A Different Perspective on Working From Home

By

How many of you go to an office every day to work?  Have you ever had the thought, “I wish I could just work from home like so-and-so does.” Or maybe thoughts like “They have it made being able to work from home and not having to go to an office every day.”  Well, it is always good to have a different perspective on things.  The grass is not always as green on the other side as you might think.  There are some disadvantages to working from hom as this person says in great detail.  But before we totally share the negative side of working from home it is important to say that there truly are great advantages.  The important thing to understand is that people are different.  There are people out there who would probably disagree with several of these points that are made.

One thing that most work-from-homers would probably agree on is that it can be tough to “leave” your work.  When your work place is only a few feet or a couple rooms over from where you sleep, it can be tough to “walk away” and leave it for later.  But that can be learned. 

So here's a different perspective on working from home for all you office workers out there…

Usually, I’m on the phone interviewing sources, but there are times when, if I’m on an especially pressing deadline, I can’t be on the phone at all. Sometimes I won’t even leave my house for a few days.

That’s when I welcome the ringing phone, just so I can hear the warm tones of my digital amanuensis. It sounds crazy, I know — the 21st-century version of an old lady and her cats — but I feel inexplicably less isolated just because she’s around.

“That’s really pathetic,” a friend of mine said when I told him about my invisible playmate. He’s right. But we do what we have to, those of us who work alone.

O.K., I know I have been the envy of my office-worker friends, who complain about the lack of privacy, the politics, the gossip at their workplaces. And those are certainly things that I’ve wanted to avoid over the years. But now, frankly, I’d like to poke fun at the boss with my colleagues, or to know whether Sheila in accounting is dating the messenger guy.

We home-office loners compensate for our lack of community in myriad, pathetic ways. I try to get out at night, I see friends and hit the gym and check out hip city happenings, but none of that really takes the place of being around a group of people who are working toward a similar goal.

If you want to read more, you can view the complete Kamaron Institute Job Market article by clicking the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03pre.html?ex=1338523200&en=ad7650f12a17b9b9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Kamaron Institute business news, educational career and parenting reference tips and resources.  

William James – A Pioneering American Psychologist

By

So many people have studied the life and workings of William James for a good reason.  He was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher.

About William James (1842 – 1910)

He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.

William James was born at the Astor House in New York City, son of Henry James, Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, James Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Jung.

William James – Classic Quotes

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

“Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.”

Education lesson resources from Kamaron Institute for parents and teachers.

Booker T Washington Quotes: Wisdom of Booker T Washington

By

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

About Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

 

Lecturer, Civil Rights & Human Rights Activist, Educational Administrator, Professor, Executive Founder of Tuskegee Institute

 

Dedicating himself to the idea that education would raise his people to equality in this country, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Washington became a teacher. He first taught in his home town, then at the Hampton Institute, and then in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.

 

QUOTES SAYINGS OF BOOKER T WASHINGTON

 

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

Booker T. Washington

 

“You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.”

 

“Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

Booker T. Washington

 

  “I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high water mark of pure and useful living.”  – Booker T. Washington

 

 “Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”

 

“One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”

 Booker T. Washington

 

“No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.”

 Booker T. Washington

 

      “Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.”

 

 “At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.”

 

 

 

IBM Lays Off & Hires

By

IBM has been making some big changes in the company.  While there have been some good size lay offs, IBM has hired far more…

IBM laid off 1,570 people Wednesday, primarily from an ongoing overhaul of operations in its giant technology services unit.

The company carried out a similar level of job cuts at the beginning of the month, for a total of 3,023 in this quarter and 3,720 for the year, according to IBM spokesman Edward Barbini.

That amounts to roughly 1% of the company, which employed 355,000 people at the beginning of the year. But even these small numbers reflect a big project inside IBM to transform its business.

Services is IBM's biggest division by revenue, but the advent of lower-cost competition overseas has forced IBM to work harder to improve the unit's profit margins. In the first quarter, pretax income for IBM's tech services fell 19%, even as revenue rose 7%.

Wednesday's job cuts were largely part of the company's response. Although IBM did not disclose where the layoffs were being made, the company had blamed the first-quarter profit shortfall on problems in its U.S. outsourcing business.

To learn more about IBM, read the complete article below from USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2007-05-30-ibm-layoffs_N.htm?csp=34

Kamaron Institute personal finance business references, tips and resources. 

Working After Retirement

By

Do you plan to work after retirement as so many Americans are doing?  Many Americans who seek new job opportunities after they retire find it a bit harder than the younger workers.  It can take almost twice as long for people over 55 to find a job after retirement.  This person gives this advice, “If you want to work in retirement, don’t retire.” 

This article today offers some good information about older workers seeking jobs after retirement…

When older workers look for jobs, they may get as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield.

It often takes many weeks, or even months, for older workers to find jobs, distinctly longer than their younger counterparts. In 2006, for instance, workers age 55 or older spent an average of 22 weeks looking for work. That was down from 24 in 2005, but still far longer than the 16-week job hunts of workers under 55, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the same vein, a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, sampling employers in Massachusetts and Florida, found that younger workers were about 40 percent more likely to be called in for job interviews than were candidates 50 or older.

Difficulties persist for older job seekers, even as a growing number of companies encourage their employees to stay on by offering phased-in retirement and part-time work. The tightening labor market has not helped. Nor have warnings by some experts of a potential shortage of new workers. And the problem is likely to become more apparent as more baby boomers reach retirement age.

If you want to read more, you can view the complete Kamaron Institute Job Market article by clicking the following link:

http://kamaroninstitute.blogging.com/blog/_archives/2007/5/22/2971201.html

Kamaron Institute business news, educational career and parenting reference tips and resources.  

Business Vocabulary Builders :Glossary Blamestorming, 404,

By

 

Terms become part of business life because they entertain and capture a moment from real life. Enjoy a few that we’ve collected for you.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

ADMINISPHERE:  the rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file.  Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate of irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

 

BLAMESTORMING:  Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

 

OHNOSECOND:  That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake.  (Like hitting send on an email by mistake).

 

SEAGULL MANAGER:  A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

 

CUBE FARM:  An office filled with cubicles.

 

404:  Someone who’s clueless.  From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.

 

PRAIRIE DOGGING:  When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

 

MOUSE POTATO:  The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

 

SITCOMs:  Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.  What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

 

STRESS PUPPY:  A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

 

SWIPEOUT:  An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

 

XEROX SUBSIDY:  Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.

 

IRRITAINMENT:  Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

 

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE:  the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.  Often feel like doing this to my computer….

 

GENERICA:  Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

 

 

WOOFS:  Well-Off Older Folks.

Jack Welch – A CEO Great

By

Jack Welch is considered by most to have been one of the greatest CEOs in American history. 
John Francis “Jack” Welch, Jr. was born November 19, 1935 and was Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. Welch gained a solid reputation for uncanny business acumen and unique leadership strategies at GE. During his tenure, GE increased its market capitalization by over $400 billion. He remains a highly-regarded figure in business circles due to his innovative management strategies and leadership style.
His net-worth is estimated at $720 million.
Great Quotes from Jack Welch
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
“An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
“Change before you have to.”
“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.”
Education lesson resources from Kamaron Institute for parents and teachers. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />

Ending Credit Card Confusion

By

There is a lot of confusion out there with all the different credit cards available.  The Fed is working to help clear up some of this confusion…

“The goal of the proposed revisions is to make sure that consumers get key information about credit card terms in a clear and conspicuous format and at a time when it would be most useful to them,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday. “Greater clarity in credit disclosures allows consumers to make more informed credit decisions and enhances competition among credit card issuers.”

People now often have to wade through tiny print and dense language to get information about the terms of their credit card. When terms — including rates and fees — are changed, that can be on a separate piece of paper accompanying the monthly statement. Those separate inserts aren't always looked at, the Fed says.

To help, the Fed's proposal would call for a table summarizing the changes to appear on the statement above the list of the consumers' transactions. That's where people are most likely to notice the changes, the Fed says.

From solicitations to monthly statements, the Fed's proposal would require key information appear in larger print, with rates and fees in an easier-to-see boldface. The proposal also aims to make language easier for people to understand.

To learn more about the changes being considered, read the complete article below from USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/2007-05-23-credit-card-proposal_N.htm?csp=34

Kamaron Institute personal finance business references, tips and resources. 

So Many Office Celebrations

By

Celebrations for different important events in co-workers lives are important.  People spend a large part of their day with co-workers and become close friends with many of them.  So taking the time to celebrate a new baby or a birthday can be very important.  But it can also get out of hand or cause problems in the work place.  This article gives some good advice on office celebrations that may be helpful…

Q. It seems there’s a cake in the conference room every week celebrating a birthday, a new baby or a wedding engagement. Are personal celebrations appropriate at work?

A. Yes, but in moderation. We spend a lot of time with our co-workers, so it is natural to want to note life events and achievements with them. It is also a morale booster, providing a chance to step away from your desk for a while and have some fun.

“People are so used to dealing with computers and not human beings; celebrations give us a chance to be human again, to connect with others in the organization,” said Peter Handal, chairman of Dale Carnegie Training, a company in Hauppauge, N.Y., that focuses on interpersonal skills.

But frequent celebrations can also cause resentment, if employees are continually asked to make financial contributions or if parties interfere with work.

“When it’s forced, it’s not fun,” said Kate Zabriskie, president of Business Training Works, a consulting firm in Washington that specializes in business etiquette.

“If you don’t have time to plan your kids’ birthday party,” she said, “you don’t want to be forced to help plan a party for someone who isn’t really your friend.”

If you want to read more, you can view the complete Kamaron Institute Job Market article by clicking the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/yourmoney/20career.html?ex=1337313600&en=571f6e939ad61752&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Kamaron Institute business news, educational career and parenting reference tips and resources.  

Happy Graduation – Say It With Cash

By

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />  

Nearly 30 percent of American’s have a graduate on their gift list this month. Nearly all of those shoppers (90%) will be giving one of two basic gifts that are sure to please.  According to researchers, we plan to says “Congratulations Grad” with cash or its electronic twin, the Gift Card.  We will be spending about $50 per graduate and that brings the total graduate gift spending to $4.5 Billion.

 

GRADUATE GIFTS

  • Gift Cards – 31.3 percent
  • Cash – 48.8 percent
  • Electronics – 11.5 %
  • Apparel – 9.1%

 

 

Parents and grandparents will spend the most on graduation gifts this year, with the average American over the age of 45 spending over $110 on gifts.

 

Sources include BIGResearch and Kamaron Institute