As I have written before, during the Mad Men era a significant portion of employees spent their careers working for a single employer and retiring with gold watches and lifetime pensions. This isn’t to say that people didn’t lose their jobs – we still had a general doctrine of employment at will – it was more that decent performance in a stable company generally led to a lifetime with your employer. And employees responded to that sense of stability with a sense of trust in and commitment to their employer. (more…)

When you are looking for a pattern, you can see it all over the place. Just recently, a client asked me what I thought about job descriptions.   I could hear in her voice that she wasn’t sure what my answer would be and that it may have been a source of much discussion inside the company.

Here’s the rub … with the nature of work changing, with the speed at which technology is changing how we do our jobs and with the constant drumbeat of disruptive innovations in many industries it is just plain hard to keep a job description up to date and accurate.

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