Record All Of These Things And Celebrate Them

Devise a project to increase that component in your work life, and give yourself one month in which to accomplish it. Record all of these things and celebrate them. Spend several days to a week doing this. Your project could entail acquiring more customers like that. Or it could be moving your relations with more customers to that level. Every day, do something that helps you accomplish your goal. It’s good if you can do it first thing in the morning but not essential. At the end of the month, evaluate your progress. If you do this in a disciplined fashion for a year, you’ll complete four to six projects, each of which will have increased some area of your job that turns you on. You’ll also find that you’re no longer in the job you started out with. You’ll be on your way to reaching your ideal job. It’s something that you craft over time, assembling the pieces as if it were a temporal jigsaw puzzle.

Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

You wake up one morning and realize you’re in it. Quite possibly you have felt it too or seen it close up or even tangled with it. Fear of being without a job, fear of being unable to maintain your accustomed living standard, fear of downward mobility in all its varied incarnations. In a capitalist society with relatively free labor markets, involuntary job loss has always been a possibility and is accepted as such. But there is also the belief that other jobs would be available and that this event would be nothing more than a temporary inconvenience. Headlines scream about increasing unemployment rates. Job loss has become the most important reason that homes are foreclosed. A college education used to be a pretty good guarantee of employment. This is no longer true, and the line of the educated unemployed is long and growing longer. Thus, many in the workplace with jobs have fear in their hearts. This fear is physically constricting and mentally debilitating. It causes people to hold onto jobs that they find nauseating.

Living Proof

It prevents them from being authentic and leads to a sharp increase in toxic workplace politics. It was a small item in the financial press, but Tim caught it and his stomach constricted. A private equity outfit had acquired the third largest firm in his industry and was looking for other acquisitions. Would his company be next? Private equity guys were vultures. They said that they liberated value and made the businesses they took over more efficient. What they actually did was strip an acquired company bare, reduce expenditures drastically by laying off lots of workers, load the entity with debt from which they paid themselves a huge fee to recoup their money, and then spin the remainder out in a public offering that gave them even more lucre. The weakened company would either fail or totter along, but they didn’t care. He cursed the financial engineers who played such an important part in the economic scene. He had set this up so he would never be late and incur the increasingly horrendous late fees. There was a sizable charge from an upscale store. His wife had bought two evening dresses intending to decide between them at leisure. Unable to make up her mind she had kept both.

Depending On You

Why did she have to be so profligate? He worked such long hours that she felt this was her due. She just didn’t understand how precarious his standing in the company was. Every time he tried to talk to her about this they got into a screaming fight. His secretary buzzed. It was time for the staff meeting to discuss Abigail’s proposal. Abigail reported to him, and he had tried to quell some of her more outlandish ventures. But she had gone over his head to his boss’s boss, who had taken a shine to her innovative thinking. He had to call a meeting to discuss each harebrained idea and document why he squelched it. He suspected that Abigail was using her connection with the senior executive to undercut him. He was surprised to see his boss, Al, at the meeting. Apparently Al was free and thought he would see what was going on. Tim felt an instant of panic and forced it down. Was Al there to build a case for letting him go? He wished he had spent more time reading Abigail’s report. But it did not look good with Al there. Tim praised Abigail for her initiative but pointed out that her idea would eat up virtually the entire discretionary budget and require hiring at least two people. He was prepared to do that only if she had evidence that doing so would have a reasonable chance of success. An academic paper touting the strategy and showing spectacular results obtained in an experiment involving students was not enough. Do I actually have to tell her this? he fumed silently. He could have been more forthright and gotten rid of her or told her exactly what she had to do if he was surer of himself. He did know that her father was a golfing buddy of two of the board members. After the meeting he got back to work. What made it different was that Jim had assembled solid evidence and made a darn good case for his proposal. He had piloted a small experiment using real products with the company’s customers, and the results had been outstanding. Should he preemptively suggest decreasing headcount in his division? That would be a good way to get rid of Abigail, and no one could accuse him of unfairness if he also dropped the axe on Jim. I receive many reports from the frontlines of major companies every day. People are more reluctant to say what they really feel, more ready to acquiesce to what their bosses want, less willing to take actions that depart from normal practice, and more disengaged from the jobs they are striving to retain.