities and go on to success. 

I am occasionally surprised by the many in business who seem unable to tell good stories.  Yet on several occasions, when interviewing for a consulting job, I've had an exec say to me, "tell me a few stories about your clients."  Stories, far better than mere ideas, tell people who we are, what has happened to us and others, and how, hopefully, similar wonderful things can happen to other people.  

A few years ago, our middle daughter interviewed for a superb position in a biopharmaceutical firm.  On the second round, she conversed with 7 or 8 different managers.  Upon receiving the position, she wisely went back to talk to each of the managers, wanting to know what they saw in her that made them hire her.  She got the same responses from each of the managers:  "Superb background of experience, unusually qualified by education, and . . . you have great stories."

On numerous occasions my clients have responded to my coaching with comments about how useful are the stories I have to tell them about such and such a learning experience or competency.

One of the secrets of business and political success is the ability to tell good, relevant, pointed stories to make your case.  Many don't how to tell stories, but storytelling is a skill that can and should be learned for every career.  Not only do stories inform and inspire, but as Goodall says, they persuade.

Stories persuade because they are the most primitive form of human communication.  You're never too old to learn how to tell stories.

"A good story has the same effect on me that I suppose a good drink of whiskey has on an old toper (drunk); it puts new life in me!"  Abraham Lincoln