On the Job: How to Make It in the Real World of Work - Softcover

Viscusi, Steven

 
9780609806869: On the Job: How to Make It in the Real World of Work
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0609806866 ISBN 13: 9780609806869
Verlag: Three Rivers Pr, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A helpful guide to coping with the challenges and obstacles of the modern-day workplace links personality with business success and offers helpful advice on how to keep one's balance and sanity in an unpredictable environment, establish an identity that reflects one's skills and goals, communicate effectively, and more. Original. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Viscusi is a careers professional who has helped thousands of people solve job-related problems. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show On the Job. He is also president and founder of the Viscusi Group, an international search firm, rated one of the top ten executive search firms by Crain’s New York Business. He lives in New York City.

Aus dem Klappentext

career counseling is going to help you figure out how to get a coworker to quit snooping through your e-mail, how to deal with an underground romance that has accidentally become public knowledge, or how to regroup and save face after a disastrous client meeting. Finally, here s a book that explains how the world of work really operates, and how to navigate it.

On the Job combines the hard-hitting advice of Stephen Viscusi, one of today s best-known experts on job-related problems, with enlightening this could happen to you scenarios and true-life stories. In this manual for every kind of on-the-job predicament, Viscusi provides strategies for:
* Keeping your balance and sanity in an unpredictable and frequently unfair world
* Establishing an identity that reflects your skills and goals but not your most intimate secrets
* Communicating effectively in every venue, from meetings to e-mails to gossip

Whether you&

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1-- Be Here Now:

Focus on the Job

What is the difference between a career and a job, anyway? A career is the sum of all the jobs you've ever had. A career is described in retrospect. But "work" is what you live every day. Work is what this book is about. It's a supremely important lesson that everyone needs to learn -- or to be reminded about from time to time: Your career is whatever job you hold today. And, further, the way you deal with your current job is what matters most.

Each step of the way, at every job, you're continually creating your identity, forming habits, and cultivating your values and beliefs. That's why slacking off is so dangerous; not only can it badly damage your reputation, but also, more important, it has a negative impact on your self-esteem. Committing to doing your best and extracting the most value from where you work now is the antidote to boredom and burnout.

Although this advice may sound like common sense, oddly enough, there are very few resources available that show how to stay focused on work, at work. Plenty of books offer advice on how to forge a career, assemble a portfolio of skills and connections, and integrate work with outside life -- all of which is fine. But these guides usually omit the biggest subject: Most of our work life is spent working.

Your Worst job is a special case. Any new worker has basics to learn about work life and organizational mores, and it doesn't matter all that much where you acquire them. (This book can shorten the curve by over 50 percent if you pay close attention!)

And don't worry: Your career is whatever job you hold today does not mean that you're doomed to remain an executive assistant, that you'll be stuck at a copy shop instead of making it big as a DJ, or that you'll be spending the rest of your life writing ads for kitchen cleansers. What it does mean is that your career is the totality of all your jobs, and each one of them counts. Not equally, to be sure, but you might be surprised by unexpected outcomes of a seemingly lackluster job.

From Niches to Riches

So often, young people become impatient and feel that the job they are doing today is too demeaning to lead to a career. This attitude leads to what I call AADD, or adult attention deficit disorder, the inability to focus on the job at hand. My own work history is a perfect illustration of what can happen if you overcome AADD -- a seemingly menial job turning out to be the seed of a fabulous career. Let me explain.

My family just happened to live in a house that was located next to a furniture store called The Modern Furniture Barn. I was sixteen when the seventy-two-year-old owner and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Euster who ran the store day and night, hired me. Our clients were mostly doctors, lawyers, dentists, and other upscale types from throughout the New York metropolitan area and Fairfield County, Connecticut, who were all hungry for the latest craze of bubble lamps and Eames chairs. I was a file clerk, filing the various furniture catalogs and price lists away during hectic weekends when couples came in to purchase their furniture. I earned $10 an hour, far above the 1979 minimum wage of around $2.75. It was not a typical job for a teenager, but I took it very seriously, distributing catalogs around the store, polishing the various glass tables with Windex, and occasionally going across the street to the local 7 Eleven to pick up Entenmann's and coffee for the staff.

Maybe because my mom had been in retail, I was drawn to selling. So although I wasn't hired to sell, I was always eager to ask or answer a customer's question. Despite the fact that the other salespeople resented my enthusiasm, I found learning about the business both fun and fascinating. I was amazed, for example, at the price of furniture. Could an Eames lounge chair and ottoman for the living room really cost $2,000?

After a year with the company, I received my first promotion: to salesperson for a new discount center in the basement of the store where they sold all the damaged or returned furniture. But I wasn't stuck in the basement for long. Every time someone bought an item from the discount area, they inevitably also wanted to buy a new, good piece of furniture upstairs, so I got to work throughout the store. My wages were raised to about $14 per hour, and within another year, I was selling $5,000 worth of furniture every weekend.

Of course, I hadn't yet absorbed the lessons of this book -- I was a normal teenager after all! -- and so I was a bit embarrassed by this job. The fact that the store was removed from the town and that local people did not often stop in was a big relief. It meant I didn't have to see my peers every weekend while working.

Meanwhile, I began to develop an affinity for furniture and design and continued to work weekends at the store as I went through college. Just as I was graduating, the company owner asked if I would help him create an office furniture division. It seemed like an exciting offer, the chance to open up almost my own business with someone else's money and have autonomy. Most significant of all at the time was to gain an important-sounding title. My friends were all going to work for IBM, Con Edison, General Electric, and AT&T, and I was going to remain behind at the furniture store -- at least now, I could say I was a manager.

Two years out of college a recruiter with whom I had been working, trying to hire employees for the furniture store, suggested that I start to go on interviews with Fortune 500 companies in Manhattan. I jumped at the chance and went on my first interview in New York City on Madison Avenue between Sixtieth and Sixty-first streets, the glamour capital of New York City's corporate world. I was more in awe of the real estate than the job, which was not managerial, less money, and in some ways a step backward. My parents were devastated and frightened for me -- they both had held the same job forever and were shocked that I would consider such a radical move. But the whole idea of being a salesperson with a car and expense account and a glamorous office overlooking Madison Avenue seemed captivating. Between the headhunter's strong-arming and my own intuition, I accepted the position and never looked back.

I thrived in that corporate culture. My exposure to the Fortune 500 environment gave me the tools necessary to open my own head-hunting business in a big-league, big-corporation way.

Joanne is currently chief resident in neurology at a West Coast teaching hospital. Ten years ago she was working her way through college by delivering pizza. Unlikely as it sounds, that job as a cheese whizzer (as her friends termed it) provided her with a lot: spending money to sustain her hard-studying existence, as well as several friends she otherwise wouldn't have made, one of whom introduced her to a favorite sport -- snowboarding -- and another to her fiance. Joanne treated her pizza gig with respect, and as a result she reaped rewards she otherwise would have missed.

Here's the lesson: This one, narrow niche area -- furniture -- that I stumbled into while in high school led to a much broader, successful career, including a multimillion-dollar head-hunting business that allowed me to do what I loved to do as a radio and television broadcaster specializing in the workplace. Was it glamorous? No. Was it sometimes embarrassing? Yes. But was it profitable? Was it a real business where I could make real money? Yes, yes, yes!

The Pride Ride

Joanne did not think that as a pre-med she was above that kind of work -- delivering pizza -- because she's not wired to look at things that way. But pride is a very common trap at the workplace, where some employees believe that certain types of tasks are beneath their dignity. Well,...

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Verlag
Three Rivers Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0609806866
ISBN 13 
9780609806869
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
293
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar