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Career advice
Four pieces of excellent career (or life) planning advice at Slate. I'm not going to try to summarize them because they deserve a full read. At my Harvard Business School job, I've spent several years studying what makes people successful, and this article gets it right. Well worth reading even if you aren't a corporate warrior. (Really good career advice applies equally well whether your career is investment banker, homemaker, science teacher, pastry chef, or fifth-grader. This is how you can tell it apart from mere boosterish jargon.)
From the article:
"Finding the bright spots" means that you spot things that are working and study them carefully, in hopes that you can reproduce them. (This is distinct from "looking on the bright side," which will just make you annoyingly sunny.)Consider a sales manager who oversees a team of five, including three average reps, one superstar, and one laggard. The typical manager will spend most of her time dealing with the laggard -- after all, that's where the problem is, right? But a wise manager will fixate on the superstar: What can I learn from him that I can spread to my other reps? Or a freelancer with only a few clients will be tempted to obsess about the difficulty of landing new work, but she'll be better served by focusing on her bright spots: Despite the odds, I've landed work with several clients. How, exactly, did I manage that?
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About Miss Conduct
Welcome to Miss Conduct’s blog, a place where the popular Boston Globe Magazine columnist Robin Abrahams and her readers share etiquette tips, unravel social conundrums, and gossip about social behavior in pop culture and the news. Have a question of your own? Ask Robin using this form or by emailing her at missconduct@globe.com.
Welcome to Miss Conduct’s blog, a place where the popular Boston Globe Magazine columnist Robin Abrahams and her readers share etiquette tips, unravel social conundrums, and gossip about social behavior in pop culture and the news. Have a question of your own? Ask Robin using this form or by emailing her at missconduct@globe.com.
contributor
Robin Abrahamswrites the weekly "Miss Conduct" column for The Boston Globe Magazine and is the author of Miss Conduct's Mind over Manners. Robin has a PhD in psychology from Boston University and also works as a research associate at Harvard Business School. Her column is informed by her experience as a theater publicist, organizational-change communications manager, editor, stand-up comedian, and professor of psychology and English. She lives in Cambridge with her husband Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, and their socially challenged but charismatic dog, Milo.
Who is Miss Conduct?
Robin Abrahamswrites the weekly "Miss Conduct" column for The Boston Globe Magazine and is the author of Miss Conduct's Mind over Manners. Robin has a PhD in psychology from Boston University and also works as a research associate at Harvard Business School. Her column is informed by her experience as a theater publicist, organizational-change communications manager, editor, stand-up comedian, and professor of psychology and English. She lives in Cambridge with her husband Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, and their socially challenged but charismatic dog, Milo.
