EDITORIALS

When I first got into sailing as a young man (I was in my 30’s), my father-in-law suggested we take a class – what a concept!Sailing is actually pretty simple. First, you can’t sail directly into the wind (I wonder why?). Next, never spit into the wind. And finally, if you feel yourself ge...

One of our members wrote to me a few years ago seeking some career advice. It seems his firm is restructuring and his job is being eliminated. That said, he has some “work opportunities” that are available to him, (some at his current firm) but all of which are a little off task to his pri...

For almost a decade I was Chief Financial Officer of an Advertising Agency.In addition to learning how to deal with a wild and crazy bunch of folks, I learned a lot not only about the advertising business, but also about advertising in general.One of the facts that I learned was that a goo...

I don’t know if all of you know it, but I started my career in retailing at B. Altman & Company, one of the old line “Carriage Trade” retailers in New York City, and an interesting place to be sure.To be successful in this retailing segment you had to treat your customers’ right. All m...

Walter Mitty was an interesting guy. Although he did one thing in his real life, he had the opportunity to do lots of exciting things in his imaginary life.As we advance in our careers, I think all of us want the opportunity to do new and different things. It is only normal to want to chan...

I guess the desire to shorten just about everything is part of human nature. I once worked with a guy named Harry and the boss insisted on calling him Har. I suppose he could have called him H, but maybe that was TOO short.When I was in college, everyone was talking about the ATGSB. For th...

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 once got a note from one of our members listing several websites with job listings. The question was which ones to sign up for given that some of them had fees associated with them.I will now talk out of both sides of my mouth, so pay attention.Here in The FENG evening newsletter, we mak...

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...