With my co-host, Margo Meeker, we’ll discuss the many types of stress you might encounter on the job and deliver techniques we use with our clients to help you deal and eliminate your stress.

Episode Resources

We mentioned the following resources in the show:

• Site: “The Work” By Byron Katie
• Book: “8 Minute Meditation” by Victor Davich
• Book: “Self-Powerment” by Faye Mandell
• Site: “Due Soon/Important Grid” By Randy Pautch
• Tool: Rich’s “Due Soon/Important Grid”

So without further ado . . . here’s our podcast (go to the top of this post)!

How much love is there in your life?

You probably love your parents, your spouse/partner, your kids . . . but what else do you love?

Do you love any of your friends? Colleagues? Nature? A beautiful day? A good book?

How about work? Do you love it? Hate it? If work was a long spectrum from Totally Love to Uncomfortably Despise, where would you fall on that line? 

During one of my free Inside Track Open Mike Sessions, we discussed this typical symptom of business. How can I move up that spectrum and better love what I do. Because if you love what you do:

• You do it better.
• You enjoy doing it.
• You are fulfilled doing it. Challenged.
• You learn.
• You grow.
• You have FUN.

So how do you love what you do? We first need to investigate why you don’t love what you do. It’s usually because of these four reasons:

1. It’s boring. Or ‘SOS’ – you do the ‘Same Old Stuff’ every day. 
2. You hate the business, the people, the commute, or the location.
3. You question or someone else questions your performance. You feel you are not fully qualified or someone is a severe critic.
4. It’s not what you really want to do.

During our sold-out open mike session, I mentioned there are only three choices when it comes to work:

1. Endure. Stay and do nothing.
2. Change. Stay and change the game.
3. Leave. Get the heck out of there.

That’s it. If you want to LOVE what you do, you can’t choose #1 (endure). So if we take our model and apply it to our four reasons:

1. It’s boring.

Change. Ask for more demanding/challenging work from your boss. Think of new ways to deliver to clients. Be inventive, take chances, use your imagination. Staying safe and fearful will only deliver more boredom. Trust me.

2. You hate the business, the people, the commute, or the location.

Leave. Changing any of these items is difficult (unless you can relocate or telecommute). But I’ve found, the best way to deal, is to make a wholesale change to a different environment. But be careful, you might just jump from the fat into the fire.

3. You question or someone else questions your performance.

You — Stop doing that. When we question our performance, it’s usually based on a fear of forgetting something critical. Most of the time, we are correct and don’t have to worry. Start using a checklist or redundancies to solve this problem.

Them — Ask them for constructive feedback rather than being just a critic. Ask them to help you do your job better. Ask others (who you feel are top performers) for insight and advice. 

Otherwise . . . Leave.

4. It’s not what you really want to do.

Analyze your options and environment and make a change to another position. Or leave and do what you really want to do.

A lot of these solutions might sound simple or trite. But it’s the truth. You might be making it more complex, but if you sit down and lay out your situation, it probably falls within one of these four areas.

If you find it difficult — you probably don’t want to change.

Sweet Potatoes? Peas? Squash? Corn? No.

Is it a loved one who passed away this year? Is it a family member who is serving our country overseas?

Let’s all take a moment and express our love and gratitude for all the people in our lives.

But today, I would like to go a little deeper — what’s missing from your INNER Thanksgiving table this year?

Have you lost your job?
Have you lost confidence in yourself?
Have you lost your clients?
Have you lost your focus?

2010 has been both problematic and revelatory for many of my clients, colleagues, and friends. Some are up, some are down.

But the one thing we all need to remember, is that we have the ability to change. To take action. To slowly (or quickly) start turning our fortunes around to where we want them to go.

Only YOU have the ability to change where you are.

Only YOU can make the decision to begin charting a new course.

Everyone else can only be a tool to help YOU accomplish your goals.
We can show you how to swing the club, YOU are the only person who must swing and hit the ball.

So at this time of the year, let’s all be thankful that we have the ability to take action. The ability to change course.

And the gratitude to realize that Friday is also a holiday — spend some time that day to start taking action.

P.S. Here’s a Thanksgiving gift for you to download and enjoy.

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” – Unknown

Too bad we’ll never know who originally said this great quote. A little secret . . . this is one of my mantras in life. Let’s think about it:

1. Stop complaining about your job. Start doing something about it. Take steps to make it more challenging, more interesting, more fun. Step out of your comfort zone and ask your boss for more work. Try to stretch yourself and speak about a new, strategic idea that might impact the company. Do something that changes your work dynamic — and see if that makes a difference.
2. Stop complaining about the economy. Many people today are making big bucks again. Go find them and see what they are doing. Copy them. Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is crazy — start benchmarking other successful behaviors and you’ll slowly become successful. In the process, you might run across a person that you might want to hook up with that will demonstrably change your perspective.
3. Stop complaining about your marriage. At one time, you loved your spouse or partner. Find out why and focus in on those elements. You both have changed but take the time to fall in love AGAIN. Spend more time together, take little walks, go to dinner, get to know one another again. You might surprise yourself. Just open your heart to your spouse – that’s the secret. Again, take the time to fall in love again.
4. Stop complaining about money. You have two choices, make due with what you currently have or change the game and make more. If you have to make due, go visit this site (http://almostfrugal.com/) or this site (http://zenhabits.net/the-cheapskate-guide-50-tips-for-frugal-living/)- they’re the best. If you need to make more money, investigate if you have the ability for a raise at your current level. If not, you need to change the game and move laterally, up, or leave your job altogether. Another suggestion is to start doing something on the side that will make extra cash. I still remember meeting an older couple at a bed & breakfast who told my wife and I (we were newlyweds) to always have a side job that brought in extra income. They took old grape vines, twisted them into wreaths and sold them at craft shows – it paid for a very comfortable retirement.
5. Stop complaining about life. Life is made up of options and choices. Most of the time, people who are disappointed about life have limited their options and sometimes make the wrong choices. So, to make your life a little bit better, figure out how to expand your options and make more educated and informed decisions. Unless you’re in prison, you always have options and choices — just broaden your perspective.

Get the pattern? Stop complaining about something in your life and start doing . . . take action and change it!

CIOs are under more pressure than ever. The job is incredibly challenging. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, we believe information technology is at the heart of corporate strategy. IT must deliver more systems faster and operate them in a fail-safe environment. Being successful as a CIO requires an unusual combination of technical know-how, business acumen, and organizational leadership skills. It’s a job with a sometimes short life cycle, and it takes a seemingly superhuman to do it effectively.

I read this great article in InformationWeek from Dr. James Cash and Dr. Keri Pearlson. Hope you enjoy it!

Why does this characterization sound so familiar? Partly, we suspect, because you’ve heard it before-and continue to hear it over and over. Observers have been spouting generalizations and hyperbole about the challenges of IT management for well over 30 years, or as long as the job has existed. The job certainly is difficult, and many otherwise capable managers have foundered in the role of CIO. The questions we want to address in this article are how the job really has changed, and what it takes to survive and even succeed as a CIO today. Our conclusion is that, spurred in large part by the business implications and opportunities of information technology, the CIO job has become much more complex and more business critical than ever. This is a mixed blessing. CIOs who fail to understand the new reality may find themselves both overpromising and underdelivering. They may well be setting themselves up for high-profile failure.

Successful CIOs today are far more than IT strategists and functional managers. They see themselves as business strategists and change agents. In most large companies, the CIO is expected to play a strong leadership role-and not just about technology architectures and capabilities. They’re actively involved in exploring new business opportunities, in advising line managers on how to launch IT-dependent business ventures, and in defining priorities for fundamental organizational transformation. Most businesses simply can’t succeed without a strong IT function. The stakes for CIOs and their organizations couldn’t be higher.

The “New” CIO Role
Our research and conversations with dozens of CIOs and business executives has confirmed that the successful CIO today in most large companies is a different creature than even five years ago. Here are a few of our findings:

The business and technology contexts surrounding the CIO are substantially different than ever before. The job has become far more complex at the same time that the critical nature of information systems has gone up by an order of magnitude in virtually every business. To compound matters, there’s an unprecedented urgency to develop and implement IT capabilities-an urgency that often flies in the face of what has traditionally constituted good IT management practice.

CIOs are struggling to manage this complexity, and meet the expectations of their bosses, peers, and subordinates. Life in this fast track may be exciting, but it can also be stressful and lonely.

Too many CIOs continue to spend most of their time with their internal staff. They spend very little time interacting with outside customers, in spite of the growing importance of IT in supporting customer information and interorganizational processes.

IT organizations are facing enormous pressure to accelerate the delivery of services. Virtually every other functional area in business has become significantly more dependent on IT. And the Internet and the new business models it has spawned have created a widespread expectation that information systems can be developed and implemented very quickly.

While some industry analysts have been heralding the “demise of the CIO,” we believe exactly the opposite is true. The CIO role has indeed become more complex, and the full gamut of CIO responsibilities may need to be shared by several individuals. But our research suggests that the CIO’s strategic importance is greater than ever.

CIOs see themselves playing five primary roles: business strategist, IT strategist, IT functional leader, technology advocate, and change agent. This configuration is new and represents a significant shift in emphasis from the past. Indeed, the best role model for a CIO may be the CEO, who must balance a wide variety of priorities and influence a very diverse group of managers and specialists to achieve tangible outcomes.

Unlike many other functionally focused managers, successful CIOs operate as true general managers and senior business executives. They often have a varied career history that includes graduate-level education in business and management, significant periods of time working outside IT, and-surprisingly-they often have substantial experience managing overseas operations.

There’s no simple or single job description of the CIO role. We’ve identified four distinctively different CIO job types: corporate CIO for operations, corporate CIO for functional leadership, business unit CIO, and regional CIO. But even within those categories there are major variations from one company to another in job requirements, business priorities, and organizational challenges.

CIO Of The Future
To ensure future success, you should start with a deep and thoughtful look at yourself and your situation. What are your personal strengths and limitations? Do you thrive on complexity, on rapid-fire decision making, on life in a fishbowl? Can you operate as a true general manager, holding both your staff and your peers accountable for IT performance? Do you have a clear vision of the future of IT in your company in terms of both its strategic role and the IT functional organization needed to build and deliver the required capabilities? Can you commit to dramatic change and ensure that others do what’s needed to accomplish that change-even if that means overhauling staff and skills, offshoring, outsourcing, or having to confront peers in other areas of the business? Do you truly understand what your companies’ customers want and need? Do you spend at least 20% of your time listening to and talking with customers? Can your IT organization deliver new, highly reliable application functionality in 90 days or less? Do you have full accountability for IT investments and architectural decisions? Is your IT organization delivering systems at the pace and with the bulletproof quality your company needs? Have you delegated responsibility for IT operations and freed your time and energy to focus on the business opportunities and performance of IT?

If you can answer these kinds of questions confidently and affirmatively, welcome to the future! If not, you may need to reassess your role and your ability to fill it. A CIO today must be focused on customers, on the business, and on the future. If your workweek is consumed with IT management issues rather than with business leadership and innovation, you probably won’t succeed as a CIO.

Key Recommendations
Faced with this complexity and urgency, the CIO must balance his or her time and priorities among a number of competing but equally critical goals. Individual CIOs must make choices: what to focus on, who to spend time with, what to learn, and what to do. Your personal agenda depends on your own situation-as a CIO, you must first be very clear about the business imperatives and the personal issues you have to focus on. There’s no simple way to operate IT in the future. However, there’s a large set of tactical actions that a CIO can take to deal with the core dilemmas of IT leadership and accelerate the way the IT organization operates. While none of these tactics is revolutionary or even new, taken together they have the potential for dramatically accelerating the delivery of IT services:

• Simplify the operating environment, governance, work processes, and task priorities that form the context for IT work.
• The first step in simplification is to establish a standard business and technology architecture and use it as the basis for all IT technology decisions and vendor selections.
• Move toward a simpler organizational structure for IT, centralizing infrastructure responsibilities and decentralizing application development and implementation responsibilities wherever possible.
• Be very clear about your own organizational situation and the business requirements that must be satisfied. Establish an explicit short list of goals and stick to it.
• Focus your time and energy outside the functional IT organization. Spend as much time as possible with external customers or suppliers (choose them based on strategic importance). We recommend at least 20% of your time, or one day a week, on average.
• If your internal staff isn’t strong enough for you to delegate most of your operational responsibilities, then devote a reasonable amount of time to strengthening the IT organization. (For most organizations this must be accomplished in six to nine months.) As the organization matures, shift your emphasis to spending more time with business clients and external customers.
• As CIO, think of yourself as the CEO of an IT products and services company, regardless of whether you have a large staff or have outsourced all of your operations. Focus your time and attention on strategic issues, on external relationships, and on the future.
• To accomplish this strategic leadership role, think of yourself as a storyteller and an entrepreneur, not as a controller. Adopt a marketing mind-set and introduce marketing processes into the IT organization to complement (not replace) the engineering disciplines that currently characterize the IT profession.
• Establish clear, explicit goals for shortening IT decision and development cycles. Focus the entire IT organization on accelerating all of its core business processes.
• Find the right balance for you personally, and for your organization, between fostering organizational change and exploiting the potential of IT, on the one hand, and ensuring the discipline to produce highly reliable, bulletproof systems and infrastructure, on the other.
• Manage your own time and personal agenda carefully-and explicitly. Be sure to reserve enough time for reflection, learning, and peer-to-peer networking. Adapt your leadership style to match the needs of your organization, combining collaborative problem solving with task-focused direction setting to produce a cohesive, committed organization.

Dr. James I. Cash recently completed a 27-year career as a professor and senior associate dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He’s a member of InformationWeek’s Editorial Advisory Board. Dr. Keri E. Pearlson is a research director with the Concours Group. Numerous graduate programs use her book, “Managing And Using Information Systems: A Strategic Approach,” to train future IT leaders.

Here’s a fun list that I saw on Madatoms:

Denial
I’ve got plenty of money! I’ll start looking next week!

Anger
Craigslist and Monster sucks! I’ve got a college degree! Jobs should be looking for me!

Bargaining
I’ll just drive around looking for help wanted signs. I hear that Starbucks has health insurance!

Depression
Why did I major in Communications? I have no useful skills.

Acceptance
I didn’t know I qualified for unemployment! I love this country!

The U.S. economy is not only shedding jobs at a record rate; it is shedding more jobs than it is supposed to. It’s bad enough that the unemployment rate has doubled in only a year and a half and one out of six construction workers is out of work.

By Roger Lowenstein From The New York Times Magazine.

What truly troubles President Obama’s economic advisers is that, even adjusting for the recession, the contraction in employment seems way too high. As one administration official said, “This has been a very steep job loss.” One proof, he added, is that the country is deviating from the standard (among economists) jobs predictor known as Okun’s Law.

In the 1960s, Arthur Okun, a prominent economist, claimed to have discovered a mathematical relationship between the decline in output (that is, goods and services produced) and the rise in unemployment. It held up pretty well until recently. But this time around, although the decline in output would have predicted a rise in unemployment to 8 percent, the actual jobless rate has soared to 9.5 percent. So this recession is killing off jobs even faster than the things — like automobiles, houses, computers and newspapers — that jobholders produce.

The Federal Reserve now expects unemployment to surpass 10 percent (the postwar high was 10.8 percent in 1982). By almost every other measure, ours is already the worst job environment since the Great Depression. The economy has shed 6.5 million jobs — nearly 5 percent of the total, far outstripping the 3 percent that were lost in the early ’80s. Economists fear that even when the economy turns around, the job market will be stagnant. Keith Hall, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sums it up as “an ugly picture out there.”

Explanations for the collapse of the great American job machine begin with the marked absence of what is called labor hoarding. Usually during recessions, firms keep most of their employees on the payroll even as business slows, in effect stockpiling them for better days. In the current downturn, hoarding seems to have gone into reverse. Not only are firms laying off redundant workers, but they seem to be cutting into the bone. Hall says the absence of hoarding means that firms do not expect business to pick up soon. This is supported by other evidence, like a doubling in the number of involuntary part-time workers (there are nine million of them) and the shrinking workweek, now 33 hours — the shortest ever recorded. Presumably, before companies start to rehire laid-off workers, they will ask their current employees to work more.

Those who hope for a rebound argue that employers, frightened by the financial shocks and the credit crisis of last fall, effectively panicked. That is, they cut deeper than necessary. And that may be.

But layoffs are only part of the story. The problem isn’t just that so many workers have received pink slips but also that companies are failing to hire. And this, unfortunately, has been a trend for most of the past decade (unnoticed, perhaps, because the mortgage bubble was papering over latent weaknesses). At the end of the Clinton era, which also marked the end of a decade-long boom, companies that were opening or expanding operations added nearly 8 workers for every 100 already on the payroll. During the recession of 2001, the figure dropped to 7 per 100: optimistic firms were a bit less optimistic. The surprising fact is that when the recession ended, the percentage stayed at 7. “We never got our groove back,” asserts Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. In the current recession, the rate has fallen to 6 per 100.

It’s hard to give a definitive explanation for this trend, but among the reasons are a decline in innovation in the aftermath of the tech boom, leading to fewer new businesses, and the aging of the population. More people have dropped out of the work force, and a smaller work force tends to dampen job totals. The percentage of adults who are working has fallen from 64 at the end of the Clinton era to only 59.5 now. Some of those dropouts are retirees, but some may be responding to the economy’s declining dynamism. Traditionally, it was a mark of Americans’ resiliency that, when times were tough, they relocated from state to state and region to region. Now, according to the Census Bureau, mobility is at an all-time recorded low. Perhaps people with underwater mortgages cannot afford to move. Perhaps the areas they used to move to, typically the Sun Belt, are too devastated by foreclosures. But the vaunted ability of the U.S. economy to renew itself seems a little tarnished. Maybe it’s no accident that this time around, folks on the unemployment line are staying there longer.

In terms of its impact on society, a dearth of hiring is far more troubling than an excess of layoffs. Job losses have to end sooner or later. Even if they persist (as, say, in the auto industry), the government can intervene. But the government cannot force firms to hire. Ultimately, each new job depends on the boss’s belief — or hope — that sufficient work will materialize. It’s a bit of black magic also described as confidence. Over the years, it is why America has not only attracted immigrants (whose arrivals are now slowing) but also generated more opportunities and — favorite word of politicians — hope for those born here.

The administration’s tilt toward so-called sustainable new jobs, in green energy and such, shows that it understands what is at stake, both for the country and for its political fortunes. Whether its plans will bear fruit is, of course, another matter. Along with double-digit unemployment, the country is facing a second potential scare headline: falling wages. Even during recessions, businesses don’t like to lower pay, because it reduces morale. But layoffs are also a downer. And in this recession, employers ranging from the State of California to publishers (including this newspaper) have cut back on pay. In effect, job losses have been so severe that businesses have been forced to spread the pain. In June, overall wage growth was zero. Zandi thinks the United States could see negative wage growth.

How would Obama, not to mention Congress, respond to declining employment and falling wages? The pressure for another stimulus (and greater deficits) would be intense. So would that for demagogic solutions like trade barriers. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, says most lost jobs are not coming back. The huge question is when — or whether — new ones will take their place.

Roger Lowenstein, an outside director of the Sequoia Fund, is a contributing writer for the magazine.

By David Von Drehle at Time.

The death of American manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. According to U.N. statistics, the U.S. remains by far the world’s largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as much value as No. 2 China. Since 1990, U.S. manufacturing output has grown by nearly $800 billion — an amount larger than the entire manufacturing economy of Germany, a global powerhouse.

But growth does not mean jobs. While sales soared (at least until the recession), manufacturing employment sank. Using constantly improving technology to make more-valuable goods, American workers doubled their productivity in less than a generation — which, paradoxically, rendered millions of them obsolete. (See pictures of retailers which have gone out of business.)

This new manufacturing workforce can be seen in the gleaming and antiseptic room in Southern California where Edwards Lifesciences produces artificial-heart valves. You could say the small group of workers at the Edwards plant, most of them Asian women, are seamstresses. Unlike the thousands of U.S. textile workers whose jobs have migrated to low-wage countries, however, these highly skilled women occupy a niche in which U.S. firms are dominant and growing. Each replacement valve requires eight to 12 hours of meticulous hand-sewing — some 1,800 stitches so tiny that the work is done under a microscope. Up to a year of training goes into preparing a new hire to join the operation.

Highly skilled workers creating high-value products in high-stakes industries — that’s the sweet spot for manufacturing workers in coming years. After an initial surge of enthusiasm for shipping jobs of all kinds to low-wage countries, many U.S. companies are making a distinction between exportable jobs and jobs that should stay home. Edwards, for example, has moved its rote assembly work — building electronic monitoring machines — to such lower-wage and -tax locales as Puerto Rico. But when quality is a matter of life or death and production processes involve trade secrets worth billions, the U.S. wins, says the company’s head of global operations, Corinne Lyle. “We like to keep close tabs on our processes.”

Recent corner-cutting scandals in China — lead-paint-tainted children’s toys, melamine-laced milk — have underlined the advantages of manufacturing at home. A botched toy is one thing; a botched batch of heparin or a faulty aircraft component is quite another. According to Clemson University’s Aleda Roth, who studies quality control in global supply chains, the successful companies of coming years will be the ones that make product safety — not just price — a “big factor in their decisions about where to locate jobs.”

Innovative companies will also stay home thanks to America’s superior network of universities and its relatively stringent intellectual-property laws. Consider, for instance, the secretive and successful South Carolina textilemaker Milliken & Co. While the rest of the region’s low-tech, backward-looking textile industry was fading away, Milliken pushed ahead, investing heavily in research and becoming a hive of new patents.

U.S. manufacturing will also be buoyed by a third source of power: the American consumer. Even in our current battered condition, the U.S. is the world’s most prosperous marketplace. As global economic activity rebounds, so will energy prices. The cost of shipping foreign-made goods to the U.S. market will begin to offset overseas wage advantages. We saw that last year when oil prices zoomed toward $200 per barrel.

Thus, even if fewer cars are built by America’s wounded automakers, there will still be plenty of car factories in the U.S. They will be owned by Japanese and Chinese and Korean and German and Italian firms, but they will employ American workers. It just makes sense to build the cars near the people you expect to buy them.

Raised on images of Carnegie and Ford, we rue the loss of once smoky, now silent megaplants but are blind to the small and midsize companies replacing them. Ultimately, what’s endangered is not U.S. manufacturing. It is our deeply ingrained cultural image of the factory and its workers.

Presenting Part Four of a Ten-Part Series on The Future of Work from Time Magazine.

By Laura Fitzpatrick at Time.

On the worst days, Chris Keehn used to go 24 hours without seeing his daughter with her eyes open. A soft-spoken tax accountant in Deloitte’s downtown Chicago office, he hated saying no when she asked for a ride to preschool. By November, he’d had enough. “I realized that I can have control of this,” he says with a small shrug. Keehn, 33, met with two of the firm’s partners and his senior manager, telling them he needed a change. They went for it. In January, Keehn started telecommuting four days a week, and when Kathryn, 4, starts T-ball this summer, he will be sitting along the baseline.

In this economy, Keehn’s move might sound like hopping onto the mommy track — or off the career track. But he’s actually making a shrewd move. More and more, companies are searching for creative ways to save — by experimenting with reduced hours or unpaid furloughs or asking employees to move laterally. The up-or-out model, in which employees have to keep getting promoted quickly or get lost, may be growing outmoded. The changing expectations could persist after the economy reheats.

Companies are increasingly supporting more natural growth, letting employees wend their way upward like climbing vines. It’s a shift, in other words, from a corporate ladder to the career-path metaphor long preferred by Deloitte vice chair Cathy Benko: a lattice. (See pictures of cubicle designs submitted to The Office.)

At Deloitte, each employee’s lattice is nailed together during twice-a-year evaluations focused not just on career targets but also on larger life goals. An employee can request to do more or less travel or client service, say, or to move laterally into a new role — changes that may or may not come with a pay cut. Deloitte’s data from 2008 suggest that about 10% of employees choose to “dial up” or “dial down” at any given time. Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization (MCC) program began as a way to keep talented women in the workforce, but it has quickly become clear that women are not the only ones seeking flexibility.

Responding to millennials demanding better work-life balance, young parents needing time to share child-care duties and boomers looking to ease gradually toward retirement, Deloitte is scheduled to roll out MCC to all 42,000 U.S. employees by May 2010. Deloitte executives are in talks with more than 80 companies working on similar programs.

Not everyone is on board. A 33-year-old Deloitte senior manager in a southeastern office, who works half-days on Mondays and Fridays for health reasons and requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record, says one “old school” manager insisted on scheduling meetings when she wouldn’t be in the office. “He was like, ‘Yeah, I know we have the program,’” she recalls, “‘but I don’t really care.’”

Deloitte CEO Barry Salzberg admits he’s still struggling to convert “nonbelievers,” but says they are the exceptions. The recession provides an incentive for companies to design more lattice-oriented careers. Studies show telecommuting, for instance, can help businesses cut real estate costs 20% and payroll 10%. What’s more, creating a flexible workforce to meet staffing needs in a changing economy ensures that a company will still have legs when the market recovers. Redeploying some workers from one division to another — or reducing their salaries — is a whole lot less expensive than laying everyone off and starting from scratch.

Young employees who dial down now and later become managers may reinforce the idea that moving sideways on the lattice doesn’t mean getting sidelined. “When I saw other people doing it,” says Keehn, “I thought I could try.” As the compelling financial incentives for flexibility grow clearer, more firms will be forced to give employees that chance. Turns out all Keehn had to do was ask.

Presenting Part Three of a Ten Part Series on The Future of Work.

By John Curran at Time.

Was it a mirage? Not just our formerly fat 401(k)s but also the whole idea of a comfortable work life followed by an evergreen retirement, replete with health coverage, perks aplenty and — oh, yes — pension checks as far as the eye could see.

Faced with the rapidly rising costs of such benefits, companies are scaling back. It’s become distressingly clear that employees are increasingly on their own when it comes to retirement savings and health care. (See 10 things to buy during the recession.)
Employers don’t typically trash an important employee benefit — too much negative press — but they are shifting more of these costs onto workers, who feel it in the form of higher health-care premiums, rising co-payments on drugs and much less certainty about their retirement finances. You may be able to preserve your benefits in your next job. But you’ll have to spend more of your own money to do so.

Towers Perrin, a global human-resources-consulting firm, recently surveyed hundreds of U.S. companies representing more than 13 million employees on changes they are making — or contemplating making — to their employee-benefits packages. The knife cuts deepest on the most expensive benefits, with the biggest often being health care.

It costs the average American company more than $14,000 per year to provide coverage to an employee and her family. The employer response: shift more of that growing burden to workers. As a result, companies have seen their health-care spending rise 29% over the past five years, but employees have seen their outlays — for premiums, co-pays and deductibles — rise 40%.

Retiree health care is getting whacked hardest — just when the boomer generation needs it most. Of the employers surveyed, 45% have already reduced or eliminated subsidized health-care coverage for future retirees, and an additional 24% are planning to do so or considering it. Of those offering the perk, roughly 25% put a dollar cap on how much they will spend per retiree.

“Once the cap is reached, future inflation risk transfers to the retiree,” notes Ron Fontanetta, an executive with Towers Perrin.

Corporate pensions, the third leg of the proverbial retirement stool (the other two being Social Security and personal savings), are also being eroded as the foundering stock market wreaks havoc on employer pension funds. At the end of 2008, employer-sponsored pension plans were underfunded by more than $400 billion, according to Mercer, a management-consulting firm.

The recent stock-market rally has halved that deficit, but it remains a funding sore spot and is one more reason that companies are turning away from this benefit. In mid-May, Cigna, the big insurer, joined a growing list of employers in announcing that it was “freezing” its pension plan — ending the accrual of new pension benefits for its workforce.

“Companies initiated many of these benefits in a different time,” says Fontanetta. “Retiree benefits started being offered when many companies had a young workforce with few retirees, so it was not really a cost they had to contend with.” Today it’s the reverse, particularly in old-line industries. Detroit’s Big Three automakers, for example, have more than four times as many retirees as active hourly workers.

Yet as some benefits disappear, others are blossoming, better suited to business realities and, in some ways, more prized by the younger workers that companies want to attract. That can mean account-based plans, like the 401(k), with a generous employer match (in flush times), or a more recent innovation known as the cash-balance pension. It treats younger workers better than traditional pensions because it’s based on pay and ignores tenure. It stacks up well against 401(k)s too because it typically grows with a fixed rate of return, so it will not be upended by a bear market.

And what will become of employer-sponsored health care? A little over a year ago, Towers Perrin asked workers to rank specific benefits and perks. The 45-and-over age groups ranked base pay and health care as their top two. The 18-to-34 age groups — the workers employers have their eye on — ranked base pay along with career advancement as their top priorities. The younger workers did not rank “retirement benefits” in their top 10, while that choice ranked third for the over-55s.

Too bad, boomers. You are no longer calling the tune on benefits.

Presenting Part Two of a Ten Part Series on The Future of Work.

By Justin Fox at Time.

It’s commencement day at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a highly regarded if off-the-beaten-track business school housed on a former military base (Thunderbird Field) in Glendale, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix. The 279 graduates have gathered on a May afternoon in a convention center next door to the Arizona Cardinals football stadium. After a presentation of the flags of 35 nations and a speech by school president Angel Cabrera, something unusual happens.

“As a Thunderbird and a global citizen, I promise,” Cabrera begins. The graduates repeat after him. Then the recitation continues:

I will strive to act with honesty and integrity. I will respect the rights and dignity of all people. I will strive to create sustainable prosperity worldwide. I will oppose all forms of corruption and exploitation. And I will take responsibility for my actions. As I hold true to these principles, it is my hope that I may enjoy an honorable reputation and peace of conscience.

This is the Thunderbird Oath of Honor, the unlikely leading edge of an assault on business as usual at business schools. It’s part of a broader rethinking of the balance between doing well and doing good that could reshape the economy and the workplace in coming years — or could just stay a debating point. B schools, Thunderbird president Cabrera and his fellow rebels contend, are ethical wastelands partly to blame for the Wall Street collapse of the past year. Even those who defend B schools don’t claim that they’re moral beacons. Debating Cabrera in April at the annual convention of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), Purdue business-school dean Richard Cosier attributed the crisis to “personal greed” and too much debt.

Personal greed reflects personal values,” Cosier asserted when I caught him on the phone a few days later, “and you can’t blame business schools for determining personal value systems.” (Watch TIME’s video about the Thunderbird School of Global Management.)

There was a time, in the first half of the 20th century, when business schools did try to instill values and norms. They aimed to establish a profession of management that took its cues from medicine and the law. That effort fizzled by the 1970s, says Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School prof whose 2007 history, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, chronicles the shift. Khurana, a close ally of Cabrera’s, argues that business schools have become trade schools focused on securing the highest-paying jobs for their graduates. “If you wonder why CEOs spend so much time thinking about whether their bathrooms are up to par,” Khurana says, “look at the business schools they went to.”

Khurana was a keynote speaker at the April AACSB convention, and he doesn’t think his message went over well. “Two hours of making 1,200 people squirm in their seats” is how he describes it. It’s not just business educators who squirm at the idea of management as a profession. When I mentioned it to a lawyer friend, he scoffed, “It doesn’t work unless you have a professional exam, a licensing board and exposure to malpractice.” Cabrera and Khurana agree. “The biggest question is — and we don’t know the answer — How are we going to institutionalize this?” Cabrera says. We’re a long way from a world where you could lose your management license for taking shortcuts to meet a quarterly-earnings target. But we do have the Thunderbird Oath.

Cabrera, a Spaniard with a psychology Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, introduced a similar oath as dean of a business school in Madrid, but it was abandoned after he left in 2004. In hopes of making the concept stick at Thunderbird, he put students in charge of writing the oath and getting faculty and trustee approval. Applicants to Thunderbird must write an essay discussing the oath, and students say it often comes up in class. A few don’t love it. One student circulated an essay this spring declaring his unwillingness to sign or recite the “insulting,” “tacky” oath. Not that it kept him from graduating: even at Thunderbird, making ethical promises mandatory is still seen as beyond the business-school pale.

By Alex Altman at Time.

Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values — and women will increasingly be at the controls. Here are 10 ways (published each day) your job will change. In fact, it already has.

Part One — High Tech, High Touch, High Growth

On a gloomy afternoon earlier this month, a group of Harvard students took a break from crafting final papers to peer into the future. Surveying a shattered employment landscape, they summoned the optimism to regard looming obstacles as opportunities for scenic detours. “There are definitely downsides to it being harder to get a job,” says Alex Lavoie, a 21-year-old junior from Avon, Conn. “But it’s forced people to look harder at what they really want to do instead of following a standardized path.”

During the fat years, that path led many of America’s élites to Wall Street. These days, that’s a less appealing destination. In 2008 the financial sector, which had ballooned over the past three decades, contracted for the first time in 16 years. “The glamour is gone,” says Bridget Beckeman, 20, a junior from Westford, Mass., who will intern at an investment bank this summer. But it hasn’t disappeared. Financial centers like Charlotte, N.C., will flourish anew; driven largely by a banking boom, the city’s workforce has grown 50% over the past decade, according to John Connaughton, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. (See which businesses are bucking the recession.)

The fall of finance has its upside. Top grads will tack toward a variety of potentially lucrative positions that prize technological savvy and analytical aptitude. According to consulting giant McKinsey & Co., nearly 85% of new jobs created between 1998 and 2006 involved complex “knowledge work” like problem-solving and concocting corporate strategy. Job opportunities in mathematics and across the sciences are also expected to expand. The U.S. Department of Labor spotlights network systems and data communications as well as computer-software engineering among the occupations projected to grow most explosively by 2016. Over the next seven years, the number of jobs in the information-technology sector is expected to swell 24% — a figure more than twice the overall job-growth rate.

There will be some limits to that growth. “This place is going to get more and more high-end talent and less and less commodity-type folks,” says Mark Dinan, a Silicon Valley recruiter. “The real question is, What’s the next big thing, and what’s going to be the big moneymaker?” Cloud computing? Nanotechnology? Genomics? The answer will come from the companies that entrepreneurs can create — and destroy — more easily than ever before, because the cost of start-ups is dropping rapidly. Richard Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, says that “these really sharp, aggressive, Harvard-type students doing entrepreneurship, forming new businesses … would be the best thing that could happen to this economy.”

Where else could your next job come from? Health care and education, the labor market’s traditional bulwarks in lean times, show no signs of abating. An aging population will open up opportunities too. “Construction of senior communities, assisted-living facilities, nursing homes … these things are all going to have to expand tremendously,” says Connaughton. The key to finding the jobs of the future will be knowing where to look.

Catch Part Two tomorrow — “Training Managers to Behave”.

Watch out, baby boomers. The Millennials are coming for your jobs.

By Nancy Johnston at The Baltimore Sun

This generational warfare is the story developing in the media, and as with most trend stories, it does have a kernel of truth. The baby boomer generation – born between 1946 and 1964 – has had a stranglehold on nearly every arena in American life, including politics, economics and the culture wars, since I was born. Even President Barack Obama, who campaigned on a promise to leave behind the boomers’ old campus feuds, is, technically, one of them.

But with the rising technological wave changing the way we live, the way we work, and the way we think about the world around us, today’s younger work force, born 1980 and after, is threatening the status quo. Even now, a coalition called 80 Million Strong is planning a D.C. summit in July to highlight this younger bloc, demanding that American leaders better serve this country’s youth, both politically and economically.

“Today’s 20-somethings are likely to be the first generation to not be better off than their parents.” This is the first line of Economic State of Young America, a report released by Demos, a nonpartisan public policy think tank in New York City. And that’s a troubling thesis for a generation that grew up being told they can do and be anything.

Sure, it’s no surprise that with college tuition rising and job opportunities plummeting, the future isn’t looking too bright for the youth of America. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, after factoring for inflation, the average young white man in 2005 earned $35,100 a year, compared to $43,416 in 1976. While tuition at public universities has doubled since the 1980s, income has declined by 19 percent.

Those who can’t afford college in the first place, or can’t find employment after earning their degrees, have also helped raise the unemployment rate for Americans in the 16-24 age range 9 percentage points higher than the general population. Insurance and pension benefits are steadily shrinking, and no one my age labors under the belief that the dollars we send to the Social Security Administration over in Woodlawn will be waiting for us when we retire.

This recession isn’t good for anybody. But blaming baby boomers for staying at the workplace at the expense of Millennials, or insisting that the youth are stealing jobs from their more experienced counterparts, are arguments far too simplistic to explain the destruction of the American dream.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the no-limits nature of the world that the Internet has wrought, it’s that we do not live in a zero-sum society. We must foster an economy that provides jobs for everyone. From the traditional manufacturing and service jobs that have built the American middle class since after World War II, to the new “green” jobs and cyber-focused industries the Obama administration has declared a priority, there can and should be opportunities for everyone.

Yes, we need to make hard decisions now to address the problems the young and those not yet even born will inherit – climate change, Social Security and Medicare, the national debt. But setting them up as flash points in an ageist conflict between the me-generation boomers and the supposedly altruism-minded Millennials isn’t going to accomplish that. The only way to solve those problems is to create an economic and social order that is fair to all – and the only way to agree on those hard choices is to embrace a political order in which all ages have a seat at the table.

Over the course of the life of this blog, other authors will approach this different ways. I convinced my supervisor at a wireless telecom company (this was in 2005) to let me become a workshifter for three out of five days a week. It wasn’t easy, but I found several keys that got me the freedom to work out of a coffeeshop, and the flexibility to do more with the two hours a day that shift brought me.

By Chris Brogan at Workshifting.com

Get On the Boss’s Side of the Fence
If you’re going to convince your supervisor to let you workshift, it’s not going to be because they really want you to enjoy an extra cup or two of coffee in the morning. Start the process by identifying what’s in it for the boss. In my case, my commute was over an hour each way, so I told him that giving me a few days to work remotely would add two hours of productivity per day. Showing him the benefit up front gave him a chance to wiggle his eyebrows on what six hours (2 hours x 3 days) would give him each week: practically another working day!

Get Accountability Figured Out Right Away
The biggest shift I encountered in workshifting was that my boss (like many supervisors) was still considering me productive as measured by “hours spent with butt in chair.” Yes, sadly, with all the world has brought us in technological advances, it’s human nature to equate physical presence with productivity.

The truth of the matter was, because of my position, people often sought me out at my desk to discuss technology changes and work-related issues. I pointed out to the boss that we had some fairly tangible deliverables to my work, and that if wasn’t turning things in promptly, it would show pretty quickly, and he could reassess whether I should be a workshifter. He bought this reasoning, and I endeavored to deliver ahead of time as often as I could.

Touch: the Art of Presence Management
When you’re out of the office, silence on your part is always met with frustration and concern. It’s again a matter of human nature. The cure? Connect with your supervisor often through electronic means. Send a brief email every hour or so with some work-related piece of information. If your company is cool enough to use something like Socialcast or Yammer, that would be the very best tool for the “touch” job.

Another point on this: brief emails with very succinct needs listed are better for you (and your boss) than longer emails that bundle things together. It would seem that bundling things is better, but most times, this serves two purposes: it allows you to properly thread pertinent conversations, and it keeps your supervisor abreast of situations. Is this the best? No. Does it ease tensions? Yes, indeedy.

Be Very Available and Flexible
Early on in my workshifting efforts, I found myself suddenly saddled with lots of local chores. Because I was down the street at the local coffeeshop (I prefer to work out of the house, because if I stay home, I play with the kids too much), I’d be tasked with things like picking up prescriptions or all the other various family-related things. This was okay, but it meant that I had to stay very available.

Simple things like answering the phone as often as you can when the boss calls go a long way towards easing relationship tensions and management concerns around workshifting.

Sometimes, the boss might need you to come in on your “away” day. As long as this doesn’t become a habit, I’ve taken the stance that it’s still a job and that onsite is still the primary way of doing business. As a concession, you might ask for a different day that week. That said, be attentive to whether or not your supervisor might be potentially abusing your agreed-upon experience. Tread gently here, but be firm. It may be a sign that things aren’t working out.

Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency, as well as the home of the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp educational events. He works with large and mid-sized companies to improve online business communications like marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies.

You’ve gotten pretty far in a job discussion. You like them. They like you. And it’s getting down to the nitty gritty.

by Marci Alboher at Yahoo.

Then your prospective employer pops the question you’ve been dreading: “So what are you making now?” (or some variation like, “What were you making in your last position?”) You freeze. You know that answering the question can only hurt you. It might peg you at a salary you feel you’ve outgrown or that you improperly negotiated. And you know that you’re always supposed to let the other person name a price first in any negotiation.

So what do you do?

Avoid revealing your salary. Never reveal your prior salary, says Ramit Sethi, creator of the blog, IWillTeachYouToBeRich, and author of the recently published book of the same title. He is clear and unequivocal. “It’s just none of their business,” he told me. “You’re focusing on a new job and if you reveal what you made previously, two things happen. First, you’ve laid out all your cards. Second, you’re admitting that you are inexperienced in interviewing and negotiating.” (That last bit was particularly painful for me to hear since I’ve made the mistake of revealing a prior salary and I’m in the business of advising people about how to manage their careers.)

Focus on your value. If the employer persists, Sethi suggests steering the conversation to the value you’ll be bringing to the position. If you can focus, say, on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue you’ll help the company generate, it becomes harder for them to focus on the thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars you might be haggling over. If your position doesn’t have a clear connection to the bottom line, Sethi says to emphasize how your job will allow your manager to do his or her job more effectively. In the end, it’s all about how you’re going to help the organization achieve its goals.

Discuss salary ranges. If you get the prior salary question, steer the negotation to why you should be at a certain number or range, says Carol Frohlinger, managing director of Negotiating Women and author of the book, “Her Place at the Table.”

One instance where it’s fine to reveal your salary is when you feel like your current salary is in a reasonable range and you are only seeking a slight bump–say around 10 percent–according to Susan Cain, president of The Negotiation Company.  “If you’re not there, which is often the case, then you’ll want to deflect at least until they love you and don’t want to lose you,” says Cain. “At that point, you can say that you don’t think your current employer would be comfortable with your disclosing what you earn.” If you ultimately feel you have to disclose, Cain says you should just explain, in a non-defensive way, why you think it’s low and why you should be in a higher range. She recommends saying something like: “I’ve had various training and experience and am now looking for a position that will reflect my acquired expertise.”

Know your worth. When you do sit down to talk numbers, make sure that you do your homework so that you know what the range should be for the position. “It’s not just what the job pays, but what does it pay in your geographic area, in a company of the size of the one you’re looking at, in the same industry,” says Frohlinger. “And also think about what there is other than salary, what other things people have gotten for a total compensation package.”

Do your homework. In order to build a picture of what a job is worth, canvas your entire network, looking especially for people who have left a company you’re talking to. In addition, check out sites that offer comparative salary details, like Vault, PayScale, Salary.com and Glassdoor. If you work as an independent contractor or freelancer, ask your peers what they charge. “Talk to at least five people,” says Sethi, “since not everyone charges properly for their work and you might get a range of anywhere from $30-$200 an hour.”

What if you reveal too much? So what if you’ve messed up and revealed more than you wanted to? The best way to recover, says Sethi, is to start collecting evidence of your success on the job and immediately plan for an opportunity to sit down with your manager about how you’re doing. You’ll have to let some time pass–Sethi suggests about six months–but it’s important to let your manager know far in advance that you are preparing for a conversation that will include revisiting your compensation as part of it. In fact, Sethi says that by the time you have that conversation, your manager should fully know that you’re seeking a raise since you will have been laying the groundwork and showing off your accomplishments along the way.