mpnThoughts

…as the Bard famously wrote. (And that’s not Daniel Bard, the pitcher for the Red Sox, either!) Un-employment. Job-less. Let go. Fired. Out on the street. Think of all the terms we have for that period when you don’t have a full-time job – note “you don’t”. It is, at least linguistically, an empty space, [...]

What the hell is marketing anyways? It’s certainly perceived as an expendable cost center by the current crop of finance whizzes masquerading as CEO’s. To sales people it’s just a source of collateral and leave behinds that don’t have much impact compared to their sophisticated sales tactics and carefully practiced closes. To engineers like Dilbert, [...]

In yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe, an artist was quoted as saying along the lines of, “In business, time is money; for an artist, money is time [to work on their art].” In many ways the job search can be about time, too. How much money do you have to allow you to look for that [...]

Yesterday afternoon, I saw “Lemonade”, the 37-minute video that has been making its rounds of the job-seekers community. Written, filmed and produced by recently laid off advertising executives, it’s an impressive production. It follows a group of creatives who were laid off from their jobs; how they dealt with their layoff; and what they then [...]

Hear the intonation in this question: it brings back taunts from the playground, put downs from parents and teachers… and, worse yet, our own inner voices that aren’t sure that we are all that special at all. Yet…and this is a big yet…you need to define why you are special — and what your specialty [...]

What makes the job search process so endlessly fascinating— at least to me!— is that while everyone handles it in their very own unique way, there seems to be a pattern underlying many searches. But not all…and that’s the rub. Some people just get going, hang a resume on line, and, bang, they seem to [...]

Yesterday’s Boston Globe (Dec 6, 2009) features an article by Scott Kirsner, their respected technology columnist, “How to Make the Most of Your E-mail to Get Prompt Replies.” Coincidentally, we covered a similar topic at our meeting on Nov 23 when we discussed the cover e-mail. A few of the conclusions that we came to: [...]

One of the major changes in MPN this fall, besides a perceptible uptick in the local hiring market, has been the introduction of Table Topics into the agenda for each Monday Meeting. Interestingly, it’s less teaching and more listening as everyone seems to have an opinion as well as some very constructive suggestions as to [...]

The bad news: smaller businesses (<500 employees), which account for about two thirds of all new hires including marketing professionals, are currently laying off people at rates higher than the big companies. In addition, their plans for expansion are at lows not seen since the 1974 recession.
As an article in Knowledge@Wharton recently put it, [...]

I happened to read the Corner Office section of The New York Times Sunday paper (Oct. 18, 2009) this morning. It was about Carol Bartz, the current CEO of Yahoo. She grew up poor on a farm in Wisconsin; her mother died when she was 8; her grandmother raised her; and she worked in sales [...]