Recession

3 Ways To Update Your Career GPS.

It's about time. The recession is over, things are looking up, companies are hiring, executives are coming out from hiding in their offices and cubicles. For all intents and purposes, many of us have held our collective breaths for the past 2 years for this moment. It's now time to take stock of who we currently are, where we are in our career, and where we want to go.

The Most Important (financial) Book You'll Buy This Year.

I read LOTS of books. And it's funny - a lot of people are amazed at the number of books I read. I don't think I read a lot - but many people I meet think I'm crazy about spending time reading books. Candidly, I feel that it's a clear sign of the 'dumbing down' of America. People are 'shamed' into not reading - you should see the faces of people when I mention I read 3-5 books at a time and finish 100-150 books a year. "Don't you have better things to do with your time?"

CEO's Must Trash Short-Term Thinking & Embrace Long-Term Strategy. Now.

I'm tired. And angry. And I'm not alone. For too long, the stewards of our most cherished institutions have been acting less than ethical. I call it "short term thinking for short term gain" — get in, make a quick buck, and move on to the next sucker. Not the best behavior for supposedly the best executives in this nation.

The Future of Work: Yes, We'll Still Make Stuff.

Presenting Part Nine of a Ten-Part Series on The Future of Work from Time Magazine. By David Von Drehle at Time.

The death of American manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. According to U.N. statistics, the U.S. remains by far the world's largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as much value as No. 2 China. Since 1990, U.S. manufacturing output has grown by nearly $800 billion — an amount larger than the entire manufacturing economy of Germany, a global powerhouse.

But growth does not mean jobs. While sales soared (at least until the recession), manufacturing employment sank. Using constantly improving technology to make more-valuable goods, American workers doubled their productivity in less than a generation — which, paradoxically, rendered millions of them obsolete. (See pictures of retailers which have gone out of business.)

This new manufacturing workforce can be seen in the gleaming and antiseptic room in Southern California where Edwards Lifesciences produces artificial-heart valves. You could say the small group of workers at the Edwards plant, most of them Asian women, are seamstresses. Unlike the thousands of U.S. textile workers whose jobs have migrated to low-wage countries, however, these highly skilled women occupy a niche in which U.S. firms are dominant and growing. Each replacement valve requires eight to 12 hours of meticulous hand-sewing — some 1,800 stitches so tiny that the work is done under a microscope. Up to a year of training goes into preparing a new hire to join the operation.

Highly skilled workers creating high-value products in high-stakes industries — that's the sweet spot for manufacturing workers in coming years. After an initial surge of enthusiasm for shipping jobs of all kinds to low-wage countries, many U.S. companies are making a distinction between exportable jobs and jobs that should stay home. Edwards, for example, has moved its rote assembly work — building electronic monitoring machines — to such lower-wage and -tax locales as Puerto Rico. But when quality is a matter of life or death and production processes involve trade secrets worth billions, the U.S. wins, says the company's head of global operations, Corinne Lyle. "We like to keep close tabs on our processes."

Recent corner-cutting scandals in China — lead-paint-tainted children's toys, melamine-laced milk — have underlined the advantages of manufacturing at home. A botched toy is one thing; a botched batch of heparin or a faulty aircraft component is quite another. According to Clemson University's Aleda Roth, who studies quality control in global supply chains, the successful companies of coming years will be the ones that make product safety — not just price — a "big factor in their decisions about where to locate jobs."

Innovative companies will also stay home thanks to America's superior network of universities and its relatively stringent intellectual-property laws. Consider, for instance, the secretive and successful South Carolina textilemaker Milliken & Co. While the rest of the region's low-tech, backward-looking textile industry was fading away, Milliken pushed ahead, investing heavily in research and becoming a hive of new patents.

U.S. manufacturing will also be buoyed by a third source of power: the American consumer. Even in our current battered condition, the U.S. is the world's most prosperous marketplace. As global economic activity rebounds, so will energy prices. The cost of shipping foreign-made goods to the U.S. market will begin to offset overseas wage advantages. We saw that last year when oil prices zoomed toward $200 per barrel.

Thus, even if fewer cars are built by America's wounded automakers, there will still be plenty of car factories in the U.S. They will be owned by Japanese and Chinese and Korean and German and Italian firms, but they will employ American workers. It just makes sense to build the cars near the people you expect to buy them.

Raised on images of Carnegie and Ford, we rue the loss of once smoky, now silent megaplants but are blind to the small and midsize companies replacing them. Ultimately, what's endangered is not U.S. manufacturing. It is our deeply ingrained cultural image of the factory and its workers.

Losing Your Job & Breaking Shovels.

It's a lot like losing your job. The first time it happens, people are pretty shell-shocked. They do a lot of soul searching (why me?), denial, hatred of their company, boss, etc. — you know the drill. Ultimately, when the adrenaline dissipates, they get down to business and look for a new job. The second time someone loses a job (and this happens more often that you realize in this economy), they tend to almost laugh about it, pick themselves up quickly, and go after that next job.

Want to keep your job? Be happy.

Does the recession with its rampant layoffs and cutbacks make your job look better all the time? Believe it or not, donning a pair of "recession goggles" can be good for your career and your mental health. Research shows that an attitude of gratitude in trying times can not only help you keep your job, but get you the job you want.