EDITORIALS

The classic cruel joke of job search is that the client is looking for someone just like you, but much younger.Of course, no one can use these exact words out of fear of getting sued for age discrimination, which we all know is illegal. Setting illogically low levels of experience and/or d...

As the days of fall begin to arrive in the Northeast and the trees begin to change colors, it is all very beautiful. (However, yesterday it rained hard all day and today it was very windy.) Earlier this month I mostly finished decommissioning our sailboat for the season. This past weekend ...

I often wonder to myself how politicians can do so much lying and get away with it. Okay, sometimes we boot them out of office for lying, but we only replace them with new folks who also lie.The truth I suppose is subject to each person’s individual judgment. What one person considers to b...

One of the core values of The FENG is our willingness to share job leads with each other.For some reason people seem to overvalue job leads. There are lots of things that are wrong with published job leads. For one thing, it is a fair fight. I much prefer networking where there is often no...

For those of us who read the newspaper from time to time, one can’t help but notice that just about everyone who is mentioned in any story is given a label.The label selected is usually something very simple such as “a 46 year old truck driver from Illinois.” In this case it is someone’s c...

For those of you who were flying road warriors before Covid-19, I can understand that you may no longer remember the very helpful discussion that preceded take off.Personally, I don’t think that anyone who doesn’t know how to work the seat belt should really be let out alone to wander the ...

The process of self-assessment is never easy. It is sort of like taking out your own appendix, but without anesthetic.As senior financial folks, it is often the case that we don’t have to engage ourselves in the game of “What is it we do? And, who are we?” until very late in our careers. U...

Every once in a while I get a note from one of our members about folks who are promising to find him/her a job by waving their magic wand.I can almost see these so called miracle workers crawling out from under the rocks they call home. You would think that exposure to sunlight would kill ...

As a group I think you will agree that most financial folks tend to be modest. I am not sure, but I think there was a required course on the dangers of bragging back in college, because it is like pulling teeth to get most members to provide an honest assessment of what they did.There were...

I’m not sure why human beings resist change. It is truly the only constant in our world.For almost 6 years I worked for The Thomson Corporation, a company that was really into change. I used to joke that we reorganized every week even when it wasn’t really necessary, just to keep in practi...

Since we have many new members each year AND many members who may be active again from time to time, I thought it might be a good idea if I wrote about our “qualified members only” approach to responding to job leads and why it works for you.First, let’s understand that posted jobs are onl...

Anyone involved in personal selling will tell you that one of the more difficult tasks faced by any salesperson is handling customer objections.The easiest customer objections to handle are the ones the customer tells you about. Innocent sounding questions like “What colors does it come in...

As I hope all of you know, I have a consulting practice called The Financial Executives Consulting Group, LLC. (As time permits, please visit our website: www.TheFECG.com to see what we do.) Bruce Lynn is my business partner. We both also devote significant amounts of time on a volunteer b...

It is a sad fact of life that no one ever has enough friends. Men in particular (and our membership is 90% men) seem to have a difficult time making friends.The whole “guy thing” sort of works against us, I suppose. Men are supposed to be strong and never need help from anyone. Remember wh...

Remember back at the beginning of time when you would return to school in the fall and would have to write something about what you did all summer?Oh how I envied all those kids who did exciting things over the summer. We didn’t have a lot of money and my father was a plumbing contractor, ...

It is at all times important to remember that Americans live in the present and the future.If you want to sound like an old person all you have to do is spout phrases like “I remember when gas was 25 cents a gallon.” Or, “I remember when we did spreadsheets with pencils and calculators.”To...

I would be the first one to agree that finding ways to keep in touch with your business contacts during a job search is more art than science. That said the old saw “out of sight, out of mind” applies here.At the end of my two year job search which began in 1991, I had about 1,400 index ca...

Personally, I am not a big fan of art museums. Sure, there are particular “objects of art” that I find to be of interest, but I guess I find the walking around part a little tiring.For amusement during these art museum tours I try to overhear what the tour guides are saying. The at length ...

One of the biggest problems you face as a senior financial executive is that you have too many product benefits. In a very real sense, you are too good to be true.For those of you who have been hearing you are “over qualified,” let me suggest to you that you are. After over 20 years of wor...

Have you ever felt you didn’t know anything about computers? I do all the time, and I have been using them since my first Apple IIe.Still, there is just so much to know and so much to learn. And, the rules keep changing. Things that work on one computer don’t work on my next one. (Why Micr...

“They” say (I don’t know who they are) that searching for a job is filled with highs and lows.It doesn’t matter who you may have heard it from or how often you heard these words of consolation, if you have been through a long job search, you know the feelings. I suppose we can find ways to...