309/corner offic… · Web viewI never planned my career. I never planned to be president of...

Career advice

What do you mean?

Answered by Joseph Plumeri, Willis Group

It means that if you go push yourself out there and you see people and do things and participate and get involved, something happens. I got involved with my first job at Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt. It had four names, so I thought it was a law firm. I was going to law school. My last class was over at noon, and so I thought I'd go over on Wall Street and find a job in the afternoon with a law firm. So I go knock on doors and I see Cogan and I figured it was a law firm. So I went up to see the receptionist, and said, who could I see about a job? And she says go down the hall, make a left, and see Mr. Weill. I didn't know who Sandy Weill was. This was 1968. And he said, what can I do for you? So I give him the spiel about law school in the morning, learning the practical part in the afternoon. A really good pitch. And he says that's a great idea, but what makes you think you'll be learning law here? I said, this is a law firm. He said no, this is a brokerage firm. I tried to find the hole to climb into. I'm not easily embarrassed, and he laughed and he thought it was funny. And so he gave me a job working part-time and that was 1968, and that turned into Citigroup. And when I left Citigroup after all those years, I was walking down a street in Paris, and I ran into Henry Kravis by accident. He says what are you doing? I said I'm looking for my next adventure, because I'd just left Citigroup. And he said, why I've got this company we just bought: Willis. I said what is it? He says it's an insurance broker. Two weeks later, he calls me. You know the rest of the story. So both of my great occasions in life happened by accident simply because I showed up. And I tell people, just show up, get in the game, go play in traffic. Something good will come of it, but you've got to show up.

This answer originally appeared in On Passion and Playing in Traffic »

What's your best career advice?

Answered by Joseph Plumeri, Willis Group

Everything that I have done I've done because I went out and I played in traffic and something happened.

This answer originally appeared in On Passion and Playing in Traffic »

What career advice do you give people just starting out?

Answered by Mindy Grossman, HSN Inc.

One, take the time to absolutely find what makes you excited to wake up in the morning. Take the time. You don’t have to decide in five minutes. Two, don’t be afraid to take risks, but know when there’s a difference between risk and suicide. Know what that line is for you, because everybody is different. Three, be very, very watchful, careful and cognizant of who you want to work with and for, and make sure that that is aligned with your values, because that’s going to make you feel whole.

This answer originally appeared in Are You a Tigger, or an Eeyore? »

What’s your best career advice?

Answered by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University

I never planned my career. I never planned to be president of Harvard. People would have thought I was crazy, probably, at the age of 8 or 10 or 20, if I had said that. So what I would say to people planning their careers is to be ready to improvise. Be ready to follow up on opportunities as they unfold. Be ready to jump in directions you never thought you were going to jump if that is what unfolds before you. Watch for the opportunities.

This answer originally appeared in Leadership Without a Secret Code »


Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO

Always be highly inquisitive and interested in not being siloed. I’ve always been interested in doing lots of different things and participating in lots of different pieces of the process, whether it’s as an organization or in design or whatever it might be. I’ve always liked being an interdisciplinary person, and I always give that same advice to others. Particularly in a world like

today’s, where change is going on around us all the time, agility and resilience are two characteristics that organizations need, and individuals need.

This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »


Answered by Carol Bartz, Yahoo

You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid. You need to have a base of experience because it’s a much more stable structure. And so that involves taking lateral moves. And it involves getting out of your comfort zone.

This answer originally appeared in Imagining a World of No Annual Reviews »

What should business schools teach more of, or less of?


I think there ought to be some classes for people to get more philosophical about who they are and what motivates them, and therefore why they act like they act. Some of the most fantastic training I’ve had over the years is the tests and the feedback I’ve gotten on what drives me as a person, and to sort of face up to it. What’s important to me and therefore why would I make certain decisions? For instance, I grew up dirt poor. I am constantly in fear of being poor. I’m so far from being poor, it’s crazy, but I’m constantly in fear of being poor. And I know that drives a lot. Now you could say the dark side of that is maybe that would drive me to make risky decisions that I shouldn’t make. It actually drives me the other way. It drives me to be more conservative, so I’ve had to teach myself to get out of that conservative zone. It also turns out that I’m an introvert. You would not believe that, would you? And I know I am because introverts have to refuel by being alone. Extroverts — Bill Clinton’s a famous extrovert — have to go to a party. At the end of the day, he comes home tired, and he wants to party. I come home. I suck my thumb and don’t talk to me. I learned how to get down time. Even an hour by myself feeds me. What motivates you? What are you scared of? Knowing that will help inform how you lead, how you make choices, how you face the day. And I don’t think we do enough of that.


What else?


I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine. When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: "Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?" When people come to me and say, "I can’t work for so-and-so anymore," I say, "Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?" People want to take a bad situation and say, "Oh, it’s bad." No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something.


What career advice do you offer people?

Answered by Susan Lyne, Gilt Groupe

In my early 20s, I talked my way into a job as the assistant to the editor in chief of City Magazine. It was a really useful role to be in, being able to watch someone doing the job you wanted was hugely valuable. It's actually something that I have urged a lot of younger people to do. What I always ask is, whose job interests you? Try and get a job as their assistant. Just to have a seat at the table, be able to listen in, listen in on the phone conversations, understand how their day works, what the job really entails. And one of the interesting things is that many times people discover, "I really don't want to do that." So it's useful on many levels to either allow you to see what kind of skills you'll have to develop and to be imprinted with a good leadership style, or it's going to tell you that you've got to rethink where you're going.

This answer originally appeared in Want to Talk to the Chief? Book Your Half-Hour »

What would you like business schools to teach more of, or less of?

Answered by Linda Hudson, BAE Systems

Well, first of all, I've never been to business school. But what I see when I look at the business school graduates that come to work here is they come with a great theoretical knowledge about business. But they don't have a clue of what it's like from a people-skill point of view, or the coping-skill perspective of learning to deal with disappointment and failure. I find new business school graduates come in here thinking that, first of all, they're going to run the company overnight. Many of them are convinced they've never made a mistake. They're not accustomed to encountering the kinds of road blocks or disappointments that often come with the way decisions get made in a corporate environment, and they have almost no people skills. So I think an important part of teaching business ought to be focused more on realistic expectations and the people-skill part of business, dealing with failure, learning from adverse experiences, navigating the corporate environment, because quite often they don't get it, and they have not been taught the coping skills of being told no, or being told that they can't have what it is they think they need. We give them all the book smarts, but we don't tend to give them the other skills that go along with business.

This answer originally appeared in Fitting In, and Rising to the Top »


Answered by Linda Hudson, BAE Systems

I tell people that in a corporate environment, which is all I've ever known, first and foremost you need to understand the culture you work in, and find a way to make it work for you rather than trying to fight it. Corporations are very interesting machines. And what you need to look for is the informal power of the corporation, not necessarily the way the organization looks. An early boss told me, spend the first couple of months in this job figuring out how things really work around here, and then go and establish allies with the real movers and shakers in the organization because that's the way you will be the most successful. And I advise people to do the same thing. You can never succeed in a corporate culture on your own. It is all about how you fit, how you know how to make things happen within the infrastructure and in a way that's acceptable to the norms and values of the corporation that you work in. Once you catch on to who really pulls the strings and where the real power base is, who you have to collaborate with, who you have to inform, who you have to seek for advice and agreement, you can actually make these big, very, very lumbering organizations work very, very well. It's all about the informal structure. It's about the critical relationships, and it's about fitting in, in a constructive way, so that you really make your decisions that not only benefit yourself but benefit the corporation as well.

This answer originally appeared in Fitting In, and Rising to the Top »

What advice do you give people about managing their career?

Answered by Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

I started out as a lawyer and came in laterally to Goldman Sachs. So I learned myself that life is unpredictable. That you really should, in terms of your career, try to be excellent at what you're doing. I think if you focus on your job, and you focus on being broad in the context of your job, the next jobs follow from that. If you live the next job, it's a lower likelihood that you'll get it. And if you whine about it and that becomes the way you're known, then it may be hopeless.

This answer originally appeared in Lessons Learned at Goldman »

What would you like business schools to teach more of, or less of?


Look, I think it's very important to teach people to have a healthy respect for facts and information. And you know, to paraphrase Keynes, "to change minds when facts change." That's why I think certain careers -- and maybe not intuitive careers -- do very well. There's a lot of lawyers floating around Wall Street. There's a lot of engineers. A lot of people who deal in facts and have an appreciation for facts. A quantitative thing is very helpful. I was a social studies major, but you need to be numerate. If you have those good quantitative skills, it's very, very helpful. Remember, I didn't go to business school. I went to law school. And I mean, law school would characterize its job as not to teach you law, but to teach you how to think like a lawyer. How do you think like a business person so that when you go in deep, you understand? Presentation skills, marketing skills, communication skills to me are as important -- maybe more important -- than the content of a particular discipline within the business school curriculum.


And what's your version of a two-minute commencement speech?


Don't be totally obsessed about getting everything right. In my own experience, I plotted and planned my life when I was getting out of law school to know by what year I'd make it to the Supreme Court. That didn't work out the way I planned. You don't know what the environment is. You don't even know yourself. So I would take some of the pressure off and think about what I wanted to do, what I liked to do, what I wanted to be for the next two or five years and suspend your faculty beyond that. Because by then, things might be totally different anyway. The world will have changed, and you might have changed. It may not turn out, but you're just as likely to get to a good place as if you were calculating about it. And if you're doing something that you like, you'll have a happier life and you'll be better at it. I remember when I was getting out of high school, I had no pretense as to where I would go to college. I had applied to very simple schools like Brooklyn College and state school, and I applied to a few Ivy League schools. And I got accepted to Harvard. And I was just the happiest guy around. I never expected it. I spent no time being miserable the day before, and I was just elated the day after. When I went to Harvard College, I was applying to law school, and suddenly I knew what the stakes were. I understood it better. I had different expectations. I was killing myself with anxiety about getting into Harvard Law School. I got in and it worked out, but it resulted in me not enjoying my senior year in college as much as I enjoyed my senior year in high school. I think the point I was making about not being worried is that it not only relaxes you, but it's like a golf swing -- the easier you hold onto your career and all your expectations, you actually get a better swing and you'll be a better player.



Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor

Don't manage your career. Follow your dream and contribute. Think about just exceeding expectations of every job you're being asked to do. Continually ask for feedback on how it's going. Ask everybody involved what you can do to do an even better job, and the world will beat down your door trying to ask you to do more and more. I've never laid out a career. I never said I wanted to do this job and this job and this job, and frankly, I'd propose that you really don't know what a job is until you're in it. The most important thing is that you are open to really understanding what is expected, and also where you can make the biggest contribution. The more humble you become, and the more honored you are to serve, it allows you to really understand what you can do to make a bigger contribution.

This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »

What career advice will you give your kids?

Answered by Maigread Eichten, FRS

I interview a ton of people and I get really frustrated with interviews, to be honest, because I find that people come in a lot of times and they don't even know that much about the company, which I find just really odd. I went to business school, and I decided I wanted a PepsiCo internship. They were only taking one intern, so my shot at getting this Pepsi internship was slim to none, because I had no experience. But I decided I wanted this internship and what I did was -- I think about this all the time when I interview people, sort of, why don't they do this to me? -- I researched all the people coming to campus to interview. I knew everything about them. I knew everything about Pepsi-Cola and the PepsiCo company. I knew everybody in the U.C.L.A. recruiting office and I wrote the story of myself as a brand and I came up with a whole talk about why Pepsi should hire me, and the assets I could bring. I had called up the two or three people who had been Pepsi interns from other campuses, and I found out every single thing that they had done as interns. So I had done all that work before I took this interview. I was one of the four people they took back to New York for an interview, and I got this internship. I was probably also incredibly annoying, but I certainly was superqualified. And what I would say to my kids is, to get the job you need two things. You need the functional skills, but then you also have to be superprepared, and you have to have incredible passion. You have to make that person want to hire you. They have to have a reason to hire you. There's no excuse why you can't have that. I'm just really surprised by some of the people I interview. A few people, when I say "FRS," they say, "I haven't tried the product." If they say that, the interview is over.

This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. Must Decide Who Swims »

What's the best career advice someone ever gave you?

Answered by Gary E. McCullough, Career Education Corporation

I believed early in my career that if I just worked hard, put my head down and did my job, everyone would notice and good things would happen. And in fact, that's not true, necessarily. You can do your job and you can toil along in anonymity without anybody noticing for a real long time. I was among the last people in my class who came into Procter & Gamble to be promoted to brand manager, and I would attribute part of that to the fact that I just wasn't very savvy politically. A mentor taught me that no one could micromanage my own career better than me. And so I won't say

that I became more demanding, but I certainly began to have more of a plan around things that I felt I needed to do to grow, and I was more overt stating what I wanted or what I needed. I think it's an implied contract. You know, when you work at a company, you owe them a good day's work. The company owes you a fair salary and growth opportunities. I was giving my best effort but I didn't think I was getting, in some cases, all the return. So I started asking for it, not in a rude way, but in a way that it implied a quid pro quo, so to speak.

This answer originally appeared in The Lesson of the 38 Candy Bars »

Talk about how you've handled failure.


There was a point in time in my career where I was told point blank that I wasn't going to be promoted, that I didn't have the skills to go on to the next level. And when you're faced with a situation like that, there's two ways you can respond to it: You can accept it and you can move on, which I think would've been the easy thing to do, or you could seek to find out why people had that belief and convince them that you can do the work. I chose the latter. I think when you're faced with that, everybody has to dig in to look at themselves and say, "Am I here to make something happen, or am I going to believe this to be the case?" There are some things that are within your control and that you've got to drive to make happen. And there are some things that are outside your control that you can't. When they said I wouldn't be promoted, I basically said, "Tell me what I need to do." And I focused like a laser beam on those things and I delivered those.


What do you think business schools should teach more of, or less of?


Having gone to business school -- this is going to sound terrible but I'm going to say it anyway -- I didn't learn that much at business school. It was a great way for me to transition from the military to the private sector, and I learned basic things, like buy low and sell high. I learned that sometimes it's not what you know, it's who you know. And I made some lifelong friends, which was all good. I think I'd ask them to be mindful of teaching about leadership. If I was going to teach a course, that's what I would teach, about leadership, about playing nicely in the sandbox with others, about being more collaborative, and I would ask them to teach or to impress upon people that when they

graduate, it does take a little while to get a job like mine. I can't tell you the number of young people who think that they're going to end up with a job like mine after a year or five years. It just doesn't work that way, and I think if people could come out of business schools with a more realistic sense of how things really operate in organizations, and that there is a bit of dues-paying that has to happen, we'd all be better off. So managing expectations is something that I'd ask those people to really think through.


What's your two-minute commencement speech?


I would tell people that the race ultimately doesn't go to the fast. It goes to the strong. It goes to the resilient and it goes to the people who are well prepared. I have my own kids, and I tell them that when I walk into a room of more than five or seven people, I know that I am not the smartest guy in the room and I'm very, very comfortable with that fact. There are people who are off-the-charts smart, and that's great. That's good for them. I like to surround myself with really smart people, as I said before. I will outwork, and have over the course of my career, about anybody. If you're clear about what you want, if you're strong, if you're resilient, if you're well prepared and you're willing to work -- I mean really work -- then good things can happen. I'm a guy who never planned to be in an office like this, and that was not my goal coming out of business school, believe it or not. And so, it surprises me that I'm in this role and in this job. I think when you're too focused on the top job, you can get derailed somewhere along the way.


Looking back, do you feel there was a moment or experience that set your career on a different trajectory?

Answered by Carol Smith, Elle Group

I started working at 16. I worked all through college. Work brought me success and money and freedom, and then more success and more money and more freedom. I failed a few times. I failed to get into the college of my choice. I failed to get into law school. And they were big failures for me, but I found the more I worked, the better I did, without ever having a goal. I didn't have a goal. I wanted to be a lawyer and I didn't get to be a lawyer, but all of a sudden I woke up one day

and I was in publishing, and I knew what I was doing. As I look back, I think that sometimes you can't have the five-year plan for yourself. If you're doing something well, you tend to keep doing it. That's how you fall into careers.

This answer originally appeared in No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers »

What advice do you give your daughter and other young people?

Answered by David C. Novak, Yum Brands

I tell people that once you get a job you should act like you run the place. Not in terms of ego, but in terms of how you think about the business. Don't just think about your piece of the business. Think about your piece of the business and the total business. This way you'll always represent a broader perspective.

This answer originally appeared in At Yum Brands, Rewards for Good Work »

There are lots of paths to the top job, but you came up through sales to run the business your family started. How does that sales background help you now?

Answered by Daniel P. Amos, Aflac

First thing I'll tell you is, I didn't think I was going to be the C.E.O. I never came to work for the company with the idea of running the place someday. I'm glad I didn't, because I probably would have grown frustrated and caught up in the day-to-day politics. I just ran my areas, and thought I'd continue to do that. I did very well financially, and I was happy. Because our company is sales-driven, it's very important to make sure someone has the leadership skills to drive those sales because, sooner or later, if those sales dry up, then profits will eventually dry up. When my son, who has a J.D./M.B.A. degree, said he wanted to come and work for the company, I put him in sales on all commissions for the first two and a half years. I said if you don't understand how our salesmen make a living, then you can't comprehend what they do and how they struggle. You need to see the tough work and the failures that are out there.

This answer originally appeared in Stumping for Votes, Every Day »

Are there messages you find yourself repeating to the women you mentor?

Answered by Jacqueline Kosecoff, UnitedHealth Group

The most common thing is to understand what job you want, because I think that often people want a job and they simply don't understand what it involves. Second, work is not going to get any easier as you get to the top, so be prepared for what it means to take on a particular position. It's not just the skill sets that you have, but it's also the time commitments, the stress you're going to deal with. And the third is, perhaps you can't have it all at once. I think oftentimes the fantasy that's held is that you can do it all; you can be a parent, and you can be engaged in the community, and you can be the C.E.O., all at the same time. And I think that helping people to plan a life that includes all that, but perhaps more serially, is a useful discussion.

This answer originally appeared in The Divine, Too, Is in the Details »

Was there a particularly good piece of advice somebody gave you about your career?

Answered by Clarence Otis Jr., Darden Restaurants

One of the guys I worked for very early on said: "As you think about career, it's not about planning it. Things are too dynamic; there's too much going on; there are too many things that'll pop up, good and bad. It's not about planning and career planning; it's about preparation and building skills. And if you do that, then you'll recover from the mishaps, and you'll be able to take advantage of the opportunities."

This answer originally appeared in Ensemble Acting, in Business »

What prepared you to run your own company?

Answered by Dany Levy, DailyCandy.com

Most of what I learned was from my first job out of college, when I was an intern and then the managing editor's assistant at New York Magazine. And it was being her assistant that really taught me how the whole machine operates.My career has been this just wonderful series of events that somehow makes perfect sense now. It was not a glamorous job. The Xerox machine broke, it was my problem. I was customer service. I would get people calling and complaining about the magazine,

and I would try and talk them down, just knowing that every subscriber had a dollar figure attached to them. So it's that kind of thinking, understanding the business side of it and understanding the relationship between advertising and editorial, and running up and down and getting people paid.I learned about office politics and how an office works. When I graduated from college, I really understood that I didn't know anything.In the real world, college doesn't really prepare you for that. That's what worries me a little bit about the present. There's definitely, in this generation, from what I've seen, more a sense of entitlement, a bit of, 'Why should I go work for 'the man' and put in the time when I could have my own blog and do it myself?' And I totally understand that impulse. But there are some key things to learn from the grunt work.

This answer originally appeared in In Praise of All That Grunt Work »

Can you talk more about that?

Answered by Dany Levy, DailyCandy.com

I think learning to work for people is really important. I think to be a good leader it's key to know what it's like to be an employee, and to have had a lot of the different level jobs where you've been the scrappy little nobody. I've had crazy bosses and I've had wonderful bosses, and it's important to figure out that if you're working for someone who you don't gel with, there can be a way to manage that.

This answer originally appeared in In Praise of All That Grunt Work »

What was the best advice you were given about your career?

Answered by Eduardo Castro-Wright, Wal-Mart Stores

Someone I trusted when I was working for Nabisco convinced me that if I really wanted to have bigger and more impactful opportunities, then I probably needed to become broader in my knowledge. And I've changed industries twice since then, completely different industries.

This answer originally appeared in In a Word, He Wants Simplicity »

What would you like business schools to teach more, or less?

Answered by Eduardo Castro-Wright, Wal-Mart Stores

I've done this quiz several times when we have gone to talk at business schools. I always ask people, ìSo who's taking accounting?î And everybody raises their hand. And, ìWho's taking strategy?î And everybody raises their hand - and you go on with your typical curriculum about the business school. Mostly they are very good at teaching strategy, operations, management, finance, accounting. But then I ask, ìO.K., how many courses have you taken on how you talk with an employee you're firing?î Or, ìHow do you talk with the person who comes to your office late at night to tell you that her daughter is sick and she might not be able to come in the following day?î Or, ìWhat do you say when they come in with issues in their marriage that are impacting their job?î As managers and leaders of people, those are the kinds of questions that one deals with probably 80 percent of the time. I think that business schools could do more to prepare kids to deal with the often more difficult side of business management and leadership. The balance of courses is probably weighted to the numeric side of business as opposed to the people side of business.

This answer originally appeared in In a Word, He Wants Simplicity »

Do you recall an insight that put your career on a different trajectory?

Answered by Robert A. Iger, Disney

Well, as you'd expect in a 35-year career, there are twists and turns along the way. I started off wanting very much to be a newscaster. I began as a weatherman and I learned very quickly I wasn't very good at it. I'd say the first lesson I learned is, if you're not good at one thing, try something else. Don't stick with something you're not good at unless you think you could turn yourself into someone who's good at that.

This answer originally appeared in He Was Promotable, After All »

What career advice do you give to people?

Answered by Robert A. Iger, Disney

When you navigate the sometimes tricky waters of a big corporation, there's a need to be really patient. When it comes to managing a career, patience is extremely important because people set goals for themselves that often are unrealistic. It's great to do that because you want to be ambitious, but you don't have control of a lot of circumstances. And when you set these goals and they're not met, the reasons are beyond your control, it creates impatience and you then make career decisions out of impatience. That's a big mistake. One of my bosses once said that just when you think nothing's going to change, everything changes. And you reach a point where you're not sure any opportunity is going to present itself, and the next day you come in and you're -- boom -- smacked in the face with some huge new opportunity you didn't even predict was going to occur. That happened to me a number of times.

This answer originally appeared in He Was Promotable, After All »

Looking back over your career, even to the early years, do you recall an insight that set you on a different trajectory?

Answered by Richard Anderson, Delta Air Lines

Yes, and it was actually at my first job while I went to night law school at South Texas College of Law. And I had a good full-time job as the administrative assistant to the D. And what you understood was you really needed to be a problem-solver, not a problem-creator. You know, don't bring a Rubik's cube to the table, unless you have an idea on how you're going to try to get an answer. And always try to be a leader that comes up with the creative answers to the hard problems.

This answer originally appeared in He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects »

And what about advice on your career?

Answered by Richard Anderson, Delta Air Lines

If you just focus on getting your job done and being a good colleague and a team player in an organization, and not focused about being overly ambitious and wanting pay raises and promotions and the like, and just doing your job and being a part of a team, the rest of it all takes care of itself.

This answer originally appeared in He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects »

Any job-seeking advice for college grads?

Answered by Terry J. Lundgren, Macy’s

No. 1, don't be so specific about what you want in this environment. Don't be so choosy. You should get your resume out there to a fairly broad number of companies and businesses to give yourself a chance. No. 2, use every single contact you can come up with. Use your friend's father's uncle who knows somebody who's an assistant to the college recruiter. Use whatever contact you have to try to get your resume read. That's the most important thing -- just to get it in front of people. Because we're all flooded with, of course, thousands and thousands of resumes in a company of our size, and getting your resume read is not an automatic. And so do what you can do to get it in front of the people who matter who will read it. It's not the C.E.O. typically, by the way; it's the H.R. person or the head of recruiting or head of training or whatever. Third, don't stop there. Don't just do it online, because it's easy to do it online. Do it online and then put it in an envelope and send it to the top company that you're interested in pursuing. And then follow up with a phone call, and talk to the assistant and say: "I just want to make sure that my resume's getting read. I'm very interested in your company, and it's really important to me. And I just want to know -- can you give me advice? -- is there anything that I can do to get my resume in front of your boss?" Whatever you have to say, just to show the most important thing -- that you're hungry. And to convince them, maybe you use a little of your acting skills. And I'll probably relate it to college dating -- you know, use a little, "I'm really interested in you" -- to say: "This is the company I want to work for. Yours is the company that I want to work for." And then once you get, hopefully, more than one opportunity, you're back in charge to say, "Where do I want to go and where do I want to work."

This answer originally appeared in Knock-Knock: It's the C.E.O. »

In the speeches that you give to schools, do you have favorite passage?


When I was a trainee at Bullock's, and then I was moved into my first assistant buying job, the guy I was working for, you know, I didn't love him, frankly, and he had me doing what I thought were stupid jobs. I was working hard, but I was literally hand-writing transfers of furniture from one store to another store, and I wondered, "Is this a really good use of my time, or is there something else I could do?" I happened to get called up by the guy who recruited me off of campus,

who I just had total admiration for, a guy named Gene Ross. And I told him, "Well, you know, it's not really going that great, and I was wondering, you know, if I could go move in another department, I think I could do more." And he just nodded his head and looked at me, and he pointed in his office over his shoulder to a poster. It had a little tree in a pot, and it said, "Bloom where you're planted." And I thought, "O.K., I get it." And he said: "You're not going to do this forever. There's a finite amount of time you're going to be doing this. Do this really, really well. And if you do this really, really well, everybody will see that, and they'll move you onto the next thing. And you do that well, and then you'll move." And that was fantastic advice for me.


But somebody might say, "That's what calculators are for."


And that's exactly the problem. Because when, at least when I was in school, we didn't have the computer technology that we have today to do a lot of the work for us. And so I think there's logic that has to go into this. And I don't think you should actually have to have a calculator for every decision that you make that has numbers attached to it. Some of that should just come to you quickly, and you should be able to quickly move to your instincts about that being a good or not good decision. And I think that just knowing how to manage people for the situation and individually, managing them differently -- what I would call situational management -- is really important. You really have to have some instincts there to adjust to get the most out of people and the most out of different situations. I don't know how you teach that; I just want to make sure that it's known that it has to be different, and you have to make adjustments.


Anything you would like business schools to teach more? Less?


In our business, there's not enough emphasis on math. Coming out of college, we really like to have kids who like math, study math and get it. And so I'd like to make sure that there is an emphasis on math. I think there is a strong emphasis on marketing already, and we want that and we need that. But to me, the math piece is weak in most business school educations, and I'd like to have more emphasis on that.


Looking back over your career, do you recall a certain insight that put your career on a different trajectory?

Answered by Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox Corporation

A couple of things. I had come up through the sales organization and I was very much a product of that -- you know, the next level of upward mobility. I reached a point where I felt like I was just running out of steam, and I knew that you can always get bigger and bigger budgets and sales assignments. But I chose to go into human resources. I didn't do it so much because of leadership development or career aspirations. I did it just simply because I thought it was really interesting. I'd always believed that human resources could be a very powerful part of an organization and often wasn't. So I kind of threw my hat in that ring, wound up running human resources for Xerox worldwide. That was a decision that certainly changed my career path and reinforced the power of leadership for me.

This answer originally appeared in The Keeper of That Tapping Pen »

309/corner offic… · Web viewI never planned my career. I never planned to be president of...

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