My colleague, Sarah Milstein, just wrote a book on Twitter (conveniently called “The Twitter Book”). Before her book came out, I liked to think of Sarah as my own private Twitter tutor. She was the 21st user of the service and tried to get me interested in it back in 2006. I resisted. I couldn’t see why I’d want yet another communication tool in my already over-communicated life. Once I got started though, I had a fairly typical Twitter path, moving from resistance to hooked in a matter of weeks. I recently read that Twitter is a little like coffee. It tastes awful at first, but then suddenly you’re addicted. (Anyone know where I read this so I can give credit?)

I asked Sarah to collaborate with me on a post about five ways to use Twitter in your career. If you’ve never even visited Twitter.com, this is a good primer on how to set up an account and get started. If you’re already on the service, but still don’t really get it, read this.

And now, our five tips: {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

My colleague, Sarah Milstein, just wrote a book on Twitter (conveniently called “The Twitter Book”). Before her book came out, I liked to think of Sarah as my own private Twitter tutor. She was the 21st user of the service and tried to get me interested in it back in 2006. I resisted. I couldn’t see why I’d want yet another communication tool in my already over-communicated life. Once I got started though, I had a fairly typical Twitter path, moving from resistance to hooked in a matter of weeks. I recently read that Twitter is a little like coffee. It tastes awful at first, but then suddenly you’re addicted. (Anyone know where I read this so I can give credit?)

I asked Sarah to collaborate with me on a post about five ways to use Twitter in your career. If you’ve never even visited Twitter.com, this is a good primer on how to set up an account and get started. If you’re already on the service, but still don’t really get it, read this.

And now, our five tips:

Keep up with industry news. Follow thought leaders and/or people who post links to new ideas in your field. To find people in your sector, try tools like MrTweet.com and wefollow.com, which organize Twitter users by category. Once you’ve followed a few smart, relevant people, you’ll have created a customized news feed of headlines that interest you. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

Several weeks ago, I saw Suzy Welch on the Today show talking about her new book, 10-10-10. The book offers a simple tool for making decisions in all corners of life.

Here’s how it works: When working through a decision, you let yourself go down various paths and you explore the way the decision could unfold on those various paths over the next 10 minutes, over the next 10 months, and over the next 10 years. Those time frames aren’t meant to be exact; they are stand-ins meant to help you look at how the making of an important decision might affect the short-term, the medium-term, and long-term periods of your life.

From the moment I saw that interview, I was 10-10-10-ing every decision, from whether to take a new assignment that threatened to ruin a pre-planned vacation, to how to confront a close friend who had offended me. My old standby of writing down pros and cons was quickly supplanted by this new method, and I’ve now tested it in scores of situations. In short, I’m a believer. Which is why I wanted to share Welch’s ideas on this blog. I interviewed her by phone about how to use 10-10-10 to make better decisions around career issues. The following is an edited version of our conversation:

{Read the rest at Yahoo!}

I was raised with business in the background and the foreground. When I was in middle school, my parents bought their first motel — a small beachfront property on the Jersey Shore — and moved our family into an apartment on the second floor. We lived like that, alongside my parents’ work, for the rest of my teen years until I went off to college. Working for yourself feels natural to me, so it’s not all that surprising that I followed their path. But the model of self-employment I’ve chosen is worlds apart from theirs. They ran a physical business with employees and property. I work entirely on my own, with a laptop, a phone, a virtual assistant and a rotating group of colleagues and clients.

Like it or not, more people are going to be joining the ranks of the self-employed whether they do it in my parents’ style, in mine, or in some other way altogether.

If you didn’t grow up with entrepreneurship in your DNA, one way to catch up is to study at the heels of Pamela Slim, a consultant, life coach and blogger whose new book, Escape from Cubicle Nation, is a roadmap to self-employment. I chatted with Slim about how the current economy is affecting people striking out on their own, how to launch a business on the side, and whether it’s possible to warm to self-employment when it’s not your natural inclination. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

I’m in the middle of reading The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, a memoir by Jacqueline Novogratz. The book traces her journey from her time as a young banker in Africa to her current role as the founder of the Acumen Fund, a new kind of venture fund that invests in market-oriented approaches to solving problems like access to health, water, housing and energy, around the world.

As I thought about her life, I started wondering what is it that makes people like Novogratz able to do what the rest of us merely wish we had the ability to do — make real contact with people in need and actually do something to move them out of poverty. I was especially curious about what Novogratz would say to people living in the developed world who are so worried about their own diminished financial well-being that they find it hard to imagine how they could meaningfully affect the lives of less fortunate people in Africa or Pakistan.

So I had a meeting and a series of email conversations with her to get some answers, and some inspiration. After the jump is a condensed version of our discussion. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

Personal branding has been one of the hottest buzz phrases ever since Tom Peters wrote a Fast Company article way back in 1997 that turned into the book, The Brand Called You. The notion is that individuals are all brands — much like our running shoes and kitchen appliances (though some of us are clearly more running shoe than refrigerator). And from that flows that logic that we all need to cultivate and nurture our brands so they thrive and prosper just as the brands managed by big business.

There’s a new kid on the personal branding block — Dan Schawbel — and he’s taken Peters’ principles to their next logical incarnation — branding in the social media age. I call him a “kid” because at 25, he is also part of the new generation of Internet wunderkinds who have become so adept at spreading their ideas online that they write their first books and hit the morning show circuit when barely out of college.

Now that we are all publishers — writing personal blogs, answering questions on LinkedIn, updating our status on Facebook or Twitter — Schawbel has a message that is very much of the moment. Which is that we need to harness these tools in order to convey our personal brand to the world. And once we do that, we will not only find career opportunities, but they will find us. (Read the rest at Yahoo!)

I’ve just returned from the annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference at Harvard where the mood was a mix of anxiety and inspiration. The anxiety came from the many staffers who had recently lost jobs or were preparing for that possibility. The inspiration came from the heady conversations about craft and narrative that typically characterize this gathering of master storytellers and those aspiring to that title.

Since this was a conference where almost all the attendees and speakers were journalists, and where people were live blogging and tweeting, there are plenty of vivid recaps of the event. So I’ll spare you the full-blown summary.

Read more »

Jonathan Fields

I’m starting a new interview series where I’ll be catching up with people at various stages of a career transition or reinvention. In some cases, the subjects will be folks I’ve profiled before, as is the case with my first guest, Jonathan Fields. I met Jonathan in the Fall of 2001 when I interviewed him for this New York Times article on businesses that were thriving in post-9/11 New York City. At that time, Jonathan had recently left a position as an associate with Debevoise and Plimpton to open Sonic Yoga, a yoga studio in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen.

In 2003, I wrote a follow-up story on him for the Times, this time focusing on Jonathan’s path from corporate lawyer to entrepreneurial yogi.

Jonathan is in the midst of yet another identity shift as he has just published his first book, Career Renegade, which is steadily climbing the Amazon rankings.
Read more »

This morning, the public radio show, The Takeaway, invited me to come on to talk about underemployment. {Listen here.} Specifically, they wanted some advice for the growing number of people who are working part-time but would prefer to be working full time, and for people who are working in jobs for which they are overqualified.

As background, the producers sent me this interesting article from Slate.com by Daniel Gross. According to the article, though the unemployment rate might not be as low as it was, say, in 2003, those numbers might not tell the whole story since neither the unemployment rate nor the payroll jobs figures captures “people who work part-time because they can’t find — or their employer can’t provide — full-time work” or “people who have left the work force entirely.”
Read more »