Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (3 page)
Read Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door Online
Authors: Harvey Mackay
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Careers, #Job Hunting
If this is true when times are booming—and it is—you can only imagine how true it is in times like these.
This book is about bundling that crushing zigzag lightning you have recently absorbed and hurling it back in one focused thunderbolt to land you on the payroll and to keep you there.
“At this point, I’m just happy to still have a job.”
Chapter 2
7 Danger Signals
You May Soon Be out of a Job
•
It’s not your bad breath keeping you on the outskirts:
Suddenly your boss invites your second-in-command to meetings you usually attend . . . but forgets to ask you. Or your office is abruptly relocated two floors away from the C-suite or your department’s power alley. Or you are transferred to Novosibirsk or Chişinău, Moldova, with a glorious opportunity to build a brand-new market . . . and report back in five years.
It’s not your bad breath keeping you on the outskirts:
Suddenly your boss invites your second-in-command to meetings you usually attend . . . but forgets to ask you. Or your office is abruptly relocated two floors away from the C-suite or your department’s power alley. Or you are transferred to Novosibirsk or Chişinău, Moldova, with a glorious opportunity to build a brand-new market . . . and report back in five years.
•
Your organization chart is rerouted
. You now report to somebody with much less clout or stature than your last chief. Perhaps your new boss is the outfit’s Attila the Hun, who specializes in dirty work like axing longtimers. Your prize subordinate (and backup) is reassigned. An overqualified new hire is parked in your department until “the right spot” opens up.
Your organization chart is rerouted
. You now report to somebody with much less clout or stature than your last chief. Perhaps your new boss is the outfit’s Attila the Hun, who specializes in dirty work like axing longtimers. Your prize subordinate (and backup) is reassigned. An overqualified new hire is parked in your department until “the right spot” opens up.
•
The meat is trimmed off meetings with your boss.
Those weekly half-hour status sessions become monthly fifteen-minute rush jobs, if they happen at all. However, when he or she does see you, the talk is all about hard-fisted goals, especially the ones that you are having the toughest time achieving.
The meat is trimmed off meetings with your boss.
Those weekly half-hour status sessions become monthly fifteen-minute rush jobs, if they happen at all. However, when he or she does see you, the talk is all about hard-fisted goals, especially the ones that you are having the toughest time achieving.
•
Communication “chat content” drops to zero.
The e-mails and phone calls you get are strictly about measurement against the numbers or measurable benchmarks. And watch for this dead giveaway: Bad news or criticism is repeated to you twice, spoken slowly and clearly . . . or sent to you in writing when it would normally have been an offhand comment.
Communication “chat content” drops to zero.
The e-mails and phone calls you get are strictly about measurement against the numbers or measurable benchmarks. And watch for this dead giveaway: Bad news or criticism is repeated to you twice, spoken slowly and clearly . . . or sent to you in writing when it would normally have been an offhand comment.
•
You are put decidedly out of the loop.
Your department is up for restructuring, but no one’s asking your opinions. Suddenly your boss makes your decision for you, the one you’ve been weighing for the last two months. You’re no longer asked to train new staff members. You vanish off the mail trail, especially for insider plans on competition and strategy. You are now seen as fully qualified for your job: Why waste time sending you to training programs?
You are put decidedly out of the loop.
Your department is up for restructuring, but no one’s asking your opinions. Suddenly your boss makes your decision for you, the one you’ve been weighing for the last two months. You’re no longer asked to train new staff members. You vanish off the mail trail, especially for insider plans on competition and strategy. You are now seen as fully qualified for your job: Why waste time sending you to training programs?
•
You are the object of a neatness campaign
. Control freaks from the personnel department descend on you and your staff. Your boss wants the box score on all your timing-and-action calendars, and, by the way, how about a copy of your CMS—contact management system—with all those phone numbers and e-mail addresses? You call up your personnel records, and, overnight, every typo and sloppy entry has been airbrushed away.
You are the object of a neatness campaign
. Control freaks from the personnel department descend on you and your staff. Your boss wants the box score on all your timing-and-action calendars, and, by the way, how about a copy of your CMS—contact management system—with all those phone numbers and e-mail addresses? You call up your personnel records, and, overnight, every typo and sloppy entry has been airbrushed away.
•
You feel like you have been cordoned off in quarantine.
Nobody asks for your photo to tack on to the house blog. Buddies in other departments “forget” to invite you for an after-hours watering hole stop. When the company is quoted in the press, other voices say the things you were once asked to utter. And, after not hearing from him for sixteen days, your boss has just texted you this message on your BlackBerry: He wants to have a talk with you . . . next week . . . away from the office. Now I wonder what the topic might be?
You feel like you have been cordoned off in quarantine.
Nobody asks for your photo to tack on to the house blog. Buddies in other departments “forget” to invite you for an after-hours watering hole stop. When the company is quoted in the press, other voices say the things you were once asked to utter. And, after not hearing from him for sixteen days, your boss has just texted you this message on your BlackBerry: He wants to have a talk with you . . . next week . . . away from the office. Now I wonder what the topic might be?
Chapter 3
Play for Keeps—
Hold On to Your Job,
A Survivor’s Handbook
A Survivor’s Handbook
In the last half century, there has been a torrent of new laws and principles in medicine, economics, business, the sciences, and, of course, the legal system. None astonishes me more than Moore’s Law formulated by Gordon E. Moore in 1965. A cofounder of Intel, Moore contended that the number of transistors that could be economically loaded on an integrated circuit would double about every two years. The Caltech PhD was right as rain, and so appreciative of the good schooling he got that he and his wife have since enriched Caltech by a crisp $600 million, the biggest donation in history to a college or university.
What’s so peachy about Moore’s Law? Moore is describing the enormous increase in memory within computers, cars, phones, and nearly every other gadget we use. The most incredible thing of all: Moore’s Law is expected to continue to prevail until the year 2015.
In case somebody hasn’t formulated it yet—and somebody may well have done so—let me throw a new one at you. I’ll call it Mackay’s Law, and it works this way: Take the number of people in your department. Let’s say it’s twenty-five. My projection is, in five years, that number is likely to be fifteen. That means an average attrition rate of two bodies a year.
Moore’s Law is part of the reason. As computer memory skyrockets, not only does the volume of machine-made calculations increase, the complexity of things computers can do will also multiply . . . and in amazing ways. If a Toyota robotic trumpeter can already belt out a flawless version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” you can be sure unimaginable labor- and management-savings technology is headed our way. The innovations will be over the moon! They will slay us . . . literally . . . at the rate of two per year in the workplace.
Keeping your job will be a lot like navigating a
Survivor
obstacle course in reality TV. In Greek mythology, mighty Hercules had to perform twelve labors of repentance. One of the labors of Hercules was death defying, like bringing back Cerberus, the vicious multiheaded guard dog of Hades. And he had to do it bare-handed. A second labor was to wash out the biggest, rankest cattle stalls found in glorious old Greece. Suicide mission . . . and sloughing through deep doo-doo. Sounds like “all in a day’s work” for the modern manager.
Survivor
obstacle course in reality TV. In Greek mythology, mighty Hercules had to perform twelve labors of repentance. One of the labors of Hercules was death defying, like bringing back Cerberus, the vicious multiheaded guard dog of Hades. And he had to do it bare-handed. A second labor was to wash out the biggest, rankest cattle stalls found in glorious old Greece. Suicide mission . . . and sloughing through deep doo-doo. Sounds like “all in a day’s work” for the modern manager.
Mackay’s Moral:
In the future world of jobs,
Moore means less.
In the future world of jobs,
Moore means less.
Quickie—How Bad Can Things Get?
One day, as I sat musing . . . sad and lonely and without a friend, I heard a voice out of nowhere say:
“Cheer up. Things could be worse.”
So I cheered up. And, sure enough, things got worse!
“Oh them—they’re just tge ghosts of all the people we’ve terminated.”
Chapter 4
Things Change . . .
and It Pays to Know How
When I was growing up as a kid, the U.S. GDP was in the hundreds of millions . . . then it went to billions. According to CNBC that number in the second quarter of 2009 was $13.7 trillion. The media is constantly confusing billions with trillions and vice versa. We have been so desensitized with these numbers, it’s hard to comprehend them.
A quick little drill: I’m going to ask you to count from one to a trillion right now, and please stay awake until you finish this little assignment. How long will this take? 31,658 YEARS!
When I graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1954:
• A gallon of milk cost ninety-two cents.
• A loaf of bread: seventeen cents.
• The high for the Dow Jones was 338.
• And I drove a fire-engine red Pontiac Star Chief with a sticker price of $2,500.
In 1981-82:
• Milk had risen to $2.23 a gallon.
• Bread had climbed to fifty-three cents a loaf.
• The Dow was at about 900.
• And a Pontiac Firebird went for around $8,000.
Fall 2009:
• A gallon of milk is $2.69.
• A loaf of bread is $2.80.
• The Dow has bounced back above 9,000.
• And the Pontiac? That make won’t even be around by next year.
Recently I saw a video on YouTube that Sony played at an executive conference this year. It points out how dramatically the world has changed and is changing:
• China will soon become the #1 English-speaking country in the world.
• Incidentally, when I was at the Olympic Games in China last summer, I learned that three hundred million people play basketball in China—the same number of people who live in the United States.
• The 25 percent of India’s population with the highest IQs . . . is greater than the total population of the United States. Translation: India has more honors kids than America has kids.
• We are living in times of exponential growth—there are thirty-one billion searches on Google every month. In 2006, this number was less than a billion.
• For students starting a four-year technical degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.
Changes such as these can have a direct impact on you because they have a dramatic effect on the global employment market.
Mackay’s Moral:
What you don’t know can hurt you, and it
usually draws first blood from your pocketbook.
What you don’t know can hurt you, and it
usually draws first blood from your pocketbook.
Chapter 5
12 Herculean Labors
to Keep You on the Payroll
1.
Make yourself indispensable.
There are as many ways to make yourself indispensable as there are reasons for your boss to cut you loose. It pays to whip up the glue that will help you stick around.
Make yourself indispensable.
There are as many ways to make yourself indispensable as there are reasons for your boss to cut you loose. It pays to whip up the glue that will help you stick around.
Does your sales manager beef that no one is a team player? Hand off the ball every chance you get and then dive in blocking to help the other guy score a touchdown.
No one wants to touch the export trade opportunities to Upper Catatonia because their tariff laws are so complex, even though the CEO thinks this is the Mother of All Untapped Markets. Spend your weekends tracking down every detail you can on the Web. Maybe even hire an international trade law student to help you dig through the downloads.
The otherwise bright human resources director’s administrative assistant thinks a .jpg file is something you stick on a message board. In an instant, you see your opening to become the most gifted and patient IT skills tutor on the company team.
2.
Rev up your horsepower and flash it.
Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson always believed you could get by working half days, and it didn’t matter much if you worked the first twelve hours of the day or the second. If the hours for your job are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., clock in at 7 a.m. and out at 6 p.m. And really spend that extra time
working
. There will be few others there for you to waste your precious minutes jawing. The clock doesn’t care how you spend your time—6 p.m. will still come at 6 p.m.
Rev up your horsepower and flash it.
Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson always believed you could get by working half days, and it didn’t matter much if you worked the first twelve hours of the day or the second. If the hours for your job are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., clock in at 7 a.m. and out at 6 p.m. And really spend that extra time
working
. There will be few others there for you to waste your precious minutes jawing. The clock doesn’t care how you spend your time—6 p.m. will still come at 6 p.m.
If the guy or gal in the next cubicle is working a straight forty and making pretty much the same dough, it won’t take long before the boss figures out that you’re a bargain by a factor of 1.5.
Let’s say your boss likes to work late; there can be a schmooze percentage if you do, too. Or, your boss may like to work late and values having someone reliable cover the bases while he sleeps in. There’s no magic formula, but it’s up to you to figure out the hours that will yield the biggest personal payoff for you.
3.
Volunteer.
In the army, never volunteering is the eleventh commandment. In business, volunteering may well be the First Opportunity. What does your boss hate to do? Is it sitting at his notebook and entering the weekly status report? How can you do it for him? There will always be a place in this world for the person who says, “I’ll take care of it.” And then does it.
Volunteer.
In the army, never volunteering is the eleventh commandment. In business, volunteering may well be the First Opportunity. What does your boss hate to do? Is it sitting at his notebook and entering the weekly status report? How can you do it for him? There will always be a place in this world for the person who says, “I’ll take care of it.” And then does it.
4.
Stick out and shine.
“The invisible guy is first to go,” warns executive recruiter Stephen Viscusi in a recent
Fortune
article. It doesn’t matter how you shine, as long as it’s positive for the company. Play third base on the softball team. If your boss’s favorite charity is a soup kitchen for the down-and-out, learn how to ladle. Shoot the marketing VP that hot-off-the-press competitor’s brochure a customer left in your office. Sprinkle your profile all over the company landscape. It’s a lot harder to terminate a face than a social security number.
Stick out and shine.
“The invisible guy is first to go,” warns executive recruiter Stephen Viscusi in a recent
Fortune
article. It doesn’t matter how you shine, as long as it’s positive for the company. Play third base on the softball team. If your boss’s favorite charity is a soup kitchen for the down-and-out, learn how to ladle. Shoot the marketing VP that hot-off-the-press competitor’s brochure a customer left in your office. Sprinkle your profile all over the company landscape. It’s a lot harder to terminate a face than a social security number.
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