The Long and Winding Road

I'm paraphrasing but a close friend of mine once described his career as follows:

Get a scholarship to study agriculture in college. Attend college and get your agriculture degree but then, rather than getting a standard agriculture-related job, decide to go to law school. Discover that you hate law school but persevere nonetheless and get your J.D. Now be sure not to practice law but instead go to work for a large agri-business firm in Arizona. Get laid off, then get a job with a land bank in California. Work there for several years, then leave for a financial job in Florida. Have health problems and take a job as a county air pollution inspector in Arizona while you're recovering. Once you've back on your feet, leave that job to take a position in Texas and Louisiana researching land rights for oil companies. Learn that you are not only very good at that work, but that you love it. Get your realtor's license along the way.

A straight shot, right?

There are people who have careers that seem to move along a super-highway. God bless them. But a sizable number of talented people will take long detours and a few muddy country roads. This is not always bad. An alert individual can pick up a lot of insight while hauling a career out of a ditch or two and those fortunates who have never known such set-backs can risk becoming a tad complacent.

The reality that many a career encounters "Bridge out" is seldom communicated to young people. Those innocents are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" by elders who know that some of those hope-filled answers will be sucker-punched by life.

As brutal as that seems, there may be no way around the process. Many of us don't know what we want to be until life shows us what we don't want to be.

Inside Track

The job standards should be spelled out.


Unless we're recruiting for an executive position, right? Why tie our hands?


We will want to have extensive outreach.


That's a waste of time for this job. I just got this guy's resume at last week's conference and, I assure you, he is a real winner. You should have heard some of his stories.


And after the national recruitment, we will, of course, have an interview panel.


Sure, sure. I suppose that will be fine...and then we can hire this guy.


We will negotiate over salary after considering all of the candidates.


Well, I sort of mentioned some numbers to him on the way back to the airport.


Hmmm. This selection process will take some time.


Are you kidding me? I needed this guy here yesterday. Let me just name him as an emergency appointment.


You've already had three "emergency appointments" this year.


And each one was a real emergency. Will you people get with the program? Why is HR always such a stumbling block?

Wolfe on Target

Tom Wolfe goes after modern architecture in a debate at Yale.

[HT: 2Blowhards ]

Quote of the Day

Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. He can "earn" more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is nothing succeeds like failure.

- Warren Buffett

An Interesting Silence

Stuart Taylor Jr. on free speech and double standards. An excerpt:

In the matter of the Holocaust-denying, terrorism-sponsoring, nuke-seeking, wipe-Israel-off-the-map-threatening, we-got-no-gays-in-Iran-spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his September 24 showcase speech at Columbia University: It would be easier to stomach the free-speech grandstanding of Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president and Ahmadinejad's histrionically hostile host, and others of Bollinger's ilk if they were a bit less selective in their devotion to the First Amendment. When a student group recently canceled an event featuring an anti-illegal-immigration speaker for fear of a hecklers' veto by leftist students, for example, Bollinger had nothing to say.

[HT: RealClearPolitics ]

Far Away Places

Brian Smeenk gives some tips on managing employees abroad.

Blue Ocean: Cirque du Soleil

A taste of the brilliance that is Cirque du Soleil.


Many of you will recall that it was cited as the ultimate "blue ocean" company in that by combining the circus with theater they created a unique business in which there are no real competitors.

The video shows one reason why they are so successful.

Miscellaneous and Fast

Roger von Oech wants a new expression to describe a person who is really busy.

John L. Herman, a fan of visualization, suggests that we "fly the ride."


The disaster that Robert Mugabe has wrought in Zimbabwe.

The writer's life: Does the Hollywood system ruin screenwriting?


A most unusual car commercial from Renault. [HT: Adfreak ]

David Allen is Wired

David Allen's books on productivity have become must reading for many executives and managers. This Wired article is a revealing look at the man behind the books. An excerpt:

He compares the person working at a desk with a person walking through the forest. There is a surfeit of things that one could possibly pay attention to, and the primary task is to pick out, from the surrounding environment, those signals that require processing. "Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry," he says. "Which is it?" To resolve this question by reference to one's highest purpose would be inefficient. When it comes to processing incoming signals, Allen recommends sorting by the most immediate criteria: How long will it take, what is your location, what devices do you have at hand, what other people are present? These direct, contextual cues do not demand any profound insight. Tasks can be assessed extremely rapidly and executed without friction. Where earlier gurus tried to help their followers make their deep personal commitments explicit and easily accessible to memory, Allen is selling a kind of technology-enabled forgetting.

Quote of the Day

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

- Raymond Chandler