Career Management. Me plc.
What do Steve Jobs, Karl von der Heyden and other 20 top executives at Fortune have in common? They all have been «interim managers», hired on a temporary basis to revitalize a firm and then leave. With the arrival of the New Economy, such short-term employment contracts are now becoming the norm. Highly paid projects teams created for particular assignments. Once the project is completed, the team is simply disbanded.
In the past you had a job for life. Many people used to work for the same organization which had a hierarchical structure until they reached retirement. Then along came the «re-engineered» 90s and changed that. Companies realized they were overstaffed. This could happen because there has been a decline in demand for the company’s services, or because a company was running more efficiently than it once has been. Mass redundancies followed. Workers were delayered according to a planned reduction.
Now the tables have turned. The 43 mln. jobs lost in the US along since 1979 were compensated for by the 70 mln. jobs created in the same period. With so many job opportunities, it’s now our employers who are afraid we’ll take our expertise elsewhere. Today 67% of managers put a job for life at the bottom of their list of priorities. All wanted the flexibility to work from home or even telecommute.
Mark Albion, co-founder of Students for Responsible Business advises to take a «big» job if you are offered. He says: «You might not find it satisfying as you’d hoped, but it would be a jumping-off point for what you really want to do». It’s true. If you demonstrate that you are active, dynamic and have a lot of initiative, you can progress from entry level positions of your career ladder to higher levels of pay, skill, responsibility, or authority.
Recruitment. Top Ten Tips.
If you decided to apply for a job first thing you should do is to prepare a number of documents. These documents are: a letter of application with your curriculum vitae. Enclose cover letter. And don’t forget to prepare references from your previous employers. Here are some recommendations on how to be successful at interviews.
Tip #1 seems obvious, but making a good first impression is really vital. Stay cool, put the interviewer at ease. Remember, most of them are as worried about choosing the wrong person as you are about not getting the job. Tip #2 – show you’ve done research on the company by asking informed and intelligent questions during the interview. Tip #3. The great way to sell yourself is to conduct part of the interview as a short presentation entitled «Why YOU should want to employ ME». The forth recommendation is about describing yourself. You should give concrete examples of things you’ve actually done, but try to avoid sounding self-congratulatory or using a lot of adjectives. Tip #5 is about showing loyalty to your previous employers. If you say negative things about your ex-employers, interviewer will wonder if you’re going to be as disloyal to them at the same point in the future. Talking about you strengths – you should be proud of what you’ve achieved in your career so far. If you will be too modest, the interviewer might just think you’re an under-achiever who lacks ambition. Talking about your weaknesses – don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes. But always remember to balance them with a positive outcome. Tip #8 is about covering your gaps in CV. Don’t try to lie telling that you were working for Charity in some third-world country. Tell the interviewer how these transitional periods in your career have helped you to focus on what you really want to do. Tip #9 is about suiting up! Visit the building where the interview is going to be held a few days before the interview itself. Look what kind of clothes, jewellery do people have. The final Tip is about projecting the right attitude. You SHOULD be very confident. The worst thing that can happen is that you just leave without the job.
If a worker resign voluntarily, he gives notice or hands in his resignation. But sometimes people are forced to resign. For example because of a scandal. Or if company is going through financial difficulties. If a person finds himself out of work through being laid off or being given the sack he needs to contact a recruitment agency which will keep him in touch with the latest job vacancies.
Enterprise. Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is the act and art of being an entrepreneur or one who undertakes innovation or introduces new things, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods.
An entrepreneur is someone who starts or founds their own company or revitalizes a mature organization in response to a perceived opportunity. Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes and all of them hold an equal fascination for us. What’s their secret?
But an entrepreneur is not what you are, it is what you become. At first nobody takes them seriously and by the time they’ve finally earned the respect of the business community they’ve already made it. The road to entrepreneurial success can’t be mapped out in advance, you get there one sale at a time.
In the beginning only the entrepreneur needs to see the goal. And the goal is simple: get an idea, identify your customer and make a sale. What you need first is a steady cashflow, so forget about marketing strategy at this stage. Bide your time and focus on little things. Big companies are just small companies that got bigger.
Take for instance Nicolas Hayek – he invented the Swatch group and brought the swiss watch making industry back from the dead. Hayek took on Japanese market leaders and beat them on price and quality. The swatch group is now by far the largest manufacturer and distributor of finished watches in the world.
Clearly, what makes a good entrepreneur is not the same thing that makes a good manager. Good managers are born organizers who come from fairly conventional backgrounds and rise through the ranks to reach the top of the corporate ladder. But the budding entrepreneur is more likely to be an outsider who drops out of school and discovers a flair for building companies. Most of all, they’ll be a master of risk management. For entrepreneurs the ultimate risk is not taking a risk. And that’s probably how they manage to become billionaires.
E-business. Dot-Con? 5 stages of Internet evolution.
The IT industry has a tendency exaggerate. In the beginning of 21st century in a period of corporate panic programming experts, called in to debug doomed mainframes, amassed a vast fortune in consultancy fees. In the end, little more than minor technical problems were reported.
So, the arrival of New Wireless Economy was announced. There followed a frenzy of financial speculations. It seemed like every post-adolescent with a laptop and business plan could get access to unlimited venture capital. Domain names like business.com were snapped up for millions of dollars.
Bust followed boom. In the race to outgrow competition e-business burned up capital. For example, the stock market flotation of lastminute.com raised $175 mln overnight and made its founders multimillioners, while shareholders lost everything due to 1 trln dollars of capotalisation was lost in 6 hours of corporate madness on Wall Street.
Was there the return of dotcom? New technology always leads to some kind of market correction. Significantly, companies whose success is built on technological superiority have survived or those who open convetional highstreet branches in response to customer demand.
Consumer sales, B2C, were never going to be exiting. Only 7% of SMEs carry out online transactions. The real growth are was always B2B. B2B trading over the internet forecast to reach $20 trillion by 2010 because the Internet is the friction-free environment
What are the stages to Internet evolution for the company?
Email – it boosts your efficiency, making global communication easy.
Webste – it enables customers to communicate with you at any time from anywhere
E-commerce – your business can be trading 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
E-business – business processes are increasingly driven by Internet technology. It boosts productivity and reduces operating costs.
Ecosystem – processes and logistics are automated using internet technology.
5. Two kinds of quality
Quality remains an elusive target for many Western companies, even though the craze for quality has been around for some twenty years. The main progress there has been made in 1986, then the Japanese auto industry lead over Ford had shrunk from 100% to about 20%. But since that many companies have struggled to keep up on quality.
The truth is, the Japanese have unfair advantage – their culture values quality and appreciates the small details. In fact, the Japanese have two expressions for quality, and the first is taken-for-granted quality. They take for granted that things should work as they are supposed to, and they even see an elegance to things working properly.
Japanese manufacturers became so obsessed with taken-for-granted quality that they created a stream of innovations that built on that concept (of Ed Deming). These innovations included lean manufacturing, just-in-time industry and design for quality. But there are two traps on the road to quality. One is faking a commitment. There is no way around it. Whether you are adopting total quality management or other quality schemes, these techniques require everyone in company to learn how to think and to work differently. And the other trap is than companies become so quality-process obsessed that quality-management techniques cease to be a tool of company’s performance and instead become an end in themselves. That’s why statistical analysis should be used for questions for which a company doesn’t have an answer.
That brings us to the second of two Japanese expressions for quality: enchanting quality. This kind of quality appeals to a person’s aesthetic sense of beauty and elegance.
In today’s competitive markets, manufacturers need to make quick progress towards the taken-for-granted kind of quality. If they don’t, they will go out of business. But with the hungry competitors in most markets today, taken-for-granted quality by itself may not get the job done. That’s why it is very important to use both two kinds of quality for a company to succeed.
6. The it Fallacy.
In recent years three forces – downsizing, globalization and the need for speed – have combined to change the work environment. The result of downsizing is such situations when six people are doing the work that ten used to do at the same budget and time. Here you can add the globalization trend – to beat global competitors firms have to keep budgets and headcounts lower. And the final ingredient – in fierce competition you have to do everything faster.
To justify the quest for efficiency and speed corporate leaders made huge investments in IT equipment and services. It was supposed to boost productivity and profits and to do more with less. However, it could work only after investing in training and system integration, so that all pieces connect to each other. Unfortunately, firms expected that more technology means more speed and output per employee, and when this results don’t occur, they require people to work longer hours.
The same thing happens even when the technology works as promised. For instance, with arrival of PowerPoint, senior managers now often direct analysts and top managers to prepare presentations so that they have less time available for the other aspect of the job.
If you do not want cope with pressure and non-stop work, it’s time to polish your resume. But the grass isn’t much greener anywhere else.