Perspectives
Turf Wars
Office politics and turf wars seem to hit a nerve with people. The thing is that it's all so unnecessary and can be easily eliminated if companies realized what a toll it's having on the organization. Here's what I think is causing office politics in the first place....
Office Politics
A colleague of mine once remarked that office politics in universities are so intense because the stakes are so small. Same too for companies except in some cases the stakes grow and the battles simmer. Another friend recently reported that she's in the midst of a big...
Self-Promotion
Are you sitting doing your job quietly while everyone else is getting all the glory? Do you wish that more people paid attention to what you know? Are you upset when obvious phonies get all the attention? It sounds like the beginning of a Charles Atlas ad that...
When is enough, enough?
Of all the questions you need to ask when you're looking for a new job, perhaps the most critical is "How will I know when I've succeeded?" This is the same as saying, when is enough enough? Let's say you're sitting down to write a report for the first time to...
How will you know how you’re doing?
Back again for another day of questions to ask in a job interview. If you want to get ahead, you have to know how you're doing on a regular basis. In the industrial economy or if you're in sales, you always know how you're doing. No need to be told. There are all...
How will you know what’s expected of you?
Yesterday I set out four questions you need to get answered in an interview to tell if you're going to be working for a good boss. In case you've forgotten or too lazy to check, the four questions are: How will I know exactly what is expected of me? How will I know...
What you need to find out when you’re looking for a job
I was asked an interesting question the other day by someone who is looking for a job. She wondered that with all the idiot bosses out there, how can you tell in an interview whether or not you're going to have a good one. I didn't have a good answer so I thought a...
Competing visions
There is a great Peanuts cartoon that exemplifies the problem of competing visions. In it, Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown. ‘Charlie Brown, life is like a deck chair on a cruise ship. Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people...
And then there were three
If you thought it was bad when Blackberry had two CEOs, you would not be surprised to find out how much worse it got when they had three. When Thorstein Heins was made CEO and Balsillie and Lazaridis still sat on the board, the company effectively had three different...