July 2007 Archives

About nine months ago I made a fateful decision - it was time to upgrade to an HDTV.  For years I had lived with a 20-inch RCA TV/DVD combo, which seemed sad for a guy in his 20's.  I could never get anyone to come over for a game and, though my fiancé and I love movies, it's hard to get excited watching a 2-inch version of Tom Cruise as Maverick or Cole Trickle ("Days of Thunder", remember? - Tom wasn't always a crazy tabloid headliner more famous for his marriage and his baby than his movies, you know).  After some surprisingly easy negotiations with my future wife, we settled on a 50-in plasma with a built-in DVR, which is every bit as excellent as you would expect.  And that leads us to the point of this post:

Summer is, hands-down, the worst time of the year for television, HDTV or not.  Granted, there a few gems out there ("The 4400" - not in HD, for some absurd reason), but most of our favorites ("How I Met Your Mother",  "The Office" and the always classic "Law & Order: SVU") are on perpetual reruns.  The poor DVR has set virtually empty until last week when I discovered a new show - "The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch" on CNBC.  It's a nightly talk show that focuses on new ideas, innovative products and entrepreneurship - which makes it a must watch (though maybe not on a nightly basis) for anyone with dreams of running a business or owning their own business, which, if my conversation with incoming freshman are any indication, include more and more Kelley Indianapolis students each year.

If you truly are interested in learning how to own and grow your future business, you could do worse than to supplement what you'll learn in the classroom by listening to frank conversations with other successful entrepreneurs.  And the host of the show isn't just one of the random guys you see when you guiltily watch VH1's "Best Week Ever".  He just so happens to be the Chairman of Deutsch, Inc., one of the nations' top 10 advertising agencies.  Check out his bio and then check out the show:

As Chairman of Deutsch Inc., Donny Deutsch implemented his "leaner, meaner, faster, smarter" philosophy to transform a small advertising shop into one of the nation's top 10 agencies. The $2.8 billion full-service agency has provided clients with strategic marketing programs that are intrusive, effective and talked about. Prestigious clients include GM, Johnson & Johnson, DirecTV, Novartis Worldwide, and IKEA.

I'm a fairly young guy, and I'm as big a fan as anyone of today's technological advances (though it looks like I might have jumped the gun a little early in electing to go with a Treo over iPhone, even though the iPhone is absurdly expensive).  That said, I arrived later than most to the blogging party.  Not only is this my first (and probably my only) regular blog, I hadn't read a single blog before writing for Kelley.  However, once I started blogging, I started to check out what everyone else was up to and I've found that there is an incredible amount of information out there on just about every topic - including careers.

A quick Google search of the term 'career blogs' turns up 105,000,000+ results. That's where I started - and I clicked through hundreds of alternately boring, preachy, stale, inaccurate, and defunct blogs before I somehow found the 2 bloggers that I'd like to recommend you check out: Penelope Trunk and Jason Warner. 

The blogs written by Penelope and Jason have fresh takes on a variety of career-related issues and offer a steady flow of candid, easy-to-implement advice.  They have a sense of humor and provide some valuable insight into the myriad of issues nearly everyone is likely to encounter when job searching and/or advancing their career in today's economy. 

It also just so happens that both are fairly accomplished in their day jobs:  Jason has recruited for Microsoft, CSC Consulting, Starbucks, and is now the head of staffing for Online Sales and Operations at Google.  Penelope is a career columnist at the Boston Globe and Yahoo Finance. Her syndicated column has run in more than 200 publications.  She is also the author of the book Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, which I haven't read yet, but I did have the office place an order for it last week (yes, these are the perks I get to look forward to working at a university).

Take a half-hour or so and read through some of their postings and I anticipate that you'll come away impressed.  Let me know.