While workers thinking that they have an average or above-average chance of finding a job may not sound like much, I was surprised at a finding that positive given the grim state of the news about the job market.
Just last week, I read a rather depressing story in The Wall Street Journalabout a meeting of the newspaper’s CEO Council. “After the financial shocks of September and October,” the story said, “executives running businesses ranging from hair salons to giant utilities are hunkering down by trimming capital-spending budgets, delaying plant construction, laying off workers and skimping on pay raises.” It went on to say that almost 80 percent of the CEOs at the Journal meeting thought it would be at least two years before “the U.S. economy returns to a normal growth rate.”
Given that context, Talent Retriever survey findings were an incredibly positive—and rare—bit of encouraging news coming from the workforce.
“This level of worker confidence despite the economic downturn is a sign that employers should not become complacent when it comes to employee retention efforts; otherwise they may risk losing their best employees,” said Dave Barbato, president of Massachusetts-based Talent Retriever. “For employers looking for new talent, now may be one of the best times to step up recruitment activity.”
The study also had a couple of other interesting findings:
• 44 percent of workers surveyed said they were more likely to stay in a job in which they were dissatisfied;
• 57 percent said they would be more likely to take a new job if it meant greater job stability and;
• 43 percent said career advancement was most important when deciding whether to take a job under current economic conditions.
“Workers’ conflicting responses wavering between confidence and concerns about job prospects reveal opportunities for employers,” Barbato said. “Employers seeking workers need to demonstrate that they have the financial stability and management team to weather the economic storm. For staff retention, employers should consider creative ways of offering low-cost perks, incentives or even a modest holiday office party to show that you value your employees and that your firm is in a strong position for growth when the economy recovers.”
But more to the point, this survey shows the great resilient quality of the American worker. No matter how bad things may seem today, our national character is based on the strong belief that they will be better tomorrow. That’s an upbeat note to keep in mind, because if you believe it long enough, it will—eventually—come true.
Maybe it’s just something odd about me, but all too often, I find myself in a passionate conversation with my Sunday newspaper.
This doesn’t mean I have lost my mind and am talking to the actual newspaper. No, what it usually means is that I find myself worked up and sometimes even yelling about something I can’t believe I’m actually reading in the paper—usually because it is ludicrous, amazing, or both.
Here’s what got me going this week: I’m rolling along through the Sunday business section of my local paper, reading through the syndicated Wall Street Journal pages that seem to be more of a staple in business sections everywhere, when I run into a regular column written for people just getting started in the workforce called Starting Out. Its headline caught my eye: “Where’d My Job Go?” It’s a good question in these troubled economic times, so I read the beginning of the story:
“Michael Moses landed a job as a human-resources consultant in Chicago straight out of college. He moved to the Windy City from New York, signed an apartment lease and was ready to work. But then he got a call that more job hunters have been dreading—the company could no longer afford to hire him. ‘I was ready to go, and they just pulled the carpet out from under my feet,’ says Mr. Moses, who is 22 years old.”
And that’s what got me shouting at my Sunday newspaper. A 22-year-old, straight-out-of-college HR consultant? How can someone who has just graduated become a consultant on anything, much less HR? What kind of wisdom and expertise do they bring to the table? And what client in his right mind would look for advice from a consultant with no work, business or significant life experience to draw upon?
I was writing then about companies such as Circuit City and Tribune Co. that seemingly don’t care about experience and view workers with a few more years on them as just a bigger dollar sign they can cut and roll to the bottom line. While that’s true, it misses an important business truism: that experience matters. Experience can bring smart, time-tested thinking to difficult business problems—the kind of thinking that can help organizations perform better during a time of economic upheaval.
But having said that, I’m back to my original question: How can someone straight out of college become a consultant? What can someone like that advise me, Mr. Business Executive, about HR?
This is one of the issues I have with business consulting: that it all-too-often is a “buyer beware” proposition where newly minted MBAs and others jump directly into consulting without a single scrap of real-world experience. These people have no business telling you how to fix or run YOUR business, so it makes me wonder, what consulting firm in their right mind would hire them?
Is there anyone who can make a case for a 22-year-old HR consultant, or someone right out of college consulting anyone on anything? If so, I’d love to hear about it, either as a comment posted here or sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com
What can you say about a top manager who is so blinded by the past that he can’t see the future?
That pretty much sums up Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. He finally decided to step down late Monday, “ending a brief, turbulent tenure,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “that was marked by a slumping business and a failed takeover bid by Microsoft Corp.”
That pretty much covers Yang’s 17-month tenure as CEO, but it fails to fully capture just how badly he did leading the company he founded, and how inconsistently he managed his most important resource—his human capital. Here are a few highlights:
• Yang single-handedly blocked an offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo at $33 per share, or more than three times what the stock traded at Monday. A key component of his push to block the deal was his unprecedented decision to offer a lucrative severance package to every single Yahoo employee in an attempt to make the deal too expensive for Microsoft to pursue. My take at the time: If Yang and Yahoo had applied that kind of creativity to its ongoing business, maybe it would never have had to defend itself against Microsoft in the first place.
• He brought in highly paid consultants to handle what every person with half a brain who was watching the company knew—that Yahoo needed to cut its workforce. My take at the time: Yang doesn’t have the managerial huevos to do the tough stuff that comes with a management role.
As CNBC’s Jim Goldman put it, “Clouded by self-interest, [Yang] lost his way, sacrificed tens of billions of dollars in shareholder equity, abandoned reason, and surrounded himself with people who slapped him on the back, or gave each other high fives when Microsoft pushed back from the table, depending upon who you believe, for a job well done. … The stunner is that it took this long to get him out. The stunner is that the board gave him such an amazing amount of latitude to leaf-blow his way through so much shareholder value.”
Yang will now go back to his job as “Chief Yahoo, a nebulous position that will allow him to keep his fingers in a number of projects but has no day-to-day management responsibilities. He will also remain on the company’s board,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
That’s probably an appropriate place for a guy who founded the company, but if I were the Yahoo board, I’d keep Yang away from anything resembling a management duty. He’s shown time and time again that despite his technical expertise, he doesn’t have a managerial bone in his body. Getting rid of him now falls into the category of “better late than never,” but it remains to be seen if Yahoo, and its beaten-down workforce, can rebound from bad managerial mojo its overmatched chief yahoo left at the company’s doorstep.
The older I get and the longer I work, the more I find this question is on my mind: How much does experience matter in the 2008 workplace?
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot because I’ve always believed that work experience—a solid and meaningful track record of relevant employment—was a good thing and a positive differentiator. Smart employers generally want people with good backgrounds and solid, focused experience, right?
Well, I used to think that was the case, and it certainly was for me until the economic downturn that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble eight years ago. I had been working as a vice president at a well-known but fatally flawed San Francisco dot-com, and when the company closed its doors, I thought I would have no problem finding a new job, especially given my varied work background and deep experience.
But then I found out something while applying for more than 130 jobs: My deep and varied experience meant something very different to me than it did to prospective employers. I thought it meant that I had a savvy and time-tested management style that would clearly benefit a new employer. Problem was, all those prospective employers saw it differently. Where I saw experience as a positive, they saw it as a negative because my experience, although positive, brought along a big negative—a greater expectation for higher pay.
For the first time in my life, I found that my experience wasn’t a positive, but was in fact a negative, holding me back from a job. This was crazy, I thought. Wasn’t experience worth more salary, given all that I brought to the table? Well, it wasn’t, and all too many potential employers had no problem telling me so.
I thought about this today while reading a New York Times article about how newspapers all over America are getting rid of their most experienced and best talent –critical human capital—in a seemingly futile attempt to cut their costs and regain some semblance of financial equilibrium. Times media writer David Carr points to another recent example of a company that tried to do this—electronics retailer Circuit City, where former CEO Phillip Schoonover thought doing this was a winning workforce strategy.
This is more than a philosophic argument, of course, because the best workplaces are a mix of talent with many different experiences from many different age groups, races, genders and backgrounds. The real art of management is assembling a staff with the right mix of all of these things, giving them the resources they need, and then encouraging and leading them to do their best work. And having experienced workers who can add savvy thinking and much-needed work perspective is a critical component, even if idiots like Phillip Schoonover and Sam Zell don’t seem to think so.
There is huge pressure on businesses everywhere to cut costs, and that means a seemingly endless stream of layoff announcements nearly every day. It’s an incredibly grim economy, as we saw in the October jobs report, but job cuts need to be done with a scalpel, and not mindlessly with a meat ax, as preferred by the Schoonovers and Zells of the world.
Experience matters because experience can bring smart, time-tested thinking to difficult business problems—the kind of thinking that can help organizations perform better during a time of economic upheaval. Slashing staff takes no real talent.
It’s a stupid management trick that is not only shortsighted, but oftentimes just makes the situation worse. That’s what Circuit City, now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, found out, and it’s something many other shortsighted executives will undoubtedly find out too.
No matter how many times I hear about this, it’s something I just don’t get: Why do some big-time executives need to lie about academic degrees they never earned?
This topic is in the news again now that The Wall Street Journal has found that the chairman and CEO of gaming giant MGM Mirage has been lying about earning an MBA in finance from the University of Southern California.
According to the Journal, “J. Terrence Lanni, one of the gambling industry’s most powerful figures,” is stepping down from his executive posts after the newspaper started asking questions about Lanni’s academic credentials.
Although Lanni did graduate from USC with a bachelor of science degree in business back in 1965, he never earned the MBA in finance that is listed for him on the MGM Mirage Web site, according to USC officials.
And like all of these academic credential stories, this one follows a predictable pattern: When the executive is confronted by a long-standing but unsustainable academic claim, he changes the story a little in the hope that will help matters, even though in reality, it only makes things worse.
“Lanni said he took a series of classes toward an MBA, but didn’t finish because he went to work instead,” the Journal reported. “But he said he was awarded an honorary MBA from USC in 1992 when he was named Alumnus of the Year by the business school. ‘I understood I was given an honorary degree,’ he said. At USC, [a spokesperson] said the university’s list of honorary degrees didn’t include Lanni either.”
Another predictable part of this episode is the standard-issue claim that the lying excecutive’s departure has nothing to do with the foolish lie being discovered. “Lanni, who is to leave Nov. 30, said his resignation was for personal reasons. … Lanni said, ‘I must stress that this issue has nothing to do with my decision.’ ”
This is a foolish fib that makes no sense. Lanni is, by all accounts, a stellar executive who “joined [the company] in June 1995 as president, chief executive and a [company] director,” according to the Journal. “He guided the company through periods of unprecedented growth, including mergers with Mirage Resorts and Mandalay Resort Group, [and] he was also instrumental in expanding MGM Mirage’s reach into the Middle East—personally negotiating a landmark partnership with Dubai last year that led to a $5 billion cash infusion from the Persian Gulf state’s investment arm to buy half” of MGM Mirage’s huge CityCenter project and a stake in the company.
I don’t know why Lanni did this, because whether he earned an MBA or not would seem to be inconsequential in the larger arc of his long career. But here’s my guess: He added the MBA reference to his résumé many years ago, when he felt it might help him. And then he forgot about it. After time went by, he couldn’t remove it since the reference had been on the résumé for so long, but on the other hand, he thought it would never be checked out. In his mind, it didn’t matter.
Problem is, it does matter. Lies and cover-ups always seem to bite people in a big way, usually much more than the original transgression itself. In fact, Terrence Lanni missed a golden opportunity to stand up and actually be held accountable here.
He could have set himself apart from people like Richard Fuld and all those Wall Street executives by saying something like: “You know, I put this on my résumé a long time ago when I felt I needed to, but it was wrong then and it’s wrong now. I don’t think it makes me any less of an executive or manager, but I should have never done it because lying is always wrong, even if I thought at the time that I was doing it for a good reason.”
The problem with executives lying (or anyone lying, for that matter) is that it makes people think that if you lie about one small thing that you’ll probably lie about anything. That’s kryptonite to a company’s culture. It kills trust and destroys careers.
J. Terrence Lanni didn’t need to pretend he had an MBA. He built a great and accomplished career without it. Unfortunately, all those accomplishments will now always be clouded by a lie that didn’t need to be told. In other words, all the great good can be overshadowed by the little bad.
It’s a sobering lesson for everyone and anyone tempted to fib. In this day of Google searches and background checks, a little fib can come back to bite you in a big way.
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