Monday, August 1, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
office dares
Office Dares
One-Point Dares
Ignore the first five people who say 'good morning' to you.
To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears and grimace.
Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, "Sorry, I really prefer it this way".
Walk sideways to the photocopier.
While going in an elevator, gasp dramatically each time the doors open.
When in elevator with one other person, tap them on the shoulder and pretend it wasn't you.
Finish all your sentences with "In accordance with the prophecy..."
Don't use any punctuation.
Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.
Three-Point Dares
Say to your boss, "I like your style", wink, and shoot him with double-barreled fingers.
Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
Every time you get an email, shout ''email''.
Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
Keep hole punching your finger. Each time you do, shout, "dagnamit, it's happened again!". Then do it again.
Introduce yourself to a new colleague as "the office bicycle". Then wink and pout.
Call I.T. helpdesk and tell them that you can't seem to access any pornography web sites.
Five-Point Dares
At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if you actually launch into it yourself).
Walk into a very busy person's office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as "Dave".
Announce to everyone in a meeting that you "really have to go do a number two".
When you've picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake conversation with the words, ''she can abort it for all I care''.
After every sentence, say 'Mon' in a really bad Jamaican accent. As in: "The report's on your desk, Mon." Keep this up for one hour.
In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, "Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!"
At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, "As God is my witness,I'll never go hungry again!"
Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: "Do you hear that?" "What?" "Never mind, it's gone now."
Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash each biscuit with your fist.
During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
Sign or p.p. all letters with your initials and a swastika.
Dry hump the photocopier. When someone spots you, stop and cough embarrassingly, then lean in to the machine and whisper loudly, "I'll see you tonight".
One-Point Dares
Ignore the first five people who say 'good morning' to you.
To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears and grimace.
Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, "Sorry, I really prefer it this way".
Walk sideways to the photocopier.
While going in an elevator, gasp dramatically each time the doors open.
When in elevator with one other person, tap them on the shoulder and pretend it wasn't you.
Finish all your sentences with "In accordance with the prophecy..."
Don't use any punctuation.
Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.
Three-Point Dares
Say to your boss, "I like your style", wink, and shoot him with double-barreled fingers.
Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
Every time you get an email, shout ''email''.
Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
Keep hole punching your finger. Each time you do, shout, "dagnamit, it's happened again!". Then do it again.
Introduce yourself to a new colleague as "the office bicycle". Then wink and pout.
Call I.T. helpdesk and tell them that you can't seem to access any pornography web sites.
Five-Point Dares
At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if you actually launch into it yourself).
Walk into a very busy person's office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as "Dave".
Announce to everyone in a meeting that you "really have to go do a number two".
When you've picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake conversation with the words, ''she can abort it for all I care''.
After every sentence, say 'Mon' in a really bad Jamaican accent. As in: "The report's on your desk, Mon." Keep this up for one hour.
In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, "Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!"
At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, "As God is my witness,I'll never go hungry again!"
Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: "Do you hear that?" "What?" "Never mind, it's gone now."
Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash each biscuit with your fist.
During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
Sign or p.p. all letters with your initials and a swastika.
Dry hump the photocopier. When someone spots you, stop and cough embarrassingly, then lean in to the machine and whisper loudly, "I'll see you tonight".
Rules For Managers
Rules For Managers
Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring it to me.
The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.
If it's really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it's going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.
Always leave without telling anyone where you're going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.
If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don't open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.
If you give me more than one job to do, don't tell me which is priority. I am psychic.
Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.
If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out, it could mean a promotion.
If you don't like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.
If you have special instructions for a job, don't write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.
Never introduce me to the people you're with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.
Be nice to me only when the job I'm doing for you could really change your life and send you straight to manager's hell.
Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it's nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.
Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I'm not here for the money anyway.
Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring it to me.
The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.
If it's really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it's going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.
Always leave without telling anyone where you're going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.
If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don't open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.
If you give me more than one job to do, don't tell me which is priority. I am psychic.
Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.
If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out, it could mean a promotion.
If you don't like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.
If you have special instructions for a job, don't write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.
Never introduce me to the people you're with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.
Be nice to me only when the job I'm doing for you could really change your life and send you straight to manager's hell.
Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it's nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.
Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I'm not here for the money anyway.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Insurance Coverage & Bad Faith
Many insurance claims require a prompt and objective review of coverage issues. The critical factor in any coverage claim is the interpretation of the applicable policy. The insurance defense attorneys at Lewis Wagner can assist you in interpreting that policy and analyzing the validity of first and third party insurance coverage issues.
Our insurance defense attorneys provide practical solutions to complex insurance disputes involving self-insured parties, businesses and insurance companies. Our team of insurance defense attorneys has advised individuals and businesses about insurance coverage issues including insurance policy coverage opinions, declaratory judgments on policy coverage and defense of insurers against breach of contract and bad faith claims.
We handle insurance coverage disputes and defend declaratory judgment and bad faith actions with respect to:
Commercial and construction liability insurance
Personal and commercial auto insurance
Homeowner insurance
Life, health, and disability insurance
Environmental insurance
“Claims made” and professional liability insurance
Duties to additional insureds and certificate holders
Property insurance
Workers' compensation insurance
Product liability insurance
Business interruption insurance
Our insurance defense attorneys provide practical solutions to complex insurance disputes involving self-insured parties, businesses and insurance companies. Our team of insurance defense attorneys has advised individuals and businesses about insurance coverage issues including insurance policy coverage opinions, declaratory judgments on policy coverage and defense of insurers against breach of contract and bad faith claims.
We handle insurance coverage disputes and defend declaratory judgment and bad faith actions with respect to:
Commercial and construction liability insurance
Personal and commercial auto insurance
Homeowner insurance
Life, health, and disability insurance
Environmental insurance
“Claims made” and professional liability insurance
Duties to additional insureds and certificate holders
Property insurance
Workers' compensation insurance
Product liability insurance
Business interruption insurance
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
How to Address Failure in a Job Interview
How to Address Failure in a Job Interview
IT failures that occurred on your watch don't have to kill your chances of landing a new job. You just need to know how to discuss them in job interviews. Here are five tips.
By Meridith Levinson
Tue, June 28, 2011
CIO — For CIOs who experience some kind of enterprise IT failure in the course of their careers—whether a high-profile security breach, massive network outage, or multi-million dollar ERP boondoggle—the incident can feel like a career killer. But unless a CIO repeatedly makes the same mistake, or the failure stemmed from some illegal or "just plain stupid" action, it won't end a CIO's career, says Mark Polansky, senior client partner and managing director of Korn/Ferry International's Information Officers practice.
"There is as much—if not more—to learn from something that didn't work as something that did," says Polansky. "Every one of those experiences is a life lesson and goes into making you a better CIO."
CIOs who wish to recover from failure just need to know how to address suboptimal work experiences in their job searches and during job interviews. Consider the following five tips for addressing the fiascoes that occurred on your watch with prospective employers and executive recruiters.
1. Fess up. Don't ever try to hide failure; you won't get away with it. If an employer doesn't already know about, say, the ERP catastrophe at your previous employer, they will find out about it eventually. Better you be the source of that information than someone else.
"A good offense is the best defense," says Polansky, who advises CIOs to proactively address their failures in job interviews. "Always bring it up. Doing so gives the candidate credibility and shows that he or she has the confidence and sincerity to broach the subject of the failed project head on."
2. Anticipate prospective employers' concerns. When framing how you discuss your failure, put yourself in your prospective employer's shoes and think about the concerns they'd have with your candidacy, advises Peter Handal, president and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training.
For example, employers will want to be assured that such a failure will not occur inside their company. They'll also want the details around what happened, why it happened, what you learned from the experience, and how you will prevent similar events from occurring in the future, says Polansky.
3. Accentuate the positive. One failed project among 10 successful ones is no big deal, says Handal. He advises CIOs to put any failures they've experienced in the context of their larger successes.
"Explain that a particular project didn't go well," says Handal. "State the reason, and if you made a mistake, explain what you learned. Then point out all the other successful things you did."
4. Offer references who can back up your story. Make sure your references will corroborate your explanation of events when employers and recruiters call them.
"If the failure was outside the CIO's purview, such as a change in business circumstances or corporate strategy, I would have references who could confirm that information," says Polansky. He adds that executive recruiters and employers will contact the references the candidate provides as well as individuals they know in the candidate's industry to vet the candidate's story.
5. How you discuss your failure is sometimes more important than the actual failure. John Hamm, author of Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership (Jossey-Bass 2011), notes that the questions about failed projects that come up during a job interview are sometimes a smokescreen. When a CEO asks a prospective CIO questions about a failed project, the CEO may be more interested in how the CIO confronts the failure, rather than the project itself, he says.
"The CEO could be testing for how the CIO sees the situation and if the CIO is willing to be accountable," adds Hamm, who is also a former CEO. "They know the [CIO] role is hard and that stuff fails. They want to know how you [the candidate] will handle it."
It is possible for CIOs to continue enriching careers in IT leadership despite high-profile flops staining their track records. After all, most organizations have some tolerance for failure.
"If you don't take risks, you can't try anything new," says Handal. "And if you take risks, you'll have some failures. Encouraging people to take risks is an important part of any organization, so you have to be tolerant of failure."
Adds Polansky, "It's always possible to recover. Sometimes, it just has to be at the right place and right time."
Meridith Levinson covers Careers, Project Management and Outsourcing for CIO.com. Follow Meridith on Twitter @meridith. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Meridith at mlevinson@cio.com.
http://www.cio.com/article/685259/How_to_Address_Failure_in_a_Job_Interview?page=2&taxonomyId=3123
IT failures that occurred on your watch don't have to kill your chances of landing a new job. You just need to know how to discuss them in job interviews. Here are five tips.
By Meridith Levinson
Tue, June 28, 2011
CIO — For CIOs who experience some kind of enterprise IT failure in the course of their careers—whether a high-profile security breach, massive network outage, or multi-million dollar ERP boondoggle—the incident can feel like a career killer. But unless a CIO repeatedly makes the same mistake, or the failure stemmed from some illegal or "just plain stupid" action, it won't end a CIO's career, says Mark Polansky, senior client partner and managing director of Korn/Ferry International's Information Officers practice.
"There is as much—if not more—to learn from something that didn't work as something that did," says Polansky. "Every one of those experiences is a life lesson and goes into making you a better CIO."
CIOs who wish to recover from failure just need to know how to address suboptimal work experiences in their job searches and during job interviews. Consider the following five tips for addressing the fiascoes that occurred on your watch with prospective employers and executive recruiters.
1. Fess up. Don't ever try to hide failure; you won't get away with it. If an employer doesn't already know about, say, the ERP catastrophe at your previous employer, they will find out about it eventually. Better you be the source of that information than someone else.
"A good offense is the best defense," says Polansky, who advises CIOs to proactively address their failures in job interviews. "Always bring it up. Doing so gives the candidate credibility and shows that he or she has the confidence and sincerity to broach the subject of the failed project head on."
2. Anticipate prospective employers' concerns. When framing how you discuss your failure, put yourself in your prospective employer's shoes and think about the concerns they'd have with your candidacy, advises Peter Handal, president and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training.
For example, employers will want to be assured that such a failure will not occur inside their company. They'll also want the details around what happened, why it happened, what you learned from the experience, and how you will prevent similar events from occurring in the future, says Polansky.
3. Accentuate the positive. One failed project among 10 successful ones is no big deal, says Handal. He advises CIOs to put any failures they've experienced in the context of their larger successes.
"Explain that a particular project didn't go well," says Handal. "State the reason, and if you made a mistake, explain what you learned. Then point out all the other successful things you did."
4. Offer references who can back up your story. Make sure your references will corroborate your explanation of events when employers and recruiters call them.
"If the failure was outside the CIO's purview, such as a change in business circumstances or corporate strategy, I would have references who could confirm that information," says Polansky. He adds that executive recruiters and employers will contact the references the candidate provides as well as individuals they know in the candidate's industry to vet the candidate's story.
5. How you discuss your failure is sometimes more important than the actual failure. John Hamm, author of Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership (Jossey-Bass 2011), notes that the questions about failed projects that come up during a job interview are sometimes a smokescreen. When a CEO asks a prospective CIO questions about a failed project, the CEO may be more interested in how the CIO confronts the failure, rather than the project itself, he says.
"The CEO could be testing for how the CIO sees the situation and if the CIO is willing to be accountable," adds Hamm, who is also a former CEO. "They know the [CIO] role is hard and that stuff fails. They want to know how you [the candidate] will handle it."
It is possible for CIOs to continue enriching careers in IT leadership despite high-profile flops staining their track records. After all, most organizations have some tolerance for failure.
"If you don't take risks, you can't try anything new," says Handal. "And if you take risks, you'll have some failures. Encouraging people to take risks is an important part of any organization, so you have to be tolerant of failure."
Adds Polansky, "It's always possible to recover. Sometimes, it just has to be at the right place and right time."
Meridith Levinson covers Careers, Project Management and Outsourcing for CIO.com. Follow Meridith on Twitter @meridith. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Meridith at mlevinson@cio.com.
http://www.cio.com/article/685259/How_to_Address_Failure_in_a_Job_Interview?page=2&taxonomyId=3123
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