December 3rd, 2008

Nobody works for a dollar

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 1:56 pm

Categories: Apple, Economy, Leadership, Salaries

Tags: Stock, Jet, Salary, CEO, Benefits, Stock Options, Investment, Payroll Solutions, Financial Accounting, Human Resources

Executive salaries, plus or minus a few jets.

Blasting across the television screen and into my living room last night was a headline that never fails to drive me batty: Execs Say They’ll Accept $1 Salary.

In this case, the self-sacrificing, willing paupers were the CEOs of the three biggest auto-makers on the occasion of their $34 billion bailouts, vowing to sweeten the deal for taxpayers by sacrificing their yearly millions.

Except, none of these boldface names actually work for a dollar. Not former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, not Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, nor its CEO, Eric Schmidt. Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs doesn’t work for 100 pennies a year either, and neither do the execs of Capital One or Pixar, all who have been the cause for previous “Works for Pennies!” headlines.

One dollar salaries are a PR move: a message to shareholders, employees and taxpayers that the bosses care, and are doing everything in their power to get the company out of the mess they’ve overseen, even sacrificing their own bottom line to save the company. They’re symbolic gestures, kind of like arriving for their meeting on Capitol Hill in hybrid cars after being chastised for arriving at the previous meeting in private jets. They’re no more retiring their private jets than they will be opening cans of soup for dinner should the bailout meet approval.

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October 15th, 2008

Signs your company might soon go belly-up

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:00 am

Categories: Economy, Job Hunting, Leadership

Tags: Job, Recruitment & Selection, Real Estate, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Business Operations, Deb Perelman

Before a company goes under, just about everybody knows it. And before everybody knows it, a bunch of people are already whispering in the corridors and around the water cooler, certain they see the writing on the wall. But what about you? Can you read the clues sprinkled like breadcrumbs down the cubicle aisles?

The benefits to the common worker of seeing the doom in your company’s future before they get around to mentioning that, oh, paychecks are running a few days behind this week, are immeasurable: First of all, the sooner one has the inkling that their organization isn’t doing so hot, the sooner they can get their resume in the hands of friends and former coworkers, in hopes to make an exit before the pink slips are shipped. Second, it is a lot easier to find a job if you already have one–or in this case, while you already have one. Finally, say you’re in an IT group of 1,000 at a company that has decided to offshore the whole shebang (there are almost too many examples to choose from, sadly) in a desperate cost-cutting measure one day. Rather than be in that job market flooded with techies with experience similar to yours, you could be ahead of the rush, and hopefully in the front of the line for the best positions.

Here are some of the most common things to look out for. Do any one of these mean you should go into a full-out panic and take the first job you can get? Of course not. But if some of them sound all too familiar, it might be time to sniff out further clues that might protect your own interests, as you can be certain your employers are protecting their own.

• It’s no longer focused on what was once its business: Straying from the business’s main product or service is a common occurrence when a company is struggling. You work for a widget manufacturer that’s suddenly making outside real estate investments? You’re absolutely right to find that fishy.
• Their customer base is limited. Say your company only sells their widgets to one or two buyers; if either of their accounts are lost to bankruptcy or the buyer opting for a competitor’s widgets instead, your company may struggle to stay afloat until they can find a new one, if they find one at all.
• It hasn’t bounced back from its last downsizing. If two years after laying off 50 percent of the workforce, your company is still making the same number of widgets because employees are still doing the jobs of four people, you’re right to feel a little unsettled.

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July 30th, 2008

Signs you might not be IT management material

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 2:41 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, IT Skills, Leadership

Tags: IT Administration, Information Technology, Manager, Professional Development, Team Management, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Career, Management, Human Resources

In theory, everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder. With promotions come steps up that eventually land an employee in the coveted management echelon, with the opportunity to increase both their pay grade and influence.

Yet in practice–as anyone who has ever had a lousy boss or manager can tell you–not everyone is actually cut out to be a manager. Perhaps they’re happiest buried in thick lines of code or have little patience for the schmoozing or interest in the visibility that come with more pivotal roles. Perhaps they’re better suited for other things.

Though the fault is rarely with the individuals–all too often companies reward employees they don’t want to lose with inflated titles and promotions, whether they’re ready for prime time visibility or not–many could save themselves headaches further down their career path by understanding their own limitations and finding more suitable paths.

Here are eight telltale signs:

You hate bureaucracy

Fact is, managerial roles are rife with all the fixings of a bureaucracy–meetings and reports and reviews and pow-wows–and this will be what you spend the bulk of your time on.

“If you cringe when you go into a meeting with more than one person or you feel you would rather pluck out your eyeballs rather than go into a performance review of a subordinate, those are the very first signs that you should not become a manager,” said Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Yoh, a Philadelphia-based provider of IT staffing services.

You need a lot of support

Not all employees are the independent type. They might need to know that someone is looking out for them or checking their work; they might work best on teams. Though there is no detriment in having this approach to work, it’s usually a bad fit in the management space.

“Managers get very little support, much less coaching from their boss,” says Alam Allard, an executive coach based in Lawrenceville, Ga. “You’re probably not cut out for management if you’re not ready to take on more stress, challenges and headaches…without getting much support from above. Most managers are promoted, then realize they have to do all the work they’ve been doing all along…and then take on the extra work of managing a team, often without much of a raise.”

You’re in it for the title

There is no question that a title that connotes that you are within the upper ranks of your company can be impressive on a business card or slipped into a casual introduction.

“In our world, we value external titles and visible things. If you meet someone who is a director or manager of something, you think ‘look at that guy. He’s really successful.’” said Lanzalotto.

But if this is the reason you want it, or–even worse–you’re unclear on your personal motives for accepting such a position, you could be in for a rough haul.

“You’re probably not ready for management if you’re not clear on your motivation for accepting the role: Is it for ego gratification, self-esteem boost, because you think it won’t be that challenging, so, heck, why not?…or does it fit in your clearly thought out career acceleration plan?” said Allard.

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July 10th, 2008

IT pros: Choose a side

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 6:56 am

Categories: Business Technology, IT Skills, Leadership, Offshore Outsourcing

Tags: Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Deb Perelman

One of the biggest aggravations I hear vented from the mouths and keyboards of IT professionals is that someone, someone keeps moving their cheese.

What they’re talking about is IT benchmarks, and the fact that they’re constantly shifting. First you’re told to know a single technology like the back of your hand and then you’re told that being too entrenched in a technology can be a career-limiting move. You’ve been told to stock up on certifications to justify your piece of an organization’s payroll and then learned that some of the letters after your names weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. One year you’re assigned a desk in the dark room at the end of the hall and another you’re told to put on a suit and get an MBA if you want a job destined to stay on this continent.

Constantly re-marketing oneself as the IT professional du jour can be exhausting, to say the least.

“I’ve seen a lot of different flavors of The Solution. There’s training, certifications, new skills, new roles… The process of shifting gears every 18 months turns us into puppets,” a consultant in Southern California with nearly three decades of IT experience told me.

“Whenever Manager Bill decides to change his paradigm, we end up going through six to nine months of redoing our work and then bridging two very different environments, and very few people want to talk about standards so we’re not always reinventing the wheel.”

Well, here’s one more to add to the pile: In a recent conversation with Forrester vice president and research director, Alex Cullen, he told me that they believe it is the IT organization that going to go through a drastic change in the next decade, with some splitting off from the departments we recognize today to become what he calls “renegades.” And not surprisingly, IT pros will have to figure out where and how they want to fit in.

“You have to pick,” said Cullen. “The traditional IT organizations will stay in the traditional IT mindset–they’re all about IT excellence. IT is a factory, and they’re running it that way. The people who know Java and databases and configurations will go to this one.”

But at the fork in the road, some IT leaders will take a risk and aim for full integration with business by becoming all about peer relationships, product insight and service innovation. The department heads will be top company executives, and the people within the organizations will barely touch technology.

“The MBAs will ultimately go here. They’re in their own separate organization and they’ll spend all of their time on business stuff, and thinking about customer loyalty. They’ll have a team in India that does all of their development work,” said Cullen.

In some ways, Cullen’s views about the new direction of some IT departments could be a relief for techies who have been perplexed as to why they would need to be DBAs and MBAs and IT project managers–i.e. everything under the sun. But there’s going to be little left for pure techies among the IT renegades.

So does this mean that some IT professionals should drop everything and become pure business technology players?

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June 26th, 2008

Microsoft's geeks might miss Gates the most

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 1:31 pm

Categories: Leadership, Microsoft

Tags: Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp., Sales Strategy, Tools & Techniques, Sales Force Management, Sales, Management, Deb Perelman

One of the most disheartening things that can happen in any job is when the boss that inspired you, the one you loved to learn from and who made a grueling job more bearable leaves the building. It may be no different at Microsoft this week, as the “geeks” or the software people at Microsoft that were Bill Gates’s biggest fan club mourn his departure.

As my colleague Mary Jo Foley has duly noted, Microsoft has operated during its 33-year history largely as a partnership between a “dynamic duo,” the tech-focused Gates and the sales-focused Ballmer.

“Now that it’s going to be Ballmer alone running the show, some of the more tech-focused Microsoft developers (known internally as “Bill’s Guys”) and products that Gates championed could end up falling by the wayside,” Foley explained.

Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software and a former Microsoft employee talks about his admiration for Gates’s technical prowess in a July 2008 Inc. column, but warns of what can happen when the business guys take leadership of the techies.

“Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf,” writes Spolsky. “Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.”

But not everyone is so worried.

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