Old Rules, New Accountability: When the Hammer Comes Down

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It’s not exactly Pink Turns Blue‘s version, but the hammer has came down these last fews month; will things ever be exactly the same?

Consider the following

  • The University of Pittsburgh canned new head football coach Mike Haygood last week, one day after he was arrested on a domestic violence charge. Haygood had recently been hired from his job as head football coach at Miami University and had yet to move into his offices at Pitt.
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Football Coaches and Outsider CEOs: When the Messiah Isn’t

There are many reasons to love this time of year.

Day (actually daylight) will start to get longer, spring and warmth is not too far around the corner, and it’s also the time of year when the annual churn in US college and professional football teams happens with uncanny predictability.

For those of us who work in “regular” business, the football sports world offers a great analogue for things like leadership, assessment, and succession.… Read the rest

The 3R’s of How-to-Job-Network: Small Town, Big City

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Research supports that networking is the best way for most (people like you, as Richard Nelson Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute fame and I would suggest) to find your next job.  It’s estimated that 80% of job openings are unlisted, which means that most jobs will be filled through networking, not tossing a resume into a company’s applicant tracking system or even having coffee with your favorite executive recruiter.… Read the rest

“How long should I wait until I look for another job after realizing the one I just got isn’t the right fit for me?”

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My twitter friend Hutch Carpenter noted (tweeted actually) that “Quora is the new black” – always a signal that something may become popular – the website provides an interesting mix of questions and answers in a quasi-curated format. Co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever and the rest of the team have created for the moment a site what provides a rich collection of questions and answers on a host of topics.… Read the rest

Bright Lights, Dark Days: Joys of the Winter Solstice

While the science of genetics proves we all (yes, we all) originated in and around the Great Lakes region of Sub-Saharan Africa, time and migration have scattered humankind around the globe and somewhat given us a northern hemisphere outlook.

Along with the evolution of a common darker skin to a broader spectrum from jet black to pale opaque, our human migration patterns gave us a north of the equator, Northern Hemisphere bias.… Read the rest

Your Career: When – or If – Do You Pull the Parachute Ripcord?

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You don’t have look very far in the San Francisco Bay area to run into someone who has or has had an employment acquisition / buy-out arrangement.

Dentists, CPAs, other business owners of one stripe or another frequently have as part of the sale of their business a provision to work (“earn out period” – samples here) for some defined period of time with the people to whom they’ve sold their practice.… Read the rest