Corporate Glossary: every Friday, learn the secret meaning of common corporate words — Every Friday, you get the real meaning behind padded corporate terms that get tossed around like the nice guy’s ball cap in study hall. Knowing the reality behind the sanitized words or phrases will help you protect yourself and avoid learning these for the first time when you’re experiencing them. …

Encouraging you to see this as a normal perk of success is as common as it is perverse — At the waning end of the tech bubble, I worked for a company striving like crazy to be … not great, not meaningful, not impactful, but definitely profitable. They built a fancy building in a hip, movers-and-shakers-work-here neighborhood with the requisite parking deck, which was packed from day one. Get…

And one smart question you can ask to take back your freedom. — On a sunny fall afternoon years before bike rides necessitated helmets, my brother and I piled into a station wagon with wood on the sides and back-facing seats. “What’s this?” my mother asked, pointing to the sheet of mimeographed paper my brother clutched in his hand. My brother replied, “These…

96% of people use LinkedIn wrong. Here's the key to using it right. — Remember when Airbnb was the trendy darling of the crowd-sourcing set? After its inception in 2007, it exploded in popularity, yet by 2017, articles titled “Did Airbnb Kill the Mountain Town?” began asking if Airbnb was damaging long-term rental markets. Fast forward to now. You're on trend if you joke…

It offers excellent advice. Do you agree? — Back when we were younger, my brother bought his wife a hot-air balloon ride for her birthday. That's how one fall afternoon we found ourselves at the tiny local airport in rural Virginia. The existence of an airport suggests this town had more than two stoplights. It didn't. The airport…

Why you should stop talking about your "problem solver" skills and talk about this instead. — A pattern I've observed repeatedly in working with and managing people: Humans are really good at identifying problems ― but really bad at coming up with solutions. — Zain Kahn My employer was in death spasms before the bank bailout of 2008. The economic downturn didn't cause their problems so much as expedite their demise.

This is the new trend and here’s how you can do it — In Spring 2020, four days after Covid abruptly halted the Venice Carnival, I was on a train heading down the east coast. Passengers were already wearing masks and giving their seats a Lysol wipedown. My phone vibrated. It was a client I’d helped land his last job. Now, two years…

How salary transparency and parity are changing and salary compression might be stuck. — When Netflix red envelopes were arriving in mailboxes, my friend Bess had a sweet job with a famous tech firm in Silicon Valley. Tech stock was frenzied. The first silicon valley millionaires were emerging, and Bess was smack in the middle of it all. Everyone who didn’t work in Silicon…

Here’s why career change is hard and how to make it easier. — Courtney, I’ve got great experience and impressive credentials in my field, but I hate my job. I got here via the path of least resistance. My first job out of college was in this field, and you know how it is, one job led to another. Now here I am…