How To Get and Keep a Job

If you don’t have a job, you want to get a job. In a very bad job market you are looking for anything that will give you an advantage.  

Isn’t that what Michael Phelps taught us?

If you have a job, you want to keep it, and you want to get ahead. But if you want to perform at your best, you want to know the difference between good and great performance.

Of all the qualities that matter in a job search the last one you are likely to think of is … good grammar.

Yet, if you want Kyle Wiens, the CEO of a company called iFixit and the founder of a company called Dokuzi, to hire you, you will have to pass a grammar test.

Wiens refuses to hire anyone who does not make a habit of using correct grammar.

In a world where texting and tweeting discourage good grammar—in some cases they discourage anything that resembles grammar-- it feels like a daunting challenge.

Yet, since so much communication, business and personal, takes place online and in writing, good grammar is a necessity. Incorrect grammar will make you look bad. When you are on the job, bad grammar will make your company look bad.

Wiens explains:

Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can’t tell the difference between their, there, and they’re.

Naturally you will have some objections to this form of judgmentalism.

Wiens anticipates them:

After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?

He responds that people who use good grammar are more likely to have good character. If you are disciplined in your written communications you are more likely to be disciplined on your other tasks.

Wiens writes:

I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

The principle applies to programmers, because great programmers pay attention to the most minor details. And grammar, you know, is a minor detail.

Wiens explains:

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose….

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.

I hire people that care about those details. Applicants that don't think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren't important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren't issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

Anyone who did not take the time and attention needed to write a grammatically correct resume, probably won’t care enough to write a grammatically correct business letter or proposal or report.

If your business plan contains grammatical errors you are less likely to attract investors. If your annual report is filled with grammatical errors your investors, actual and potential, will think less of your company.

Of course, the same principle applies to table manners. No one is going to give you a table manners test, but when you are being interviewed at lunch or are pitching some business over dinner, you are being judged by your table manners.

And bad manners will undermine your presentation, no matter how good it is.

If you have bad table manners you will be showing that you do not know how to work with others, that you do not respect your companions, and that you do not value social harmony.

Bad table manners, like bad grammar, bespeak a slothful character.

If you don’t have enough discipline and self-control to chew with your mouth closed you will very likely demonstrate the same slothful habits when working on projects that really matter.

Uniculturalism

Imagine that you are a Human Resources manager. You are managing a culturally diverse workforce. If you are living in America, you are naturally afraid of being sued. But you also know that your people need to learn how to get along. Otherwise they will never be able to work effectively.

If you are a creature of the times you will decide to subject everyone to diversity training. It is the culturally accepted way of promoting tolerance and other warm fuzzy feelings.

Besides, someone has to keep all of those diversity trainers in business.

American corporations have been awash in diversity training. Now, it turns out, it has not been solving the problem. In fact, it has been aggravating the problem.

Companies that have showered their employees in diversity training are suffering a wave of diversity-based lawsuits.

Yesterday Peter Bregman stated it loudly and clearly: “Diversity training does not work.”

Why should this be so?

Diversity training celebrates diversity. It teaches everyone to embrace diversity. It attempts to create a workplace environment that shows full respect for everyone’s different culture.

In other words, it makes the company into a Tower of Babel. We know how that worked out.

Companies cannot function when everyone is defined according to their membership in a different culture. Companies, like teams, can only succeed when there is one culture. That is, when everyone is playing the same game by the same rules. What we really need is uniculturalism.

Remember the old line: e pluribus unum: out of many, one.

Diversity training, like other forms of sensitivity training, divides people into subgroups. Identifying people by their membership in a subgroup does not unify; it divides.

Diversity trainers and sensitivity trainers believe that you can solve problems by raising consciousness and awareness. People are told that they must be aware of how everyone is different. Then they force everyone to bathe in a tub of warm empathy. They imagine that once you know what it feels like to be like someone else you are going to be more tolerant. Everyone will then get along better and the world will be a better place.

The naiveté is breathtaking.

When diversity training divides the team into subgroups and raises conscious about what it means to belong to a subgroup, it does not produce understanding and comity. Just the opposite.

Bregman states it well: “Diversity training doesn't extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.”

Why so?

Bregman explains:

A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had "no positive effects in the average workplace." Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes — and the diversity of the organizations — remained the same.

It gets worse. The researchers — Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota — concluded that "In firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects on management diversity."

Which shouldn't come as a surprise, actually. Anybody who has ever been scolded is familiar with the tendency to rebel against the scolding.

But it's deeper than that. When people divide into categories to illustrate the idea of diversity, it reinforces the idea of the categories.

If your team mates are prominently identified as members of subgroups then their loyalty to the company will be thrown into doubt.  

Diversity training teaches everyone that certain members of the team have a divided social identity. A divided identity means divided loyalty.

Is the member of subgroup X doing what is best for the team or doing what is best to advance the agenda of subgroup X?

If you do not know, if your consciousness has been raised to the point where you cannot know, then you are more likely to distrust members of the subgroup.

Thus, Bregman states, diversity training produces prejudice.

Don't Just Sit There. Do Something!

Depression occurs when you are faced with two bad options and you choose to do nothing.

So explained Martin Seligman, in his book Learned Optimism. His concept has validity.

But then, how should you deal with two bad options? What should you do when you come to a fork in the road and you know that nothing good is going to happen if you turn right and that nothing good is going to happen if you turn left.

In more everyday terms, what happens when you face a moral dilemma, find yourself in a spot where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Perhaps you will stop and think. Perhaps you will decide to wait until you feel more inspired.

Effectively, there is nothing wrong with a moment's reflection. When reflection supplants action, you are heading for trouble.

Call it procrastination. When we procrastinate we tell ourselves that we are waiting for an inner spirit to move us, to answer the riddle, to point us on our way.

We do this because we believe that all actions must be directed by some kind of mental process. We forget that we can do something just to do something without knowing why we are doing it or whether it will work.

When there is no good solution, then doing something is better than doing nothing.

Or sometimes, we look at the task at hand and say to ourselves that it is so enormous, so difficult, so taxing that we will never get it done. Why waste energy on such a project?

Thereby, we make a habit of inaction. We become demoralized and dysfunctional. For failing to take action we even see the situation change, to the point where we are not just dealing with the original dilemma, but are having to manage the consequences of our failure to act.

Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter offered just the right advice. She recommends that you do something, anything, regardless of whether your heart is in it, whether you know why you are doing it, or feel prepared to do it right. Link here.

It’s an old adage: Don’t just sit there. Do something!

It’s better to get it wrong then to do nothing. Getting it wrong energizes you. It involves you. It shows you different aspects of the problem. It is a step in the right direction.

As Kanter explained: “Actions produce energy and momentum. It simply feels better to take action than sitting around navel-gazing and getting sluggish. Overwork can bring stress, but, in fact, many studies show that the important factor in work stress is lack of control. Identifying a positive action is a way to feel in control. Getting moving doesn't drain energy; it tends to build energy. For people trying to solve the national obesity epidemic, or just to lose a few pounds, exercise is more fun than dieting.”

Happily, Kanter relates the problem to the one I posted about yesterday. Whether you are confronting an organization that has lost its direction or a life that has lost its purpose, doing something is better than doing nothing.

For those who believe that action, even exercise, drains energy, Kanter correctly responds that activity produces energy.

I hope I recall this correctly, but I remember reading about one of Aaron Beck's efforts to treat a bedridden depressed patient. The patient explained calmly that she could not walk to the door. Beck suggested that she place a foot on the floor. Surely, she could do that. He then suggested that she place her other foot on the floor. And so on.

Kanter explains it in more organizational terms: “Accomplishments come in pieces. A journey of a thousand miles is daunting. The single step with which the journey begins is manageable. Every step you take now adds up by getting that much closer to a goal. Busy people in high-productivity environments tend to take just one more action, return one more phone call, set one more thing in motion before calling it quits for the day. By tomorrow, new demands will start piling up. Mental tricks like dividing big tasks into numerous small steps make it possible to identify immediate actions to get big things off the ground.”

You may not know the best thing to do, but you can certainly do something. As Kanter points out, pursuing the perfect solution becomes an excuse for inactivity.

In her words: “Perfection is unattainable anyway. Forget perfection. Just do it. So what if you're wrong? You can always try again. In an uncertain world of rapid change, business strategy includes room for improvisation. Live by some classic slogans: Best is the enemy of good. (Don't wait for perfect conditions.) Nothing ventured, nothing gained. (It takes a little risk to get rewards.)“

It’s all about the wisdom of old adages and classical slogans. To which Kanter adds a new one: “So what if you’re wrong?”

No one is right all the time. Problems do not solve themselves. Yet, they will eventually yield to effort and failed attempts. If you are not in the game, you are not going to excel.

She adds: “Sometimes it doesn't seem easy. Organizational cultures, autocratic bosses, uncooperative co-workers, long losing streaks, the uncertainty of shifting industry conditions, and big world events like natural disasters and revolutions can stop people in their tracks. But those who emerge triumphant, and get the most done anyway, are the people who would rather take action, any action, than wait around.”

Kanter’s article is not so much about telling you something that you don’t know. She is trying to incite you to follow the rule.

Fitting in with the Company Culture

It's not enough to do your job. It's not even enough to be great at your job. If you cannot fit in to the company culture, your career will stall out.

That's the slightly discouraging word from Forbes. Link here.

Offices have their own rituals. They create solidarity by involving everyone in the rituals. It may be mini-birthday parties or nights out carousing.

The rituals may seem empty. They may even offend your own sensibility and habits. It doesn't matter. If you want to be part of the group, and that involves eventually assuming leadership within the group, you must participate.

It may involve downing cheap champagne and cupcakes to celebrate someone's birthday. It may involve throwing a few dollars into the office Super Bowl pool.

These rituals are usually not excessively demanding. But that means that a failure to participate will be read by everyone else as a sign that you do not feel like a part of the group, that you do not really identify with the good of the company, and that you do not want to take on more responsibility within it.

As Forbes noted, it does happen that some cultures are so vulgar or so alien to your values that you cannot participate in their rituals. Think of Liar's Poker. It is best to know this before taking the job, but, if you discover it later, you need to start looking seriously for a new job.

If anyone told you that it was sufficient just to do a great job, they were misleading you. Surely, if anyone told you that you would be able to actualize all of your individual potential on your job, they were giving you very bad advice.

The sad truth is, that you must participate in these rituals, even if you do not care, even if your heart is not in it, even if they feel like an utter waste of time.

This all sounds rather Confucian. You recall that the great Chinese sage posited that communities hold together because people perform rituals and ceremonies. And that it does not matter whether you know why you are doing it; you must still do it.

Perhaps the knowledge that you are advancing your career and producing a more cohesive team and better teamwork will help you to participate, even when you do not want to.

Because Confucius also said that the more often you participate in these rituals the more likely it is that they will start making sense to you. And thus that your participation will gain a feeling of sincerity.

The Trial and Error Driven Life

Our lives need goals. They also need direction and purpose. We may not know why we're here but that does not make it all meaningless.

Our lives also need achievements and improvements. No one feels very happy stagnating.

Given that this is one of those occasions when we can get to there from here, I want to look at some advice offered by business coaches in the Harvard Business Review.

Peter Bregman advises us to live our lives as though we were conducting an experiment. Link here. Nothing more fully defines the trial and error driven life than the concept of experiment.

I would add, as Bregman makes clear, that conducting your life as an experiment feels a lot like playing in a game. For my purposes, it is the antidote to living  your life as a drama or a narrative. The latter we can call a therapy driven life.

Fulfilling the terms of a narrative is quite different from fulfilling yourself. In my view if you opt for the first you will be giving up the second.

After Bregman's article I would draw your attention to Robert Sutton's article, "Forgive and Remember." Link here.

Sutton is offering advice to managers. He wants them to encourage their staffs to feel free to suggest all manner of good and bad ideas. And he wants managers to create a psychological safety net for their staff.

Staff members should be encouraged to admit error. They should also look askance at those who shift the blame and always present themselves as being in the right.

Obviously enough, if you cannot see where you have made an error, you cannot use the information to formulate a new trial, a new approach, or a new idea.

Let's look at how this all works out in everyday life. Using himself as an example, Bregman explains how he set up an experiment that involved returning an item to a store. He had purchased the item; he had tried it out; he had discovered that it did not serve his purposes; he was going to return it.

Yet, he knew that the store had a stockage fee, a 20% charge for returning the used item. The logic of the policy was unassailable. If the item had been used, they could no longer sell it as new. Thus, if they offered a full refund they would be losing some of their profit.

For the sake of this post we will graciously ignore the moral issue of whether or not Bregman should have even asked the store to waive the stockage fee.

Bregman began by asking himself how he should behave in order to maximize his chances of getting the fee waived.

Allow me to list some of his list of possible behaviors, with some of my own. He could try to argue; he could fight; he could try to browbeat the manager; he could threaten never to return to the store; he could make a scene; he could assert his power.

With some reflection Bregman decided that none of these would be effective. A trial and error life does involve making use of the lessons of past experience... almost by definition.

Bregman decided to try a different approach: to throw himself on the mercy of the manager. He decided to appeal to the manager's generosity.

He was not going to demand anything; he was not going to insist; he was not going to snarl or growl. He would explain humbly that it would be very nice if the manager could be so kind as to waive the stockage fee.

It feels like humility; it almost feels weak. Of course, it worked. If it had not, I suspect that we would not be reading his article.

Will it work in all circumstances? Probably not. Bregman does not imagine that this approach will always work, even with all managers.

He is not married to this persona; neither should you be married to any one persona. He is not enslaved to an emotion that requires expression; neither should you believe that you must, at all costs, express your emotion.

He is playing a game, not acting in a drama. His investment in the tactic is far less than it be if he had chosen to act like an angry young man and then had decided that that was who he really was. In that case, if you reject the persona and you reject him.

Given that Bregman is using trial and error, he does not delude himself into thinking that the meek humble person who kindly makes a request of the story manager is who he really is. If his tactic had failed, he would have returned to the drawing board, to devise another tactic for the next store manager.

As I say, he is not married to the tactic; it is like a move in a game. Either it works or it does not.

Does the same rule apply in different areas of life? Of course, it does.

If you have a goal in mind-- you want more sex-- and you adopt an approach that seems to turn off your spouse, doesn't that mean that you should change your approach? Better to change your approach than to try to overpower your spouse. Better to change your approach than to make yourself crazy by sticking with a failing approach. If it doesn't work, try something else.

If your attitude in the office or your conduct or your customary way of dressing is causing people to take you less seriously, you could complain about how they are all jealous or about how you have been misunderstood.

Or you could, in your trial and error driven life, work to change your attitude. If the Mr. Nice Guy routine is not working out for you, then try adding a bit of an edge or try being a little more forceful.

If the macho man routine is holding you back professionally, then perhaps you should recalibrate your image, change your style, and leave the biker gear at home.

Just make sure you don't go to the opposite extreme and transform yourself into Casper Milquetoast.

Too radical a transformation in front of people who know you well will not be credible and will not be taken seriously. Bregman was adopting a persona in front of someone who did not know him at all.

How to Quit Your Job

Click on this link and you will see how to quit your job, with humor, and probably incite a lot of people to want to hire you.

What Not to Say at Your Next Job Interview

Anthony Balderrama has collected a number of anecdotes, from hiring officers and career coaches, of the worst mistakes people make at job interviews.

If you are about to go on an interview, check the list to see if you are prone to any of them. If not, the list provides an interesting glimpse into what I would call asocial skills.

Link here.

Going High Concept

Readers of this blog know that I advise job seekers not to sell themselves, but to buy them.

You will do better in a job interview if you show how much you understand the company that is interviewing you and how much you want to be part of their culture. This tactic is far better than touting your virtues, your successes, and your achievements.

An article from the Harvard Business Review reminded me that even when you are not selling yourself, you should know how to present yourself. And to do it clearly, concisely, in a way that relates to the job you want, in one sentence that you can pronounce in fifteen seconds.

In other contexts this is called high concept.

When Daisy Wademan Dowling presented this idea, she called it the elevator pitch. It assumes that you are trapped in an elevator with a hiring executive for a short period of time and need to find the right, high concept pitch. Link here.

Dowling offers the example of the executive assistant whose elevator pitch was: "I can make any boss shine."

Dowling considered this to be a great pitch. It is. It is far better than saying: I am a great assistant, or I am the most efficient assistant there is.

The concept works because she is not selling herself; she is showing that she understands what the job really entails. And she is basing her pride on the effect her work produces on others.

She is not asking what the job can do for her; she is showing what she can do for her employer.

How Matters

Tom Friedman did not have to work too hard to convince me that How matters. See his op-ed column: "Why How Matters."

After all, when I described the difference between therapy and coaching on my website I said that therapy was about the Why while coaching was about the How.

Therapists want to know Why you get things wrong; coaches want to show you How to get them right.

My approach there, and throughout this blog, has had a strong ethical component. What matters in life is how we treat other people, how we conduct our relationships, whether we are loyal, trustworthy, and responsible.

So I was also pleased to see Friedman directing our attention to the work of Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, a man who is in the business of promoting ethical behavior in the workplace.

Seidman wants to improve how people behave. See link. He emphasizes the importance of connecting with other people, treating them with respect and courtesy, and making them feel valued. In Seidman's view, and in Friedman's and mine, behaving ethically is an essential element in any business transaction.

At one time we had it. We do not any more.

Many people in the financial services industry were so interested in pursuing their own self-interest that they forgot their duty to maintain the viability of the financial system. They forgot that they had a responsibility to the the business community and to the community at large.

Most of them did give gobs of money to charity. But that could hardly make up for the fact that they were running the financial system into the ground.

Certainly, this is not true of everyone in the financial world. Yet, if you play a perfect game and your teammate fumbles the ball you are still on a losing team.

Having discussed these points on this blog, I immediately found Friedman's argument persuasive: "You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream-- a home for no money down and nothing to pay for two years-- without that eventually catching up with you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters."

Indeed it does.

Friedman is also correct to offer this prescription: "We need to get back to collaborating the old fashioned way. That is, people making decisions based on business judgment, experience, prudence, clarity of communications, and thinking about how-- not just how much."

This is a radical prescription. For decades now the culture has been drumming it into everyone's head that the Puritan ethic leads to sexual repression, neurosis, and cancer. To say nothing of imperialism, colonialism, and oppression.

The therapy culture has contributed mightily to this effort, but its more important contemporary manifestation is the cult to celebrity.

Celebrities do not earn money the old fashioned way. They do not get rich by a lifetime of hard work and savings.

Their culture disconnects work from wealth; it tells us all that we can all be rich because we might all hit the jackpot or win the lottery.

Celebrities are rewarded because they do not work hard and do not save. They earn the most for doing the least. After all, didn't Alex Rodriguez earn $25,000,000 for playing Kabballah with Madonna? And how many of those who were going berserk over the pay received by executives batted an eye at the millions celebrities were making for being entertaining?

Today's celebrity is a model for profligate spending. Now, you might not have enough money to spend like a celebrity, but the banking system has been kind enough to give you enough credit to make a good go of it. You too can live beyond the value of your productive labor.

In a world that drools over celebrity notions like showing respect, being trustworthy, and tempering emotion feel retrograde.

Celebrities live out psychodramas. They are supposed to have conquered repression; in fact, they have merely numbed themselves to shame. They do not set an example of good behavior, respect for others, or even respect for themselves. Celebrities will never be pillars of the community.

Friedman asks the right question: How did we lose touch with the values that made for a functioning financial system and a functioning national community?

My answer is simple: we became postmodern. We learned in the best universities that everything was a social construct. Deep thinkers taught us that there was no such thing as intrinsic value. An object was said to be valuable when a lot people or a lot of influential and powerful people said that it was valuable, and acted accordingly.

Apply the same principle to creditworthiness. Wasn't it just another social construct? Your credit score, your income, your savings, the evidence of your responsible monetary behavior... these were merely what the power elite took to be measures of value. They had been constructed to discriminate against people who had no money. Clearly, the situation had to be rectified.

And it was, in subprime mortgages, liar loans, zero down payments, and so on.

Now, the number on the mortgage was also a social construct. Pieces of property did not have any intrinsic value. If the bankers said the house was worth a million dollars, it was worth a million dollars. Value was what these powerful people said it was.

And when the worthless mortgages that had been given to people who were-- by fiat-- declared creditworthy, and that were collateralized by properties that were declared to be worth as much as the mortgages, were repackaged into debt instruments... lo and behold, ratings agencies were so postmodern in their thinking that they declared these packages to be AAA. With that imprimatur investment banks could borrow against them, with 40-1 leverage.

So, the current crisis is simply a reality check. It does not mean that capitalism has failed. It should be the death knell of postmodernism and social constructivist theory.

Obviously, the people who hold to these ideas will not accept that the crisis is a reality check; they believe that reality is a social construct... especially when it contradicts their precious ideas.

Happy Thoughts

Many years ago a friend was explaining the effects of Prozac on brain chemistry. If you look at primate research, he said, you see that when a male primate gains an enhanced status in the group, his brain chemistry changes in ways that resemble what happens when people take Prozac.

He concluded that we were going to have a society where everyone thinks he is an alpha male, only he isn't.

Of course, it is not just Prozac that is fostering this modern illusion. Misguided educators, talk show hosts, the media, and the therapy culture has told people to think happy thoughts, the better to auto-generate enhanced self-esteem, regardless of the evidence.

This dovetails nicely with a point that Steve Salerno made in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Friday. Link here.

Salerno asks this question: How many business people are so pumped up on happy talk, on positive thinking, on mindless optimism that they have no sense of their strengths and weaknesses and no sense of whether their business is good or bad?

It is not entirely fair to lay this entirely at the recently burgeoning field of happiness studies. Derived from cognitive-behavioral therapy, happiness studies have become increasingly important in today's psychology. In many ways it was a change for the better.

To counter Freud's unremitting pessimism, Aaron Beck invented cognitive therapy to train his patients to engage more balanced judgment.

Beck would tell his patients to take disparaging self-judgments-- "I never get anything right," "I am worthless"-- and to write down three facts that would validate the thought and three that would disprove it.

Thus, patients gained balance. They learned to see both the good and the bad, the positive and the negative.

Now, what began as a necessary corrective to Freudian thought has been transformed by the culture into bad advice. Working their rough magic, the media, the educational establishment, and the therapy culture have brought pie-in-the-sky optimism into the American workplace.

There, it has become, Salerno said, "a crusade for all-out positivity." Employees have completely bought it. Today, most of them "prefer celebrity-driven inspiration over skills-intensive training."

Call it an escape from reality; call it mindless idolatry; it is wishful or magical thinking. Lately the guru most associated with it is Rhonda Byrne, author of "The Secret."

As Salerno says: "It is intriguing that 'The Secret' came to prominence during the same year as the mortgage meltdown. For what was the subprime lending crisis if not a large scale conspiracy of wishful thinking."

I have not read "The Secret." Nor will I ever. I am opposed to self-abuse, especially when the self in question is mine.

I am persuaded, however, that Byrne is a genius ... at marketing. For having trans-substantiated a trite piece of childish reasoning into a major fortune she deserves some grudging praise.

Better yet, she has convinced people that learning a secret that is now known to countless millions of people puts them in the company of a privileged few.

Part of her genius is to have inoculated herself against criticism. So many people have taken leave of their senses to plunge into the abyss of Byrne's mind, that if I were to say that she is peddling cretinous blather they would immediately take offense... and rush to her defense.

Criticizing the book threatens their self-esteem. Since their self-esteem, thanks to Byrne, is now based on wishful thinking, it has no basis in reality. Thus it is now hanging by a thread, which makes people very sensitive indeed.

Happily, there is no need to read this book. Any review will tell you the secret: since like attracts like, thinking happy thoughts will attract other happy thoughts and will necessarily produce happy events.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Byrne declared that if you imagine something, if you want it badly enough, it will necessarily happen. "The only reason a person does not have money is that they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts." She advises: "See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person."

Byrne is saying that if you put your head in the sand, dream a happy (and rich) thought, you need merely camp out in front of your mailbox. The checks will start rolling in.

Or take it a step further. Byrne says that it is a good thing to pretend that you are really rich: "A shortcut to manifesting your desire is to see what you want as absolute fact."

This is wish fulfillment run amok. Worse yet, people who believe their wishes are real are properly considered to be delusional.

Let us say that you decide to live by these principles. You want to be rich. You know that hard work, diligent effort, education, and training are not going to do it for you. In fact, you have always known this. That is why you are a slacker. Now you are happy that your chronic lethargy has been vindicated as a path toward the secret.

You discover that in order to become rich you need merely work on visualizing yourself as rich, and on believing that you are really as rich as you think you are.

Fortified with this pseudo-delusional belief, you go out and buy whatever your rich self needs to possess. You charge it to your American Express card.

Then, the bill comes due. You cannot pay it. What do you do?

Of course, you open up your copy of "The Secret" and it tells you that you did not want it badly enough. Buying the book was insufficient; you need to buy some notebooks and the movie version and sign up for some seminars.

You have not given yourself over completely to magical thinking; you are worrying too much. Thus, as Byrne says: "the only reason people do not have what they want is that they are thinking more about what they don't want than what they do want."

Salerno is right that this mimics, on a micro level, what happened in the subprime mess. After all, at the root of the problem is the average American who believed, despite the evidence, that he was as rich as Croesus, and who went out and bought a house that fit his puffed-up self-esteem but not his budget.

The moral of the story: never underestimate the damage that cretinous blather can do to otherwise intelligent people.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

What do the denizens of the New York financial world have to say about the financial crisis? What is their take on the world that is crumbling around them?

Yesterday my friend AM was telling me about some conversations he had had with friends and acquaintances who were part of that world.

He had been struck by what he was hearing, but especially by what he had not been hearing.

What was he hearing? No one could have foreseen this. Only a perfect storm could have beaten our trades. No one could have done anything about it. It was completely out of our hands.

What was he not hearing? Any recognition that anyone was at fault, that anyone had made a mistake, that anyone had been wrong.

AM was not begrudging anyone his or her success, but noted that they were earning large bonuses for being stewards of the financial system. And there, they had completely fallen down on the job.

He attributed it to a simple failure to understand the reality of markets. As smart and as rich as they were, how could they not know that you do not make grossly outsized returns on capital year after year without their being a reckoning?

In the end they were simply shifting the blame... to God. So much for the new vogue of atheism.

Anyway, no one apologized because no one did anything wrong. Perhaps no one committed a crime, but surely people had failed. They had failed themselves, they had failed the financial system, they had failed the country, and so on. And no one, up to now, has stepped forward to apologize.

To use the trope from Arthur Conan Doyle's "Silver Blaze": apology was the dog that didn't bark.

Look at it mathematically: the cry of public outrage at the behavior of Wall Street bankers is inversely proportional to the willingness of these people to accept responsibility for their business.

It's all about balance. The outcry was so strong because the apologies are weak to non-existent.

Of course, no single person is totally responsible.

Among those who have failed are Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers; James Cayne of Bear Stearns; and Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch.

Surely, Franklin Raines and James Johnson of Fannie Mae bear a large portion of the blame, as do those members of Congress and the executive branch who mandated a trillion dollars worth of sub-prime loans and protected Fannie and Freddie from oversight and regulation.

Many will say that Alan Greenspan bears responsibility for flooding the monetary system with liquidity. And others would place blame on the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations.

More recently, an offhand remark by Charles Schumer provoked a run on Indymac bank, and a more recent remark by Harry Reid caused collapse of insurance company stocks. Were either of them responsible for the consequences of their actions? Not at all... it would have happened anyway.

As for the larger point about whether anyone could have foreseen this, surely James Grant of "Grant's Interest Rate Observer" and Nouriel Roubini of NYU were surely prescient. No one may have been listening; no one may have had the character to do something to pre-empt the crisis, but the warnings were out there.

When we make it all an act of God we are saying that we want to wash out hands of the whole matter. If you think that human beings did nothing to get us into this, then you are also saying that they can do nothing to get us out of it. It is an ultimate counsel of despair.

Or else, they believe that since God got us into this, God will get us out of it. As for the humbled former masters of the universe: they are out playing golf.

Vox Populi

Yesterday, the Paulson bailout bill was voted down in the House of Representatives. Apparently, Henry Paulson had thought that dealing with Congress was like dealing with the partners at Goldman Sachs.

Apart from that, the bill got drowned in partisan rancor, largely because each side wanted to control the narrative of what went wrong.

But the larger reason was simply that the American people rose up and shouted: No bailout for Wall Street.

Given the choice between systemic financial collapse and the hides of Wall Street's masters, the populace decided that anything would be better than giving Wall Street a reprieve. In the eyes of the public, the financial community deserves humiliation. Nothing less.

Surely, Wall Street is not entirely at fault. Many people on the Street will tell you that the problem began with an act of Congress, the 1995 Community Reinvestment Act, that forced banks to write mortgages for people who did not quality for them. If they did not comply they could lose their charter. These were sub-prime mortgages. Lawyers and community organizers stoked the flames of the sub-prime fire.

It did not matter that much whether the mortgages were going to be paid off-- especially after the interest rates were adjusted-- because the banks were not holding on to them. They were selling them to Fannie Mae, which was on a sub-prime mortgage buying spree.

After Fannie Mae bought the mortgages, it repackaged them and magically transformed them into investment grade securities. Ratings agencies and investment bankers colluded, because, after all, if they said they were AAA then they must be AAA.

Efforts to regulate Fannie Mae were scuttled by the same Congressional leaders who are today blaming the debacle on free market capitalism.

So, Congress forced banks to write sub-prime mortgages. Wall Street simply gamed the system. But it did not just accumulate obscene profits; it also flaunted its success. Ironically, the nation's leading capitalists became the most visible beneficiaries of an anti-free market policy.

Of course, it was a Ponzi scheme and it did collapse, damaging the masters of the universe. It damaged their careers, their reputations, their status, and their portfolios.

Many did not have the means to deal with the damage. Those who had followed the counsel of therapists or the nostrums offered by the therapy culture were especially at a loss.

Therapy had told them to ignore what other people thought of them and to generate their own self-esteem. The result: these masters of the universe had no idea how they looked to people who were on the outside.

And then, one day, they looked up and noticed that the nation had risen up en masse to say that it would bear any burden, suffer any loss, even undermine the world financial system... if only it would cause the masters of Wall Street some serious pain.

What were the people saying? They were making an ethical point. Or better, a point about the absence of elementary ethics on Wall Street.

The problem was: it is one thing to amass a great fortune; quite another to earn it. And it is one thing to feel good about yourself; quite another to earn the respect of others.

You can tell when someone respects what he has earned, and, by extension, if he respects his labor he probably respects himself. Someone who has earned what he has spends it judiciously, does not flaunt it, does not waste it on trifles, and does not throw it in the face of those less fortunate.

If you have money you have not earned, if there is no correlation between what your work and your wealth, you will start to function like a dimwitted celebrity. You will believe that one day you will be found out as a fraud, and that someone will take it away from you. Thus, the compulsion to spend.

Profligate spending does not make you look good to those who have more modest means. They know that when someone who is wealthy flaunts it, he is building up his self-esteem at someone else's expense.

The masters of Wall Street knew how to make lots of money, but they lacked humility and benevolence.

They did not have enough humility to believe that participating in a market entails an ethical obligation, not to your raw self-interest, but to the orderly functioning of the markets. Your self-interest comes second.

Those who have missed this point are often humbled by the markets.

And these masters lacked benevolence, even as they gave fortunes to charity. Benevolence is not just generosity, and it goes beyond giving money to those who are neediest.

Benevolence involves being kind, considerate, and respectful to others. It is about how you talk to the dry cleaner or the waiter in the restaurant. However important you are on the Street you owe your fellow citizens gestures of respect. Most of them do not want your charity anyway.

Know Thy Gut

The word did not come from Delphi, but Omaha. It did not come from Apollo, but from Warren Buffett.

In the midst of the current financial uncertainty Warren Buffett stepped forth to offer a vote of confidence in the system. He took a large stake in Goldman Sachs.

I will not comment on the wisdom of the investment but on the way Buffett made his decision. As he puts it, he trusted his gut and made a quick judgment.

When I first read this, I thought that it was surely bad advice. In my coaching practice-- a place where questions of decision-making are often crucial-- any time anyone tells me that he has decided to go with his gut, my own starts to feel queasy.

If he adds that he is simply following the counsel and example of Warren Buffett he does not calm my disquiet. I start thinking that he has misunderstood the oracle.

There is a Buffett mystique. The world's richest investor makes occasional pronouncements, just like Apollo's oracle at Delphi. And just as the god's message was communicated by a young woman sitting on a stool, so too Buffett's wisdom is offered to us by Becky Quick and Liz Claman.

What does it mean to follow your gut? Is it simply an affectation, a form of down-home folksiness that Buffett puts on to lure unsuspecting bankers into selling their assets as fire-sale prices? Or is there more to it?

How did Warren Buffett decide to take a major position in Goldman Sachs? (See link for the larger story.) One day he was sitting in his office in Omaha, feet on his desk, sipping Cherry Coke, nibbling on some nuts, when some guy called him and asked him if he wanted to invest in Goldman Sachs. A few conversations later Buffett owned $5 billion worth of preferred stock, paying 10%, along with a ton of warrants that could net him untold profits.

Not a bad deal for a country boy.

It was not the first time one of New York's major financial institutions had put in such a call. But, it was the first time there had been a deal.

As Buffett told the story, he did not enlist an army of lawyers and did not comb through the Goldman books: a chat between friends, a few meetings on the phone... and, bingo... a deal was struck.

His gut was saying yes, so he said yes.

Does this mean that the next time you are facing a difficult decision you should be reading the signs welling up from your digestive tract? It all depends on how you understand the oracle.

Buffett's is not just any old gut. It possesses a mind of its own, a mind that has been trained by decades of experience and considerable investing success, to say nothing of a few failures. Saying that Buffett can follow his gut does not mean that you and I should grant quite as much credence in our respective guts.

Any time you are thinking about making a decision-- saying investing in something-- you will have some anxiety over the risk. That much is normal. But, it might also happen that you feel anxious because there is something wrong with the investment, something that you do not fully understand. Sometimes your gut thinks faster than your mind. Sometimes it knows more than you do.

Knowing your gut means knowing which is which, whether your gut is telling you that you are taking a risk or that you should not take the risk.

All of this assumes that you know something about businesses. The phone call last week was not the first time Buffett had heard of Goldman Sachs. It was not his initiation into the world of financial services companies. He knew the principals of the company, had studied its annual report, and had examined its balance sheet. The result was that he could size up a deal for Goldman Sachs stock much quicker and with more accuracy than you or I could.

Had he already mulled over the possibility of investing in that company? Surely,he had. Was he already thinking of where and how he was going to invest in the newly-available financial assets? Surely, he had.

His decision was not an impulse buy. His quick judgment was more like what happens when suddenly you grasp something that you have been working on and working on. It's like a mental tipping point.

But why does he dumb in down by saying that he is just following his gut? Is it an affectation, or is something else involved.

Obviously, Buffett likes to present himself as an ordinary guy. He has a ribald sense of humor, and never touts his own brilliance. By giving credit to his gut, he ensures that success does not go to his head.

But how does he maintain the right attitude and the right frame of mind? Strangely enough, he does it through lifestyle, not through self-knowledge. And he does it through disciplined restraint, not just in his investing, but in the way he lives his life.

Buffett famously lives on Cherry Coke and cheeseburgers, not caviar and champagne. He has always lived in the same suburban house in Omaha, and has never aspired to a palatial triplex on Park Avenue or a mega-mansion in Greenwich. He buys his suits off the rack, not on Savile Row. And he still drives a Cadillac, not a Maybach.

He seems to have known that abrupt changes in status and lifestyle are difficult to handle. You cannot just bounce from one community and one lifestyle to another without putting in a great deal of work to readjust and acclimatize yourself. All the time that that takes is time you will not be using to work on your investments.

Besides, what is your mega-mansion really worth if it merely gives you a severe case of anomie.

Buffett's lifestyle keeps him from getting too full of himself. It is one reason why, as the Masters of the Universe quiver in fear as they watch their empires fall apart, this country boy is standing ready to pick up the juiciest pieces, at fire-sale prices.

So, if you want to invest like Warren Buffett, start with Cherry Cokes and cheeseburgers, trade in your Maybach for a Cadillac, and downsize your living quarters. Remember, the best time to do it is before you have to.

[Added note: If you have read this far I would recommend that you also check out Adam's remarks in the comments section.]

Out of Work

What happens when a Master of the Universe loses his job, retires to the living room couch, and tries to reflate his ego by becoming the master of all her surveys? How should his wife manage the situation?

That is the question asked of Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times this week. It is a timely question, and it has elicited many comments. Here is the letter, in full:
"My husband has just lost his job on Wall Street. When he was in [sic] work he was impossible, living on the adrenaline of deal-making. Now he loafs around the house, sullen, full of self-pity, and criticizing everything the children or I do. I have spent years living with his over-sized ego, but now his ego has collapsed it is even worse. Is there anything I can do? Should I be sympathetic? Or shall I tell him to suck it up and be grateful we are not under any financial pressure? I am not going to divorce him, because of the children, but I'd like to know, do damaged Masters of the Universe ever recover?
Wife, 42"

One is tempted to say: these two sound like they deserve each other. And, recovery will surely require a more supportive spouse. As one reader said, he has been supporting her for these many years. It is time for her to return the favor.

One comment stood out for me. A woman who had found herself in the same situation offered that she had decided not to express her feelings. "If I had revealed how shocked and scared I was I would have sounded like that wife..." That is, like the letter-writer.

How does she sound? Not so much shocked and scared, but as exasperated and contemptuous. She seems mildly grateful that they have no financial problems, but she does not find him any better now than he was before.

When her husband was Master of the Universe, he was full of himself. To her he was "impossible." Now that he has been dethroned, she finds him insufferable.

Of course, she did marry him, so this cannot all be a surprise. And she does not want to divorce him.

So, she is stuck. He is stuck. They have attained a special kind of togetherness.

Imagine that the content of her letter is what she communicates to her husband. What is she telling him? That he is deficient no matter what he does? Why would that motivate him? In her eyes he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Anytime a person is put in a position that he loses no matter what he does, then he will normally sink further into the living room sofa. It is a classical definition of depression, as Martin Seligman described it in Learned Optimism.

Surely, he was acting like an arrogant Master of the Universe. And now he is acting like the proverbial bull in the china shop. But just as surely, this wife's own management skills need an extreme makeover.

When a man loses a job that was the focus of his existence, he has also lost his social network and the organization of his everyday life.

That is the time when he should be able to count on his wife and family, to restore his morale, to cheer him through adversity, and to respect the time he needs to recover.

This not what this wife is offering. She is contemptuous, disengaged, and critical. She imagines showering him with sympathy. For all we know she already looks at him with pity. How better to feed his own self-pity?

In response many readers wanted this wife to understand that marriage is a partnership. As one said, she must choose between manning the pumps or abandoning ship.

This means that her first duty should be to let him know that they are in it together, that she believes in him, and that she has confidence in his ability to move on.

Had she, perchance, been expressing pride in her husband's accomplishments when he was doing well, she would be having an easy time expressing confidence in his ability to overcome his current setback.

Instead, she labeled him impossible. Having shown contempt for his boisterous, frat-boy antics, she seems to have defined their relationship as adversarial. If that is true, that would explain why he has no interest in taking her into his confidence.

Given that the situation is dire, given that she knows that she has become part of the problem and not the solution, what advice can we offer her?

First, spare us all the sympathy and pity. It suggests that he is a victim and works to stifle positive motivation.

Second, spare him the criticism. His criticism of her and the children is probably a last ditch effort to retain some pride, but she should avoiding returning like for like. This creates drama, and nothing more. (I suspect that she has not refrained from showering him with criticism.)

Third, don't tell him what to do. It never works. His pride cannot absorb the blow that would be implied if his stay-at-home wife knew more about his business than he did.

Fourth, as one reader recommended, this means that if she is going to introduce suggestions, she must label them as his. Remember when you wanted to start your own business, manage our investments full time, go back to school, travel the world, run the marathon.

Fifth, be counter-intuitive. Thank him for showing an interest in the household and the children's schoolwork. Do not denounce him as obnoxious and incompetent. He is probably feeling like he failed at his job, so he will never accept that he is also failing as a father and husband.

Sixth, send him off to the gym. Hire him a trainer, sign him up for classes. As one reader wrote in, this will organize his time, get him out of the house, and improve his mood and energy. Since this does not concern his professional competence, she can be more assertive here. Best would be if she signs him up for some training sessions with a man who has completed Marine basic training.

Seventh, jump start their social. Few things organize a household more efficiently than an incipient dinner party. She might invite other men who are in similar straits. He is surely not the only person to have been fired recently. New opportunities most often arise from current contacts.

Eighth, lightly shame him. If she is friends with women whose husbands are in similar conditions she can report on how these other men are dealing with their down time.

Ninth, appeal to his sense of responsibility. She should tell him that she understands why he wants to chill out for a while, and that she has no objection. But instead of accusing him of hurting the children, she should mention that the children look up to him, adore him, and imitate his example. Does he want them to emulate the sullen soul who has commandeered the sofa and does nothing all day?

Panic on the Street

That thud you just heard was the sound of arrogance hitting the Street. Many of Wall Street's Masters of the Universe are being humbled.

In good times 80-to-1 leverage produces obscene profits. It also produces people who believe that they as good as their bonuses say they are. Trouble is: in bad times the same leverage will obliterate your firm in the blink of an eye.

Unfortunately, justice is imperfect. Some of those most responsible for the debacle are walking away with their fortunes intact. Many lesser lights in the financial firmament, people who did their jobs effectively and who trusted their superiors, have been wiped out.

Too many people thought that they had found a way to make enormous profits without putting in a commensurate amount of work. Like Icarus they flew too close to the sun and did not realize that their wings were made of wax.

Lest anyone looking at this from the outside start to gloat, the misfortune that is overtaking the financial services industry will eventually affect all of us.

As Wall Street goes, so go New York City and State. And that is just for starters.

Is everything coming apart? Probably not. Remember what Baron Rothschild said nearly two centuries ago: "Buy when there's blood in the street, even if the blood is yours."

Loss traumatizes, and a lot of people have lost a great deal, whether in their portfolios or their careers.

The standard psycho-therapeutic template does not seem to fit. Usually it promotes introspection as the best way to turn a trauma into a story. Mostly, this does not work. It will certainly not show you the way to deal with the disintegration of the financial system.

With my coaching clients I approach it differently.

I find that they first need to understand that trauma compromises judgment. What feels right after a trauma is usually the wrong course of action.

To overcome trauma you need someone whose judgment you trust. Hopefully you knew who you could call on before the blank hit the fan.

Keep in mind that trauma wants to maintain its influence. It will manipulate your emotions so that they will direct you toward doing exactly what you need to do in order to stay traumatized.

Trauma puts us in pain-avoidance mode. If something is truly painful we want to make sure it never happens again. Trauma will want us to believe that we need to withdraw from any and all situations that expose us to risk.

If we follow its lead, we give up, we freeze, we do nothing. Sometimes we even take the occasion to rummage through our psyches.

We might even engage in a form of therapy that encourages these bad tendencies. Like trauma, therapy wants you to lie on a couch and introspect while putting off major decisions.

The conclusion: when you have been traumatized, get out of your mind as quickly as you can. Take small steps to connect with people, professionally or personally.

Trauma threatens us. It makes us feel that we are alone and isolated, that the people we rely on to support and protect us have let us down.

It produces a rush of narcissism. It makes us feel that we can only rely on ourselves. Everyone else is a potential threat. We become thin-skinned and overly cautious, even withdrawn.

Trauma will tell you to puff up your self-esteem in defiance of the world that has betrayed you.

Trauma tells you that you are alone. It is lying to you. You cannot go it alone.

As everyone knows, when looking for a new job, the best resource is the contacts you have built up over the years.

Trauma also tells you that you are such a wonderful person, so full of goodness, that you did not deserve to lose what you lost. Some people imagine that since trauma is punishing them unjustly, the world owes them something.

Right away, without delay.

This makes them feel that they can and must trust their impaired judgment. They might begin to act impulsively. They think that the casino owes them. They become reckless. They double down on losing bets. They replicate the atmosphere that got Wall Street into the mess in the first place.

People act impulsively because they want to make back everything they lose... all at once.

Evidently, they only lose more.

Neither introspection nor self-puffery nor impulsive actions will cure the pain of trauma. What is left? How about... work.

If you seem to have lost everything, if the world is falling apart around you... you can get it back... but only through hard work.

Wouldn't it be nice if Wall Street went back to the motto on the old Smith Barney commercials: We make money the old-fashioned way; we earn it.

And this is true even for those of my clients who have worked very hard, and who are victims of someone else's errors.

Pondering the injustice of it all will not make it better.

I always advise my coaching clients to get back to work, whether this means starting immediately to look for a new job or putting extra time and effort into their personal financial plans.

When the world changes, you must change with it. Nostalgia is your enemy. Self-pity will not rectify your situation.

The danger every trauma victim faces is procrastination. Indulged, procrastination produces bad habits.

Wallow too long in the pain of your trauma and you will get good at introspecting or acting impulsively. Once such habits become ingrained, you will have far more difficulty breaking them.

If you don't know what to do, do something. Take a small step in the right direction. As the old saying goes: every journey begins with a single step.

The Eye of a Needle

Last Friday's Financial Times brought us a new case study from Lucy Kellaway. This one concerns a man who is having a midlife crisis. Having worked in banking for 20 years he has begun to realize that he has reached something of a dead end. While others are advancing up the career ladder, he seems to be stuck.

Already something does not feel quite right. A reasonably perceptive individual will not need 20 years to see that he is being passed over for promotions. Evidently, this man does not especially care about whether he is advancing.

Now he is looking for explanations. And he has had something of an epiphany. He writes that he is "plagued with the idea" that he is not getting ahead because he has too much integrity. He is bitter because the bank runs seminars on integrity and does not promote the person who has the most... him. By his lights his more successful colleagues are "selfish." They lack "backbone" and "feel no guilt about their actions."

And yet, he adds, these selfish, spineless, guiltless people are "happier and better suited to professional life."

Here is a man who presents himself as a paragon of moral virtue, but who is surrounded by a band of ruthless psychopaths. Now he has realized that he is simply too good for the cut-throat world of London banking.

Is that what he means by integrity? At the least, his integrity seems to make it impossible for him to cooperate with others, to be a team player. And it does not allow him to respect his colleagues. Apparently, his integrity does not allow him to follow the basic ethical principles that govern workplace relationships. Thus, he sounds self-absorbed, self-righteous, and infatuated with his own moral superiority.

His integrity also precludes his competing. If he had possessed a normal quantity of ambition it would not have taken him 20 years to notice that he was not getting ahead.

If competition is the name of the game, then refusing to compete does not mean that you have too much integrity. It means that you want to play by your own rules.

Or perhaps this man has simply made a different choice. He believe that a rich man will have as much trouble getting into Heaven as a camel will have getting through the eye of a needle. He might have decided that it is more important to go to Heaven than to gain the key to the executive washroom.

That is his prerogative. Complaining about the consequences and expecting to be rewarded for it in the here-and-now are not.

Of course, he does not have to be very religious to believe that working in a bank is an affront to his integrity. He might simply believe that capitalism, commerce, and mortgages are corrupt and corrupting.

Consciously or unconsciously he may have chosen to fail. He may believe that success will threaten his immortal soul. Or else, that it might alienate him from people whose company and opinions he values.

How to Keep Your Job

Recently, a thirty-year-old analyst, working in a bank, wrote to Financial times columnist Lucy Kellaway asking for advice on how to keep his job. The letter and many excellent comments are dated June 12.

This man calls himself a "solid performer," but not a "star." He has a child, a pregnant wife, and an excessively large mortgage. It is not a good moment for him to lose his job. He asks Kellaway whether he should play the sympathy card or whether he should embark on "a shameless bout of self-promotion" at the expense of his colleagues?

So, how does he keep his job?

First, by doing it. Several respondents emphasized that he must work harder and make himself more essential to the business in ways that are quantifiable.

Surely, he should make himself more visible at work. He should be the first in the office in the morning and the last to leave in the evening. The extra time will allow him to work harder on his reports, and hopefully, this will produce better results. If he is a stock analyst his work will be judged by the way the stocks he recommends perform. Harder work, coupled with less time wasted in self-pity, will surely improve his performance.

Second, he should act like he respects himself. As several respondents noted, playing the sympathy card is a bad idea. Telling his boss that he is incompetent at managing his personal finances does not inspire confidence. No boss is going to base his decision on pity. The fact that this analyst would consider begging for his job does not speak well of his character.

Third, he should avoid psychological manipulation. Anyone who promotes himself at the expense of his colleagues is going to sow dissension in the ranks. At that point, firing him will contribute to group morale. No one should ever put himself in the position where his absence will contribute to the good functioning of the group.

Besides, every boss worth his bonus knows that people who self-promote shamelessly are probably not doing their job.

This analyst should not make a spectacle of himself and cause the office to descend into drama. He should make himself someone others can trust and rely on. His goal should be to become the go-to person on projects. If his boss knows that when he takes on an assignment it will be done effectively and efficiently... to the point that the boss does not even have to worry about it, then he will be less likely to fire this man.

If shameless self-promotion leads him to bad-mouth others, then they will likely return the favor. At that point he will not only have more difficulty holding on to his present job, but he will have problems getting a new job in the future.

Fourth, as a respondent noted, praise and compliments work much better than self-promotion and confrontation. Offering praise for the good job that his boss or colleagues is doing will make it far more likely that they will return the favor. If he does it well he will become a source of office harmony and general good feeling.

Finally, the fact that his solution to the problem involves manipulating his boss and promoting himself at the expense of his colleagues tells us why he is not a star performer. It also suggests that he is about to lose his job.

Sweat the Small Stuff, 2

I was just reading an article on CNN.com about how not to get a job. Many of the listed errors are rather obvious, but if people continue to need reminding, then perhaps we do not all understand them well enough.

Where the article emphasizes job interviews, its points pertain to many business transactions: meeting a potential new client, customer, supplier, or associate.

So, the article is about now not to make a good first impression.

Begin with inappropriate dress. Clothes still make the man or woman, and a profession appearance is the first impression you will make. Get it wrong and your prospects will instantly decline.

Of course, you know what it means to look professional. You have watched television shows where stylists transform frogs into princes and princesses, seemingly over night.

Whether the subjects have gained a new glamor or a new manliness or just a new look... they always close the show by proclaiming that they feel great about themselves and have gained a new sense of confidence.

Unfortunately, this gives us the impression that a professional appearance can be turned on and off. You get a new haircut, put on a new suit, whiten your teeth; then you can go out and strut your stuff. Your high self-esteem will be infectious.

Or it won't. If you walk around all the time in stained sweats, unshaven and unshorn, when you put on the new suit and have your hair cut,you might look like you are playing dress-up. And if you look comfortable in an outfit that feels like alien skin, you will not exude confidence. You will look fake.

It takes time to grow into a new look, a new outfit, or a new professional attitude.

If you only put it on for special occasions, do not be surprised if your relationship with the potential employer, client, or customer is limited to one special occasion.

It is not enough to make good appearance a staple of your job interviews or client calls...you need to make it a habit.

Next, mistake, guaranteed to make a bad impression: badmouthing other people. It could be your ex-boss, your colleagues, associates, or partners. Or it could include your spouse, children, and neighbors.

People do this because they believe that making someone else look bad makes them look good. It doesn't.

Or else, they may have gone to a fancy college where critical theory convinced them that finding fault is a sign of superior intelligence. It isn't.

A habit of badmouthing means that you are not a team player and that you will spend your time disrupting disrupting whatever group you find yourself in.

The last mistake, for today, is revealing too much personal information. It could be in a first interview, a first client, call, or a meeting with new associates. It could also-- God forbid!-- by on your blog.

The therapy culture might have told you that true communication involves expressing your feelings openly and honestly. The trouble is: this makes you look unprofessional. It makes you look like you are easily distracted from the task at hand.

Moral exhibitionism may be legal tender in your therapist's office, but that is because therapists have been trained to overcome their normal human tendencies to reciprocate. Anyone else will take your indiscreet disclosures as a demand to do the same.

If you picked up this character flaw in your therapist's office, make sure you leave it there. But not before asking why he or she has been encouraging you to develop bad habits.

Don't Sell Yourself. Buy them.

If you are going on a job interview, the rule to follow is: Don't sell yourself. Buy them.

If you focus on telling them how wonderful you are and what great things you can do for them, this implies a criticism of their work... as though they are seriously in need of your services.

If they ask about prior performance, resist the temptation to tell them how great you were. Try to find a way to show them what you have contributed. Bring in a notebook filled with evidence. Always let your work speak for you.

You should focus on how much you admire their organization and how much you would be honored to work with them. If they have been having problems, try a no-fault approach... shift the blame to the business climate, high taxes and regulations. If they ask how you might improve things, have a couple of proposals at the ready.

Buying them begins with extensive research into their business, the market conditions they are facing, their policies, and their programs. Do not, however, act like you know it all already.

When the time comes for you to ask questions, use the occasion to demonstrate your respect for them, for the challenges they face, and the creative ways they have dealt with them.

Certainly, do not imagine that the job is beneath you and that you are doing them a large favor by working for them. That is the road to chronic unemployment.

Buying them also means respecting their culture, showing good manners, and practicing decorum. You know already that you do this by proper dress, good grooming, and punctuality. If they keep you waiting, say nothing about it. If you react as though you have been disrespected, the interview will be over before it has begun.

Getting a job has little to do with how badly you want the job. It is not about wishing, hoping, and praying for it. If you say that you really want the job, you will look desperate.

The best way to show that you really want the job is to come in prepared for it. That means you have put in the time and the effort to demonstrate your control of the information that will be in play in the interview. Hard work will take you much further than wishing.

If you have not fully prepared for the interview you will sound rehearsed, as though you are running through your talking points. No one likes being talked at.