The hiring projections of employers throughout the United States continue to be more optimistic than they were a year ago, but chief financial officers nationwide now are more pessimistic than they were during the previous quarter.In the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, based on interviews with nearly 16,000 employers nationwide, 28 percent of respondents around the country said they plan to hire more workers from Octobe...

In a bizarre episode of “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump fired the only male member of one team because the guy had been dumb enough to give up an exemption — one that would have prevented him from being fired that week.Bradford had been the captain when his team won the previous week, so he earned the exemption. With Ivana as the captain the next week, the team failed, and teammates strongly criticized her and Stacie J., who...

Any parent with two or more children picks up one lesson in a hurry, Ann Crittenden says: Although you might set the same rules, your children will have different interests and skills, different likes and dislikes. It would be absurd and frustrating for everyone involved if you treated them exactly the same.Yet many employers take exactly that step with a wide range of employees, applying one-size-fits-all management techni...

In the film “Collateral,” Jamie Foxx plays a taxi driver who gets roped in to chauffeuring around a hit man, played by Tom Cruise. And it all started because the taxi driver made an ethical misstep.Cruise offered Foxx $600 to drive him to several errands during the course of one night, eventually dropping him off at the airport. Foxx doesn’t know that the errands are part of the Tom Cruise hit parade, but he does know that...

One new TV show with a built-in audience is “Joey,” where Matt LeBlanc reprises his “Friends” role of Joey Tribbiani, moving all the way from New York to Los Angeles without changing a time slot.But the big question is: Will Joey Tribbiani’s middle name be “Frasier” or “Phyllis”?Some characters pop out of ensemble shows and thrive, such as in “Frasier” and “Laverne & Shirley.” Others stagger — to put it mildly — such as in...

If your job was running you ragged more over the Labor Day Weekend than it did on, say, Groundhog Day, you’re not alone. A survey released this month reports that nearly one-third of U.S. adults working full time have seen their workweek increase during the last six months.In the Working in America online sampling of 1,052 adults nationwide, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by management consulting firm Kronos,...

Other than political diehards and protesters, people don’t care much about the Republican and Democratic conventions these days. TV networks aren’t devoted to them the way they used to be, mainly because a lot of viewers would prefer watching the 24-hour Test Pattern Network.Some of it is cynicism about politics, certainly, but a lot of it is just that they’re boring. There is little conflict and too many long-winded commen...

When he worked as the program director of knowledge management at the World Bank during the mid-1990s, Stephen Denning had a difficult time convincing people how important it was for the organization to collect its widely scattered information and make it easier for people to have access to it.Finally, at a presentation in 1996, he began telling a story about how a health worker in one of the poorest countries in the world,...

In the fourth of six events during the men’s individual all-around gymnastics competition at the Olympics, American Paul Hamm did such a miserable vault that he almost ended up in the laps of the judges.It turned out to be an opportunity. Hamm ended up being the first American man ever to win the all-around gold medal, even after the bad vault dropped him temporarily into 12th place.Here are three workplace lessons from wha...

When her father had a major stroke and San Francisco resident Mary Graves needed to take about three weeks off from her job at accounting giant KPMG several months ago, the numbers just didn’t add up. Graves had already finished up her five weeks of paid time off for the fiscal year, so it appeared she would have to be without pay for those three weeks — combining financial stress with her emotional strain.Then her co-worke...