# data[].attributes.body
The Challenge Case ended with the suggestion that Mr Adkins might be CEO after Virginia Rometty.

But it also said he's been with the company for 30+ years. That would put him in his late 50s or possibly early 60s. Is it actually likely that he'd become CEO one day? I don't think so and that led me to do some research.

Her appointment was in 2012. Rodney Adkins retired a polite 2 years later. Which to me seems just long enough to transition someone else into his role and not look like he's leaving explicitly because he didn't get into the CEO position. Plus, he served that company well and with distinction. I hope he enjoys his retirement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rodney C. Adkins, IBM's Senior Vice President, Systems and Technology Group, has received the highest honor BLACK ENTERPRISE bestows upon a top-ranked exec: 2011 Corporate Executive of the Year. One of the nation's most powerful business leaders in the tech sector, Adkins manages a 50,000-employee division that generates $18 billion in revenues and serves global clients in automotive, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing.

He was presented the award by BLACK ENTERPRISE Chairman and Publisher Earl G. Graves, Sr. at the National Network of Black IBM Retirees and Alumni conference, a business development and leadership event that brought more than 200 to Atlanta this past weekend.Â "He's a born competitor...a driven, visionary leader...and an extraordinary manager of talent and resources,â€ Graves said of Adkins' attributes. "Moreover, this year's honoree-and the company he represents-stands at the vanguard of 21 st century corporate leadership, constantly resetting the bar for diversity and fairness in the workplace.â€Â Celebrating its centennial anniversary this year, IBM has been listed among the BLACK ENTERPRISE 40 Best Companies for Diversity since the roster's inception in 2005.

In gaining such recognition, Adkins, 53, is in good company. Past recipients include American Express Chairman and CEO Kenneth I. Chenault, Aetna Chairman and CEO Ron Williams (retired), McDonald's Corp. President and COO Don Thompson, Whirlpool International President Michael Todman, Amway Chief Global Marketing Officer Candace Matthews and Symantec CEO John W. Thompson, an IBM alum.

He's deserving of the placement: His achievements and management prowess has placed him among the leading candidates to replace retiring IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano. Appointed to his position in 2009, the Miami native who holds a degree in physics from Rollins College and a master's in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology oversees all aspects of IBM's server, storage, systems software and retail store solutions business. The company's integrated supply chain, which includes global manufacturing, procurement and customer fulfillment also reports to him. The 30-year veteran who is an engineer by training was also responsible for oversight of the servers for Watson, the computer that won the Jeopardy! competition against two champions earlier this year.

True to form, Adkins spent his acceptance saying that "he was humbled by the honor... and I thank the magazine helping me have a great professional and personal yearâ€ before giving the audience a presentation on the 130-year history of technology and Black achievement. Excited by technology entering "the learning eraâ€ and IBM's Smarter Planet thrust, he foresees the computer power and analytical capabilities of Watson transforming healthcare, finance, transportation and media sectors, among others.

Beyond using technology to improveÂ quality of life and taking IBM to greater global influence and profitability,Â Adkins, a board member of National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, promotes educational and mentorship programs to develop the next generation of African American engineers and scientists.Â He told the audience: "We all have a responsibility to reach back and pull through.â€
For more on Adkins, read the September 2011 issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine currently on newsstands and view Executive Editor Caroline V. Clarke's Power Player interview on the award-winning, nationally syndicated television show, Black Enterprise Business Report on Saturday, Oct. 8 and Sunday, Oct. 9 (check times and listings in your area).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
IBM's $18 Billion Man Named BE Corporate Executive of the Year

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rodney C. Adkins, IBM's Senior Vice President, Systems and Technology Group, has received the highest honor BLACK ENTERPRISE bestows upon a top-ranked exec: 2011 Corporate Executive of the Year. One of the nation's most powerful business leaders in the tech sector, Adkins manages a 50,000-employee division that generates $18 billion in revenues and serves global clients in automotive, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing.

# data[].attributes.body
The article about Steve Jobs mentioned "productive narcissism" and since I hadn't heard of it I looked it up.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Idea in Brief

"What's the difference between Larry Ellison and God? God doesn't believe he's Larry." So quips an executive about Oracle's larger-than-life leader. Charisma, vision-and, yes, big ego-define many larger-than-life leaders-Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs-who adorn today's business-magazine covers.

Such "narcissistic" leaders are essential during times of transition. Gifted strategists and courageous risk-takers, they inspire others and drive their organizations toward a compelling future.

But they can also be emotionally isolated and highly distrustful, prone to hair-trigger rages and grandiose airs. They can ruin their company if their excesses go uncontrolled. The challenge? Getting the most out of them-while ensuring that they neither self-destruct nor endanger their companies.

For companies whose narcissistic leaders recognize their limitations, this innovative age could be the best of times. For other companies, it could be the worst.

The Idea in Practice

Strengths of the Narcissistic Leader

Narcissistic leaders see the "big picture" and offer gripping visions of the future. Skilled orators and creative strategists, they attract and inspire scores of followers.

Weaknesses of the Narcissistic Leader

As they garner adulation and success, these leaders begin to feel invincible. They ignore cautionary words and take flagrant risks. They listen only to information they seek and begin dominating subordinates (e.g., Steve Jobs publicly humiliates employees). Other problems follow:

Sensitivity to criticism. Unimaginably thin-skinned, narcissists can't tolerate dissent. They say they want teamwork but really want yes-men.

Lack of empathy. They crave empathy but are not empathetic themselves. They can be brutally exploitative.

Intense desire to compete. They pursue victory ruthlessly, often unrestrained by conscience and convinced that threats abound. ("Only the paranoid survive," Andy Grove of Intel maintains.)

Avoiding the Traps

Productive narcissists avoid these traps by:

Finding a trusted sidekick. Ideally a colleague-who keeps them rooted in reality, points out the operational requirements of their visions, and gets them to accept new ideas. Don Quixote had Sancho Panza, Bill Gates has Microsoft president Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison has Oracle COO Ray Lane.

Indoctrinating their organizations. Converting people to their point of view by providing impressive rewards for people who internalize-and commit to-their vision. (GE's Jack Welch embodies this approach.)

Getting psychotherapy. Self-reflecting leaders who are aware of their irrational needs can remain highly productive.

How to Survive Working for a Narcissist

Empathize with your boss's feelings. But don't expect empathy back. Understand the vulnerability behind the display of infallibility. Support his best impulses-without becoming sycophantic.

Give your boss ideas, but let him take the credit for them. Find out what he thinks before presenting your views. If you think he's wrong, show him how a different approach will benefit him.

Hone your time-management skills. Make yourself available at any time, but prioritize his too-many requests. Forget those that don't make sense; he will, too.

When Michael Maccoby wrote this article, which was first published in early 2000, the business world was still under the spell of the Internet and its revolutionary promise. It was a time, Maccoby wrote, that called for larger-than-life leaders who could see the big picture and paint a compelling portrait of a dramatically different future. And that, he argued, was one reason we saw the emergence of the superstar CEOs-the grandiose, actively self-promoting, and genuinely narcissistic leaders who dominated the covers of business magazines at that time. Skilled orators and creative strategists, narcissists have vision and a great ability to attract and inspire followers.

The times have changed, and we've learned a lot about the dangers of overreliance on big personalities, but that doesn't mean narcissism can't be a useful leadership trait. There's certainly a dark side to narcissism-narcissists, Freud told us, are emotionally isolated and highly distrustful. They're usually poor listeners and lack empathy. Perceived threats can trigger rage. The challenge today-as Maccoby understood it to be four years ago-is to take advantage of their strengths while tempering their weaknesses.

There's something new and daring about the CEOs who are transforming today's industries. Just compare them with the executives who ran large companies in the 1950s through the 1980s. Those executives shunned the press and had their comments carefully crafted by corporate PR departments. But today's CEOs-superstars such as Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Welch-hire their own publicists, write books, grant spontaneous interviews, and actively promote their personal philosophies. Their faces adorn the covers of magazines like BusinessWeek, Time, and the Economist. What's more, the world's business personalities are increasingly seen as the makers and shapers of our public and personal agendas. They advise schools on what kids should learn and lawmakers on how to invest the public's money. We look to them for thoughts on everything from the future of e-commerce to hot places to vacation.

There are many reasons today's business leaders have higher profiles than ever before. One is that business plays a much bigger role in our lives than it used to, and its leaders are more often in the limelight. Another is that the business world is experiencing enormous changes that call for visionary and charismatic leadership. But my 25 years of consulting both as a psychoanalyst in private practice and as an adviser to top managers suggest a third reason-namely, a pronounced change in the personality of the strategic leaders at the top. As an anthropologist, I try to understand people in the context in which they operate, and as a psychoanalyst, I tend to see them through a distinctly Freudian lens. Given what I know, I believe that the larger-than-life leaders we are seeing today closely resemble the personality type that Sigmund Freud dubbed narcissistic. "People of this type impress others as being 'personalities,'" he wrote, describing one of the psychological types that clearly fall within the range of normality. "They are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or damage the established state of affairs."

Throughout history, narcissists have always emerged to inspire people and to shape the future. When military, religious, and political arenas dominated society, it was figures such as Napoléon Bonaparte, Mahatma Gandhi, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt who determined the social agenda. But from time to time, when business became the engine of social change, it, too, generated its share of narcissistic leaders. That was true at the beginning of this century, when men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford exploited new technologies and restructured American industry. And I think it is true again today.

But Freud recognized that there is a dark side to narcissism. Narcissists, he pointed out, are emotionally isolated and highly distrustful. Perceived threats can trigger rage. Achievements can feed feelings of grandiosity. That's why Freud thought narcissists were the hardest personality types to analyze. Consider how an executive at Oracle describes his narcissistic CEO Larry Ellison: "The difference between God and Larry is that God does not believe he is Larry." That observation is amusing, but it is also troubling. Not surprisingly, most people think of narcissists in a primarily negative way. After all, Freud named the type after the mythical figure Narcissus, who died because of his pathological preoccupation with himself.

Yet narcissism can be extraordinarily useful-even necessary. Freud shifted his views about narcissism over time and recognized that we are all somewhat narcissistic. More recently, psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut built on Freud's theories and developed methods of treating narcissists. Of course, only professional clinicians are trained to tell if narcissism is normal or pathological. In this article, I discuss the differences between productive and unproductive narcissism but do not explore the extreme pathology of borderline conditions and psychosis.

Leaders such as Jack Welch and George Soros are examples of productive narcissists. They are gifted and creative strategists who see the big picture and find meaning in the risky challenge of changing the world and leaving behind a legacy. Indeed, one reason we look to productive narcissists in times of great transition is that they have the audacity to push through the massive transformations that society periodically undertakes. Productive narcissists are not only risk takers willing to get the job done but also charmers who can convert the masses with their rhetoric. The danger is that narcissism can turn unproductive when, lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers. They nurture grand schemes and harbor the illusion that only circumstances or enemies block their success. This tendency toward grandiosity and distrust is the Achilles' heel of narcissists. Because of it, even brilliant narcissists can come under suspicion for self-involvement, unpredictability, and-in extreme cases-paranoia.

It's easy to see why narcissistic leadership doesn't always mean successful leadership. Consider the case of Volvo's Pehr Gyllenhammar. He had a dream that appealed to a broad international audience-a plan to revolutionize the industrial workplace by replacing the dehumanizing assembly line caricatured in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. His wildly popular vision called for team-based craftsmanship. Model factories were built and publicized to international acclaim. But his success in pushing through these dramatic changes also sowed the seeds for his downfall. Gyllenhammar started to feel that he could ignore the concerns of his operational managers. He pursued chancy and expensive business deals, which he publicized on television and in the press. On one level, you can ascribe Gyllenhammar's falling out of touch with his workforce simply to faulty strategy. But it is also possible to attribute it to his narcissistic personality. His overestimation of himself led him to believe that others would want him to be the czar of a multinational enterprise. In turn, these fantasies led him to pursue a merger with Renault, which was tremendously unpopular with Swedish employees. Because Gyllenhammar was deaf to complaints about Renault, Swedish managers were forced to take their case public. In the end, shareholders aggressively rejected Gyllenhammar's plan, leaving him with no option but to resign.

Given the large number of narcissists at the helm of corporations today, the challenge facing organizations is to ensure that such leaders do not self-destruct or lead the company to disaster. That can take some doing because it is very hard for narcissists to work through their issues-and virtually impossible for them to do it alone. Narcissists need colleagues and even therapists if they hope to break free from their limitations. But because of their extreme independence and self-protectiveness, it is very difficult to get near them. Kohut maintained that a therapist would have to demonstrate an extraordinarily profound empathic understanding and sympathy for the narcissist's feelings in order to gain his trust. On top of that, narcissists must recognize that they can benefit from such help. For their part, employees must learn how to recognize-and work around-narcissistic bosses. To help them in this endeavor, let's first take a closer look at Freud's theory of personality types.

Three Main Personality Types

While Freud recognized that there are an almost infinite variety of personalities, he identified three main types: erotic, obsessive, and narcissistic. Most of us have elements of all three. We are all, for example, somewhat narcissistic. If that were not so, we would not be able to survive or assert our needs. The point is, one of the dynamic tendencies usually dominates the others, making each of us react differently to success and failure.

Freud's definitions of personality types differed over time. When talking about the erotic personality type, however, Freud generally did not mean a sexual personality but rather one for whom loving and above all being loved is most important. This type of individual is dependent on those people they fear will stop loving them. Many erotics are teachers, nurses, and social workers. At their most productive, they are developers of the young as well as enablers and helpers at work. As managers, they are caring and supportive, but they avoid conflict and make people dependent on them. They are, according to Freud, outer-directed people.

Obsessives, in contrast, are inner-directed. They are self-reliant and conscientious. They create and maintain order and make the most effective operational managers. They look constantly for ways to help people listen better, resolve conflict, and find win-win opportunities. They buy self-improvement books such as Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Obsessives are also ruled by a strict conscience-they like to focus on continuous improvement at work because it fits in with their sense of moral improvement. As entrepreneurs, obsessives start businesses that express their values, but they lack the vision, daring, and charisma it takes to turn a good idea into a great one. The best obsessives set high standards and communicate very effectively. They make sure that instructions are followed and costs are kept within budget. The most productive are great mentors and team players. The unproductive and the uncooperative become narrow experts and rule-bound bureaucrats.

Narcissists, the third type, are independent and not easily impressed. They are innovators, driven in business to gain power and glory. Productive narcissists are experts in their industries, but they go beyond it. They also pose the critical questions. They want to learn everything about everything that affects the company and its products. Unlike erotics, they want to be admired, not loved. And unlike obsessives, they are not troubled by a punishing superego, so they are able to aggressively pursue their goals. Of all the personality types, narcissists run the greatest risk of isolating themselves at the moment of success. And because of their independence and aggressiveness, they are constantly looking out for enemies, sometimes degenerating into paranoia when they are under extreme stress. (For more on personality types, see the sidebar "Fromm's Fourth Personality Type.")

Not long after Freud described his three personality types in 1931, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed a fourth personality type, which has become particularly prevalent in today's service economy. Fromm called this type the "marketing personality," and it is exemplified by the lead character in Woody Allen's movie Zelig, a man so governed by his need to be valued that he becomes exactly like the people he happens to be around.

Marketing personalities are more detached than erotics and so are less likely to cement close ties. They are also less driven by conscience than obsessives. Instead, they are motivated by a radarlike anxiety that permeates everything they do. Because they are so eager to please and to alleviate this anxiety, marketing personalities excel at selling themselves to others.

Unproductive marketing types lack direction and the ability to commit themselves to people or projects. But when productive, marketing types are good at facilitating teams and keeping the focus on adding value as defined by customers and colleagues. Like obsessives, marketing personalities are avid consumers of self-help books. Like narcissists, they are not wedded to the past. But marketing types generally make poor leaders in times of crisis. They lack the daring needed to innovate and are too responsive to current, rather than future, customer demands.

Strengths of the Narcissistic Leader

When it comes to leadership, personality type can be instructive. Erotic personalities generally make poor managers-they need too much approval. Obsessives make better leaders-they are your operational managers: critical and cautious. But it is narcissists who come closest to our collective image of great leaders. There are two reasons for this: they have compelling, even gripping, visions for companies, and they have an ability to attract followers.

Great Vision.

I once asked a group of managers to define a leader. "A person with vision" was a typical response. Productive narcissists understand the vision thing particularly well, because they are by nature people who see the big picture. They are not analyzers who can break up big questions into manageable problems; they aren't number crunchers either (these are usually the obsessives). Nor do they try to extrapolate to understand the future-they attempt to create it. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, some people see things as they are and ask why; narcissists see things that never were and ask why not.

Consider the difference between Bob Allen, a productive obsessive, and Mike Armstrong, a productive narcissist. In 1997, Allen tried to expand AT&T to reestablish the end-to-end service of the Bell System by reselling local service from the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs). Although this was a worthwhile endeavor for shareholders and customers, it was hardly earth-shattering. By contrast, through a strategy of combining voice, telecommunications, and Internet access by high-speed broadband telecommunication over cable, Mike Armstrong has "created a new space with his name on it," as one of his colleagues puts it. Armstrong is betting that his costly strategy will beat out the RBOC's less expensive solution of digital subscriber lines over copper wire. This example illustrates the different approaches of obsessives and narcissists. The risk Armstrong took is one that few obsessives would feel comfortable taking. His vision is galvanizing AT&T. Who but a narcissistic leader could achieve such a thing? As Napoléon-a classic narcissist-once remarked, "Revolutions are ideal times for soldiers with a lot of wit-and the courage to act."

As in the days of the French Revolution, the world is now changing in astounding ways; narcissists have opportunities they would never have in ordinary times. In short, today's narcissistic leaders have the chance to change the very rules of the game. Consider Robert B. Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto. Shapiro described his vision of genetically modifying crops as "the single most successful introduction of technology in the history of agriculture, including the plow" ( New York Times, August 5, 1999). This is certainly a huge claim-there are still many questions about the safety and public acceptance of genetically engineered fruits and vegetables. But industries like agriculture are desperate for radical change. If Shapiro's gamble is successful, the industry will be transformed in the image of Monsanto. That's why he can get away with painting a picture of Monsanto as a highly profitable "life sciences" company-despite the fact that Monsanto's stock has fallen 12% from 1998 to the end of the third quarter of 1999. (During the same period, the S&P was up 41%.) Unlike Armstrong and Shapiro, it was enough for Bob Allen to win against his competitors in a game measured primarily by the stock market. But narcissistic leaders are after something more. They want-and need-to leave behind a legacy.

Scores of Followers.

Narcissists have vision-but that's not enough. People in mental hospitals also have visions. The simplest definition of a leader is someone whom other people follow. Indeed, narcissists are especially gifted in attracting followers, and more often than not, they do so through language. Narcissists believe that words can move mountains and that inspiring speeches can change people. Narcissistic leaders are often skillful orators, and this is one of the talents that makes them so charismatic. Indeed, anyone who has seen narcissists perform can attest to their personal magnetism and their ability to stir enthusiasm among audiences.

Yet this charismatic gift is more of a two-way affair than most people think. Although it is not always obvious, narcissistic leaders are quite dependent on their followers-they need affirmation, and preferably adulation. Think of Winston Churchill's wartime broadcasts or J.F.K.'s "Ask not what your country can do for you" inaugural address. The adulation that follows from such speeches bolsters the self-confidence and conviction of the speakers. But if no one responds, the narcissist usually becomes insecure, overly shrill, and insistent-just as Ross Perot did.

Even when people respond positively to a narcissist, there are dangers. That's because charisma is a double-edged sword-it fosters both closeness and isolation. As he becomes increasingly self-assured, the narcissist becomes more spontaneous. He feels free of constraints. Ideas flow. He thinks he's invincible. This energy and confidence further inspire his followers. But the very adulation that the narcissist demands can have a corrosive effect. As he expands, he listens even less to words of caution and advice. After all, he has been right before, when others had their doubts. Rather than try to persuade those who disagree with him, he feels justified in ignoring them-creating further isolation. The result is sometimes flagrant risk taking that can lead to catastrophe. In the political realm, there is no clearer example of this than Bill Clinton.

Weaknesses of the Narcissistic Leader

Despite the warm feelings their charisma can evoke, narcissists are typically not comfortable with their own emotions. They listen only for the kind of information they seek. They don't learn easily from others. They don't like to teach but prefer to indoctrinate and make speeches. They dominate meetings with subordinates. The result for the organization is greater internal competitiveness at a time when everyone is already under as much pressure as they can possibly stand. Perhaps the main problem is that the narcissist's faults tend to become even more pronounced as he becomes more successful.

Sensitive to Criticism.

Because they are extraordinarily sensitive, narcissistic leaders shun emotions as a whole. Indeed, perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes in this age of teamwork and partnering is that the best corporate leader in the contemporary world is the type of person who is emotionally isolated. Narcissistic leaders typically keep others at arm's length. They can put up a wall of defense as thick as the Pentagon. And given their difficulty with knowing or acknowledging their own feelings, they are uncomfortable with other people expressing theirs-especially their negative feelings.

Indeed, even productive narcissists are extremely sensitive to criticism or slights, which feel to them like knives threatening their self-image and their confidence in their visions. Narcissists are almost unimaginably thin-skinned. Like the fairy-tale princess who slept on many mattresses and yet knew she was sleeping on a pea, narcissists-even powerful CEOs-bruise easily. This is one explanation why narcissistic leaders do not want to know what people think of them unless it is causing them a real problem. They cannot tolerate dissent. In fact, they can be extremely abrasive with employees who doubt them or with subordinates who are tough enough to fight back. Steve Jobs, for example, publicly humiliates subordinates. Thus, although narcissistic leaders often say that they want teamwork, what that means in practice is that they want a group of yes-men. As the more independent-minded players leave or are pushed out, succession becomes a particular problem.

Poor Listeners.

One serious consequence of this oversensitivity to criticism is that narcissistic leaders often do not listen when they feel threatened or attacked. Consider the response of one narcissistic CEO I had worked with for three years who asked me to interview his immediate team and report back to him on what they were thinking. He invited me to his summer home to discuss what I had found. "So what do they think of me?" he asked with seeming nonchalance. "They think you are very creative and courageous," I told him, "but they also feel that you don't listen." "Excuse me, what did you say?" he shot back at once, pretending not to hear. His response was humorous, but it was also tragic.

In a very real way, this CEO could not hear my criticism because it was too painful to tolerate. Some narcissists are so defensive that they go so far as to make a virtue of the fact that they don't listen. As another CEO bluntly put it, "I didn't get here by listening to people!" Indeed, on one occasion when this CEO proposed a daring strategy, none of his subordinates believed it would work. His subsequent success strengthened his conviction that he had nothing to learn about strategy from his lieutenants. But success is no excuse for narcissistic leaders not to listen.

Lack of Empathy.

Best-selling business writers today have taken up the slogan of "emotional competencies"-the belief that successful leadership requires a strongly developed sense of empathy. But although they crave empathy from others, productive narcissists are not noted for being particularly empathetic themselves. Indeed, lack of empathy is a characteristic shortcoming of some of the most charismatic and successful narcissists, including Bill Gates and Andy Grove. Of course, leaders do need to communicate persuasively. But a lack of empathy did not prevent some of history's greatest narcissistic leaders from knowing how to communicate-and inspire. Neither Churchill, de Gaulle, Stalin, nor Mao Tse-tung were empathetic. And yet they inspired people because of their passion and their conviction at a time when people longed for certainty.

In fact, in times of radical change, lack of empathy can actually be a strength. A narcissist finds it easier than other personality types to buy and sell companies, to close and move facilities, and to lay off employees-decisions that inevitably make many people angry and sad. But narcissistic leaders typically have few regrets. As one CEO says, "If I listened to my employees' needs and demands, they would eat me alive."

Given this lack of empathy, it's hardly surprising that narcissistic leaders don't score particularly well on evaluations of their interpersonal style. What's more, neither 360-degree evaluations of their management style nor workshops in listening will make them more empathic. Narcissists don't want to change-and as long as they are successful, they don't think they have to. They may see the need for operational managers to get touchy-feely training, but that's not for them.

There is a kind of emotional intelligence associated with narcissists, but it's more street smarts than empathy. Narcissistic leaders are acutely aware of whether or not people are with them wholeheartedly. They know whom they can use. They can be brutally exploitative. That's why, even though narcissists undoubtedly have "star quality," they are often unlikable. They easily stir up people against them, and it is only in tumultuous times, when their gifts are desperately needed, that people are willing to tolerate narcissists as leaders.

Distaste for Mentoring.

Lack of empathy and extreme independence make it difficult for narcissists to mentor and be mentored. Generally speaking, narcissistic leaders set very little store by mentoring. They seldom mentor others, and when they do they typically want their protégés to be pale reflections of themselves. Even those narcissists like Jack Welch who are held up as strong mentors are usually more interested in instructing than in coaching.

Narcissists certainly don't credit mentoring or educational programs for their own development as leaders. A few narcissistic leaders such as Bill Gates may find a friend or consultant-for instance, Warren Buffet, a superproductive obsessive-whom they can trust to be their guide and confidant. But most narcissists prefer "mentors" they can control. A 32-year-old marketing vice president, a narcissist with CEO potential, told me that she had rejected her boss as a mentor. As she put it, "First of all, I want to keep the relationship at a distance. I don't want to be influenced by emotions. Second, there are things I don't want him to know. I'd rather hire an outside consultant to be my coach." Although narcissistic leaders appear to be at ease with others, they find intimacy-which is a prerequisite for mentoring-to be difficult. Younger narcissists will establish peer relations with authority rather than seek a parentlike mentoring relationship. They want results and are willing to take chances arguing with authority.

An Intense Desire to Compete.

Narcissistic leaders are relentless and ruthless in their pursuit of victory. Games are not games but tests of their survival skills. Of course, all successful managers want to win, but narcissists are not restrained by conscience. Organizations led by narcissists are generally characterized by intense internal competition. Their passion to win is marked by both the promise of glory and the primitive danger of extinction. It is a potent brew that energizes companies, creating a sense of urgency, but it can also be dangerous. These leaders see everything as a threat. As Andy Grove puts it, brilliantly articulating the narcissist's fear, distrust, and aggression, "Only the paranoid survive." The concern, of course, is that the narcissist finds enemies that aren't there-even among his colleagues.

The story of Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of the Scandinavian airline SAS, is an almost textbook example of how a narcissist's weaknesses can cut short a brilliant career. In the 1980s, Carlzon's vision of SAS as the businessperson's airline was widely acclaimed in the business press; management guru Tom Peters described him as a model leader. In 1989, when I first met Carlzon and his management team, he compared the ideal organization to the Brazilian soccer team-in principle, there would be no fixed roles, only innovative plays. I asked the members of the management team if they agreed with this vision of an empowered front line. One vice president, a former pilot, answered no. " I still believe that the best organization is the military," he said. I then asked Carlzon for his reaction to that remark. "Well," he replied, "that may be true, if your goal is to shoot your customers."

That rejoinder was both witty and dismissive; clearly, Carlzon was not engaging in a serious dialogue with his subordinates. Nor was he listening to other advisers. Carlzon ignored the issue of high costs, even when many observers pointed out that SAS could not compete without improving productivity. He threw money at expensive acquisitions of hotels and made an unnecessary investment in Continental Airlines just months before it declared bankruptcy.

Carlzon's story perfectly corroborates the often-recorded tendency of narcissists to become overly expansive-and hence isolated-at the very pinnacle of their success. Seduced by the flattery he received in the international press, Carlzon's self-image became so enormously inflated that his feet left the ground. And given his vulnerability to grandiosity, he was propelled by a need to expand his organization rather than develop it. In due course, as Carlzon led the company deeper and deeper into losses, he was fired. Now he is a venture capitalist helping budding companies. And SAS has lost its glitter.

Avoiding the Traps

There is very little business literature that tells narcissistic leaders how to avoid the pitfalls. There are two reasons for this. First, relatively few narcissistic leaders are interested in looking inward. And second, psychoanalysts don't usually get close enough to them, especially in the workplace, to write about them. (The noted psychoanalyst Harry Levinson is an exception.) As a result, advice on leadership focuses on obsessives, which explains why so much of it is about creating teamwork and being more receptive to subordinates. But as we've already seen, this literature is of little interest to narcissists, nor is it likely to help subordinates understand their narcissistic leaders. The absence of managerial literature on narcissistic leaders doesn't mean that it is impossible to devise strategies for dealing with narcissism. In the course of a long career counseling CEOs, I have identified three basic ways in which productive narcissists can avoid the traps of their own personality.

Find a trusted sidekick.

Many narcissists can develop a close relationship with one person, a sidekick who acts as an anchor, keeping the narcissistic partner grounded. However, given that narcissistic leaders trust only their own insights and view of reality, the sidekick has to understand the narcissistic leader and what he is trying to achieve. The narcissist must feel that this person, or in some cases persons, is practically an extension of himself. The sidekick must also be sensitive enough to manage the relationship. Don Quixote is a classic example of a narcissist who was out of touch with reality but who was constantly saved from disaster by his squire Sancho Panza. Not surprisingly, many narcissistic leaders rely heavily on their spouses, the people they are closest to. But dependence on spouses can be risky, because they may further isolate the narcissistic leader from his company by supporting his grandiosity and feeding his paranoia. I once knew a CEO in this kind of relationship with his spouse. He took to accusing loyal subordinates of plotting against him just because they ventured a few criticisms of his ideas.

It is much better for a narcissistic leader to choose a colleague as his sidekick. Good sidekicks are able to point out the operational requirements of the narcissistic leader's vision and keep him rooted in reality. The best sidekicks are usually productive obsessives. Gyllenhammar, for instance, was most effective at Volvo when he had an obsessive COO, Håkan Frisinger, to focus on improving quality and cost, as well as an obsessive HR director, Berth Jönsson, to implement his vision. Similarly, Bill Gates can think about the future from the stratosphere because Steve Ballmer, a tough obsessive president, keeps the show on the road. At Oracle, CEO Larry Ellison can afford to miss key meetings and spend time on his boat contemplating a future without PCs because he has a productive obsessive COO in Ray Lane to run the company for him. But the job of sidekick entails more than just executing the leader's ideas. The sidekick also has to get his leader to accept new ideas. To do this, he must be able to show the leader how the new ideas fit with his views and serve his interests. (For more on dealing with narcissistic bosses, see the sidebar "Working for a Narcissist.")

Dealing with a narcissistic boss isn't easy. You have to be prepared to look for another job if your boss becomes too narcissistic to let you disagree with him. But remember that the company is typically betting on his vision of the future-not yours. Here are a few tips on how to survive in the short term:

Always Look elsewhere for your own self-esteem. Understand that behind his display of infallibility, there hides a deep vulnerability. Praise his achievements and reinforce his best impulses, but don't be shamelessly sycophantic. An intelligent narcissist can see through flatterers and prefers independent people who truly appreciate him. Show that you will protect his image, inside and outside the company. But be careful if he asks for an honest evaluation. What he wants is information that will help him solve a problem about his image. He will resent any honesty that threatens his inflated self-image and will likely retaliate.

Give Find out what he thinks before presenting your views. If you believe he is wrong, show how a different approach would be in his best interest. Take his paranoid views seriously, don't brush them aside-they often reveal sharp intuitions. Disagree only when you can demonstrate how he will benefit from a different point of view.

Hone Narcissistic leaders often give subordinates many more orders than they can possibly execute. Ignore the requests he makes that don't make sense. Forget about them. He will. But be careful: carve out free time for yourself only when you know there's a lull in the boss's schedule. Narcissistic leaders feel free to call you at any hour of the day or night. Make yourself available, or be prepared to get out.

Indoctrinate the organization.

The narcissistic CEO wants all his subordinates to think the way he does about the business. Productive narcissists-people who often have a dash of the obsessive personality-are good at converting people to their point of view. One of the most successful at this is GE's Jack Welch. Welch uses toughness to build a corporate culture and to implement a daring business strategy, including the buying and selling of scores of companies. Unlike other narcissistic leaders such as Gates, Grove, and Ellison, who have transformed industries with new products, Welch was able to transform his industry by focusing on execution and pushing companies to the limits of quality and efficiency, bumping up revenues and wringing out costs. In order to do so, Welch hammers out a huge corporate culture in his own image-a culture that provides impressive rewards for senior managers and shareholders.

Welch's approach to culture building is widely misunderstood. Many observers, notably Noel Tichy in The Leadership Engine, argue that Welch forms his company's leadership culture through teaching. But Welch's "teaching" involves a personal ideology that he indoctrinates into GE managers through speeches, memos, and confrontations. Rather than create a dialogue, Welch makes pronouncements (either be the number one or two company in your market or get out), and he institutes programs (such as Six Sigma quality) that become the GE party line. Welch's strategy has been extremely effective. GE managers must either internalize his vision, or they must leave. Clearly, this is incentive learning with a vengeance. I would even go so far as to call Welch's teaching brainwashing. But Welch does have the rare insight and know-how to achieve what all narcissistic business leaders are trying to do-namely, get the organization to identify with them, to think the way they do, and to become the living embodiment of their companies.

Get into analysis.

Narcissists are often more interested in controlling others than in knowing and disciplining themselves. That's why, with very few exceptions, even productive narcissists do not want to explore their personalities with the help of insight therapies such as psychoanalysis. Yet since Heinz Kohut, there has been a radical shift in psychoanalytic thinking about what can be done to help narcissists work through their rage, alienation, and grandiosity. Indeed, if they can be persuaded to undergo therapy, narcissistic leaders can use tools such as psychoanalysis to overcome vital character flaws.

Consider the case of one exceptional narcissistic CEO who asked me to help him understand why he so often lost his temper with subordinates. He lived far from my home city, and so the therapy was sporadic and very unorthodox. Yet he kept a journal of his dreams, which we interpreted together either by phone or when we met. Our analysis uncovered painful feelings of being unappreciated that went back to his inability to impress a cold father. He came to realize that he demanded an unreasonable amount of praise and that when he felt unappreciated by his subordinates, he became furious. Once he understood that, he was able to recognize his narcissism and even laugh about it. In the middle of our work, he even announced to his top team that I was psychoanalyzing him and asked them what they thought of that. After a pregnant pause, one executive vice president piped up, "Whatever you're doing, you should keep doing it, because you don't get so angry anymore." Instead of being trapped by narcissistic rage, this CEO was learning how to express his concerns constructively.

Leaders who can work on themselves in that way tend to be the most productive narcissists. In addition to being self-reflective, they are also likely to be open, likable, and good-humored. Productive narcissists have perspective; they are able to detach themselves and laugh at their irrational needs. Although serious about achieving their goals, they are also playful. As leaders, they are aware of being performers. A sense of humor helps them maintain enough perspective and humility to keep on learning.

The Best and Worst of Times

As I have pointed out, narcissists thrive in chaotic times. In more tranquil times and places, however, even the most brilliant narcissist will seem out of place. In his short story The Curfew Tolls, Stephen Vincent Benét speculates on what would have happened to Napoléon if he had been born some 30 years earlier. Retired in prerevolutionary France, Napoléon is depicted as a lonely artillery major boasting to a vacationing British general about how he could have beaten the English in India. The point, of course, is that a visionary born in the wrong time can seem like a pompous buffoon.

Historically, narcissists in large corporations have been confined to sales positions, where they use their persuasiveness and imagination to best effect. In settled times, the problematic side of the narcissistic personality usually conspires to keep narcissists in their place, and they can typically rise to top management positions only by starting their own companies or by leaving to lead upstarts. Consider Joe Nacchio, formerly in charge of both the business and consumer divisions of AT&T. Nacchio was a supersalesman and a popular leader in the mid-1990s. But his desire to create a new network for business customers was thwarted by colleagues who found him abrasive, self-promoting, and ruthlessly ambitious.

Two years ago, Nacchio left AT&T to become CEO of Qwest, a company that is creating a long-distance fiber-optic cable network. Nacchio had the credibility-and charisma-to sell Qwest's initial public offering to financial markets and gain a high valuation. Within a short space of time, he turned Qwest into an attractive target for the RBOCs, which were looking to move into long-distance telephony and Internet services. Such a sale would have given Qwest's owners a handsome profit on their investment. But Nacchio wanted more. He wanted to expand-to compete with AT&T-and for that he needed local service. Rather than sell Qwest, he chose to make a bid himself for local telephone operator U.S. West, using Qwest's highly valued stock to finance the deal. The market voted on this display of expansiveness with its feet-Qwest's stock price fell 40% between last June, when he made the deal, and the end of the third quarter of 1999. (The S&P index dropped 5.7% during the same period.)

Like other narcissists, Nacchio likes risk-and sometimes ignores the costs. But with the dramatic discontinuities going on in the world today, more and more large corporations are getting into bed with narcissists. They are finding that there is no substitute for narcissistic leaders in an age of innovation. Companies need leaders who do not try to anticipate the future so much as create it. But narcissistic leaders-even the most productive of them-can self-destruct and lead their organizations terribly astray. For companies whose narcissistic leaders recognize their limitations, these will be the best of times. For other companies, these could turn out to be the worst.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many leaders dominating business today have what psychoanalysts call a narcissistic personality. That's good news for companies that need passion and daring to break new ground. But even productive narcissists can be dangerous for organizations. Here is some advice on avoiding the dangers.

# data[].attributes.body
Facebook at one point had nearly 100 gender options. Splitting sex and gender into two different categories is something that requires practice and intentionality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Facebook worked with UK groups Press for Change and Gendered Intelligence to add 21 new options to ensure the list best reflected the ways UK users may choose to describe themselves.

"Gender identities are complex and for many people, describing themselves as just a man or just a woman has always been inadequate," said Professor Stephen Whittle, vice-president at Press for Change. The European Court of Human Rights has upheld the right to develop our gender identity, as key to our personal autonomy.

"By challenging the gender binary, Facebook will finally allow thousands of people to describe themselves as they are now and it will allow future generation of kids to become truly comfortable in their own skins."

Ensuring users feel comfortable being their true selves while using the network is a priority, said Simon Milner, Policy Director, UK Middle East & Africa at Facebook.

"An important part of this is the expression of gender especially when it extends beyond the definitions of just 'male' or 'female.' Today's announcement provides significantly more options for people in the UK," he added.

Other websites have already implemented similar policies as transgender issues became more widely considered. Google+, for instance, allows users to choose from "male", "female" or "other". The company says that around one per cent of people identify as "other".

Currently Facebook targets adverts to users based on their gender. If a users chooses an option other than male or female then adverts will be selected based on the pronoun they choose to be mentioned with.

The 21 new options for UK users

Asexual

Female to male trans man

Female to male transgender man

Female to male transsexual man

F2M

Gender neutral

Hermaphrodite

Intersex man

Intersex person

Intersex woman

Male to female trans woman

Male to female transgender woman

Male to female transsexual woman

Man

M2F

Polygender

T* man

T* woman

Two* person

Two-spirit person

Woman

The list of the 50 previous gender options

Agender

Androgyne

Androgynes

Androgynous

Bigender

Cis

Cis Female

Cis Male

Cis Man

Cis Woman

Cisgender

Cisgender Female

Cisgender Male

Cisgender Man

Cisgender Woman

Female to Male

FTM

Gender Fluid

Gender Nonconforming

Gender Questioning

Gender Variant

Genderqueer

Intersex

Male to Female

MTF

Neither

Neutrois

Non-binary

Other

Pangender

Trans

Trans Female

Trans Male

Trans Man

Trans Person

Trans*Female

Trans*Male

Trans*Man

Trans*Person

Trans*Woman

Transexual

Transexual Female

Transexual Male

Transexual Man

Transexual Person

Transexual Woman

Transgender Female

Transgender Person

Transmasculine

Two-spirit

Watch: Fewer than a third of Facebook's staff are women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook's 71 gender options come to UK users

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Facebook worked with UK groups Press for Change and Gendered Intelligence to add 21 new options to ensure the list best reflected the ways UK users may choose to describe themselves. "Gender identities are complex and for many people, describing themselves as just a man or just a woman has always been inadequate," said Professor Stephen Whittle, vice-president at Press for Change.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
-Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), writing in The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2014
A reader asked about this line in Sen. Portman's article, which warned of a looming budget crisis because of growth in entitlements. Could this figure possibly be true?

The Facts

Ten thousand people a day is certainly a big number. Over 365 days, that's almost 4 million people. But then everything about the "Baby Boom" generation is pretty big.

There were 76 million people born between the years 1946 and 1964, the traditional window for the baby boom generation. That means that they will retire over a 19-year period. Simple math shows that 76 divided by 19 is 4 million, or almost 11,000 people a day.

While a certain percentage will die before they reach retirement age, analysts say that immigrants will actually boost the number of potential baby-boomer retirees to nearly 80 million -and not everyone retires exactly at 65 or 66. Some baby boomers likely retired at 62. So let's say it's 80 million over 20 years-which still yields 4 million a year.

Thus, as a simple round figure, 10,000 a day is pretty close. In fact, that a number used by the Social Security Administration in a 2012 report, which Portman spokeswoman Caitlin Conant said was a source used by the senator. She also cited a Pew Research Center report that used this figure.

Indeed, in a 2013 report, the Social Security Administration said that the wave of baby boom retirements was a significant problem for the agency itself: "By 2015, almost 33 percent of our workforce, including 48 percent of our supervisors, will be eligible to retire. In FY [fiscal year] 2011, we lost over 4,000 employees due to retirement and other reasons. We expect this trend to continue. During this same timeframe, the baby boomer retirement wave continues to have a significant effect on our workloads."

The impact of baby boom retirements will certainly put pressure not only on the Social Security Administration, but on the Social Security and Medicare systems. So this is an appropriate figure to cite when discussing entitlement programs. (For more on Social Security, read The Fact Checker's popular guide to critical questions about Social Security.)

The Pinocchio Test

Portman is on solid ground with this number. He earns a coveted-and rare-Geppetto Checkmark.

The Geppetto Checkmark

( About our rating scale)
Send us facts to check by filling out this form Follow The Fact Checker on Twitter and friend us on Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do 10,000 baby boomers retire every day?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), writing in The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2014 A reader asked about this line in Sen. Portman's article, which warned of a looming budget crisis because of growth in entitlements. Could this figure possibly be true? Ten thousand people a day is certainly a big number.

# data[].attributes.body
Number 3 will shock you!

3. 41% don't have any retirement savings at all. This is extremely troubling. Where will they go? How will they live and eat? What will their quality of life be?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Worried about retirement? You're not alone. A large number of workers nearing the end of their careers are learning the hard way that retirement is expensive and that most older Americans simply aren't prepared. If you're thinking of retiring in the not-so-distant future, here are a few facts you should be aware of.

1. The average baby boomer has $163,577 saved for retirement.

According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the average household aged 56-61 has amassed a $163,577 nest egg. But while that number might seem encouraging, it's actually pretty scary. Over the course of a 20-year retirement, $163,577 amounts to just $8,178 a year, or $681 a month, of income. Granted, this number doesn't take investment growth during retirement into account, but it's glaringly small nonetheless. Furthermore, while $163,577 represents the average savings among baby boomers nearing retirement, the median savings for that age group is just $17,000, which means a large number of workers have far less than the average.

2. A frightening 41% of baby boomers have no retirement savings at all.

Here's another alarming statistic from the EPI: An estimated 41% of households aged 55-64 have no retirement savings at all. And clearly, their older counterparts didn't do a much better job of saving, either. An estimated 21% of married Social Security recipients and 43% of single recipients 65 and over rely on their monthly benefit checks to provide at least 90% of their income, which is far more than what the average worker should expect out of the program.

3. Social Security pays the average recipient $1,360 a month.

Workers who plan to fall back on Social Security are often less motivated to save for retirement on their own. But those monthly benefit checks aren't nearly enough to help the typical retiree pay the bills. Currently, the average beneficiary gets just $1,360 a month in Social Security payments, which equates to an annual income of $16,320. One thing you should know about Social Security is that it's only designed to replace roughly 40% of the average worker's pre-retirement income, and as you'll see in an upcoming point, that's hardly enough to live on.

4. One out of every four 65-year-olds today will live past age 90.

Forget about saving enough for a 20-year retirement. Seniors are living longer these days, and with that comes the need for additional savings. According to the Social Security Administration, one out of every four 65-year-olds today will live past the age of 90, while one out of 10 will live past 95. It's no wonder 60% of baby boomers claim they're more afraid of outliving their savings than actually dying.

5. Almost half of retired households spend more money, not less, in retirement.

Many older Americans bank on their expenses going down in retirement, and while some seniors are perfectly comfortable living on 70% of their previous income, almost half of retirees wind up spending more money once they stop working, not less. The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) reports that 46% of retired households increase their spending during the first two years of retirement, and for 33%, this pattern continues for six years. And it's not just wealthy retirees who take the opportunity to indulge. The EBRI found this data to be consistent across all income levels.

6. Healthcare will cost the average healthy couple $377,000 in retirement.

If that number sounds too high to be true, think again. HealthView Services, a provider of healthcare cost-projection software, released a report last year stating that when you factor in the typical out-of-pocket costs not covered by Medicare, like dental and vision services, the average healthy 65-year-old couple today is looking at $377,000 in healthcare costs in retirement. Reading between the lines, if your health isn't great or you have a known medical condition, you could spend even more. Not only that, but that $377,000 figure doesn't even take long-term care costs (such as for nursing homes) into account. Ouch.

7. A good 30% of homeowners 65 and older still have a mortgage.

Some people think they can get away with less income in retirement because they won't have a mortgage to worry about. But that's far from a given. In fact, an increasing number of seniors are entering retirement saddled with mortgage debt. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports that 30% of homeowners 65 and older (roughly 6.5 million people) still had a mortgage back in 2013, up from 22% 12 years earlier. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve data shows that 21% of seniors 75 and over continued to carry mortgage debt in 2011, up from 8% a decade prior.

8. More than 25 million seniors live at or below the poverty line.

Relying too heavily on Social Security in the absence of independent savings comes at a price. Rising medical costs, housing expenses, and mounting bills leave many retirees in a state of perpetual financial vulnerability, and over 25 million older Americans are currently living at or below the federal poverty level as a result.

9. Almost 25% of current workers expect to retire at 70 or later.

There's a reason a growing number of seniors are working longer and retiring later. Given the cost of retirement and the aforementioned collective lack of savings, many have no choice but to extend their careers in an effort to sock away extra money and stretch their existing nest eggs. According to a recent study by human resources consulting firm Willis Towers Watson, almost 25% of Americans think they won't be able to retire until age 70 or older. Even worse, 5% don't think they'll ever manage to retire at all.

10. Nine out of 10 retirees identify as happy.

Let's end with some positive news. In a recent Transamerica study, 90% of retirees said that they're enjoying their lives despite the financial challenges retirement typically presents. What this tells us is that if you're among the countless older workers who are behind on savings, you don't need to resign yourself to an unsatisfying, impoverished retirement. Rather, you can take steps to work around your circumstances and adjust your expectations. That might mean downsizing your living space in retirement, moving to an area that's more affordable on a whole, or working part-time to generate added income. If you're willing to make compromises, you can enjoy a fulfilling retirement and learn to live on less.

One final point you should take away is this: If you are willing to extend your career and focus on your savings, you can change your financial picture in retirement so you're more comfortable and less stressed. Workers 50 and over can currently contribute up to $6,500 a year to an IRA and $24,000 a year to a 401(k). Maxing out either limit could really work wonders for your nest egg, so even if you're behind on savings, all is not officially lost.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Retirement Stats Every Baby Boomer Should Know

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Worried about retirement? You're not alone. A large number of workers nearing the end of their careers are learning the hard way that retirement is expensive and that most older Americans simply aren't prepared. If you're thinking of retiring in the not-so-distant future, here are a few facts you should be aware of.

# data[].attributes.body
Perhaps we don't give Jobs the opportunity to be a complicated person.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Kind. Patient. Human. The Steve you didn't know."

Those are the words accompanying a portrait of the late Apple cofounder on the cover of this month's issue of Fast Company, which features an exclusive excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs, a new biography by longtime Valley reporter Brent Schlender (who came to know Jobs intimately over the 25 years he spent covering Apple) and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli.

The book aims to debunk the notion that the characteristics typically ascribed to Jobs-petulant, cruel, visionary-were static attributes, when in fact his evolution as a leader occurred over a lifetime. To celebrate the book's release today, we held a live Q&A with the authors. Here's five insights:

According to Schlender:

He developed patience, which believe it or not, is a leadership skill. He learned not to rush things that needed more work. He also learned how to be more sensitive to the physical limits of how much his people could work and moderated his demanding behavior. He still was a tough boss, but he got better at helping people share his high ideals for whatever Apple made.

And Tetzeli pointed out that part of Jobs's bad-boss reputation might have just been social awkwardness. He said:

He didn't care what the public thought of him. At times, he was surprised to have hurt someone's feelings. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, took this as a sign of an occasional social awkwardness, rather than an innate meanness.

Schlender shared his first hand insight into Jobs's event prep with this story:

Steve spent months preparing for his product intros and other public appearances, and rehearsed them exhaustively. I once spent an entire day watching him run through multiple rehearsals of a single presentation, tweaking everything from the color and angle of certain spotlights, to editing and rearranging the order of the keynote presentation slides to improve his pacing. He could get pretty petulant if some technical aspect went awry. In one instance that day, he just sat silently onstage with his chin in his hand, staring at the floor for nearly 15 minutes, out of frustration with a wrong lighting cue. He didn't yell this time, but just made everyone wait while he cooled down. Even before that stage, he would call journalists like me or Steven Levy who wrote for Newsweek and later Wired, to try out metaphors and lines he was thinking about using, just to see if we thought they resonated. This could be weeks and weeks before the actual event.

Tetzeli reveled this detail about how Jobs went above and beyond with employees:

We have many anecdotes of Steve defying the common stereotype. One from his personal life is the fact that Steve, after he got sick, helped several Apple employees and friends when they or their loved ones developed cancer. He'd make up spreadsheets of the kinds of care available, he'd talk about the doctors who did the treatment, he'd talk about cost.

Tetzeli also shared this example of Jobs's style of honest criticism:

A work example is from Pixar, where, when a movie was in trouble, Ed Catmull would call on Steve to have a personal conversation with the director. This wasn't a scolding thing. Steve and the director would just go on a walk together, and Steve would lay out-in his own, unvarnished, crystal-clear way-exactly where the movie had gone off the tracks.

It was a punch to the gut, but it was told in a way that made it clear that the failure was anything but personal. This is one of the complexities of Steve's criticism-it could injure those who didn't know him well, but it could be extremely valuable to those who did know him well.

As much as many may want to take leadership lessons from Jobs, Tetzeli shares why that's not the best idea:

I think that a lot of people look at Jobs and think being headstrong is the way to go, but they haven't understood the subtleties of his management skills. Headstrong is a small part of being a successful manager-in fact, it's not necessary at all. It worked for Steve. But that's no reason it should work for someone else. Steve's management style was very much in keeping with who he was, and that should probably be the first thing a manager asks himself-am I posing, or is this really me? If the answer is posing, it's time to find a new style.

Schlender revealed what really motivated Jobs:

Steve was motivated more than anything to feel he had made a solid and positive impact on the world during his lifetime. It was as simple as that. He would say, "I just want to put a dent in the universe." The funny thing was, that wasn't hyperbole. He really meant it. But at the same time, Steve was an aesthetic idealist in a very particular way. It was more important to him to create the best product than to sell the most. There's a certain snobbishness and elitism to this notion, but the second time around at Apple, Steve rarely failed to live up to the high standards he set for himself and others. And there is no question that he left his mark on the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 Surprising Insights About Steve Jobs's Management Style

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Kind. Patient. Human. The Steve you didn't know." Those are the words accompanying a portrait of the late Apple cofounder on the cover of this month's issue of Fast Company, which features an exclusive excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs , a new biography by longtime Valley reporter Brent Schlender (who came to know Jobs intimately over the 25 years he spent covering Apple) and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli.

# data[].attributes.body
I am a hobbyist Elon Musk follower. He is publicly complicated and that somehow doesn't act as a detractor for his fans. Comparing the two arguably rabid followings of Apple and Tesla is something that is probably worthy of scholastic study. I really wonder how all of this will be recorded in history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Like most leaders, Elon Musk has big ambitions for his team - really big. The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla wants to colonize Mars and transform the world's energy system.

With such seemingly impossible goals, how does one inspire people to work tirelessly to make it happen?

According to the popular 2015 biography " Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance, Musk uses a brilliant management trick to get the most out of his people.

After interviewing three dozen SpaceX engineers, Vance discovered that Musk doesn't just set deadlines; he gets people to take ownership over their projects.

"He doesn't say, 'You have to do this by Friday at 2 p.m.,'" early SpaceX engineer Kevin Brogan tells Vance. "He says, 'I need the impossible done by Friday at 2 p.m. Can you do it?'

"Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you. You're working hard for yourself."

For smart, ambitious people this kind of challenge can be highly motivating, even if it's stressful.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Another great tech leader, the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, used a similar strategy. Jobs was notorious for his "reality distortion field," a rules-bending logic that defied practicality.

Jobs frequently set improbable deadlines that sent employees scrambling. Interestingly, according to Walter Isaacson's 2011 book " Steve Jobs," it often worked.

"In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything," Bud Tribble, a software designer on Apple's Macintosh team in the early 1980s, says in the book. But it was this mindset that led Jobs "to actually be able to change reality."

While Isaacson notes that many leaders may distort reality, and Jobs had plenty of failings as a manager, his field was often "a tactic for accomplishing something."

Early employees like cofounder Steve Wozniak and controller Debi Coleman found the technique to be effective and empowering, according to the book.

Michael Kovac | Getty Images

Isaacson writes: "It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. 'It was a self-fulfilling distortion,' [Coleman] claimed. 'You did the impossible, because you didn't realize it was impossible.'"

After all, isn't that the job of any great leader - to plot a course, create a sense of urgency, and inspire people to achieve what they never thought possible?

When you think back on the best boss you ever had, was it the one who was exceedingly nice and provided an easygoing environment, or was it the one who pushed you to learn and grow and achieve more than you ever expected of yourself?

I'd venture to bet the latter.
See also: Billionaire Elon Musk credits his success to these 8 books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Elon Musk and Steve Jobs' brilliant trick to inspire employees to achieve the impossible

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like most leaders, Elon Musk has big ambitions for his team - really big. The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla wants to colonize Mars and transform the world's energy system. With such seemingly impossible goals, how does one inspire people to work tirelessly to make it happen?

# data[].attributes.body
I'm looking for diversity articles written by diverse authors. There's insight that is missed when the majority or dominant group handles all the writing. Here's an interview of a woman in any case.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The workforce is waking up to the reality that talented women can contribute just as much as men in the organization. In turn, we're seeing a greater emphasis on hiring diverse. But I can't shake the feeling that the business world has fallen into a habit of checking off the diversity quota, and calling it a job well done.

I'm much more interested to see how the workforce is including women after the hiring process. What rules, policies, and rituals are resulting in positive behaviors so great work can get done regardless of what gender takes the lead? Companies also can't expect cultural constraints to magically disappear because leadership has hired a mixed workforce. Organizational culture has to be constantly nurtured so individuals, teams, and leadership can cultivate a great place to work.

The reality is that examples are still few and far between.

I spoke with Katharine Zaleski, co-founder and CEO of PowerToFly, a recruitment service that aims to put women back into the workforce. Zaleski and I spoke at length about the current climate for women in the workplace. More importantly, I wanted to press Zaleski for examples of companies and employees working to facilitate a better workplace for all gender types.

Even in the following conversation, Zaleski found it difficult to offer examples of real companies enacting cultural change for men and women after the hiring process. However, she does offer potential tactics that can encourage change, especially if it's as simple as women helping other women lift up their voices.
Kavi Guppta: At the time of this conversation, it's been a few really big weeks as far as women are concerned given your election cycle. How are you feeling about the inclusion of women in the workplace as of right now?
Katharine Zaleski: I think that what's happened in the last couple of weeks is a silver lining and the silver lining is that women are actually talking about what it's like to be a woman every single day. To be in these situations where there's this murky line that has often been crossed and that a woman has definitely felt like she has either been assaulted mentally or professionally. It's been an amazing couple of weeks because women are coming out and telling stories now in droves. A lot of them have to do with workplace environments.

Every woman has a story like this and corporate America is a lot more buttoned up but there are certainly tons of stories. I've certainly felt uncomfortable traveling with certain male colleagues alone because of things that they have said but these are things that you've been told to brush under the rug for years and you do brush them under the rug. What's happened in the last couple of weeks which is, I think, so cathartic is that we're talking about these things.

The other thing that's been interesting is this is the convergence of the social media generation that was told to say anything, to share anything, to talk about anything, but we still need to be prodded to talk about certain things. You've seen women take to Twitter in particular. Certainly Donald Trump talking about sexually assaulting women is one of those things. Let me be clear too, the guy was saying that it's locker room banter, but he was at work. He was working for NBC, he was with an NBC colleague and they were talking about another NBC colleague. That happens all the time, it's just nobody gets caught on tape. Furthermore, he said that he was going to act on his actions by popping in his tic-tacs and going and trying to do it on the woman who he was meeting, who was also a work colleague. I think it has created a really really powerful and vocally positive conversation.
KG: Why do you think we don't already have these conversations all the time?
KZ: I think women are scared. I think time after time women have been told that these women are lying, that these women shouldn't be even complaining. Can you imagine how a woman who doesn't have a major news organization publishing her stuff or doesn't have the support of millions of other women re-tweeting her feelings? This is a perfect example of what happens on a microcosm every single day. It's making women think more and more.
KG: How can women factor in empowerment into the hiring process?
KZ: One thing we're trying to do at PowerToFly is actually highlight how inclusive an office is, because employers are just terrible at promoting that. I say terrible in the sense that they write these very specific job posts where they literally put the ping-pong table stuff above the conversation around parental leave, which applies to both men and women, or nursing rooms. When you read a job posting that leads with ping pong tables, my mind starts racing to ping pong, then drinks, there's always something highlighted about happy hour. It'll be like ping pong, happy hour, then you start thinking of environments that might not be particularly comfortable to women. Especially if they are women who are starting to have families and stuff like that. We're also trying to highlight women at organizations and what they're doing and how they're making changes and how they lead every day as women and what the environments are that they're creating.
KG: What are some of the other criteria that you point out to the companies?
KZ: We focus on what the environment is like. We focus on the lifestyle aspects of the job in many ways. Which also don't just apply to women, they apply to modern men. We're working with one major company and we highlight that they give forty hours of paid volunteer time, or there's another major company that lets you take a certain amount of wellness time in addition to your time off. Another company that we're working with, you have to basically go through ten pages of their website to see that they actually very much encourage flexible work environments. It's sort of funny, in the job descriptions, they never talk about that. They always keep it hidden.
KG: How can the hiring process be more inclusive to women without diluting the challenge of the job that they are seeking?
KZ: Well there's a couple ways. First of all, the hiring process should actually give forth a woman's experience; you talk about experience and what she's actually built versus years and years in the workforce because women tend to have some more gaps because of parental leave and those things.

The other thing that we're seeing which seems quite obvious, but you'd be surprised, we worked with another major brand who, they really wanted to hire more women and they had an all white male panel. So we went back to them and said "Hey, this isn't working. If you're trying to reflect that you're a diverse organization and that you're going to be inclusive to women you need to have a woman on your interview panel."

We also tell companies to stop giving tours where you talk about the coffee machine and the ping pong tables. Give tours where you actually focus on what humans truly need to do. For example, women truly need to nurse. These are big things, big parts of women's lives and a huge part of a woman's life is at her job so we need to figure out ways to integrate it. You need to reflect how your company is integrating work with life.

These conversations don't happen enough. There's a lot of focus on finding the woman, but inclusion is about actually changing the environment to make people feel included. I think companies are still on the integration track. Just saying "Oh, we're going to hire more people, but we're not going to change. We're going to hire more women but we're not going to change."
KG: How can women help other women in the environment?
KZ: You look at the history of workplaces, they weren't built for women right? They were built really explicitly for men. You're starting to see a real shift, and it's certainly happening, but it's happening in a lot of cases because women are--women my age, 35, are having babies now, or are starting to--but they're having babies when they're closer to leadership positions and they're the ones that are internally advocating for change and creating change.

I'll give you an example. The New York Times, their deputy managing editor is a woman named Alex MacCallum, I've known her actually since I was a baby, and she had a baby about a little over a year ago and she led a committee at the New York Times to extend maternity leave so that women wouldn't leave because their maternity leaves were too short. The maternity leave has been extended and there's a huge amount of women at the New York Times that are, frankly, going to stay much longer.

It's stuff like that. That's what I hear more and more. Unfortunately I hear it more from friends than the heads of talent that I talk to on a regular basis. I have another friend who's at a big law firm that does VC work and she was telling me about the amount of work that's being done in a women's committee to actually change some of the policies.

For example at law firms, there is sort of a battle around whether or not a woman should have her bonus if she goes on maternity leave. Things like that that were sort of brushed under the rug for years. If you don't have women within the organization facilitating those changes, that's a problem.

Companies will have a couple powerful women and if they truly respect them, they will give these women more ways to create the inclusive environments that need to be created. That's how I'm seeing it, I don't know if it's the perfect way by any means but that's where I'm seeing it.

One of the things that women struggle with most at work is that they don't have other people recognizing what's happened to them. Your boss says something very creepy to you and you look around the room and everybody pretends it never happened. That was what was happening in the Donald Trump situation but now you have millions of women who are coming out and saying "Hey, we're pretty sure this happened but the reason we're pretty sure this happened is because it happened to us." That's what's happening here.

For starters, women can just say to another woman, this is so simple, "Yeah, I heard that and let's write that down together." Or, "Yeah, I heard that, and next time he says that come and get me and I'll back you up on the fact that he said it multiple times." Or next time even if a woman says something, it's not just men. Even having meetings every two weeks where women just sort of check in on how they feel about the environment.
KG: What's your take on the argument that women should have to thrive in a challenging environment because plenty of men had to endure the same as well?
KZ: That would be a fine statement if workplaces were actually set up with women in mind, but they're not. It's like basically saying that a man has to go to a beauty salon and put up with it all day long and deal with it. This is not a great metaphor but just think about an environment that was built for women, has been built for women and has existed primarily for women for generations. Ask a man to go in there every single day and put up with comments and questions about whether or not he's committed to that environment that was never created for him in the first place, then ask yourself why after ten years he just says, "I can't, this isn't worth it anymore."
KG: What are some fears or hesitations women have about tech companies?
KZ: If you take a year to be with your kid, which in western Europe it's totally fine or Canada or Australia, but we hear a lot of, "Oh I guess I could take a smaller salary because I'm getting back into the workforce, it's only been one year." Meanwhile you hear about all these big business leaders like Steve Jobs or Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike, and they went on all these vision quests. Or The CEO of MTV years ago. They came back and made more money because they had this life experience.

You hear a woman saying, "Yeah, I should be taking a smaller salary" and what we do is we coach them and we say, "No, no, no, no, no, look at your experiences, look at what you've done, look at what you've built. You need to talk about the salary that you should be getting based on those experiences, not about the amount of time that correlates to your biological clock."
KG: What has surprised you about some of the companies you work with?
KZ: Oh god, here's one that just drives me bananas. You start a meeting with a big brand and they say, "We don't have any women, we really need you to help us find some more women, especially in tech." Then you get into the conversation, they say "But we need to know exactly how many women of color you also have on the platform and how many you're bringing in."

We feel like women are already feeling pushed at enough, to then ask them to quantify by age and ethnicity. I can understand that companies want this data and we can certainly provided that data, I'm not saying we can't provide that data, what I'm getting at there is that companies are almost finding every excuse in the book to make it harder for themselves. Let's just start out with bringing in more women, okay?

But then when you start to qualify it around "I need a very specific type of woman to fill my quota," that's where you start hitting a wall. The truth is that women bring in more women. At PowerToFly, we're 90% women because women have referred other women. We have a gender diversity problem on the other side. If we brought in more men, we would definitely have more male referrals. Just start with bringing in more women. Don't try to boil the ocean. That definitely gets me everyday.
KG: Let's end off on this this: What do you hope will be in place by the time your children enter the workforce?
KZ: First of all, I will say that I'm seeing a lot of progress. We talked about a lot of negatives and there's a lot of positive going on and I think there's even a lot of positives going on with the negatives. I keep coming back to the Donald Trump thing because I think this is going to be positive for america in the end. We're having this conversation, so that's key.

I only have a daughter right now, she's two and a half, but the workplace I would like to see is an environment where it actually integrates with her life. Maybe she has children, maybe she doesn't have children, maybe she adopts children, maybe she needs to take care of me one day, god forbid, or maybe she doesn't, but the point is that the workplace focuses on work/life integration. Maybe for ten years she works in the office all the time, no problem, but then there's a year where she needs to be able to work more remotely. I don't want her to give up her career just because her life changes. I think that's incredibly important.

Then obviously, I want to make sure that we don't have these conversations in the future, both for men and women, that make parents or people in general feel like they're not as valuable in the office because they frankly can't sit in a chair for 12 hours a day.
Are you transforming the Future of Work? Add yourself to my Future of Work list Continue the conversation with me here: @kaviguppta. here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
There's More To Workplace Diversity Than Hiring 'Enough' Women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The workforce is waking up to the reality that talented women can contribute just as much as men in the organization. In turn, we're seeing a greater emphasis on hiring diverse. But I can't shake the feeling that the business world has fallen into a habit of checking off the diversity quota, and calling it a job well done.

# data[].attributes.body
Hello Caroline Turner. Thank you for contributing to the conversation. I wish this article had more analysis instead of just recitation and simplification of studies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I periodically update the research that forms the business case for improving gender balance in organizational leadership. There are new studies linking gender diversity and better financial results every year. I include some in my latest (spring 2017) update:

Most people don't change, or willingly go along with change, because the change is "the right thing to do." They are more likely to change if there is a good reason to do so. Businesses are unlikely to change their corporate cultures because doing so is "nice" for women. They may do it if there is a compelling business reason to do so. The bottom line reasons to achieve gender diversity in leadership are indeed compelling.

The business case for diversity and inclusion generally:

· Gallup has convincingly linked engagement with positive business metrics including productivity, profitability, quality, employee commitment and retention. Diversity can improve the bottom line. Diversity combined with an inclusive culture have an even greater impact on business outcomes.

· An inclusive workplace is one where more of today's diverse workforce is engaged. According to studies cited by Scientific American, organizations with inclusive cultures have greater innovation, creativity and bottom line results.

· Turnover has significant direct and indirect costs. Companies with inclusive cultures have lower turnover.

· An organization with a reputation for being a good place to work for diverse groups has an easier time recruiting talent from today's diverse hiring pool. That saves money and time.

· Many people believe that a group with diverse backgrounds and perspectives makes better decisions than a homogeneous group. Research shows that diverse teams process facts more carefully and are more innovative.

· A diverse culture that mirrors its markets tends to do better than its homogeneous competitors. The buying power of "minority" groups is large and growing rapidly.
The business case for a gender-diversity
The business case for gender diversity includes all of this and more:

Returns: Gender diversity in leadership is strongly correlated with higher returns, profitability and share price. Diverse groups (while harder to manage) simply perform better.

· Catalyst research shows that companies with a higher percentage of women in executive positions have a 34% higher total return to shareholders than those that do not. Another Catalyst study found that companies with the most women directors outperform those with the least on return on invested capital by 26%.

· McKinsey found that, in a group of publicly traded European companies, those with gender diversity in leadership experienced higher return on equity, operating profit, and stock price.

· MSCI Inc. studied the financial performance of U.S. companies from 2011-2016 and found that those with at least three women on the board had median gains in return on equity 11% higher, and earnings per share 45% higher, than companies with no women directors.

· Gallup studied 800 business units from the retail and hospitality industries in 2014. They found that gender-diverse business units had better financial outcomes, including revenue and net profit, than those dominated by one gender. Financial performance was dramatically better for gender-diverse business units that were also highly engaged.

· Credit Suisse Research Institute reported that companies with at least one woman on their board outperformed the peer group by 26% over the preceding six years.

Talent Pipeline: To have the most skilled and talented workforce, a business must attract and retain women as well as men. In most industries, the talent pipeline includes and will include a large percentage of women. Engaging as much of your workforce as possible is good business; engaged employees do more and better work and are less likely to leave.

· According to Catalyst, women are nearly half of the workforce and hiring pool.

· According to the U.S. Department of Education, for school-year 2016-17, women were projected to earn 57.3% of B.A.'s, 58.3% of M.A.'s and 52.2% of doctoral degrees.

· Gallup has shown a correlation between high employee engagement and a number of performance outcomes including higher productivity, quality and profits.

Women's Market: Women represent a growing portion of the customers, clients and partners of many businesses. Women have tremendous buying power. Tapping this market is crucial to business growth.

· Women influence more than 85% of retail decisions.

· The women's market is crucial to many industries.

· Women are of growing importance in business-to-business relationships; they make up 43% of purchasing managers.

· Women-owned businesses have a huge impact on our economy.

· Women control trillions of dollars of wealth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Business Case for Gender Diversity: Update 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I periodically update the research that forms the business case for improving gender balance in organizational leadership. There are new studies linking gender diversity and better financial results every year. I include some in my latest (spring 2017) update: Most people don't change, or willingly go along with change, because the change is "the right thing to do."

# data[].attributes.body
Portland State offers a Masters degree in international business. This is important to know and to start planning for because FSCJ does not offer any post graduate education-- yet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Portland State The School of Business | Master of International Management

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Embark on a fulfilling career that embraces your passion for international cultures. Global companies are seeking professionals with a blend of business knowledge and a global mindset to bridge across borders. Position yourself for success in this dynamic environment.

# data[].attributes.body
As an American studying in Paris is romantic-- if not for traditional romance than for the idea of romance. Just so happens that there is a program available in English in Paris.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Paris School of Business' 90 ECTS programs require 4 years of undergraduate study. Candidates who have earned a 3-year undergraduate degree can still apply and make up for the additional year of studies in only 4 months with our 120 ECTS program.
Admission requirements:

For the 90 ECTS: 4 years of undergraduate study - 210 ECTS

For the 120 ECTS: 3 years of undergraduate study - 180 ECTS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Paris School of Business' 90 ECTS programs require 4 years of undergraduate study. Candidates who have earned a 3-year undergraduate degree can still apply and make up for the additional year of studies in only 4 months with our 120 ECTS program.

# data[].attributes.body
The mere art and science of having a simple business locally is full of pros and cons. Those complications and considerations only increase as the span of a company's reach grows. This article reviews pros and cons of globalization in a very brief format.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A story in the Washington Post said "20 years ago globalization was pitched as a strategy that would raise all boats in poor and rich countries alike. In the U.S. and Europe consumers would have their pick of inexpensive items made by people thousands of miles away whose pay was much lower than theirs. And in time trade barriers would drop to support even more multinationals expansion and economic gains while geo political cooperation would flourish."

There is no question that globalization has been a good thing for many developing countries who now have access to our markets and can export cheap goods. Globalization has also been good for Multi-national corporations and Wall Street. But globalization has not been good for working people (blue or white collar) and has led to the continuing deindustrialization of America.

Globalization is a complicated issue. It is necessary to evaluate the pros and cons before drawing any conclusions.

Pros

Supporters of globalization argue that it has the potential to make this world a better place to live in and solve some of the deep-seated problems like unemployment and poverty.

1. Free trade is supposed to reduce barriers such as tariffs, value added taxes, subsidies, and other barriers between nations. This is not true. There are still many barriers to free trade. The Washington Post story says "the problem is that the big G20 countries added more than 1,200 restrictive export and import measures since 2008

2. The proponents say globalization represents free trade which promotes global economic growth; creates jobs, makes companies more competitive, and lowers prices for consumers.

3. Competition between countries is supposed to drive prices down. In many cases this is not working because countries manipulate their currency to get a price advantage.

4. It also provides poor countries, through infusions of foreign capital and technology, with the chance to develop economically and by spreading prosperity, creates the conditions in which democracy and respect for human rights may flourish. This is an ethereal goal which hasn't been achieved in most countries

5. According to supporters globalization and democracy should go hand in hand. It should be pure business with no colonialist designs.

6. There is now a worldwide market for companies and consumers who have access to products of different countries. True

7. Gradually there is a world power that is being created instead of compartmentalized power sectors. Politics is merging and decisions that are being taken are actually beneficial for people all over the world. This is simply a romanticized view of what is actually happening. True

8. There is more influx of information between two countries, which do not have anything in common between them. True

9. There is cultural intermingling and each country is learning more about other cultures. True

10. Since we share financial interests, corporations and governments are trying to sort out ecological problems for each other. - True, they are talking more than trying.

11. Socially we have become more open and tolerant towards each other and people who live in the other part of the world are not considered aliens. True in many cases.

12. Most people see speedy travel, mass communications and quick dissemination of information through the Internet as benefits of globalization. True

13. Labor can move from country to country to market their skills. True, but this can cause problems with the existing labor and downward pressure on wages.

14. Sharing technology with developing nations will help them progress. True for small countries but stealing our technologies and IP have become a big problem with our larger competitors like China.

15. Transnational companies investing in installing plants in other countries provide employment for the people in those countries often getting them out of poverty. True

16. Globalization has given countries the ability to agree to free trade agreements like NAFTA, South Korea Korus, and The TPP. True but these agreements have cost the U.S. many jobs and always increase our trade deficit

Cons

* The general complaint about globalization is that it has made the rich richer while making the non-rich poorer. "It is wonderful for managers, owners and investors, but hell on workers and nature."

* Globalization is supposed to be about free trade where all barriers are eliminated but there are still many barriers. For instance161 countries have value added taxes (VATs) on imports which are as high as 21.6% in Europe. The U.S. does not have VAT.

* The biggest problem for developed countries is that jobs are lost and transferred to lower cost countries." According to conservative estimates by Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, granting China most favored nation status drained away 3.2 million jobs, including 2.4 million manufacturing jobs. He pegs the net losses due to our trade deficit with Japan ($78.3 billion in 2013) at 896,000 jobs, as well as an additional 682,900 jobs from the Mexico -U.S. trade-deficit run-up from 1994 through 2010."

* Workers in developed countries like the US face pay-cut demands from employers who threaten to export jobs. This has created a culture of fear for many middle class workers who have little leverage in this global game

* Large multi-national corporations have the ability to exploit tax havens in other countries to avoid paying taxes.

* Multinational corporations are accused of social injustice, unfair working conditions (including slave labor wages, living and working conditions), as well as lack of concern for environment, mismanagement of natural resources, and ecological damage.

* Multinational corporations, which were previously restricted to commercial activities, are increasingly influencing political decisions. Many think there is a threat of corporations ruling the world because they are gaining power, due to globalization.

* Building products overseas in countries like China puts our technologies at risk of being copied or stolen, which is in fact happening rapidly

* The anti-globalists also claim that globalization is not working for the majority of the world. "During the most recent period of rapid growth in global trade and investment, 1960 to 1998, inequality worsened both internationally and within countries. The UN Development Program reports that the richest 20 percent of the world's population consume 86 percent of the world's resources while the poorest 80 percent consume just 14 percent. "

* Some experts think that globalization is also leading to the incursion of communicable diseases. Deadly diseases like HIV/AIDS are being spread by travelers to the remotest corners of the globe.

* Globalization has led to exploitation of labor. Prisoners and child workers are used to work in inhumane conditions. Safety standards are ignored to produce cheap goods. There is also an increase in human trafficking.

* Social welfare schemes or "safety nets" are under great pressure in developed countries because of deficits, job losses, and other economic ramifications of globalization.

Globalization is an economic tsunami that is sweeping the planet. We can't stop it but there are many things we can do to slow it down and make it more equitable.

What is missing?

Leadership - We need politicians who are willing to confront the cheaters. One of our biggest problems is that 7 of our trading partners manipulate their currencies to gain unfair price advantage which increases their exports and decreases their imports. This is illegal under WTO rules so there is a sound legal basis to put some kind of tax on their exports until they quit cheating.

Balanced Trade - Most of our trading partners can balance their trade budgets and even run a surplus. We have not made any effort to balance our trade budget and have run a deficit for more than 30 years resulting in an $11 trillion deficit. The trade deficit is the single biggest job killer in our economy, particularly manufacturing jobs. We need the government to develop a plan to begin to balance our trade deficit even though this is not a political priority in either party.

Trade Agreements - Both the NAFTA and the South Korean Korus trade agreements might have been good for Wall Street and the multi-national corporations but they eliminated jobs in America and expanded our trade deficit. The upcoming Trans Pacific Trade Agreement will do the same thing and Congress should not fast track this bad agreement for a dozen reasons.

Enforcing the rules - China ignores trade rules and WTO laws with reckless abandon. Besides currency manipulation they subsidize their state owned companies to target our markets, and provide funding to their state owned companies that dump their products in America. They also steal our technologies, sell counterfeit versions of our products, and impose tariffs and other barriers anytime they want - as we do nothing to stop them. China does not deserve to be on our most favored nation list and we need to tax their exports to us until they stop these illegal activities.

What is good for third world countries, like Kenya, or countries with tremendous growth, like China, has not been good for American workers. Globalization is deindustrializing America as we continue to outsource both manufacturing blue collar and white collar jobs. Supporters of globalization have made the case that it is good because it has brought low priced imported goods, but they have not matched the decline of wages in the middle class and will not offset the loss of many family wage jobs

Globalization is like being overwhelmed by a snow avalanche. You can't stop it - you can only swim in the snow and hope to stay on top. I would like to make the argument that the US should try a lot harder to swim in the snow and stay on top. We can't stop globalization but there are many policies and strategies we can use to make it more equitable. We can enforce the trade laws, force the competition to play by the same rules, and stop giving our competitors the tools (technology and R& D) to ultimately win the global war.

Mike Collins is the author of Saving American Manufacturing. His website is www.mpcmgt.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A story in the Washington Post said "20 years ago globalization was pitched as a strategy that would raise all boats in poor and rich countries alike. In the U.S. and Europe consumers would have their pick of inexpensive items made by people thousands of miles away whose pay was [...]

# data[].attributes.body
One of the challenges of globalization is not only time (Paris is 6 hours ahead of East coast US) but difficulties in communication. Heather discusses some of these in a short, introductory essay on LinkedIn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Published on

Heather Zynczak

Follow Following Unfollow Heather Zynczak

Sign in to follow this author

Chief Marketing Officer at Pluralsight

A company's sphere of influence once extended only to its local community. Today, "business as usual" for startups and enterprises alike often implies working within a community that stretches across the entire globe.

There are some amazing benefits to going global. While working at SAP and Oracle, I managed teams in California, Paris, Shanghai, India and beyond. Suddenly, I wasn't limited by geography when it came to talent recruitment and local expertise. Additionally, a "virtual environment" expanded employee flexibility and general happiness. Yet, at the same time I faced a number of obstacles that threatened my ability to lead and my team's ability to succeed.

Here are four major challenges I've faced when managing global or virtual teams, along with some helpful solutions:

1. Challenge: Lack of clarity. When working with team members who have different native tongues, it's common for key messages to get lost in translation. Add poor phone connections and multitasking team members (i.e. checking email) while on conference calls, and you start to realize why communication doesn't always sink in the first time around.

Remedy: Put action items and key decisions in writing. Follow up conference calls with clear, written communication of the outcomes of the meeting. This ensures everyone walked away from the meeting with the same key takeaways.

2. Challenge: Slow decision making. When there are only a few hours a day of common "awake" time, it can take weeks to get a meeting scheduled that works for everyone's calendar. Add the lack of clarity mentioned above, and decision-making can happen at a snail's pace.

Remedy: Communicate strategy and direction face-to-face whenever possible. Video conferencing is a great tool for helping teams feel more"present" in meetings, giving participants the ability to sense each other's body language and tone. A regular in-person meeting is also a must to boost team morale and increase collaboration. When clarity is provided through "face-to-face" meetings, the speed of business and execution is much faster.

3. Challenge: Disjointed conflict resolution. Working predominantly through email makes it difficult to deal with tough issues and get everyone on the same page. Tone and body language play a large role in communication, and without these nuances, delicate situations can be hard to manage correctly.

Remedy: Pick up the phone. Never communicate "tough messages" via email, as written messages can easily be misunderstood. By speaking live to the individual in a one-on-one conversation, you are much more likely to understand one another and communicate effectively.

4. Challenge: Conflicting corporate culture. Great company culture depends on constant interaction and team bonding among employees. Such camaraderie can be more difficult for global teams to define, implement and ultimately achieve.

Remedy: Invest in cultural training. I once hired a consultant to spend a day with my management team for cultural training. The consultant split our group into teams based on nationality. Each team had to answer the question, "What values would you want to instill in your children?" The Americans said things like self-confidence, ambition, and intellectual curiosity; whereas the Germans emphasized respect for authority and work ethic. The exercise gave each of us a better understanding of how different cultures approach situations. We started to function better as a team. We had a unifying culture that still held respect for the individual perspective.

Throughout my career, I've learned that the global community is a reality. It's here. And most companies can't afford to ignore it. Global business offers an incredible opportunity to grow a company to its fullest potential and build its teams stronger than ever before.

Chief Marketing Officer at Pluralsight

Looking for more of the latest headlines on LinkedIn?
Discover more stories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Going Global: 4 Major Management Challenges and How to Cope

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A company's sphere of influence once extended only to its local community. Today, "business as usual" for startups and enterprises alike often implies

# data[].attributes.body
Rick Suttle outlines four options as business strategies. the most interesting to me is price-skimming. I'll investigate that more. I also think it might be the riskiest option. You have to have proof of concept of not only the new item but the demand in the market. Or you have to create a market-- not unlike the iTunes store.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A small company can use a number of business strategies, depending on its situation. For example, new companies may face different challenges than companies that are more established. Therefore, the ...

# data[].attributes.body
On my way to discover more about price skimming I found this. Anything related to undergrad level psychological discussion is fantastic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

We are all in business to solve problems, add value and make a profit -- tasks which involve pricing your product or service. But how do you effectively price your product or service to increase sales and make more money with little or no effort?
Related: Mastering the Art of Pricing: What the Textbooks Don't Teach You
It's simple; use psychological pricing.

Psychological pricing is a pricing/marketing strategy based on the theory that certain prices have a bigger psychological impact on consumers than others. Below are five pricing strategies entrepreneurs can adopt:

1. 'Charm pricing': Reduce the left digits by one.

This strategy, often called "charm pricing," involves using pricing that ends in "9" and "99."

With charm pricing, the left digit is reduced from a round number by one cent. We come across this technique every time we make purchases but don't pay attention. For example, your brain processes $3.00 and $2.99 as different values: To your brain $2.99 is $2.00, which is cheaper than $3.00.

How is this technique effective? It all boils down to how a brand converts numerical values. In 2005, Thomas and Morwitz conducted research they called "the left-digit effect in price cognition." They explained that, "Nine-ending prices will be perceived to be smaller than a price one cent higher if the left-most digit changes to a lower level (e.g., $3.00 to $2.99), but not if the left-most digit remains unchanged (e.g., $3.60 to $3.59)."

In an experiment conducted by the University of Chicago and MIT, women's clothing was used to test the left-digit effect. First, prices were set for $34, $39 and $44. To the amazement of the researchers, the items sold best at $39 even though that price was more expensive than other options.
Related: 10 Pricing Strategies That Can Drastically Improve Sales
So, the message here is, if you want to increase purchases of your products and services, convert zero ending numbers to nines. A perfect example of this strategy can be found on Apple's website, where each product price ends with a 9.

A postscript: Keith Coulter, associate professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Management, Clark University, has suggested that this effect may be enhanced when the cents are printed in a smaller font.

2. 'Prestige' pricing strategy

Prestige pricing is the complete opposite of odd or charm pricing. Prestige pricing involves making all numerical values into rounded figures, i.e., $99.99 is converted to $100.

You may be wondering why. According to Kuangjie Zhang and Monica Wadhwa in a 2015 study, rounded numbers (e.g., $100) are more fluently processed and encourage reliance on consumers' feelings, compared to non-rounded numbers (e.g., $99.99), which are less fluently processed, and encourage reliance on cognition.

This means that rounded numbers "feel right" because the purchase is being driven by feelings and the price is processed quickly.

Zhang and Wadhwa realized that consumers were more inclined to buy a bottle of champagne when it was priced at $40.00, rather than $39.72 or $40.28.

3. 'BOGOF': Buy one, get one free.

This is a pricing strategy in which customers pay the full price for one product or service to get another for free.

The psychological strategy at work here is, simply, greed. Once a customer comes across the offer, logic gets tossed to the wind and the main focus is making a purchase to get the free item.

Now, because this technique has been widely adopted and most people no longer take the bait, you could stir things up a bit by offering one of the following:

Buy one and get 25 percent off your next purchase.

Purchase one and get four bonuses valued at $60, for free.

Buy one, get three for free.

To fully maximize this strategy, get creative with your discount offers.

4: Comparative pricing: placing expensive next to standard

Comparative pricing may be tagged as the most effective psychological pricing strategy. This simply involves offering two similar products simultaneously but making one product's price much more attractive than the other.

This is a psychological game of choice for the customer, who has to choose between two products that are similar but have different prices.

This strategy works well with fashion brands, which place side by side tuxedos with similar quality but different prices, to make customers pick the more expensive one, which is the desired purchase.

To the average human, if something is expensive, then it is "quality."

A perfect illustration of this strategy would be the case study on "The Williams-Sonoma bread maker".

5: Visually highlight the different prices.

When you offer a sale with a previous price side by side with a new one, you make more sales because customers feel they are getting a bargain and are not interested in researching the drop in price.

To make the new pricing strategy work effectively, use the psychological trick of changing the font, size and color of the new price.

This trick triggers a fluency effect and consumers interpret the visual difference to a larger numeral distinction, according to 2005 research by Keith Coulter and Robin Coulter.

According to that research, simply changing the font, size and color of the signage for the current sale price and placing it a little bit away from the previous pricing will increase the number of purchases, because customers see the new price as cheaper and a better deal than the previous price.

Tip: The pricing difference should be no more than $10.
Related: Make Sure the Pricing Is Right With These Tips
Conclusion

So, given these psychological pricing strategies, you might try them out, remembering to split-test different ones on different pages and products to determine what works best for your business.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. We are all in business to solve problems, add value and make a profit -- tasks which involve pricing your product or service. But how do you effectively price your product or service to increase sales and make more money with little or no effort?

# data[].attributes.body
Being from an oversized small town I'm not really sure I know what a billion dollars really is. If you compute it as salaries it's 25,000 salaries at $40k. It's more than most people will earn in a lifetime. And yet, Toyota owes and can pay billions because of recall issues.

No conclusion. Just an observation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Toyota Motor lied to regulators, Congress and the public for years about the sudden acceleration of its vehicles, a deception that caused the world's largest automaker on Wednesday to be hit with a $1.2 billion Justice Department fine.

Prosecutors say Toyota's efforts to conceal the problem and protect its corporate image led to a series of fatalities that could have been prevented. The settlement, which amounts to more than a third of Toyota's 2013 profit, is being called the largest criminal penalty imposed on a car company in U.S. history.

Toyota says in the settlement that it misled Americans by making deceptive statements about the safety problems that caused its vehicles to speed up uncontrollably, a stark admission for a company that has built its brand on safety and reliability.

Early on, Toyota suggested that driver error was to blame, saying that some people may have hit the gas when they meant to hit the brake. Even after issuing recalls to address problematic floor mats that in some cases pinned down accelerators, the company hid a flawed gas pedal design that it knew did the same thing, according to documents accompanying the agreement.

The deal is a victory for the government and could serve as a model for a case against General Motors, which is under investigation by Congress, safety regulators and federal prosecutors for taking more than a decade to issue a recall for an ignition-switch problem it has linked to 31 accidents and 12 deaths.

"Companies that make inherently dangerous products must be maximally transparent, not two-faced," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who led the Toyota investigation and - according to a law enforcement source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the topic - has launched a preliminary criminal probe of GM. "That is why we have undertaken this enforcement action. And the entire auto industry should take notice."

Safety fears erupted around some of Toyota's most popular models in 2009, when California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor and three family members were killed in a high-speed crash caused by the unintended acceleration of his car. The terrifying episode was captured in a 911 emergency call in which Saylor's brother-in-law described speeding out of control in a Lexus at more than 125 mph before the car crashed, killing all four occupants.

Relatives of the Saylor family, who settled a case against Toyota for an undisclosed amount in 2010, declined through their attorney to comment on the new settlement.

After the accident, Toyota eventually recalled millions of vehicles - one of the largest recalls in the history of the automotive industry. But federal prosecutors found that the company had not come completely clean.

The company assured the public that the "root cause" of unintended acceleration had been addressed by the recall, blaming floor mats that accidentally trapped the depressed gas pedals of cars and trucks.

But Toyota knew that models it had not recalled had similar floor-mat problems, the agreement said. Also, the company hid from federal regulators a second cause of unintended acceleration in its vehicles: a sticky gas pedal.

The problem was caused by plastic material inside the pedal that could cause the accelerator to become stuck in a partially depressed position. The pedals were installed in several models, including the Camry, the Matrix, the Corolla and the Avalon.

The problem had surfaced in Toyota vehicles in Europe in 2008, causing instances of uncontrolled acceleration. In early 2009, the company gave European Toyota distributors information about the sticky pedals along with instructions to replace them if customers complained.

Meanwhile, rather than issuing a recall, the company quietly directed its pedal supplier to change parts in Europe and made plans to roll out the same change in the United States.

By then, the problem had already cropped up in cars sold in the United States, according to the documents. At nearly the same time as the highly publicized San Diego accident, Toyota staffers sent a memo to the company's headquarters in Japan warning of an unintended-acceleration problem apart from the one caused by the floor mats.

For several months, Toyota received more evidence of the pedal problem and quietly made plans to address it without informing federal safety officials as required by law. Concerned that federal officials would learn about these plans, the company canceled the change in pedal design and communicated that change orally rather than in writing, so there would be no paper trail.

After more instances of sticky pedals came to the company's attention in 2009, executives decided to disclose the issue to federal regulators and issue a new recall. But the deception did not end there. After the recall was completed, the company produced an inaccurate timeline and submitted it to federal regulators and Congress, making it appear as if the company had acted quickly to address the sticky-pedal issue.

"Rather than promptly disclosing and correcting safety issues about which they were aware, Toyota made misleading public statements to consumers and gave inaccurate facts to members of Congress," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a news conference announcing the settlement.

As part of the deal, Toyota has entered into what is called a deferred-prosecution agreement that gives federal prosecutors the right to pursue criminal charges if the carmaker fails to live up to the agreement, according to the department.

The automaker must acknowledge the facts of the government's case and have an independent monitor review its safety practices. None of its employees will face criminal charges.

Christopher P. Reynolds, chief legal officer at Toyota Motor North America, said the company took full responsibility for the effects of its actions on consumers at the time of the recalls.

"We have made fundamental changes across our global operations to become a more responsive company," he said in a statement. "Entering this agreement, while difficult, is a major step toward putting this unfortunate chapter behind us."

In addition to the $1.2 billion fine, which will go into the government's coffers, Toyota faces nearly 400 wrongful-death and personal-injury lawsuits. It has settled at least seven lawsuits in the past few months.

"The Justice Department settlement with Toyota is a complete game-changer," said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a watchdog group. "Until today, automakers faced insignificant fines and no criminal penalties under the Vehicle Safety Act. Today's fine of $1.2 billion against Toyota makes the $35 million maximum fine that [federal regulators] can impose seem like chump change."

Still, critics of the settlement say the hefty fine means little as long as no executives face jail time. The facts of the case describe a level of coordinated lying and greed that warrants stiffer punishment, they say.

"Money as a deterrent is of no consequence to these overpaid and overindulged individuals, as the companies are flush with cash," said David H. Peirez, a partner at the law firm of Reisman, Peirez, Reisman and Capobianco. "Deferred-prosecution agreements are a joke - all they defer is a jail sentence, but not the next recall."

Related:

GM names new safety chief in wake of recalls

GM announces 3 new recalls, takes $300 million charge

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Toyota reaches $1.2 billion settlement to end probe of accelerator problems

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Toyota Motor lied to regulators, Congress and the public for years about the sudden acceleration of its vehicles, a deception that caused the world's largest automaker on Wednesday to be hit with a $1.2 billion Justice Department fine. Prosecutors say Toyota's efforts to conceal the problem and protect its corporate image led to a series of fatalities that could have been prevented.

# data[].attributes.body
Reviewing the Toyota recalls reminded me of the VW diesel problem. Much different and I think harder hurdle to overcome.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

# data[].attributes.body
I know they're a young company and I know that America has not created a new car company in some 50 years but Tesla's consistent lateness with delivery is unmatched. And yet they still sell as many cars as they can handle without any formal advertising.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Reuters Staff

When most major automakers announce the production of a new vehicle, it typically rolls out to dealerships across the country within a year so everyone has a chance to get behind the wheel.

Tesla, on the other hand, has always operated differently. The company has historically struggled with the production of new vehicles, leaving early customers with long wait times before taking delivery.

The Model 3, the company's first mass-market vehicle, is no different.

Consumers started placing reservations for the Model 3 in March 2016 and got a first glimpse of the production vehicle in July during a livestream of Tesla's handover party.

Production has officially begun and the car will start rolling out to lucky buyers in the coming months. But the delivery plan is a bit complex - here's the breakdown:

The waitlist

Tesla accumulated roughly 500,000 pre-orders since it began taking reservations in March 2016, but 63,000 customers ultimately decided to drop their reservation.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been forthcoming about the production challenges ahead, but he doesn't seem worried about the cancellations, comparing the situation to a restaurant with more hamburger orders than it can fill.

Total orders for the electric sedan net 455,000 after the cancellations, but Musk said Tesla is still receiving an average of 1,800 orders every day - at least in the immediate days following the handover party.

As a result, people who order the Model 3 today shouldn't expect delivery of their car until mid-2018 at the earliest.

Who gets it first?

Tesla

Tesla will go down its reservation list sequentially, but an early order doesn't guarantee an early delivery.

When Tesla reaches your name on its order list, a company representative will ask how you want to option your car.

Tesla will offer an array of options, but there's a long wait for most of them. Tesla will only deliver Premium trims with a white interior and a standard configuration this fall, according to its website.

The $44,000 premium trim can drive 310 miles on a single charge and accelerate to 60 mph in 5.1 seconds.

Tesla will then start delivering its base Model 3 in November. The $35,000 base trim has a 220-mile range and can accelerate to 60 mph in 5.6 seconds.

Essentially, those willing to pony up more for the premium trim will get early access. If you opt for various upgrades, you face a longer wait than those who select standard configurations.

Buyers outside the US face an even longer wait.

Tesla said international Model 3 deliveries will begin in late 2018. Left-hand drive markets will get the car first, followed by right-hand drive markets in early 2019.

As was the case with previous models, Tesla is starting off by only selling premium Model 3 sedans with rear-wheel drive. The dual-motor all-wheel drive configuration won't be available until spring 2018.

Tesla will accelerate deliveries for customers who already own a Model S or Model X.

'Production hell'

Tesla

Musk has already said the first six months of Model 3 production will be "hell."

Tesla is facing its largest order yet and is making the car for the first time with a completely new set of tools. Some workers pushing for a union at Tesla's factory are preparing for bugs, kinks, and other growing pains.

Tesla also has an ambitious ramp-up plan for a new vehicle after struggling with Model S and Model X production. The company plans to produce 1,500 Model 3 sedans in September and grow that to 20,000 vehicles a month by December.

The company did keep manufacturing in mind when coming up with the final design for the Model 3. The car is far more minimalistic than the Model S and Model X, which should make production easier, Musk has said.

Either way, production won't kick into high gear until late fall, and most configurations are due to arrive later. Those who ordered the Model 3 have a long wait ahead of them.

Get the latest Tesla stock price here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tesla's Model 3 delivery plan is complicated - here's what you need to know

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When most major automakers announce the production of a new vehicle, it typically rolls out to dealerships across the country within a year so everyone has a chance to get behind the wheel. Tesla, on the other hand, has always operated differently.

# data[].attributes.body
I remember when Zappos offereing free 2 days shipping AND free returns was the exception instead of the rule. Putting the customer first really seems to be paying off for them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our Common Core: Deliver WOW Through Service

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zappos is known for its 10 Core Values, but it's not just employees who embody them. See who else is championing our beliefs in article one of this 10-part

# data[].attributes.body
Amazon is currently a behemoth that either you love or you love to hate. Curiously it's relationship to Zappos is very direct. Tony Hsieh sold Zappos for Amazon because of Amazon's long term considerations of their customers. He said, "Amazon knows the value of customers in the long term," Hsieh said. "Most Zappos employees wouldn’t do well in an Amazon environment and vice versa."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Depending on whom you ask, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is either a prophet or a madman for instituting the leaderless "holacracy" management structure at the company he founded.

But according to what Hsieh told Kara Swisher onstage at the first Code Commerce Series event in Las Vegas, it helps Zappos serve both its employees and customers better. And Zappos parent company Amazon knows this.

"Amazon knows the value of customers in the long term," Hsieh said. "Most Zappos employees wouldn't do well in an Amazon environment and vice versa."

Under holacracy, Zappos employees don't have managers. Instead, people take on different responsibilities that suit their skill sets. Hsieh often talks about going "teal," or becoming a company that lives and breathes its declared set of values.

"We're moving from a system most corporations are designed around, command and control, to one that's more self-organized, self-managed," Hsieh said.

As for the business end of Zappos, Hsieh said that the company is still figuring out what its place in e-commerce will ultimately be.

"We use the word 'wow' a lot - the idea of free returns was a big wow. Then when we encouraged customers to call our 1-800 number, that was a big wow," Hsieh explained. "As everyone moves more toward being more high-tech, we're actually moving more toward humanizing. When we get that right, we have a customer for life."

Another high-profile project of Hsieh's was his $350 million effort to turn the Downtown district of Las Vegas into a tech entrepreneur village. The effort has not been a raving success; Hsieh stepped down from its leadership amid crisis in late 2014.

So what happened?

"It's just what it is to be an entrepreneur. Not every venture is going to work," Hsieh said.

Hsieh thinks that people in the media pay attention to the sheer outrageousness of things like holacracy or the Las Vegas project, instead of the core concepts they represent.

"The media focuses on holacracy; my focus is on self-management," Hsieh said before pausing. "Use a rainforest as an example. There's no CEO of the rainforest."

Correction: A previous version of this article attributed the line, "But a lot of hope was dashed. It's not as easy to create a city," to Tony Hsieh. It was Kara Swisher who said it. We apologize for the error.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tony Hsieh explains why he sold Zappos, how he reinvented its corporate culture and what he thinks of Amazon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Depending on whom you ask, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is either a prophet or a madman for instituting the leaderless "holacracy" management structure at the company he founded. But according to what Hsieh told Kara Swisher onstage at the first Code Commerce Series event in Las Vegas, it helps Zappos serve both its employees and customers better.

# data[].attributes.body
I love the writing at HBR so I'm glad to see something there on Zappos. Tony Hsieh explains the move from San Francisco (the tech startup capital) to Las Vegas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the 11 years since Zappos was founded, we've had to make some big decisions. One of the most significant came in early 2004, over lunch at Chevys, a chain Mexican restaurant in San Francisco. We hadn't expected to make a life-changing choice over a plate of fajitas, but when you're part of a fast-growing company, a lot of decisions arise at unlikely moments.

Zappos was then nearly five years old. I'd gotten involved with the company as an investor after LinkExchange, which I'd cofounded, was sold to Microsoft in 1998. At first I thought that selling shoes online sounded like a poster child for bad internet ideas. But the founder of Zappos, Nick Swinmurn, explained that shoes were a $40 billion market in the U.S. and that 5% of them were already sold by mail order. What had started as just one of several dozen angel investments ended up as a job: By 2000 I had joined Zappos full-time. The company had survived the dot-com crash, and our gross merchandise sales were growing-up from zero in 1999 to $70 million in 2003. But for most of those years we had been short of cash and struggling to cope with growth.

In early 2004 our biggest problem was customer service-specifically, finding the right employees to staff our call center. A lot of people may think it's strange that an internet company would be so focused on the telephone, when only about 5% of our sales happen by phone. But we've found that on average, our customers telephone us at least once at some point, and if we handle the call well, we have an opportunity to create an emotional impact and a lasting memory. We receive thousands of phone calls and e-mails every day, and we view each one as an opportunity to build the Zappos brand into being about the very best customer service. Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

But that requires the right staff members-and our inability to find enough dedicated, high-caliber customer service reps near our San Francisco headquarters was turning into a huge problem. It's hard to find people in the Bay Area who want to make customer service a career. Culturally, it's not part of the Silicon Valley mentality. The high cost of living also plays a role: In San Francisco you can't afford to buy a home on a call center rep's salary. So most of the people working the phones for Zappos were temps, and they weren't always providing the wow experience our customers deserved.

How About Outsourcing?

By late 2003 we'd started looking at different options for expanding our call center. We initially considered outsourcing it to India or the Philippines, and we met with a few outsourcing companies. We got the whole sales pitch and listened in on sample calls. You could tell on the ones from India that the people talking were from another country. Accent aside, they just didn't understand the nuances of American culture. How would they be able to help a customer who asked, say, for shoes like the ones Julia Roberts wears in Eat, Pray, Love?

We were reluctant to outsource the call center, because we'd had bad experiences with outsourcing in the past. In fact, one of the big lessons of Zappos's first few years was that it never makes sense to outsource your core competency, especially if your aim is to be maniacal about customer service. In its earliest days, Zappos fulfilled orders with drop shipments: We didn't carry any inventory; instead we relied on shoe manufacturers to ship products directly to our customers.

That system never worked very well. We didn't have 100% accurate information about our vendors' inventory, and because their warehouses were all over the country, delivery times weren't predictable. So we stopped drop shipping and began buying inventory from manufacturers, but we outsourced the warehousing and shipping to a separate company in Kentucky. That didn't work well either. As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Trusting that a third party would care about our customers as much as we did was one of our biggest mistakes. If we hadn't reacted quickly by starting our own warehouse operation, that mistake would eventually have destroyed Zappos.

So we agreed that Zappos employees would staff the call center. But finding them in San Francisco remained a problem. One option would have been to set up a satellite call center, staffed by Zappos employees who were operating someplace far away. As we thought more about it, though, we realized that it wouldn't be matching our actions to our words. If we were serious about building our brand around being the best in customer service, customer service had to be the whole company, not just a single department.

1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company. It's not just a department.

2. Empower your customer service reps. Rarely should they have to escalate a customer's issue to a supervisor.

3. Fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.

4. Don't measure call times, don't upsell, and don't use scripts.

5. Don't hide your phone number. You want to talk to customers.

6. View the cost of handling customers' calls as an investment in marketing, not an expense.

7. Celebrate great service by telling exceptional stories to the entire company.

We decided we needed to move our entire headquarters from San Francisco to wherever we built the call center, whose staff we had recently named the Customer Loyalty Team, or CLT. We talked about lower-cost cities where housing would be cheaper and there would be a bigger supply of workers who might think being a phone rep for a fun, growing company was a viable career choice. We did a lot of research into real estate, wages, and the cost of living in various cities, and we narrowed down the list of possibilities to Phoenix, Louisville, Portland (Oregon), Des Moines, Sioux City, and Las Vegas.

Over lunch that afternoon at Chevys, we talked through our choices. Could the company afford the huge costs associated with moving its staff? How many of our employees would be willing to relocate to a new state? Would the potential upside be worth the disruption to our young company? What would be the best decision for our culture?

You Can Call Us Anytime

If we moved, it would be only the latest effort in Zappos's drive to achieve world-class customer service-a goal that has led us to run our business in a way that sets us apart from many of our competitors. In the United States we offer free shipping both ways to make transactions risk free and as easy as possible for our customers. A lot of them will order five different pairs of shoes and then send back the ones that don't fit or that they simply don't like-free of charge. The additional shipping costs are considerable for us, but we view them as a marketing expense. We also offer a 365-day returns policy for people who have trouble making up their minds. (Originally our returns policy was only 30 days, but we kept increasing it at the urging of our customers, who became more loyal as we lengthened the returns period.) Our returns run high-more than a third of our gross revenue-but we've learned that customers will buy more and be happier in the long run if we can remove most of the risk from shopping at Zappos.

Our customer service orientation is also apparent on our website. On many websites the contact information is buried at least five links deep, because the company doesn't really want to hear from you. And when you find it, it's a form or an e-mail address. We take the exact opposite approach. We put our phone number (it's 800-927-7671, in case you'd like to call) at the top of every single page of our website, because we actually want to talk to our customers. And we staff our call center 24/7.

Looking at every one of our interactions through a branding lens instead of an expense-minimizing lens means that we run our call center very differently from others. For instance, most call centers measure their employees' performance on the basis of what's known in the industry as "average handle time," which focuses on how many phone calls each rep can take in a day. This translates into reps' worrying about how quickly they can get a customer off the phone-which in our eyes is not delivering great customer service. Most call centers also have scripts and force their reps to try upselling to generate additional revenue.

At Zappos we don't hold reps accountable for call times. (Our longest phone call, from a customer who wanted the rep's help while she looked at what seemed like thousands of pairs of shoes, lasted almost six hours.) And we don't upsell-a practice that usually just annoys customers. We care only whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don't have scripts, because we want our reps to let their true personalities shine during every phone call, so that they can develop a personal emotional connection with each customer, which we refer to as a PEC.

One observer who spent time inside the Zappos call center described the conversations between customers and reps as resembling "protracted therapy sessions." In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh describes a customer who engaged a Zappos rep in a live chat and adopted the persona of an extremely quirky guy named "Timmy," just to see how the rep would handle it. Here's an edited transcript:

Jonathan: Hello, Timmy. How can I help you?

Timmy: Do you know how wide the G-Shock Atomic Solar watch is? Timmy has a big fat wrist. Timmy need watch grande.

I'll see what I can find out for Timmy.

Awesome. And can we please continue to talk about Timmy in the third person? Timmy likes to boost Timmy's ego by talking about Timmy that way.

Jonathan would be happy to neglect the use of pronouns for the duration of this conversation.

Jonathan and Timmy shall get along just fine.

Jonathan thinks this watch will work out well for Timmy. The watch's circumfrence is nine inches, so it will probably fit around Timmy's wrist.

Do your watches and stuff have free return shipping like your zapatos? In case Timmy wants another one or something?

As long as the watch is in its original condition and in the original packaging, Timmy has 365 days to return Timmy's order. We will even pay for the return ship! As always, our shipping to Timmy will be free.

Timmy thanks Jonathan for good help.
It's Jonathan's pleasure!
When one of our reps found out that because of a death in the family, a loyal customer had forgotten to mail back a pair of shoes she'd planned to return, the rep sent her flowers; now she's a customer for life. Once, at a shoe sales conference in Santa Monica, after a long night of barhopping, a small group of us headed up to someone's hotel room to order food, but room service had closed at 11. When we couldn't find a place that delivered food after midnight, a couple of us cajoled a woman (who didn't work at Zappos) into calling a Zappos rep for help while we listened in on speakerphone. The rep was a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. Two minutes later she told us the five closest places in Santa Monica that were still open and delivering pizzas.

There's a lot of buzz these days about social media and "integration marketing." Our belief is that as unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for five or 10 minutes, and if you get the interaction right, the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.

Usually when marketing departments do their ROI calculations, they assume that the lifetime value of a customer is fixed. We view it as something that can grow if we create positive emotional associations with our brand. To that end, most of our efforts at customer service actually happen after we've already made a sale. For example, for most of our loyal repeat customers, we do surprise upgrades to overnight shipping, even when they have chosen the free ground-shipping option. Our warehouse is open around the clock every day, which is costly. The most efficient way to run a warehouse is to let the orders pile up, so that when a worker walks around picking up orders, the picking density is higher and the worker has less distance to walk. But we're not trying to maximize picking efficiency. We're trying to maximize the customer experience, which in e-commerce involves getting orders out to customers as quickly as possible.

What We're Learning from Amazon

In the debate about moving our headquarters, we settled on Las Vegas. We didn't consult with our board or our investors-we just told them we were doing it. (It may have helped that Nevada has no income tax; some of them probably figured we were moving for tax reasons.) Las Vegas wasn't the cheapest option we considered, but we thought it would make our current employees the happiest. It also made sense for other reasons. It's an all-night city where employees are used to working at any hour, which would help us find people willing to take the overnight shift at our call center. And because so much of the city's economy is focused on hospitality, Las Vegas has a customer service mentality-employees there are used to thinking of people as guests.

Two days after the lunch at Chevys, we held a company meeting and announced that we were relocating to Las Vegas. We would pay the moving costs for any employees who came along, and we'd help them find new homes. When the announcement was made, everyone in the conference room was in a state of shock. We told everyone to take a week before making a decision one way or the other.

We had about 90 employees in San Francisco at the time, and I had guessed that maybe half of them would decide to uproot and move with the company. A week later I was pleasantly surprised to learn that 70 were willing to give Vegas a shot. In their minds it was all about being adventurous and open-minded. The move cost about $500,000 altogether, which was a significant amount of money for us at the time. It also cost us some good people: Our star software developer loved San Francisco and decided not to leave. Some of those who did move were taking a real leap of faith. One employee had been with Zappos only 10 days (and married for only 15) when we announced we were moving. He came with us-and, luckily for him, so did his wife.

Although our timing could have been better (we moved at the height of the real estate boom in Las Vegas, and subsequently property values dropped across the board), the move paid off in several ways. When we arrived in Vegas, we had no one to lean on except one another. Our company culture, which had always been strong, became even more so. As we grew, we made sure we hired only people we would enjoy hanging out with after hours. As it happened, many of our best ideas arose while we were having drinks at a local bar.

By 2008 we had hit $1 billion in gross merchandise sales. But the economic slowdown made for a crazy year. Even though we were still growing, we realized that our expenses were too high for the revenue we were bringing in. We had planned on faster growth, and discovered that we'd overhired. Late in the year we decided to lay off 8% of the staff. It was one of the hardest decisions we've ever had to make.

In 2009 we agreed to sell ownership of Zappos to Amazon. Amazon has always described its goal as being the most customer-centric company in the world, but its approach is more high-tech than ours, with a focus on using web design and functionality to make the shopping experience so easy for customers that they don't have to call the company. Ours is more high-touch-we try to make a personal connection. Since the sale, we've learned from Amazon's technology: We've started to track some metrics Amazon tracks, and we're learning how it thinks about warehouse operations. We've also expanded far beyond shoes. Now Zappos sells a wide assortment of clothing, housewares, cosmetics, and other items.

Today we have more than 1,800 employees. We offer starting pay for call center reps of around $11 an hour-typical for reps in Vegas-but because Zappos is known as a great place to work (we made Fortune's "Best Companies to Work For" list for the second time in a row this year), we have no shortage of applicants. Last year 25,000 people applied for jobs with us, and we hired only 250. Someone told me that statistically it's harder to get a job at Zappos than it is to get admitted to Harvard, which says a lot about the strength of the culture we've created here.

By providing stellar service, Zappos has made steady gains in gross revenue. But its customers take full advantage of its generous returns policy, cutting into profits. In 2008, for instance, they returned $379 million worth of goods, or 37% of purchases. And pleasing customers with around-the-clock phone service and frequent upgrades to overnight shipping carries high costs, leaving only a small profit margin-just 1% in 2008.

Click here for a larger image of the graphic.
Looking back, I attribute most of our growth over the past few years to the fact that we invested time, money, and resources in three key areas: customer service, company culture, and employee training and development. The move to Las Vegas helped us make progress in each of the three. If you'd like to hear what our telephone reps sound like, just pick up the phone and give us a call.

A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How I Did It: Zappos's CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2004 the biggest problem the online shoe retailer Zappos faced was how to staff its customer call center with dedicated, high-caliber service reps. The company's headquarters were in San Francisco, where the high cost of living-and the upwardly mobile Silicon Valley mentality-deterred people from making customer service a career.

# data[].attributes.body
Typing this title I suddenly realized how odd it is to see the title "headhunter'. I wonder the etymology. In any case, Forbes is fond of lists and made one for best recruiters.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you speak with startup founders or large-company CEOs, they'll probably tell you that hiring good people is their biggest challenge. It's no wonder there are thousands of recruiting firms in the U.S., all vying to help companies get talent in the door. But which recruiters are the most well-respected?

Forbes worked with analytics firm Statista to compile two lists of America's best recruiting firms. The first set ranks 250 executive search firms, defined as companies that place executives in positions with at least $100,000 in annual pay. The second ranks 250 professional search firms, which place employees in roles with less than $100,000 in annual income.

Click below to view the full lists:

To see the 10 most highly-rated companies in each category, open the gallery.

To conduct its research, Statista first consulted with sources like trade organizations and company databases, identifying about 4,000 recruiters in each of the two categories. Then it invited thousands of recruiters, employees who have worked with recruiters over the past three years, and H.R. managers to take an online survey. The survey asked them to recommend up to 10 recruiting firms (excluding their own), and it gathered a total of 20,000 recommendations. The companies with the most recommendations ranked highest.

Robert Half, a recruiting firm based in Silicon Valley, was the only company to make the top 10 on both the professional and executive recruiters lists. It has 16,400 employees, made $5.3 billion in revenue last year and is a member of the S&P 500. Robert Half places candidates in a range of industries, including finance, law, technology and marketing.

Korn Ferry took the top spot on the executive recruiters list. The Los Angeles-based company has 7,000 employees and works with 93% of the highest-grossing companies in the U.S. It places candidates in dozens of sectors, ranging from investment banking to industrial manufacturing and education.

New York had more recruiters on the lists than any other city, with 41 executive recruiting firms and 18 professional recruiting firms. Chicago had the second-most, followed by Atlanta.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are thousands of recruiting firms in the U.S., all vying to help companies get talent in the door. But which recruiters are the most well-respected? Forbes worked with analytics firm Statista to compile two lists of America's best recruiting firms.

# data[].attributes.body
Having a good recruiter is just as valuable to a job seeker as it is to an employer. Looking for a job is a very tough process and it's good to have someone helping along the journey.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
So you've made the decision that it's time for a new job and have started to reach out to friends about possible openings. It's nearly inevitable that you'll soon be asked, "Have you reached out to recruiters?"

Ironically, although the question seems straightforward, it's a tough one to answer. I'll admit, before entering the career services industry I couldn't tell you the difference between a recruiter, a headhunter, and a career coach.

Simply put: A career coach provides advice on anything and everything related to your career, an in-house recruiter acquires talent for their organization, and an agency recruiter, which is also known as a headhunter, helps a multitude of companies find talent. So, when someone asks if you're working with recruiters plural, it's safe to say they're referring to headhunters.

Working with a headhunter comes with a number of potential benefits. Most importantly, it provides a clear path to a hiring manager's inbox. In addition, this person can give insight into what the company's looking for, tips for a successful interview, and even advice on salary negotiation (though career coaches can do this, too). Most receive commission, so the more money they get you, the more they'll receive in turn.

Oftentimes, headhunters will find you. You may receive an email or call on your cell or at work-seemingly from out of absolutely nowhere. In reality though, they've tracked you down in a highly intentional manner and see you as a possible fit for an opportunity.

While most recruiting agencies pay to subscribe to sites providing company org charts, emails and phone numbers, there are some ways to increase your visibility to up your chances of being contacted.

1. Get Yourself There

First, is your resume up-to-date? If not, here's how to do it fast. If yes, share it with your network in order to increase your chances of receiving a referral.

How about your social media? Is it shiny and SFW? Have you thought about building a personal website? If you haven't yet, spent time building one out.

In addition to getting your social media platforms in great shape, you'll want to design a LinkedIn profile with keywords that's attention-grabbing while maximizing your experiences and accomplishments.

Not sure if you've checked off all those LinkedIn boxes? This worksheet will help.

2. Figure Out Which Headhunter Agency Is Right for You

Good first steps in finding agency names include: Asking friends who they've worked with in the past, your career coach (if you have one) for recommendations, HR professionals in your network for a referral (they often partner with agencies), or search for 'recruiters' or 'recruiting agencies' via LinkedIn or Google.

Check out agency sites online to find the necessary information on whether they're able to help you. Recruiting agencies aren't one-size-fits-all, so start by researching the industries in which the agency specializes.

Then take a look at their geographic reach. Some are nationwide while others are regional or even local. Lastly, be sure to look into the levels at which they typically place candidates (i.e., temp, full-time, entry-level, director level).

3. Get Your Name and Goals Front and Center

Once you've found the agency that fits your industry, location, and level, be brave and reach out. Since recruiters are extremely active on LinkedIn their profiles should be well-developed, that means you should take the time to research who you're dealing with.

You can either send a LinkedIn message or email (you can usually find an email address on the agency's site). Or, another option to know about is that many agencies have an area for job seekers to upload a resume for consideration. This step gets you into the company's candidate management system for future opportunities without you having to do much work.

In addition, you can also reach out via phone. Although most industries discourage unsolicited calls, "pounding the phones" happens to be a recruiting industry standard, and calls in this scenario are accepted and even encouraged. Regardless of your approach, you want to be sure you're able to highlight past experiences and accomplishments and specify what you're looking for next.

4. Follow-up Like It's Your Job

Set a reminder on your calendar to check in with the headhunter regularly. Whether you're being considered for a position, and the process seems to be dragging, or if you're waiting for the next opportunity to come along that may fit your profile, don't be afraid to reach out and politely ask for an update.

A recruiter may be dealing with hundreds of candidates spread out across a number of roles that they're looking to fill, and your goal is to make sure you don't get lost in the mix. One trick I like to suggest is to be generous yourself.

If they're having trouble filling certain positions outside your area of interest or skill set, suggest people in your network they might reach out to. This will make you a mutually beneficial asset and increase the likelihood that your name is thought of when a position that fits your qualifications comes about.

As you get comfortable adding headhunters to your job-search approach, remember not to take anything personally. And also understand that this is just one part of your strategy-don't make it the only thing you do and expect everything to fall in place just like that. Rather, think of it as a valuable tool that'll get you even closer to landing your dream job.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
So you've made the decision that it's time for a new job and have started to reach out to friends about possible openings. It's nearly inevitable that you'll soon be asked, "Have you reached out to recruiters?" Ironically, although the question seems straightforward, it's a tough one to answer.

# data[].attributes.body
I'm sure I'll be able to refer back to this collection of articles. This is a good resource for later.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tips

Ask the most experienced professionals in your network to refer you to the recruiters they know.

Seek recruiter referrals on boards hosted by their trade association, professional society or alma mater.

Building relationships with recruiters may expose you to career opportunities that you might not learn about otherwise. Most employers don't advertise the positions they hire recruiters to help fill, which are typically a firm's most senior and highest-paying. And search executives usually promote their services to employers, not job hunters.

Identifying and connecting with recruiters who specialize in your area of expertise can be very worthwhile - though candidates should remember that recruiters are paid by the employer, and will put that employer's interests first. Such niche recruiters aren't always easy to find, so job seekers might need to use creative tactics.

Here are some ways of identifying recruiters who specialize in your area of expertise.

Start by tapping your own network. Many senior executives work with recruiters at some point in their careers as a candidate or client. Ask the most experienced professionals in your network to refer you to the recruiters they know.

Other sources are people you know in your industry or at organizations that interest you. Find out which recruiting firms their employers use. Don't be discouraged if the list you compile is short. In certain niche markets, there are recruiters who pretty much work with all big players, so you'll typically hear the same name several times.

A good way to stay on a recruiter's radar screen is to suggest names of prospects you know for jobs the recruiter is seeking to fill, but for which you don't qualify. Be sure to offer quality referrals because inappropriate recommendations can reflect poorly on you.

Scan recruiter directories. Your local library may have these resources available at no charge.

RileyGuide.com, a free online job-search resource, has a listing of recruiter directories, some free to users online, such as Oya's Directory of Recruiters, among others. Most fee-based directories are more up-to-date and offer better search options.

Kennedy Information Inc. publishes RecruiterRedbook.com, the online database version of its book "The Directory of Executive Recruiters 2007-2008." Both cost $59.95 and list 16,500 recruiters at more than 5,700 search firms. The database comes as an annual subscription. Kennedy, based in Peterborough, N.H., also publishes SelectRecruiters.com, offering a downloadable spreadsheet, handy for mass mailing a resume to recruiters, for a one-time fee of $1 per spreadsheet and a minimum payment of $30. (Kennedy is a business partner of CareerJournal.com.)

BlueSteps.com, from the Association of Executive Search Consultants, includes a database of more than 4,000 recruiters from its member firms, along with other features. Access to the database costs $299 for two years, among other pricing options.

Some free recruiter directories include recruiterlink.com, onlinerecruitersdirectory.com, searchfirm.com and i-recruit.com.

You can also search for recruiters' profiles online. Many recruiters have profiles on networking sites such as LinkedIn.com, Ecademy.com and Doostang.com. To find them, do a keyword search or ask fellow members for referrals.

LinkedIn.com, for instance, carries about 90,000 recruiter profiles and most list a specialty. It's free to join and search the site, though other features require paid membership. To find recruiters' profiles, click on the "advanced search" tool at the top of the home page for members. In the Industry category, select "corporate services," then choose "staffing and recruiting." Enter a keyword, such as the recruiter specialty you're seeking, and then hit "search."

Message boards may have postings that relate to specialists in your search area. Check career-networking sites. In addition, job hunters can seek recruiter referrals on boards hosted by their trade association, professional society or alma mater.

Members of Netshare.com, a networking Web site for executives, frequently post queries for referrals on its discussion boards. (Netshare is a business partner of CareerJournal.com.) Netshare, a membership organization based in Novato, Calif., costs $40 a month to $360 a year to join. In addition to career-related groups, job hunters can seek recruiter referrals on boards hosted by their trade association, professional society or alma mater.

Remember to read the business press. Recruiters often are quoted in news media. If you read about one who interests you, type the recruiter's name into a search engine to find his or her contact information.

News stories announcing executive changes can be another source of recruiter leads. They often mention the search firm a company has hired to find a replacement.

Check trade or industry groups for referrals. Many recruiters belong to an association in their specialty. These groups may include a roster of members on their Web sites. If you join, you'll likely have opportunities to network with recruiter members.

Call top employers in your industry. Dial the main number and request to be transferred to the human-resources department. Then ask the HR employee who answers which search firm the company uses. But this tactic is likely a shot in the dark, as the employee might only give the information if the company was working with a recruiting firm on a search at the time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ask the most experienced professionals in your network to refer you to the recruiters they know. Seek recruiter referrals on boards hosted by their trade association, professional society or alma mater. Building relationships with recruiters may expose you to career opportunities that you might not learn about otherwise.

# data[].attributes.body
The keyword search omits many qualified people from jobs. So many loops and turns to get a job.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979, and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community over the past decade.
In this special Making Sense edition of Ask The Headhunter, Nick shares insider advice and contrarian methods about winning and keeping the right job, on one condition: that you, dear Making Sense reader, send Nick your questions about your personal challenges with job hunting, interviewing, networking, resumes, job boards, or salary negotiations. No guarantees - just a promise to do his best to offer useful advice.
In last week's column, "Here's why your resume isn't getting traction," I suggested that you don't need a resume to get a job. In fact, I think relying on a resume to get you in the door diminishes your chances of competing successfully against the hundreds or thousands of people applying for a job. I said the far better approach is meeting people who do the kind of work you want to do - and then meeting hiring managers through trusted personal referrals.

Our readers piled on in the comments section, stirring lively debate. Quite a few told stories about how they find their jobs through personal contacts. More disagreed with me and said things like this:

"Even if you network and learn about a position, you are told to apply online."

"You don't even know the name of the hiring manager or anyone working on the team."

"The author makes it sound like meeting people within a random company is just the easiest thing in the world."

Their willingness to cower before "the rules" troubles me, as does their hesitation to make and use personal contacts. There are ways around these objections, and we'll discuss them in next week's column.

For now, I want to focus on why job seekers are so brainwashed. HR convinces them that there is only one way to get an interview and a job: submitting a resume and waiting. I think that's absolutely wrong.

One commenter offered what I think is a scary perspective that reveals a lot about why talented people get rejected before a hiring manager even knows they have submitted an application. I think this is where employment problems begin. (For more about this, see "The Recruiting Paradox," about why companies send a personnel clerk to do a hiring manager's job.)

Erin Beth Grote: As a recruiter [who works in HR], I hate phone calls, and do NOT do walk-in appointments - MUCH prefer resumes. Anyone can talk the talk. Let your experience and skill at presenting yourself in writing show... that will tell me what kind of business writing skills you have, and what sort of knowledge base you will bring to my company.

Please don't bother me trying to convince me of how you are a hard-worker, and learn quickly... everyone says that. Write a great cover letter, learn how to write measurable, MEANINGFUL and pertinent achievements on your resume, and send it in. Customize your resume and cover letter for EVERY position you send in, and double and triple check it.

That being said, some of the advice in this article IS worth while. Research the company BEFORE you apply. Learn more about the job you are applying for than just what is in the job description. Networking is great, you can learn not just what the company does, but if you actually want to work there...

How does a recruiter know from a piece of writing (a resume) that an engineer, marketer, scientist, programmer or biologist is worth talking to, especially when the recruiter has no real expertise in any of those fields? We both know that anyone can hire a professional resume writer to script that document - so you really don't know at all how good a "presenter" the applicant is, much less how good they are at their job.

I've seen so many good people come off poorly in a resume that I will not rely on a resume as an introduction to me or to my client.

I've seen so many good people come off poorly in a resume that I will not rely on a resume as an introduction to me or to my client. I want direct contact and a trusted professional referral. (That's what recruiting is really all about; it's not about posting ads and fielding applications in an armchair.) I find the resume approach to be a lazy way to recruit that demonstrates incredible bias and overlooks suitable talent.

You've just described all that's wrong with recruiting today. "If you actually want to work here..." sounds like a threat that tells people, "I'm not an engineer, marketer, scientist, programmer, or biologist in my company.... but I will decide whether you're good enough at your specialized work to make it to the hiring manager for an interview, and you'd better do it my way, or else..."

This is precisely why employers miss out on good hires - because they judge people by keywords. And because the first cut is made by recruiters, not hiring managers.

It's frankly an insane business practice. I think it's the root cause of America's phony "talent shortage." There's no shortage - just an abject failure to directly assess the people applying for a job. (See "Unemployment - Made in America by Employers.")

What you are doing is not recruiting; it's paper shuffling. You are scanning keywords as they flow across your computer display. You are "hiring who comes along" - it's not active, responsible recruiting.

(While I may seem to be knocking HR alone, I offer similar cautions to job seekers about headhunters. I try to answer a frustrated job seeker's blunt question in this column: "Why do recruiters suck so bad?")

Real recruiters go out into the field and actually meet, talk to and learn about the people they want to recruit. They go after the people they need to hire by spending time in the professional communities where their targets live and work. They don't pluck people from a list of keywords without really knowing anything about them. And they don't reject people based on words on a document that was probably written by someone else.

While you, as an HR recruiter, are adamant about how people will get into your company, a hiring manager tells a different story: "Why Insiders Get Hired - And You Don't."

Next week, we'll look at a challenge from a frustrated commenter on last week's column about why your resume isn't getting traction:

pazczyk: Here's a bet for you: pretend you are a new, entry-level employee, just starting out. Or perhaps an older person embarking on a second (or third) career, or returning to the workforce after raising a family. Get yourself a solid, entry-level, basic-office resume. Now, go find work. I'd love to see that experiment.

I'll offer a step-by-step way to do your own experiment, without a resume, and without having to deal with any HR gatekeepers.
Dear Readers: I think employers' practice of using a gatekeeper, who is not expert in the work you do, to reject you is bogus and dangerous to any company that wants to hire the best people. Do you believe there's a problem with how employers recruit and hire? Nick Corcodilos invites Making Sense readers to subscribe to his free weekly Ask The Headhunter© Newsletter. His in-depth "how to" PDF books are available on his website: "How to Work With Headhunters...and how to make headhunters work for you," "How Can I Change Careers?", "Keep Your Salary Under Wraps" and "Fearless Job Hunting."
Send your questions to Nick, and join him for discussion every week here on Making Sense. Thanks for participating!
Copyright © 2013 Nick Corcodilos. All rights reserved in all media. Ask the Headhunter® is a registered trademark.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ask the Headhunter: Avoid the laziest way to find a job, and you just might get one

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979, and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community over the past decade. In this special Making Sense edition of Ask The Headhunter, Nick shares insider advice and contrarian methods about winning and keeping the right job, on one condition: that you, dear Making Sense reader, send Nick your questions about your personal challenges with job hunting, interviewing, networking, resumes, job boards, or salary negotiations.