Certified Linkedin Recruiter Coach

I'm excited to find out I was one of the first five people to become a Certified Linkedin Recruiter Coach.

Thank you to my team who helped to make it happen and thanks to Linkedin for including me in the rollout of this new program.


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You Are Not Special Commencement Speech from Wellesley High School

I love this one.  It should be required watching for all graduates.

The Dream

I still think this way every time I get on the bike.

Creating Your Own Luck: 12 Steps for Advancing Your Career

Written by Andrea Murad


With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, many job seekers are hoping the luck of the Irish will rub off on their careers. However, career professionals say unemployed workers can stop searching for four-leaf clovers and planting money trees and create their own luck. After all, luck is the intersection of preparation and preparation.

“Luck knocks on your door every day, and it’s a question of whether you’re ready to answer it,” says Alex Douzet, COO and co-founder of job search site TheLadders.com. “People that focus on succeeding seem to be more aware of their environment. They figure out a way to leverage the opportunities that come their way.”

In a recent LinkedIn survey, the U.S. was ranked the seventh luckiest country in the world behind Japan, South Korea, Austria, Germany, France and Switzerland. Of the survey respondents, 49% of professionals felt luckier than their peers. They attributed their luck to having strong communication skills, being flexible, acting on opportunities, compiling a strong network, and, most importantly, having a strong work ethic.

“The person who’s lucky is able to take an opportunity to the next level,” says Nicole Williams, connection director at LinkedIn. “Real luck happens when you’re prepared to take advantage of an opportunity.”

Improving labor market conditions have knocked the unemployment rate to 8.3% last month, making job seekers feel luckier about their prospects. “It’s very self-determined and a self-fulfilling prophecy. People weren’t feeling lucky a few years ago, but they are now and this influx of luck is going to turn the job market,” she adds.

So here are expert tips for employees on how to make their luck and take their career to the next level.

Have a strong work ethic. The harder you work, the luckier you become. “Do the best job to get yourself noticed, even if it’s not your career choice,” says Williams. “Be excellent, get a reputation for excellence, and luck is going to find you.”

Be passionate. “Don’t follow the money, follow the passion,” Douzet says. “If you follow the passion, the money will follow you.” Being passionate about what you do will make you want to do a better job and bring more advancement. “Success isn’t measured by a six-figure check but how you compare to your peers, your community, and your industry. Ask yourself, ‘what makes me happy and what am I passionate about?’”

Develop a career plan. Evaluate your career path and what you want to accomplish. “It’s important to have goals and to marry those goals with time periods,” says Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, chief career writer and partner at Career Trend. “You can continually adjust your plan, but, once you have one, you’ll start to believe that you’re there and people will really believe in you.”

Have a good attitude. “Luck is all attitude,” says Williams. Having a positive and genuine demeanor and being optimistic at your job goes far.

Read Steps 5 -12 and more

Steve Jobs and The Bobby Knight School of Leadership

by David Aaker


I believe that Steve Jobs was among the best CEOs of this generation because he created entirely new categories six times in a decade, and built the largest company market cap ever. Yet two recent and excellent books (Inside Apple, by Adam Lashinsky and Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson) describe a management style that was disturbingly harsh.

To understand Jobs's success, I find it helpful to look at the success of Bobby Knight, the fabled basketball coach at Indiana. Knight was one of two coaches to win over 900 games, won the NCAA championship three times, and was the national coach of the year four times yet had a management style similar to Jobs (described in detail by John Feinstein's book A Season on the Brink). What are the common success characteristics shared by these two? Before answering that question, it is useful to elaborate the two management styles.

Jobs's treatment of employees and partners has been described as brutal and even cruel. He routinely denigrated the ideas and accomplishments of employees, expected a commitment to work but seldom appreciated loyalty, arbitrarily fired people, disregarded the feelings of others, excluded people from "secret" projects, routinely took credit for the accomplishments of others, and did not allow others to have a public face. It is the very opposite of the supportive and nurturing Theory Y management pioneered by MIT's Douglas McGregor over a half century ago.

Knight's treatment of players has been termed abusive. He shouted, pushed, denigrated, humiliated, threatened, and harped on faults. Other coaches were loud and negative but Knight took it to a whole new level. He was so cruel that a key job of assistant coaches was to council distraught players to ignore what he said. Among his many examples of loutish behavior was throwing a chair across the basketball floor during a game. After many warnings, he was ultimately fired from Indiana 28 years after being accused of choking a player.

Knight and Jobs shared four common success traits that seem more obvious when looking at the two together.

1. They were incredibly knowledgeable and insightful. Read the rest of the HBR article

Marketing lessons from the streets

By Don McNay


“When I introduce you, I’m gonna say, ‘This is a friend of mine.’

That means you’re a connected guy.”

— “Lefty” (Al Pacino) in the movie Donnie Brasco

 

I learned some wonderful marketing tips from mobsters.

I grew up in northern Kentucky. My father was a professional gambler, and the Newport and Covington areas were heavily influenced, or controlled, by the Mafia.

My dad said about his bookmaking operations, “We can’t advertise on television or put a sign in the window. We can’t sue if someone doesn’t pay us. All we can do is hope that honorable people refer us to other honorable people.”

It must have been a good system. Without advertising, he never seemed to lack for customers.

I live in a more refined world of high finance and well-educated financial consultants. Many of my competitors are affiliated with huge corporations with million dollar marketing budgets.

As a small business, I have a marketing weapon that is impossible for a large corporation to compete with.  

The friend-of-the-friend referral.  

When I am meeting someone for the first time, I try to find if we have a common friend or connection. If you go through the six degrees of separation, most people will connect before you get two degrees away.

Instead of just saying my name, I mention our common relationship.


Read the rest of the Richmond Register article for complete article and more advice



Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC is the bestselling author of the book, Wealth Without Wall Street; McNay, who lives in Richmond, Ky., is an award-winning financial columnist and Huffington Post contributor. You can learn more about him at www.donmcnay.com .

He is the Chairman of the Board for the McNay Settlement Group (www.mcnay.com) which provides structured settlement consulting for injury victims, lottery winners, and the families of special needs children.

McNay founded Kentucky Guardianship Administrators LLC, which assists attorneys in as conservators and setting up guardianships. It is nationally recognized as an administrator of Qualified Settlement (468b) funds.

5 Tools For Managing Your Personal Brand Online

BY AMBER MAC

Beyonce and Jay-Z recently filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect daughter Blue Ivy Carter's name--a probable first step to establishing the newborn's personal (and likely profitable) brand. While the move may seem a bit premature, web users of all ages are similarly trying to navigate social media sites to get seen, heard, and hopefully, trusted.

Even if you work within a large organization and don't have celebrity parents, it's a good idea to start thinking about your personal brand today. Not only will the resulting larger network help you keep your options open on the work front, participating across social media sites can help you to stay informed about your area of expertise so you don't fall behind.  

Yes, it's all about expertise. If you've been successful on the personal branding front, chances are that you've established yourself as an expert. Whether you blog about real estate, tweet about stocks, or pin about jewelry, social media makes it easy for anyone to shape herself or himself online.  

Aside from creating compelling content, a personal branding regimen should also include an active plan to achieve your daily goals. Consider short intervals during your regular routine when you can manage your various online accounts. That might mean jumping on social sites every couple of hours for 15 minutes at a time, or maybe more depending on how important a strong digital persona ties into your professional success.  

Once you've put aside the time to engage, there are a few key tools beyond the obvious services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter that you should use to maintain a healthy digital presence. Here are five to help you get started and to stay on track.

1.  Namecheck - This free tool is invaluable to personal branding newbies and experts alike. With one click, enter your desired (or current) username into the search box and discover where that name is registered across multiple social media sites. The service automatically sifts through 12 of the top services to see if the name is taken or available. It's a good idea to register your name on sites that you don't plan to use, just in case those platforms soar into popularity in the months to come and you want to protect your identity in those respective places.

2.  Squarespace - This out-of-the box tool has been available for some time, but it still tops the list of easy-to-use services for a hosted website (in other words, no technical skills required). Whether you want to blog, include social media widgets (such as a Twitter feed), or show off image galleries, Squarespace is a cinch to set up. Moreover, the mobile apps versions of this tool for both iOS and Android work great. If you currently blog on WordPress or one of the more popular engines, it's simple to import all your content into Squarespace. For a personal site, it's just $12 a month--not too shabby considering you can use any of their beautiful templates and be up and running in minutes.

Tools - 3 -5 and Complete Fast Company Article