Marci Alboher, Working the New Economy’s Blog

Macalee Harlis, a high school football player from Fort Lauderdale, had one of those aha moments while playing football and looking at his coach's transition lenses. He thought about how difficult both sun glare and stadium lights can be for players on the field. That's when he came up with the idea for MAC Shields, football helmet shields that function like transition lenses. Anne Montague runs a dance school in Baltimore aimed at keeping urban kids off the streets. Amanda Loyala manufactures and sells vegetarian, eco-friendly dog treats that she whips up in her kitchen in New York City. She was inspired to create the treats after her dog died from cancer and she learned that red meat has been linked to cancer in dogs. Read More »

Last week I returned from a conference, which put me into my usual state of post-conference overload. My bag was busting with business cards; the conference agenda and my notebook were filled with notes I must have thought important at the time I scribbled them; and a tsunami of to-dos had landed on my desk and in my inbox. I spent my first day back trying to process what I learned at the conference while muddling through the rest of my work. I started thinking about what I'd tell myself if I wanted to make the most out of my conference experience. Here's what I came up with: Read More »

As a congenital connector, I make introductions all the time. Usually I have good results. I've had an uncountable number of successful career matches and even ignited a few romances (one of which resulted in a strong marriage.)

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We’re used to a familiar path of life. You get educated. You work. And by the time you enter mid-life you probably juggle a few things. You still work. Maybe you have a family. You take care of your aging parents.  At some point, you retire. And then what? Years ago, when retirement was pegged at 65, retirement consisted of a decade or so of idle recreation. But now if you retired at 65, your retirement years might last another twenty-five years.

But what if that were all flipped on its head? What if, instead, you studied throughout your life and only settled into your true career somewhere around midlife? And what if it was considered normal to work into your 80s instead of into your 60s? Read More »

To mangle Tolstoy, good bosses are all alike. They are good mentors; they care about your happiness and advancement; their interests seem aligned with your own.

Bad bosses, on the other hand, come in many flavors. And a new book, "Working for You Isn't Working for Me," by Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster, provides a field guide to the many species of bad boss. There's the "checked out" boss (can these really survive in this kind of job market?), the "rule changer" (who tells you to take a lunch break then seems surprised you're not at your desk), the "underminer" (who asks you for help and then makes it impossible for you to assist), the "chronic critic" (needs no explanation), and a slew of others. For each bad behavior, the authors give sample scenarios to help you recognize your situation, and then walks you through a process to take back power and correct it.

This is is a book that should sit next to your all your other reference bibles so that you can consult it as difficult situations arise. Meantime, I asked Katherine (KC) and Kathi (KE) to take a answer some questions that seem common enough we've all encountered them.

Q:  How is dealing with a bad boss different than dealing with a difficult family member? Read More »

Happiness is having its moment in the sun. And the darkened economy doesn't seem to have cast much of a shadow over it.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I joined a packed auditorium at the Hilton New York for a lecture on positive psychology by Shawn Achor, a popular professor at Harvard. (This was part of One-Day University, a cool program that assembles a group of lecturers from top universities for a day of public lectures in major cities.)  Achor took the audience through the greatest hits of the science of happiness, covering a wide swath of material in his alotted 70 minutes. He explained how positive psychology developed as a field of study. Instead of focusing exclusively on mental troubles like depression, psychologists like Martin Selgiman started focusing on people who are happy to figure out what we could learn from them.

Achor took us through a host of nifty experiments, like this one: Read More »