Dan Erwin

9 "Rules" for Successful Job Search

Recently I was engaged by a senior exec who had worked in a narrow, consumer products industry for years. He’d lost his job because of a buy-out and strategy change. Significantly unaware of the career implications of the changing economy, he also had no awareness of either job search realities or skills. I doubt that is unusual. It means coaching  and development of job search competencies from ground zero are required.

What follows, then, are those ground zero “rules” for job search in the 21^st century. They reflect my observations and the wisdom of highly successful managers and executives who’ve worked in everything from start-ups to leading multi-national companies. These are people who’ve moved from corporation to corporation over the past 15 years with little pain. They reflect a highly knowledgeable understanding of the flattened and networked impact of the information economy upon jobs. The degree of consensus on these “rules” for managerial positions and above is near 100%.

A caveat: If you’re in your first five years of your career after graduation, two or three of the rules will be a bit difficult to ...

Let’s Get Real About Wasteful Public Welfare Programs

By now all of us know that Mitt Romney is responsible for emphasizing the 1% and the “takers.” Of course, Romney wasn’t the only one. Bill O’Reilly, in one of his tirades, emphasized that the real problem with America are the welfare queens and the food stamp junkies. In the debate about poverty and the 1%, no one deals with the problem more uniquely than Nick Kristof. He reminds us that critics have argued that “government assistance saps initiative and is unaffordable.” After researching the issue, Kristof concedes that “the critics have a point” and finds “five public welfare programs that are wasteful and turning us into a nation of ‘takers.’”

1. Welfare subsidies for private planes. The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial.

As the leftists in the George W. Bush administration put it when they tried unsuccessfully to end this last boondoggle: “The family of four taking a budget vacation is subsidizing the C.E.O.’s flying on a corporate jet.”

All Ethical Systems are Flawed

I readily agree with the current push for business ethics. Still, it’s important to recognize that not only are all ethical systems flawed, but some are deeply flawed. They are culturally bound. That’s a way of saying that what’s wrong in one culture is not necessarily wrong in another. For example, most in the English-speaking world view the Ten Commandments as an ethical guideline. So you’d think it was in stone. Not so. The Saints Augustine and Aquinas worked around the “commandment” against murder by formulating the Just War Doctrine—a means for justifying murder in some situations.

Recently I stumbled upon a unique set of broad guidelines by George Cheney and Phillip Tomkins that are not based on general ethical doctrine, but more upon communication. Particularly the role of persuasion in business. What often frustrates me about most ethical doctrines ...

Is the All-or-Nothing Marriage Like the All-or-Nothing Job?

Since the middle of last month, I’ve been nearly fixated on a pre-research article by Northwestern’s Eli Finkel on the All-or-Nothing Marriage. Although I’ve been out of the marriage counseling business for forty years, I found the ideas and conclusions fascinating—but both delighting and discomforting. While skimming through the article just this week, I began to see a recurring pattern and wondered whether it applied to situations other than marriage. My answer is a big YES. What’s true about marriage today is also true about jobs. And that, too, is both delighting and discomforting.

Finkel and his colleagues ask the question whether marriages today are better or worse than they used to be. As he indicates, the question is usually answered in one of two ways. The marital decline camp says that marriage has weakened. Higher divorce rates are indicative of a harmful lack of commitment and a decline of moral character.

That phrase “a decline of moral character” was an interesting reminder. It’s the same term that Charles Murray and William Bennett have used to sell the wrong-headed idea that the moral decline of many in the ...

Once the Camel Gets His Nose In the Tent

The case for corruption.

Bob Strauss is a name few of the younger generations know, but he was one of the greatest political deal-makers of the 20^th century. Strauss died at age 95 on Wednesday this past week. Reading the long obituary, I broke out laughing, but with a bit of sadness. There are too few Bob Strausses left today, but god knows we need them.

Bob Strauss rose from the Texas plains to become an influential Washington insider, leading the Democratic party, but also one who occasionally served the Republican party. Most people look askance at lobbyists and deal-makers and we seem to have few in our society’s today, at least few who want to be known that way. But all societies desperately need them. They serve as the grease that elected political officials and sometimes senior executives of major corporations desperately need.

Bob Strauss was one of those who epitomized the Arabian proverb that “once the camel gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.”  The proverb was originally a metaphor ...

Performance Wisdom Meets Deep Smarts

In my previous post I reported on research indicating that neither age nor experience correlate with performance wisdom. No connection whatsoever. In Ursula Staudinger’s research on wisdom-related performance and review of related studies she emphasizes another shocker: neither fluid intelligence (inherent intelligence) nor crystallized intelligence (developed intelligence) has a significant relationship to wisdom-related performance either.

Staudinger defines wisdom as expert-level knowledge and judgment in the fundamental pragmatics of life (including business). Her elaboration of age and experience is especially pointed for assessing business people and professionals: experience and age are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for business wisdom. All experiences are not created equal. Random or reactive experiences fail to provide the business wisdom needed for the complex decision making in today’s economy. And so the gap between those with true business wisdom and those with mere competence is huge.

The ability to withhold judgment, recognize patterns and reflect about options is crucial for the development of wisdom-related business performance.

Deep smarts ...

Older--And Sometimes Wiser

I was both intrigued and amused by the article in the NYTimes Magazine by Yiren Lu on the growing gap between youngers and olders in Silicon Valley. Olders being more than 50 years old. The article was written by a “younger,” a recent college grad still in her twenties. And that gave it both a peculiar set of useful insights and also a peculiar set of missing insights.

Although her insights about youthful Silicon Valley coders and techies were illuminating, she was evidently unaware that most entrepreneurs and successful start-ups are initiated by those 40 years old or older. No surprise on that, especially since most people believe in the Zuckerberg and late-teen fantasies. I suspect that Bill Gates was one of the very few college-age entrepreneurs that became successful without the heavy hand of a supervising adult.

I was in my sixties when I worked in my first start-up with a bunch of twenty-year olds. It ...

The Hidden Side of the SAT

When David Coleman took over the College Board, home of the SAT, he did so with an awareness of the many criticisms leveled at their testing programs. He was especially interested in what MIT's Les Perelman had to say about the testing. Prof. Perelman is primary author of the first hypertext technical writing handbook, The Mayfield Guide to Technical and Scientific Writing. He has published articles on technical communication, computers and writing, the history of rhetoric, sociolinguistic theory, and medieval literature. Perelman's article in the LA Times on an earlier version of the SAT, New SAT: Write Long, Badly and Prosper is a must-read.  

It's fairly well-known that the SAT meaningfully predicts a student's first-year college grade point average. As one psychologist writes, that is "an astonishing achievement that can't be ignored." 

But what few seem to recognize is that SAT scores are as much a reflection of family income as they are of a student's knowledge. The College Board openly shared this chart comparing SAT scores with family income in Sunday's NYTimes Magazine.

Colleges deal with this information in different ways. Some no longer ...

Why Are Fewer Behaving Badly?

Leonard DiCaprio's Wolf of Wall Street is a bit late. Despite the economic rebound, research shows that behaving badly in business is down for the eighth year in a row. 

A report from The Ethics Resource Center (ERC), a 90-year-old non-profit, surveyed 6400 part-and full-time workers finding that 41% had observed misconduct in their offices last year. That's down from 45% in 2011 and from 55% at the highest point six years ago. The president of the ERC, Patricia Hamed, says that more companies are doing what they need to do.

The following is a summary of some of the relevant findings from 2013 contrasted with 2011 from the ERC's survey:

• Lying to employees, 17%, down from 20%.
• Violating company policies related to internet use, 12%, down from16%.
• Abusive behavior toward employees, 18%, down from 21%.
• Lying to customers, vendors, or the public, 10%, down from 12%.
• Abusing substances such as drugs or alcohol, 9%, down from 11%.
• Sexual harassment, 7%, down from 11%.
• Breaching customer or consumer privacy, 5%, down from 7%.
• Falsifying and/or manipulating financial reporting info, 3%, down from 5%.

Dr. Hamed indicated ...

Outside the Mainstream

"Outside the Mainstream” regularly brings articles, columns and research that challenge conventional thinking. The past two weeks have provided a deluge of challenges to conventional commitments and thinking, many of which should be taken very seriously.

Is there such a thing as “honest graft,” can we learn from annoying workers and are we little more than “puppets of our biochemistry?” These are questions from outside the mainstream everyday life.

Jonathan Rauch, The Case for Corruption: Why Washington needs more honest graft is not only spellbinding, but also absolutely correct in its recognition that we’ve gone too far in our demands for transparency and the removal of earmarks. A classic case of unintended consequences, Rauch points out that “regular order” has been replaced by “regular chaos.” “Public ultimatums supplanted private negotiations, games of chicken replaced mutual back-scratching, and bumptious Republican House members took to dictating terms to their putative leadership.” As Rauch argues, loyalty gets you only so far, and ideology is divisive. Political machines need to exist and they need to work. . . .Earnest campaigns to take the politics out of politics ...