Work Daze

It’s happened again! Just when you thought you had mastered every new technique to screw up your career, technology has stuck out its big fat foot and tripped you up again. Now, you not only have to craft a winning resume on paper and in email, but you also have to provide your potential employer with a sizzling video that will sell you as effectively as Velveeta cheese or Oscar Meyer bologna.

A re you ready for your close-up? I hope so. Welcome, chump, to the age of the video resume.

The concept of the video resume was to be expected, I expect, what with all the kafuffle about YouTube and vlogs and video dating. We live in a muli-input society, and you can’t escape a video screen no matter where you go. Even Big Brother didn’t put video in elevators and bathrooms, nor did it take a totalitarian regime to erect 60-inch plasma at the end of your bed.

Our sudden pain at making our video debuts is nothing but pleasure for the folks at Workblast.com, a newly hatched website designed to foster video-based job searching. According to Nicholas Murphy, one of WorkBlast’s highly photogenic founders. “We live in an on-demand world where people want the most detailed information to make a decision, as well as the ability to make that decision quickly.”

Though I am not 100% convinced that we do live in an “on-demand world” – I wished for a jelly donut a half hour ago and it has still not appeared – I have no doubt that given the opportunity to make us look silly and vulnerable, hiring managers will jump on the video resume bandwagon.

“I’m giving you two thumbs up for your qualifications,” some HR flunky will someday inform you. “But that camera move in your job history was a complete cliché, and I just didn’t feel your emotion when you talked about your marketing experience between June, 2003 and December, 2005.”

Hey, our managers can’t do their own jobs without major blunders. How do we expect them to make the right decisions as movie critics?

If you must make a video resume, rest assured there are professional coaches to assist you – for a fee. In fact, using video as a teaching tool has a long history in the coaching business. Consider Bill McGowan, a former anchor for ABC News and now the founder of Clarity Media Group. “Many people don’t have the proper experience in being engaging and welcoming in this piece of technology,” the executive coach told The New York Times. “How do they engage a piece of metal with the same kind of warmth that they might engage someone individually.”

Speaking personally, my managers relate much better to pieces of metal than to my flabby flesh, but that’s beside the point. For a measly few thousand a day, a media coach can teach you how to make love to the camera. Or you can simply spend $20 on a bottle of Old Overcoat and drink yourself silly before the shoot. You know how relaxed and irresistible you are when you’re blitzed.

I suppose the best part of the video resume is that you gain control over the job interview. If you can psych out the culture of the company to which you are applying, you could craft a video that will show that you are, indeed, the face of the company. For example, if you are looking for a job in the booming field of health care, why not prepare a Quentin Tarrantino-type epic, complete with a blood-spurting scream of loyalty to your potential employer, and a severed limb or two or prove, graphically, how you would “cut off your arm” to make your sales goals.

On the other (severed) hand, when applying to a move conservative company, like a bank or a brokerage firm, you might want to star in a more refined costume drama, filming your resume in the drawing room of an English castle, surrounded by leather-bound volumes and leather-clad wenches. Ooops! Save the wenches for resumes targeted to government employment.

If there is anything that could stop the rush to video, it’s a feature of the WorkBlast.com site in which employers are also invited to make their own videos, the better to attract future employees. Think about it – if you could have previewed your present supervisor in High Def. would you taken the job.

Nah. You’d have probably taken the day off and gone to the movies.

As a person who grew up behind the counter of Syd’s Camera Shop in White
Plains, New York, I can attest to the positive effects of working in a
family business. No Ivy League business school could ever provide a manager
with a similar sense of how work can affect your life at home. That’s
because in a family business, work and home are one and the same. The only
difference is that at work you get treated with more respect, and unless the
family business is a restaurant, you usually don’t have to wash the dishes.

If your only experience with a family business is The Sopranos, your view of
this unique work style may be somewhat askew. In the Mafia, family members
who have conflicts at work simply shoot each other, putting a permanent and
quick end to disagreements. In most other forms of family business,
arguments tend to go on for decades, if not for generations. And there’s no
time off for holidays or vacations. A flare up at work can mean a permanent
unwelcome sign going up when family members gather, turning even the most
joyous family occasions into angry shareholder meetings. Except at a
birthday or a bris, the disgruntled shareholders don’t vote proxies; they
throw cheese puffs.

Despite the fact that family businesses represent almost 80% of all new job
creation and about 60% of the nation’s employment, there are few resources
that specialize in the business affairs of family businesses. But there is
one such operation – the Family Business Center at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison.

Do family businesses require such high-level attention? Apparently so.

According to Ann Kinkade, the director of the Center, only 3 out of 10
family businesses are successfully passed to the second generation, and just
1 in 10 makes it to the third. Which would explain why a rising star,
fast-tracking his way to the top of the org chart at Syd’s Camera Shop,
found a pink slip packed between the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in
his Star Wars lunch box.

If you are part of a family business, the Wisconsin Family Business Center
offers a wealth of advice to help you make your company grow as big and last
as long as Ford, Annheuser-Busch, or the Genovese mob. For example, the
Center encourages business owners to “introduce their children to the
workings of the family company with simple little projects – like putting
stamps on envelopes – as early as age 3.”

[Even at my advanced age, I’d be tickled pink if my company allowed me this
level of responsibility. I guess that’s the difference between being a
3-year old and thinking like a 3-year old.]

Another interesting factor in a family business is the effect of family
problems on the business. Says director Kinkade, “Sibling rivalry, divorce,
alcohol and drug abuse, relationship conflicts with in-laws or across
generations – any of the things that happen in a family are magnified when
they happen in a family business.”

Frankly, I don’t know how Ms. Kinkade learned so much about my family, but
I’m here to say – I was completely cured of my addiction to Fig Newtons by
the age of 37, and I really doubt that our family business suffered in any
way due to my abuse of Flintstone Vitamins.

Another resource for the family business is a new book, “When Your Parents
Sign the Paychecks,” by Greg McCann. Mr. McCann points to a failure to
include the family in developing a succession plan as the #1 reason family
businesses fail. Businesses that take the “Father Knows Best” approach to
strategic planning, says McCann, can suffer by ignoring or even alienating
the kids. Probably true, say I. Despite his obvious aptitude for the sales
process, I highly doubt either Wally or the Beaver took over their father’s
booming insurance business. In fact, I happen to know that Ward sold out to
Lumpy, but that’s another story.

If you are one of the younger family members, your goal is to build
credibility according to this author. One way to build the credibility you
need to get ahead in the family business is to go to work for another
business. Ideally, I suppose, you go to work for a competitor, bringing
with you sufficient family secrets to crush the home team and drive them
into bankruptcy. At which point you buy up the family business for peanuts,
fire your father, and outsource your mother.

I don’t know about your family, but in my family, that’s what we call
success.

Wonder why you didn’t get that big promotion? Concerned because you haven’t received a raise since Brittney Spears was hot? Well, guess what – I know the reason.

It isn’t your dreadful performance or your workplace incompetence or your total inability to reach your annual productivity goals. It’s your manners. You’re a slob on the job, you yob, and everyone knows it, even your boss.

Fortunately, there’s help for the manners-challenged. If you don’t know which pinky to raise when chugging a Red Bull, Judith Bowman is ready with a helping hand. The etiquette expert is the author of a new book, “Don’t Take the Last Donut: New Rules of Business Etiquette” and according to the flack who rather impolitely notified me of its publication with an email that started “Hello Robert,” instead of the more correct salutation, “Listen up, fat head,” your failure to act in a civilized manner at the dinner table could influence your success at the conference table.

“The dining table is a great stage from which to share your personal side and demonstrate the respect that you hold for your client or prospect,” Ms. Bowman opines, presumably not with her mouth full. “It is a moment when you can display your proper attention to etiquette, protocol, manners and a myriad of details that can set you apart and distinguish you from the competition.”

Does this mean you have to give up showing your executive potential by munching on whole turkey legs in the style of Henry XIII, or stop slurping your soup straight from the bowl, even though it is environmentally correct to save all the water that otherwise would be used washing a spoon and a fork?

Probably so. To avoid any further demonstrations of acting, as your mother would say, like you “grew up in a barn,” here are a few tips from the Bowman book on getting ahead with your fork and spoon.

1. “Order items that are easy to eat (not ribs, lobster, etc.)”

While it is an attractive idea to take advantage of an expense account meal to order the lobster, watching you crush a crustacean may be somewhat less attractive. The sound of shells exploding and the sight of butter dripping from your greasy lips may be a turn off for your dining companion, especially if he or she is footing the bill. And don’t think you can get away with a messy meal by wearing a napkin around your neck. “That is for children,” insists Ms. Bowman.

Of course, the real problem is that even the most simple of dishes can be difficult to consume if you are dining in terror. The idea of losing an important client or a major promotion could cause a circus juggler to fumble his PB&J. Therefore, I suggest that whatever you choose from the menu, request that the chef to put it through the Cuisinart. Tell your dining companion that you’ve developed ulcers from working too hard, making it impossible for you to eat solid food. And you’ll be surprised how tasty a lobster shake can be.

2. “Always pass the salt and pepper together, do not pass just one or the other.”

Bad idea. If your companion was smart enough to tell the difference between pepper and salt they wouldn’t be dining with you.

3. “Do not dunk donuts in coffee.”

Well, duh! Put the donut on a plate and pour your coffee into the hole. That’s what it’s there for. Then you can use your knife and fork to eat your donut and its little lake of coffee. Or ask for a straw and suck up the coffee, leaving you with a soggy donut you can put in your pocket and eat later – on the unemployment line.

4. “If your food is bad, try to eat it anyway.”

Another obvious ploy, but it makes perfect sense when dining with a superior. If you’ll happily eat wretched food you’re more likely to put up with the bad behavior that management serves to you at work.

5. “Eat a hamburger like a sandwich, cut it in half.”

Or, if you really want to make an impression, cut it in quarters, or eighths, or just carry a cleaver in your briefcase which you can use to attack the unsuspecting burger, chopping it up like Freddie Krueger on a rampage. Add some karate shouts and wresting grunts and your dining companion will run out of the restaurant. Then you can order the lobster.

Unlike the typical tourist who goes to Florida for the mosquitoes, the sand fleas, and the jellyfish, I’m the sort of weirdo who appreciates the opportunity to bake my brain and broil my belly under the warm tropical sun. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was awoken early one morning on a recent Florida trip to the sound of obscenities and curses – the kind of salty language I had not heard since my last trip around the horn with Captain Nemesis, or my last trip around Manhattan with a New York cab driver.

Throwing open the velvet drapes in my condo I did not see the prime parking lot view for which I had paid handsomely, but a great sweep of green, grassy landscape, pock-marked with tiny islands of sand, and dotted with a series of poles on which tiny, numbered flags fluttered in the Florida breeze.

As my eyes adjusted to the sunlight, I could see that it was from this greensward that the curses emanated. Even more frightening, the men who were so vehemently shouting obscenities were also swinging wildly with clubs, just like the Spartans and the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae.

Certainly the gladiators were dressed in combat gear. They wore the most frightening amalgamation of plaids and pastels – colors and combinations that could never appear in nature.

It was only much later, after calming my nerves with a flagon of Pina Colada by the kiddy pool that I realized I was not watching a battlefield, but a golf course, the site of that theoretically fun sport called golf.

I am discussing golf in a business column only because golf is so important in business. There are better sports, but when it comes to schmoozing your way to the top, nothing beats golf. And if you doubt me, try inviting your boss to spend the weekend at a quilting bee, or searching civil war battlefields for antique bottle caps with your metal detectors.

In fact, there are some career consultants who would tell you that it is virtually impossible for any man or woman to climb to the highest levels of corporate life without mastering the game of golf. [In certain refined corporate cultures, like the Teamsters, you can pass if you play tennis. The problem comes when some bigwig asks, “What’s your sport, sport? Golf or tennis?” And you have to answer, “Actually, I prefer napping.”]

Fortunately, there are ways one can give the appearance of being a golfer without actually having to go to the trouble of learning the game, or, if you are truly devious, without ever having to play it. Here are four fore examples:

• Buy really expensive golf equipment.

Golf is one of those sports where it’s all about the stuff. You’ll never have to hit the greens if you can spend hours in the clubhouse, pontificating about the “torque ratio of a titanium versus a plutonium shaft.” When the conversation gets over your head, it is always safe to talk about “PINGs.” You might say, “What I really need is a set of PINGs.” Or, “I just traded in my PINGs and I added six shots to my handicap.” [Don’t worry if you don’t know what a PING is. No one else does, either.]

• Remember, in golf, a handicap is a good thing.

Unlike business, where your career might be hurt by your handicaps of sloth, indifference and hostility, a handicap in golf can be a good thing, since it is subtracted from your total score. So, if it takes you an embarrassing 300 swings to do 9 holes, subtracting your handicap of 450 gives you a score of minus 150, which is not only better than Tiger Woods, but means you never have to leave the club house in the first place.

• Don’t waste money on golf lessons.

Many beginners spend fortunes learning the game from so-called pros. Instead of paying $200 an hour, you can achieve the same effect from playing miniature golf at $3.00 an hour. Regular golf is just like miniature golf, only they don’t have wind mills on the course, unless you’re playing in Holland, in which case, make sure to put golf cleats in your wooden shoes, or everyone will laugh and throw Gouda at you.

• Don’t worry if you’re a lousy player.

Your wretched playing will make your boss feel better, and isn’t that what getting ahead is all about?